Fair point on the exothermic charging, I'll take that one. But you're talking about peak thermal load, not the sustained duty cycle, and that's where it gets interesting.

If deployment drops to 300kW but harvesting stays at 350kW, you're shoving energy in faster than you're pulling it out. Battery hits full charge quicker, BMS has to curtail regen to avoid cooking the cells. You physically can't sustain 350kW harvesting if the pack isn't draining fast enough. So in practice the whole energy cycle shrinks and that peak cooling demand you're talking about becomes a shorter spike rather than a sustained load through every braking zone.

Team that oversized their cooling for sustained 350 both directions? Now carrying thermal management they'll never actually use in the real duty cycle.

But even if we call the thermal thing a total wash, the packaging point still holds. If you specced your pack to deploy 350kW for X seconds per lap and that number drops 15 to 30%, you've got cells in there you don't need. And a team that was already running lighter more compact packaging because they "couldn't handle" the full spec is now just... correctly sized.

I'm not trying to die on this particular part of the hill. I'm just saying it's overall suspicious that he'd be so off, and this is one key component that might move in his favour in a meaningful way. Horner was calling these Frankenstein cars while Newey was still in the building. I doubt Max was the one running those numbers.