Scott Mitchell-Malm

And the idea was...

that Pirelli had this challenge of getting tyres that were a reasonable percentage smaller overall to produce the same level of mechanical grip as before.

And that's been married to cars with less load, different braking characteristics as well.

And the point is basically what the tyre does in the grip that it offers effectively in a straight line when I guess you're doing that initial bit of braking and the initial steering input versus when the locks properly applied differently

and you're trying to have the grip of the tyre laterally through the corner, it's quite on-off, it's quite binary.

Leclerc talked about that, he described it as digital, Stella basically backed that up, and they've noticed, McLaren's noticed how good Antonelli seems to be at getting the tyres working and getting the most out of them, because Stella's point was basically Antonelli could not be as far ahead as he was in Monaco,

without there being a strong element of how he's using the tyre.

So I wonder how much that links to your point, Mark, about Russell struggling generally with the lower grip stuff anyway.

And then if there's kind of a tyre issue on top of that, then we're kind of getting into the Oscar Piastri territory of that third of the season last year where the title challenge unraveled because you've got...

an underlying limitation or weakness there anyway which might mean in let's say quote unquote normal circumstances he'd be a tenth or two off Antonelli just because it's not quite there but when you then have an extra layer on top of that with the way that impacts the tyres and the doom cycle you get into if the tyres aren't working properly that suddenly snowballs instead of being a tenth or two adrift which I would say is the normal gap Antonelli

between really good drivers that are struggling versus really good drivers that are on it, it becomes half a second or more, which is usually something we're not accustomed to seeing.

gradually that's what will reveal a driver not where they are in any one moment or over a run of a few races yeah and it's it's also an interesting function of the fact that it's another intra-team fight as well because when we had you know apart from the fact that Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton are two of the greatest drivers of all time when they were fighting each other in 2021 for example each would have weekends through that year and Lewis had a few more than Max where

There were mistakes or imperfect performances or whatever.

But those just end up as a narrative.

They get grouped into it being a car thing because it's one car versus a different car.

And I'm not to say that that was or wasn't the case.

But you just end up with slightly less of a focus on how the driver kind of gets impacted by some of the variables we've ended up talking about over the last couple of seasons.

Because when you had Norris versus Piastri in the same McLaren...

Having different pros and cons through the year, depending on the circumstance, the circuit type, the driving demand, whatever.

And now we're seeing it again for Russell Antonelli.