- 03 Dec 10, 05:19#228443
"He was the fastest driver I ever saw - faster even than Fangio"
________________________- Mike Hawthorn on Alberto Ascari
McLaren chief engineer Tim Goss is quoted on the McLaren web site blog as confirming that the MP4-25 was indeed the 2nd fastest car in 2010, just behind the RB6.
The blog provides stats on how much faster the MP4-25 was than Ferrari's F10 - by Tim's reckoning the difference was way over a tenth of a second per race lap! He also points out that the McLaren team delivered, based on race-pace, the fastest car (yes, according to him that includes the RB6!) for no fewer than 7 races in 2010.
Here's the content of the blog:-
An email from Tim Goss pinged into the inbox this morning. ‘Car pace – who was second quickest?’ read the subject line.
Tim’s an extremely competitive guy. His email said it all: “I don’t like being second-quickest,” he wrote. “Worse still, is being told incorrectly that we’re third-quickest.”
His displeasure stemmed from several recent reports firmly contending that our MP4-25 car was the season’s third-fastest chassis. Not true, wrote Tim, and – like any good engineer – he had the data to back it up.
Over the course of the 2010 season, said Tim, our qualifying pace was just 0.001s per lap slower than third-placed Ferrari – negligible. On race pace alone, he asserted, the MP4-25 was actually 0.136s per lap quicker than the Ferrari.
Overall, then, this means our car was 0.074s per lap faster than the Ferrari.
So, while Tim still wasn’t happy that we were only second-quickest (nobody here needs to be reminded that ‘second is first of the losers’), he took some comfort from demonstrating that we weren’t any lower.
Of equal interest was his analysis of our pace in comparison to the season’s fastest car – the Red Bull RB6. While that car was emphatically the class of the field, and we were only able to best it on two occasions in qualifying (at Montreal and Monza), our race-pace was actually better at no less than seven grands prix: Bahrain, Australia, China, Canada, Belgium, Italy and Abu Dhabi.
What, if anything, does this tell us? Firstly, that Tim Goss hates being beaten. Secondly, that everybody here shares that attitude, and we’re all working as hard as we can to make MP4-26 a world-beater when it’s launched early next year.
The blog provides stats on how much faster the MP4-25 was than Ferrari's F10 - by Tim's reckoning the difference was way over a tenth of a second per race lap! He also points out that the McLaren team delivered, based on race-pace, the fastest car (yes, according to him that includes the RB6!) for no fewer than 7 races in 2010.
Here's the content of the blog:-
An email from Tim Goss pinged into the inbox this morning. ‘Car pace – who was second quickest?’ read the subject line.
Tim’s an extremely competitive guy. His email said it all: “I don’t like being second-quickest,” he wrote. “Worse still, is being told incorrectly that we’re third-quickest.”
His displeasure stemmed from several recent reports firmly contending that our MP4-25 car was the season’s third-fastest chassis. Not true, wrote Tim, and – like any good engineer – he had the data to back it up.
Over the course of the 2010 season, said Tim, our qualifying pace was just 0.001s per lap slower than third-placed Ferrari – negligible. On race pace alone, he asserted, the MP4-25 was actually 0.136s per lap quicker than the Ferrari.
Overall, then, this means our car was 0.074s per lap faster than the Ferrari.
So, while Tim still wasn’t happy that we were only second-quickest (nobody here needs to be reminded that ‘second is first of the losers’), he took some comfort from demonstrating that we weren’t any lower.
Of equal interest was his analysis of our pace in comparison to the season’s fastest car – the Red Bull RB6. While that car was emphatically the class of the field, and we were only able to best it on two occasions in qualifying (at Montreal and Monza), our race-pace was actually better at no less than seven grands prix: Bahrain, Australia, China, Canada, Belgium, Italy and Abu Dhabi.
What, if anything, does this tell us? Firstly, that Tim Goss hates being beaten. Secondly, that everybody here shares that attitude, and we’re all working as hard as we can to make MP4-26 a world-beater when it’s launched early next year.
"He was the fastest driver I ever saw - faster even than Fangio"
________________________- Mike Hawthorn on Alberto Ascari
