I was already a Kimi fan thanks to him battling the car, Alonso, shitty Mercedes engines, nails on the track, and practically everything else that could go wrong that season, and still fighting to the end. I was jumping out of my chair when he made that move on Fisichella, IMO it was his best win to date.
Alonso should have won that race. He was running ahead of Kimi when they made him drop back to let Klien back through but the time he lost put him behind Kimi at the pit stops. Race control then said it was a mistake.
I would say the 2013 cars had more downforce. They were getting pretty close to the 2004-2005 times with engines with 3/4th the power. If you look at the aero on the 2005 car, it was very simple wings. Now we’ve got this extremely complex aero elements that bend air in funny ways! 2008 was probably the year aero peaked with all the weird aero bits the cars had to maximise downforce. Now we can’t have wings sticking out of every inch of the car but the aero is a lot more complex.
The strength of the 2005 cars were their immense power. Some were pretty close to 1000bhp at times revving out the 3.5l v10 up to an insane 20k rpm! They sure had a ton of downforce too but they weren’t slot cars like the 2013 car sticking to the ground like glue, they just were really really powerful!
You are forgetting that they had to qualify with the fuel that they were using for the first stint of the race. That has a huge impact. They also had to use one set of grooved tyres for qualifying and race. The cars from 2004/2005 were massively quicker than todays cars.
I’ve been to every USGP at COTA and just saw the MotoGP bikes race there 2 weekends ago. The GP bikes are not slow, but it’s easy to pick up they’re slower. I honestly didn’t realize it was that much of a gap ( ~25 seconds a lap), but it was noticeable.
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