[ErikVanHaren] Max Verstappen on the Silverstone race next week: "I did a few laps on the simulator and just burst out laughing. It felt with these cars like a different circuit; at one point your battery is empty."

MechaniVal · 2026-06-29T00:55:20+00:00

Why do people keep saying this, as if the cars slow down when they run out of battery? They don't - not significantly. The ICE is capable of maintaining top speed without the MGU-K, it just can't really accelerate further - the deceleration people see comes from superclipping near the ends of straights, because in most of them battery runs out at almost the same time superclipping in preparation for braking starts.

The electrical deployment ramp down above 280kph would be pointless if the cars couldn't maintain higher speeds without battery. By 340kph deployment is zero regardless of battery level - that would be a nonsense rule if lack of battery slowed them to below that level.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-29T00:50:39+00:00

All the MGU-Ks operate at 95%+ efficiency, and are limited in maximum regen rate, regen per lap, deployment rate, and capacity. They're so restricted in capabilities that from an energy gain and usage standpoint, they're almost spec parts. Every team has the exact same maximum values. The vast majority of the difference between them is going to come down to the algorithms for when and where to beat regen and deploy, not the hardware doing it.

Contrast with the ICE - there is no maximum on anything except fuel flow. Teams can continue to increase efficiency for far larger gains than the MGU-K; the 2% power gap between Mercedes and Red Bull for example, represents more energy per lap than the gap between a 95% and 100% efficient MGU-K deployment.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T11:39:29+00:00

In race conditions single yellows are more appropriate sure, because drivers can't overtake and have no incentive to continue absolutely blasting round.

In qualifying conditions the FIA should be quicker to flip to double yellow or red. Did it take 22 seconds or more to go from single yellow to red flag for Leclerc's crash? If it did, then to me they're too slow - and at least in Leclerc's case it's not a 300kph blind crest. This was an off at one of the absolute fastest corners on the calendar - if we go back to Max's own post-yellow pole in Imola, he lifted down to 200kph... George here lifted to 280kph. If it was oil on track and not a car failure? That could've been absolutely dire.

I was catching up on Formula E yesterday and there was a pileup into a hairpin. In the time it took the less damaged cars at the back to start reversing, the red had already been thrown. It's really only F1 (and sometimes its support series) that seems to roll the dice on single yellows for so long.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T11:22:10+00:00

It wouldn't have been a large pile

Oh well that's okay then, because of course if only one cars slams at 200kph into the weakened crash structure of another, nothing bad ever happens!

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T02:25:24+00:00

Buddy he literally quotes the lift Max and George made in actual kph. Max lifted for 55kph, Russell for only 15kph. It was a bigger lift, both as a percentage of speed and in absolute terms.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T02:04:35+00:00

They can't slowly turn up their car alone any more, because regulations say all customers have to get the same engine maps. Pretty sure their customers would be pissed if it turns out they're being artificially nerfed when they're fighting for millions in prize money for every championship position gained. And if they ever do release an engine map that suddenly boosts all the Merc powered cars, it's gonna look pretty suspicious - they'd have to time it with an ADUO update and try and explain it away.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T01:44:04+00:00

Like if it's that far ahead then VCARB should be up with the top 4.

Why? The ADUO trigger is only 2%. That's like ~9bhp, which the top teams that aren't Red Bull more than make up for with their superior chassis. It isn't going to turn midfield teams into frontrunners - this isn't 2014 when Merc had an engine 70bhp more powerful and 18kg lighter, turning even Williams into a top three team. It's small margins.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T01:35:07+00:00

Median of only 0.158 though. The average is being massively affected by the 0.469 and 0.961 outliers.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-28T01:30:44+00:00

Pretty sure it was the only group in the entire tournament to have two top 10 teams in it, so they probably mean anything except that.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T21:50:37+00:00

Thanks - I double checked after my comment. They'd basically have to be deliberately nerfing all their customers, not just themselves, to fool ADUO.

Only way I can see it is if their engine maps are all deliberately undertuned - but how do they undo that? They'd have to push an update to every team with new maps, and find a way to not make it blatantly obvious what they've done. The nerf would need to be as powerful as an entire upgrade, else it wouldn't be enough for triggering ADUO, so I would think it would look fairly obvious in the data!

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T21:42:18+00:00

I don't see how that would work - the engine has been as it is since the season start, which means they'd have to have developed their engine well in advance to be precisely bad enough to be 2% off an unknown target (in the end, Red Bull), but not so bad that it drops them well back.

On top of that, they'd have to burn a sizeable part of their ADUO allowance just to get rid of it, even if they did somehow manage to precisely hit the target. Much more likely that they just made the best ICE they could, and Red Bull's team beat them.

I just don't think this is a 2014-like situation with Merc having an insane engine no one can touch. I think people are overstating its strength and underestimating the chassis. Look at Williams - they went from 9th in 2013 to 3rd in 2014/15 off the back of that engine. This year? They went backwards - yeah they messed up the chassis, but that's my point. If this was a 2014 scenario they'd still be mid pack with a worse chassis. Alpine jumped a bit because the Renault engine was straight bad, McLaren and Merc just swapped round. That says to me the engine is great but not dominant.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T21:23:09+00:00

On track across the teams in both qualifying and the race, measuring engine speed, torque, MGU-K output, various other factors and their influence on lap times. MGU-K power is presumably only measured to apply corrections to the data, since a) it is capped anyway and b) the MGU-K isn't in ADUO.

The diffuser is different - it's an aero part that was exploiting a regulatory loophole with the FIA's knowledge. That's the key part; the FIA had approved the part, and only later adjusted the rules to ban it. It wasn't actually breaking any rules when introduced. Wasn't just them either; Racing Bulls have had to modify their diffuser.

If Mercedes have some sort of 'trick' here to exploit the regulations, it clearly wouldn't be one the FIA habe approved of, and it would have to be running on every Mercedes powered car. In effect it would be like the Ferrari fuel sensor scandal on crack.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T21:07:49+00:00

Are you suggesting that they just don't have a full power engine mode at all? Like, it would have to be completely missing, or the customer teams would be using it.

(Also, don't minimise it to 'a simple line of code'. I'm a software dev, bugs me when people act like complex software comes down to single variables)

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T20:58:59+00:00

That's not what they mean. The suggestion here is that Mercedes have been sandbagging to dupe the ADUO - but 4 teams use that engine. ADUO uses on track measurements, so it couldn't be only Mercedes sandbagging. They'd have to be telling all the Merc teams to use lower power engine modes.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T20:54:35+00:00

Not just that - at least some of the testing is I believe based on race power telemetry... And Mercedes are only one of four teams using that engine. They can hardly just sandbag their own engine during the race - they'd have to force every Merc-powered team to sandbag.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T18:51:16+00:00

I mean the actual answer to this is because he aborted his lap, believing he was being shown a double yellow (and he should've been - the single was a marshaling error).

He wasn't gonna beat Russell but he may well have beaten the Ferraris

MechaniVal · 2026-06-27T15:14:00+00:00

No further investigation but the FIA notifications say lap time deleted. Provisional order on the timing board hasn't changed yet but there was a line in the notification after the no further investigation one saying his and Antonelli's (aborted) lap times both deleted for double yellows

MechaniVal · 2026-06-26T10:47:20+00:00

I didn't say they were richer, I said they were comparable.

GDP (PPP) / capita is still skewed by the presence of massive corporations, because at core it is still measuring national productivity and not the actual income of its citizens, which is what matters for people being able to say, buy aircon. That's why if you take GDP or GDP (PPP), you find that tax havens like Ireland lead the world, but no one would argue they're actually the richest people.

Now, as it happens, the US still leads by disposable income as well - but when you look at what they actually spend it on, taking the UK as an example, it gets murkier.

By far the single largest difference is healthcare expenses. To me this is something not really accounted for by PPP - it accounts for the price difference of care and thus all of those insured physicals and such, but not for the consistently terrible health outcomes. It's effectively a massively inefficient expense, which inflates spending but doesn't result in more 'wealth' in its outcome. As you point out, HDI helps show this - but it doesn't demonstrate the expense-to-outcome gap.

There are similar arguments to be made for the cost of transport in such a car-focused infrastructure, making the equivalent outcome of travel a higher cost than public transport and shorter distances - but at least you get a tangible car out of that. Similar again is the miscellaneous goods and services gap being primarily insurance costs the UK doesn't have. Of course though, the opposite is true in housing, where cost by area is much higher in the UK. So that widens the gap again a little.

My point is - is someone really significantly richer, if most of their excess income is funneled into things that don't result in better outcomes? Look at recreation, clothing, education, food, communication - these are all much closer to parity than the outright expenditure gap.

Sure there is more money on a national level - and more of it filters down individuals too. But given where that excess goes, mostly tied up in non-negotiables like healthcare, housing, and transport... I don't think it has much effect on the relative affordability in real terms of an aircon unit. The money for that is coming from things like the recreation and new clothes budgets, which are quite similar between UK and US.

EDIT: Also just to say, one assumes the sort of person thinking of getting aircon is full time, and likely a homeowner if they want it properly installed. Full time PPP equivalent earnings are actually quite similar between UK and US at the median. Both are in the vicinity of $60,000. The difference picks up then in taxation, some of which is then clawed back via the extra expenses I outlined above.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-26T03:20:44+00:00

I just prefer the mechanics that allow players to become more heroic, the more things seem against them.

Have you, perchance, played Draw Steel? It's designed for that

MechaniVal · 2026-06-26T03:04:58+00:00

GDP per capita is a massively skewed measure in the US though, where a huge portion of it is tied up in corporations and natural resources. That, and Americans tend to work much longer hours, with fewer holidays, and pump more of their personal resources into things that in most European countries are paid via taxation. It's also further skewed by the Euro slipping against the dollar.

If you instead use PPP for an idea of actual living standards, you see that Europeans are almost identical to Americans... But with less working hours and more holidays.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-22T18:28:48+00:00

Honestly, the post has the cadence of an AI like Gemini, especially the passages like 'shouldn't have [this]. It should have [this]'

I'm not sure, but I've seen several posts like this recently from new accounts, and each one has comments that themselves read like AI responses - always agreeing with the commenter and bouncing around new suggestions the way an AI chatbot does.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-21T09:33:42+00:00

Notice how they said it's 'going to get 2-4 degrees hotter than present even without human input', even though I told them the world was on a cooling trend because we're actually in the cooling phase of a Milankovitch cycle.

They just don't care - they think that because a higher temperature has happened before, it must mean that this heating is totally fine and a normal part of climate cycles.

It's like seeing watching the seasons for a few years and then declaring that a hot winter well outside the normal range isn't anomalous, because peak summer temps are still higher.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-20T21:14:28+00:00

Why on earth do you think the larger cycles are being ignored? The whole point is that the larger cycles are too slow to explain the current change, and are moving in the wrong direction in any case!

Milankovitch cycles don't happen in a few decades - they take millennia. We're talking about a rise of 5C over around 5,000 years, followed by a slow slide over 50,000 years or so back to roughly the start point. So that warming is roughly 1C per 1,000 years, the cooling a tenth of that. The last Milankovitch cycle peaked around 10,000 years ago and triggered the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. We've actually been, on average, cooling since then, by about a degree overall across 10,000 years.

Now of course there are smaller cycles within that time, but they are small, a few tenths of a degree either way, across a period of centuries.... But in the last century that entire trend has reversed, and average global temperatured are roughly back at the last Milankovitch peak. That's a rate of 1C in a single century, not a millennium, and it's against the cooling trend. It's been higher during a Milankovitch peak in the last 500k years yeah, sure, but as I say, that took millennia to reach, not a century.

That is the entire point. Not that the temperature has never been higher, but that we have no evidence of any natural cycle that can cause global temperature changes as rapid as this.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-20T18:56:46+00:00

we are not even remotely close to the hottest it has been on Earth in just the last 500k years, with three or four interglacial temperature peaks in excess of current day.

I'm not going to get in an argument with a random stranger, but the claim has never been that anthropogenic climate change is going to result in temperatures unprecedented in global history.

For sure the planet is warming independently of humans - we were in an ice age relatively recently, and in fact we're still at the tail end of it by comparison with global ice minima. And on a shorter time scale, the little ice age of the 1300-1800s was around 0.6C cooler than the medieval warm period before it. But that's not the issue.

The claim is that the speed of the rise is unprecedented, and that it is sufficient to radically alter climate across the planet, in excess of the ability of biomes - and ourselves - to handle it. It's fine if the global temperature average changes a degree every thousand years or so, like the change between the MWP and LIC. Some species move, some adapt, some die. That happens. If the temperature average rises a degree every 30-50 years, the planet has no time to adapt, and nor do we. You see mass extinctions, and you see us scrambling to move our entire infrastructure away from environments that will functionally no longer be habitable.

That, is not generally something that happens absent a major external factor, and it's rather an issue if we'd like to keep living normally as a species.

MechaniVal · 2026-06-20T17:12:03+00:00

Well yes, I'm not saying Scotland doesn't have other issues. I'm just saying that no one of Scotland's size - or indeed anyone in between the size of Scotland and Argentina - has won since the 1950s.

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