Chapter 1410 - 530: Old Man Undermining Himself_2

Chapter 1410: Chapter 530: Old Man Undermining Himself_2

This week, Mercedes also brought some new upgrades, though the scope wasn’t huge—mainly an optimized gearbox casing, plus an upgrade to the car’s front suspension.

The gearbox casing optimization mainly focused on reducing the gearbox’s weight, bringing the car back down to the FIA minimum weight limit again.

As for the front suspension upgrade, that was based on an idea Hamilton provided.

Hamilton reported that the car felt a bit light at the front and heavy at the rear, with way too much understeer.

So the team increased the structural strength of the front suspension, and also added a tiny bit of weight there.

Which pretty much cemented the whole "Mercedes Vibranium suspension" joke.

As a Mercedes driver, Qin Miao also genuinely felt that their car’s front suspension was unusually stiff.

Of course, the suspension stiffness is really just a side effect of this upgrade; the main goal was actually to optimize the car’s front–rear balance.

Now with the front suspension strengthened and the gearbox casing at the back lightened, the overall driving feel of the car should change quite a bit.

Because of that, when FP1 started on Friday, Hamilton jumped into the session very actively.

He was the very first one out on track.

Qin Miao was also quite curious what the upgraded W14 would feel like.

As for his verdict on the upgraded car, the Old Man wasn’t exactly singing its praises, but he was definitely very satisfied.

At the very least, the upgrade met his expectations.

And for Qin Miao, the car still felt comfortable enough to drive—in any case, the overall driving feel hadn’t changed all that much, and it still had that understeering character.

By the end of FP1, Hamilton unsurprisingly topped the session with a 1:18.500.

0.29 seconds faster than Verstappen in second.

As for Qin Miao...

When Qin Miao was doing a quali simulation run in FP1, he ran straight into a red flag.

He’d only just completed half the run when the quali sim had to be cut short.

In FP2, Qin Miao did a flying lap.

After that flying lap, Qin Miao went up to second, 0.191 seconds slower than Alonso in first.

The main reason was that Qin Miao did that flying lap on old softs; the team purely wanted him to find the feeling for qualifying runs, and didn’t really expect him to set a proper time with that lap.

Besides, the other drivers weren’t doing quali simulations on that run either.

Still, on the other side of the fence, Vassel was pretty happy when he saw Qin Miao’s time.

Even though Qin Miao’s performances over the past few seasons have already proved to everyone that he’s not someone who crumbles mentally.

But Vassel had never actually worked with Qin Miao before, so he was worried a sudden transfer might affect Qin Miao’s form.

After all, he was the one who pushed Ferrari to go all in and bet big on Qin Miao; right now, he and Qin Miao are truly tied at the hip—shared glory, shared ruin.

He might be one of the very few in the paddock who genuinely hope Qin Miao can keep his level up.

But reality shows that Qin Miao is still Qin Miao—a double world champion is not someone you can just casually question.

The contract situation between Qin Miao and Ferrari is also quite interesting.

When Qin Miao joined Mercedes, he directly squeezed Bottas out of his race seat, leaving Bottas on the Mercedes bench for a whole year.

Of course, it wasn’t that Mercedes didn’t want to release Bottas; it was mainly that they found Qin Miao too late, and by then there simply weren’t any race seats available for Bottas at other teams in the paddock.

On top of that, in internal testing Qin Miao absolutely crushed Bottas, so the team decided not to let Bottas go and kept him around for another year.

His salary didn’t get cut; he just lost his race bonuses, that’s all.

But this time, when Qin Miao joins Ferrari, it’s the same situation as when he joined Mercedes—the driver Qin Miao is about to replace still has a year left on his contract.

Right now, Qin Miao is a bit curious how Ferrari will handle the Sainz issue.

Will they directly negotiate with Sainz’s camp to let him leave, or will they keep him in the team for a season as a test driver, PUA-ing him like Mercedes did with Bottas?

Of course, if it were up to Qin Miao, he’d probably let Sainz go.

Even though Sainz took the Ferrari seat that should have been his, at the end of the day Sainz is just an employee.

Maybe personally he really did want that seat, but ultimately he was nothing more than a tool in Ferrari’s internal political struggle back then.

And now, in terms of both honours and market value, Qin Miao has completely crushed Sainz; no matter how deep the grudge, it tends to evaporate once the drivers are in different leagues.

After all, there’s an old saying back home: "When it’s time to show mercy, show mercy; always leave room for others, so you can meet again down the road."

All those sayings are there to warn later generations not to push things to the absolute limit.

That said, even though Ferrari has given Qin Miao very generous terms, even allowing him full control over his own crew and the power to fire people,

Qin Miao doesn’t feel he has the right to decide Sainz’s fate.

At most, he can give his opinion, and Ferrari will take it into account.

Friday’s work wrapped up in a tight, busy rush.

After finishing his day’s work, Qin Miao went back to the hotel arranged by the team.

The night passed uneventfully.

Saturday: FP3 is still the day qualifying begins.

During FP3, dark clouds drifted over the track from time to time, and it had already rained lightly for a while before the session started.

But fortunately, once FP3 officially got underway, the rain on track stopped.

Through FP3, Qin Miao just went step by step, following the team’s instructions to complete the final round of testing.

But considering that there were intermittent showers blowing across the track all day, and the forecast saying that during qualifying there might be showers lasting 5–10 minutes, the track temperature would be very low—roughly similar to what it was in FP3.

So the team brought out a brand-new set of softs and sent Qin Miao out during the lowest track temperature window to run a few flying laps.

Because the track temperature was low, Qin Miao’s softs didn’t wear much, so after two warm-up laps he was able to string together two consecutive flying laps with enough pace to be competitive.

At the same time, to get the most realistic data, the team asked Qin Miao to push flat out on those two laps; but to avoid letting other teams see his true speed, when Qin Miao went out for the flying laps, they loaded his fuel tank with an extra 40 kilos compared to quali trim.

After those two laps, his laptime was a 1:18.631, putting him down in P14, right there at the table with Leclerc.

But if you strip away those extra 40 kilos of fuel, Qin Miao’s true pace should be around 1:17.4, good enough for P1 in FP3.

That kind of time might still make chasing pole a bit tough, but getting into the race in the top three shouldn’t be a problem.

FP3 ended quickly.

Then it was time for qualifying.

And just as the team’s meteorology department had predicted, a spell of rain came down from the sky before quali.

But it stopped before the session started, so in Q1 it was only cloudy.

The track temperature, however, was very low.

Which played perfectly into the hands of Mercedes, who had specifically prepped for this in FP3 and nailed the conditions.

Qin Miao actually wanted to be the first one out in Q1.

He was worried about traffic in Q1; after all, Albert Park is only 5.278 kilometres long—not a long circuit—and it’s a high-speed track built around Albert Park Lake, so its width isn’t great.

The most direct consequence is that overtaking in the race is difficult outside of the DRS zones, and in qualifying it’s extremely easy to run into traffic.

If the car in front doesn’t move aside in time, or you’ve got several cars trundling slowly ahead of you, your quali laptime will definitely be affected.

Of course, Qin Miao knows that in qualifying, apart from traffic, track conditions are just as important.

But he felt that on this circuit, the advantage of going out early to bank a flying lap is still a bit bigger.

However, the team wanted to wait until other drivers had cleaned up the damp track a bit before sending Qin Miao out.

On that, Qin Miao could only agree.

After all, on the strategy side, Mercedes’ strategy group has basically never made any huge blunders—at least they’re not like Ferrari, who keep serving the Iron Buddha Temple fans those black-out-level masterstrokes.