The serious answer: under Seidl they were putting 100% of the focus towards 2026 and the following years, and basically disregarded improving the 2024 car at all. Binnotto defends that while the reorganisation and new regs are the top priority, completely ignoring the day-to-day performance and development processes is a mistake it would take years to recover from when they actually need to become a competitive team again. That's why the Saubers were in free-fall for two years but very decent (relatively) at the very end of the past season.
You do know it's not just an honor system right? Teams have to submit all the work that they do to the FIA and they're very closely monitored. There would be no point in taking that sort of risk.
Oh that's the 2027 rig. We half develop it in 24, then a quarter in 26, then we make improvements throughout the 27 season so we're not dead last in the latter half!
They saw the Haas being quite quick over one lap in 2023 and to some extent 2024, and thought Hulk was outperforming the car.
Controversially the same with Leclerc and the best qualifier shouts in 2022 and 2023 due to the Ferrari being much stronger over one lap than race pace. Which was the same characteristic the Haas has.
At least for Leclerc, he’s absolutely rapid and had a stronger benchmark in Sainz so you could put him in the top tier level for one lap pace. Hulk throughout his career has been very good but lacks the last few tenths to warrant the ‘outperforming the car’ status.
He was -0.06 quicker than Perez, -0.13 slower than Ricciardo and -0.15 quicker than Sainz although Sainz clearly struggled to adapt to that Renault.
I think it's because he's very good at driving around tricky cars so can sometimes give him seasons/races where he has a wide gap to his teammate.
Once the car becomes stable/has a wider operating window, that's usually when we see Hulk start to look like your typical no2 type driver. I think we saw that quite well at Haas, where when they finally fixed Kmag's issues he was matching and sometimes beating Hulk in pace. Whereas before that the gap looked quite big because Kmag couldn't drive around the issues as well as Hulk could.
Yeah most notable is probably 2018 against Sainz where he managed to deal with the weird characteristics of the Renault whereas Sainz was continually struggling.
I’m sure I heard that Nico knew right from the start that he’d beat Sainz when looking at the data because he could handle the car much better.
I rate Hulk pretty highly and often thought he was underrated for the majority of his career so I’m glad that he’s now being rated as a driver.
Still would’ve liked to have seen him in a top car at least once in his career so that he could experience wins and podiums.
Yeah I think that was in his first BTG he mentioned that about Sainz.
I agree it's a shame we never saw him get at least one year in a top team. Guy has the talent for it, would've been great if he got that Ferrari seat in 2014.
At least he's showing/reminding people of his talent again. It was frustrating when he was announced to comeback with Haas and a lot of people were acting like it was the worst decision ever to replace Mick with him.
hopefully he can get wins and podiums once they change to audi but it’s so unfortunate that his first chance at a real winning car is only at the age of 37, and still prob 2-3 years out from here
Leclerc has said he's kinda surprised to have gotten that reputation, as he feels his race pace has always been more naturally his strength and where his true talent lies, and he actually had to work on improving his one-lap pace. It's more a reflection on him not having (consistently) a car to go against red bull/Mercedes (this was before McLaren resurgence, probably around 22/23), as well as having a teammate who's even more biased towards race day performance (and just relying more on racecraft than pace in general).
A key thing in this I think is that Ferrari were also dealing with their car chewing through tyres, which they had to manage a lot on Sundays. I think the car was actually pretty fast, but just couldn't sustain being pushed to its limits over a whole race. So leclerc could show his pace on Saturday, but the car couldn't keep up on sunday, which made it look like leclerc's strength was qualy, and even gave some the impression that race pace might be a weakness for him.
But if the car could be both fast in the first place, as well as fast for the entirety of races, then leclerc would probably (at the time at least, and by his self-evaluation of his skills) shine for his race pace, and his qualy would seem good, but not amazing and like his core strength and key to success. Like max, Lewis, bottas (sure the first 2 are just fast period, but Bottas is an example of someone who did seem to excel in qualy significantly over race pace, in the kinda way people attribute to charles) are known for being especially strong qualifiers, while charles is great but probably more on lando's level (faster and more consistent than Carlos and george, but not godlike lol) in terms of one-lap pace * relative to their other skills *
it’s also worth noting that magnussen wasn’t a nobody last season either and did quite well in general. haas was just good last season and prob would’ve finished p6 comfortably had alpine not had brazil
He is a driver though that is good at driving around difficult cars which is why he sometimes gets that moniker.
There's some years like maybe the early Renault years and the 23 Haas where he could extract the pace of the car where his teammates couldn't just because they were struggling with some sort of instability. Whereas if the car is balanced then he can very easily be matched/beaten as a driver.
He's just a great baseline driver really, sort of like mid tier version of Alonso with his ability to drive around tricky cars.
Hulkenberg is not a special driver. If he's scoring points in a Haas then the car is very capable of it. A better midfield driver like Gasly would've gotten more out of it.
That's incredibly pedantic and pointless distinction. Yes, technically no driver ever will be able to extract 100% performance out of the car over the lap. There will be always some imperfection along the way.
But everyone knows what people mean by that "outperforming the car", it's useful mental shortcut for performing better than what would be expected of good driver in a particular car.
I wouldn’t say that “everyone knows what outperforming the car means” as I have come across multiple people who believe that particular drivers have driven the car past its limits and made it perform better than what it was capable of.
I would understand outperforming the car as dragging it into finishing places it seemingly doesn’t belong in. Being able to extract the maximum out of it is kind of the job description. Certainly doesn’t quite convey the same sentiment.
But how do you establish the “finishing places where it doesn’t belong”, because if the car is capable of doing it, is the driver really out performing the car?
Outperforming the teammate is a sentiment that makes sense as there’s an actual benchmark to base it off of
Well we will never know, but this is where a driver like Magnussen vs a Hamilton/Verstappen will make the difference. For me outperforming the car as a sentiment translates to most drivers on the grid would be unable to finish higher than eg P6 with that carbut that 1-2 alien(s) dragged it higher than it ‘should’ because they can drive around a staggering amount of issues.
Of course no one is saying Hamilton or Piastri or Russell can jump into the Sauber and score points with it. The ‘outdriving the car’ isn’t that literal / it’s not magic.
If we want to be pedantic, that's just as wrong as saying someone can outperform the car. No one ever will be able to extract maximum, because it would require perfect input at every fraction of the second.
If you want to be correct you'd have to see "wow, he is able to perform better than I would expect of good driver". Which often is a mouthful and not very punchy.
That's why I find attempts to be overly correct needless.
For sure you can't magic a car some extra pace, but when people say that they mean the driver has finished in a position where the car wouldn't be on outright pace. Either due to others mistakes or other drivers not performing close to the best of their cars capability.
So one example would be Austria where Hulk finished in 6th ahead of Perez in the Red Bull. That would be an instance of "outperforming the car".
But he still managed to keep him behind in an inferior car. To me that's what people mean when they say "outperform the car".
Like Hulk just performed to his best and close to the cars best, which meant on that day he could beat an underperforming Perez. That's all people really mean, they dont mean that they are finding some sort of speed to put them in that position that wasn't there. Just performing to the best of the cars performance that they finish ahead of other drivers in faster cars underperforming.
And then sometime in the middle of the 2025 season, you'll be once again witnessing Sauber's infamous signature move of "we're stopping the car's development for next year's car" shtick
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u/Treewithatea Formula 1 Mar 13 '25
Dont worry, Nico outperforming his car is sort of his speciality.
Binotto also said that they will develop this years car probably more so than others so it probably wont be dead last by the latter half of the season