It is regularly suggested by motorsport enthusiasts that differences in performance between two drivers within the same structure are primarily due to the direction taken by the team in question towards the behavior or operation wishes of the team. auto of a “privileged” driver compared to the other, or that the natural effort of a team can be turned towards the one who remains the most efficient, or engaged in the longer term with the team.
This suggestion is very regularly refuted by the teams themselves, from managers to track engineers, but this belief dies hard and we sometimes talk about the “nature” of the car or the type of operation (particularly in terms of tire wear) better suited to one “driving style” than another.
However, it could actually happen that pilots first had a new introduction, often called an “improvement”, but which, as an evolution, does not in reality systematically bring an increase in performance or an improvement in behavior. effectively!
The correlation between factory and track data remains a difficult subject to master and the 2024 season has demonstrated this again, with teams such as Aston Martin or Ferrari getting lost at different times of the season on introductions supposed to improve the behavior of the cars.
Sometimes, it is also a lack of new parts that leads a team to choose to allocate it to one driver over another. We saw this frequently at Williams this year, where Albon was often the choice of reason over Logan Sargeant when only one upgrade was available, but in other cases, like at Mercedes, he was even recalled that Lewis Hamilton had chosen to “give” his equipment to his teammate George Russell.
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In any case, Red Bull has sometimes been accused this year, firstly by the Pérez clan, of not equipping the Mexican in the same way as his formidable teammate, as if the team actively wanted to sabotage the performance of its own driver. To the point of leading the team to definitively close the subject at the end of the season and to allocate a completely new chassis at the end of the season to the one which regularly struggled to get out of Q1 on Saturday and reach the finish in the points on Sunday as the team tried to save its crown in the constructors’ world championship.
Sky Sports F1 consultant, Jenson Button reminded us again recently: the teams have no desire or idea of slowing down one of their drivers and will always have the preference of having to manage situations between them if they come to struggle internally or on the track, than having to do intrinsically what no one wants in F1: drive slowly!
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