FERRARI WINS ON STRATEGY!? 2024 Italian Grand Prix Review

[Music] I actually didn't expect to do one of these today because I assumed like a lot of other people that one or both of the McLarens would just go off into the distance I mean not quite like how Lando did at zanville but still that was how I expected it to go but you know you had some unpredictability you had a different winner and lots of other different things that happened that made it a decent race so we might as well do a review I was anticipating scraping the bottom of the barrel to say McLaren won Red Bull was slow something something botched upgrades something something iffy breake pedal something something something or just not doing a video at all but yesterday was a mixture of gambles strategy Pace teammates fighting and a lot of other things that added up to be a decent event all around and it had one main question did Ferrari win or did McLaren Chuck it away like they' done at Silverstone that's what I am to find out and for you to have fun debating it in the comments because that's why I do these videos I mean there's a little bit of Engagement bait there as well part of the reason Monza provided a race like it did is because the track had been resurfaced and there are a few other upgrades as well but the main key part here is that the track surface did things to the tires that caught a few of the teams out so what we're going to do now is look at them using some video game footage because I can't exactly go to Monza and take the pictures of myself can I one of the changes they made to the track was at the first chicane they widen in the central part of the chicane while keeping the entrance and exit the same an exact reason for doing this I can't find but it looks like that it's been done to allow for easier Switchback moves or to just ease congestion in the starts particularly when series like the wec visit the circuit you've got a lot of cars trying to go through that section and two classes of car involved too but what's good about this is that the entry and the exit of the complex are the same there's no wider entry so it's all taken as it normally would be Lando's pole La shows him using the same line that he would have done last year so it was actually quicker to do that than to try and really open up the second part of that chicane for the run through Cur of Grande the second properly noticeable change was nearer to the end of the lap at the escari chicane what the circuit owners have done here is take out the old gutter style curbing on the right hander and install some flatter curbing on that corner as well as flattening out the Apex curb on the final left that spits you out onto the straight between ascari and parabolica sorry Alberto before I get absolutely mured by the uh actually uh correction uh excuse me crowd the reason that these curves were controversial is because of the thing that affects all racing drivers in that if you're giving them an inch they'll take a mile before this update you had to stay off the curbs entirely even in pre-round effect cars you certainly didn't touch that gutter curb and you only hit the two Apex curbs on the two left handers if your car was set up well enough to be able to hit them East lines and so on as I've mentioned in several videos now the McLaren's Norris in particular can attack Cubs a lot better than the other front running cars in the two Mercedes the two Ferraris and one of the Red Bulls yeah exactly but the thinking was that these new flatter curves weren't so much to do with two cars taking the benefit of them but more to do with the whole ruining the magic of that section because you had to be laser guided through there other changes involved the removal of some of the extra runoff that was on some of the curves you know that green stuff that was around them and then bringing the gravel traps closer to those curbs so that the track limits were the track limits as colapinto found out in his first qualifying session and he had a decent race to be fair to him and I thought I'd mention that because people will want to have me mention it but really we're focusing on McLaren versus Ferrari here and what happened in the race also Magnuson getting 12 penalty points on his license so that should be the first band since Roman Gran in 2012 and that's a video I need to do in the future but the main thing on top of these changes to the Fane and these new curves at ascari the whole track had been resurfaced a brand new sheet of tarmac applied to the track and because it was brand new the tires were going to react differently to how they would elsewhere which would become a big talking point later on in the race a race that McLaren managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of Victory from again you'd argue part of that was done at the start Lando once again not getting the best of starts with piastri hounding him all the way towards the second chicane and piastri himself lucky to avoid a puncture when he cut across the front of Russell's Mercedes and damaged part of Russell's front Wing as the two McLaren flew down towards the second chicane piastri positioned himself on the outside and lobbed it in with Norris getting a kick of oversteer and almost ending up like vettle did in 2018 so Norris down from first to third as lir went by on the exit of the rogier piastri cut it a bit fine by going across Russell like that but to be honest what was he supposed to do staying behind Lando and lose a position to George and oral behind after that though it's a debate over what he should have done with George held back due to cutting the chicane I reckon there was a gap available for Oscar to hold it into the rier but that's just me they were racing under what's become known as papaya rules which basically translates to race each other but don't crash although someone did put it bluntly on a Reddit thread regarding this whole papaya rules thing which does sound like it will become a for meme at some point papaya rules is so stupid a notion to say after your teammate sends it in the middle of a chicane on lap one forcing you to take evasive action and turn an easy onew into a 13 and compromising a WDC challenge that only Lando seems to care about they need a overtake your teammate on the straights you Muppet so they don't either have to lose positions avoiding you or Crash Into You racing normally rule Lando should have stuck to the normal line and had a silver arrows s crash then the team will finally stop sitting on their and do some team management Anubis 1958 a 66-year-old with a lot of experience said if Lando hadn't yielded they would have both gone off if Oscar had try that with Max there would be broken cars and a safety car Oscar is capitalizing on Lando being too nice Lando needs to realize that to win the driver's Championship he needs to be ruthless and race for himself but lap 14 Oscar had a 3sec lead to lir who was following in second place and then Lando was about half a second back from the Ferrari give or take but then as the race went on and it got to around lap 10 lap 11 the problems with the new Surface started to come about because the surface is brand new it reacts differently piastri while leading the race was consistently a second faster than he'd been in second practice but it was just a matter of time before things started to drop off what the new surfice was doing was it was giving the cars more grip but at the same time it was going to give the tires what's known as graining so what's that then to be honest I don't know so let's learn together Formula 1 tires much like other racing tires have an optimal temperature window in which that they'll work properly and this is why you see them weaving and doing other bits and pieces like speeding up and slamming on the brakes to generate the tire temperature either through the side to side weaving or also the heat of the brakes radiating through into the rims and then into the tire unless it's that clip of kimy driving in a straight line while everybody else is weaving like a snake Martin brle has said on a few occasions that he doesn't think that any of that weaving stuff works and that it's all Placebo graining happens when the surface of the T Tire scrubs across the tarmac through a corner and the way the car and physics do their thing means that the tire is scrubbed across the tarmac and this pulls on the rubber bits of the rubber are pulled off as this happens and because the surface of the tire is now incredibly hot the rubber sticks back on to another part of the tire and you can see some graining on these tires from 2016 those wavy lines just below the larger chunks of rubber are all part of the graining process and the larger chunks might just be because of picking up marbles after the race it's not actually clear all this happens because the surface temperature is hotter than the carcass temperature and grip will drop because of having an uneven contact patch as the surface of the tire gets thinner you lose Tire temperature because of it being harder to retain the heat as the carcass temperature comes up things start to equalize out and you get rid of the graining or at least reduce it enough so you get better performance now blistering is the opposite blistering happens when the tire is too hot at the carcass and this causes the tire's rubber to basically boil and have bubbles that blow up and destroy the rubber irreparably this is the thing about graining over blistering give it a few laps and you can usually get rid of it the tldr is the track had too much grip so basically what happened was the tires reacting on this particular surface caused the graining and once the graining had started they couldn't get rid of it because they couldn't get the tires back into the right window with which to get rid of it I hope all of that makes sense with Red Bull definitely having issues Max taking another set of hards at his first Pit Stop it was also clear that the McLaren would have to stop again at the end of lap 16 piastri stopped for a set of hearts and it was going to be a tall order to get him to the end unless he found a way of getting through things but Norris seemed to be getting it worse than piastri with McLaren giving him an extra bit of front Wing to help with the turn in and in the second part of the race Norris was lapping nearly half a second slower than Oscar was while lir sat quite happily in second by the midpoint of the second stint there was no choice for McLaren but to pit again piastre if he wanted the win was going to have to lap something like 2 seconds a lap faster than Charles was and this is where Ferrari snatched the victory a lot of people expected the Ferrari to drop off and for Oscar to catch back up myself included because of the way the tires are working but as the race noted lir did what for stappen piastri and Norris couldn't do and managed to stabilize his graining so his lap times remained somewhat consistent while piastri was able to clear SS into second lir was just too far ahead p was hampered by lapping stoll's Aston which didn't help but it would have still been a toall order to get past and for Ferrari to pull this off seems even better considering that for so long they've been associated with a picture of a pit wall with Pepe the frog in clown makeup superimposed over the heads of the people on that pit wall which leads to the poll I put up on Twitter yesterday was this a Ferrari Master stroke or was it a case of if you throw enough at the wall eventually some of it's going to stick most people said that it was a great strategy call but the general consensus is that McLaren managed to throw it away much like they'd done at silverston Ferrari did have some stuff going in its favor though they had a new floor and a new rear wing with the floor designed to help reverse some of the bouncing issues they've been having since the upgrades brought to the Spanish G prie in May the thing is Monza isn't exactly a track where there's a lot of bouncing involved so it probably won't be until Baku and beyond that any gains or losses will be seen with that floor on top of this the Monza circuit played into Ferrari's hands too given that Monza has more slower speed Corners that the Ferrari is good in and doesn't have as many long Corners that the Ferrari struggles with this might have also helped with the graining issues now I'm not saying for a second that Ferrari only won because of this or because of this or because of this or because of this or because of this llaa was still fourth on the grid for the Grand Prix getting ahead of both of the McLaren was going to be a tall order the McLarens were still the fastest cars on that particular weekend even though Norris said that the Ferrari was faster but I'm going to press EXT to doubt on that but still lir did some stuff that his own teammate couldn't do which was managed the graining and managed to get to the end and managed to keep things consistent enough that the Gap was there to be able to keep piastri behind come the end of the Grand Prix so it was as much of the driver and there was a lot of driver input more than it was just car and track matching up Oscar's overtake on Lando was Brave and pulled off to Perfection it's something that Lando should really take note of and try to put into his own driving because he doesn't seem to have that killer instinct that he needs if he wants to One Day become Champion sure nice guys have become champions in the past Stewart Clark Graham and Damon Hill butt look at how many people win it through being Nikki louder won a championship by telling Enzo Ferrari himself that the cast sucked they fixed it he went on to be Champion the following year schumacker and Senna were ruthless on track Prost ruthless off it if Lando wants to be serious about winning a championship he needs to stop being so slow and cautious on lap one but McLaren should be looking into what's going on the dri's championship was a long shot to start with it's an even longer shot now the constructors should be the absolute priority with them handing theen and Red Bull as much as possible but with the way that things have been going recently there might need to be a chat or two because while the Hungarian Grand Prix was an easy one two and that could be cleared up this whole papaya rules thing might become a bigger problem down the line and just as some extra bits and pieces because what usually happens when I do these opinion videos is I'll write what I need to write I'll record it I'll edit it and then I get ideas on extra things to put in for more context opinions and to expand on things and stuff like that so remember the bit from Reddit earlier that said that Oscar is capitalizing on Lando being too nice like mentioned that's the exact same move Lewis pulled on Sebastian vettle in 2018 and Seb sent himself around for the trouble but that move was pulled off by two drivers who at the time had eight championships between them so there is the opportunity for Lewis to try that move and Seb to not crash into him because of the experience they have even if Seb did make contact with Lewis and ended up being spun round but Lewis would have known that Seb is a driver that he could have done that with as that same Reddit poster alluded doing that with a driver that has a yield or crash attitude there is absolutely no way that move is on and it's almost as if Oscar is saying to McLaren intentionally or not don't throw your weight behind this guy because I'm here too but at the same time what does McLaren want to do or need to do because when was the last time they were this good nearly 18 years ago when the two drivers were let me check my notes Hamilton and Alonzo and we all know how that went down okay it's probably not going to go to those kinds of extremes so is it McLaren reacting to a warning from history if you try to get in the way of that kind of thing or is it that they've forgotten what they have to do in this kind of situation the last time they won a drivers and constructor's double was 1998 and that was with hackin as a clear number one and Kar is the clear number two there's no way that those two drivers are going to be kept happy one of them is going to have to suck it up at some point but I don't think that any of this papaya rules graining Lando not being great on the opening lap Oscar doing this Lando doing this should take anything away from what the Clair did yesterday he made it work where so many many others couldn't he did a One Stop while everybody had to do two he maintained a pace while everybody else is slowed down and he managed to complete the set of winning his home Grand Prix and Ferrari's home Grand Prix in the same season which should be a big morale booster for the next race and going towards next season provided that the floor upgrade has the desired effect because you didn't really see it much at Monza but you'll probably see it more at Baku which is a bumpier track and the problems experienced by Mercedes McLaren and Hass there a couple of years ago should serve as a warning from history so while the toosi can celebrate the win at Monza I don't think they should get too excited yet so then a look at what happened at yesterday's Italian Grand Prix thing and this has been my look back opinion analysis and reaction to that thing if this thing has made you think things about the thing then like this thing so I know I've done a good job and for more things from this thing hit the Subscribe button thing and also ring the bell thing so never miss out on anything that I do around here massive thanks as ever go out to the Mad Lads that support me at a more personal level on patreon and allow for the ability to buy up official top quality images for use in these opinion videos and if you do want to help contribute to that and any other expenses around here then a link to patreon is in the 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