Verstappen said, about Monaco: “So it doesn’t matter whether you drive for ten, fifteen or a hundred laps.” A hypothesis with three values, I took the biggest. A hundred laps. This morning, in my room, sim running, Monaco loaded, my ghost ahead of me.
The principle is simple: you follow the ghost, you try to pass it. The ghost is me in qualifying, so it doesn’t make mistakes. At Sainte-Dévote, I’m in its gearbox. At the Casino, same. In the tunnel, I get the tow, I pull out, there’s no room. At the harbour chicane, I brake later, I touch the barrier, reset.
After a hundred laps, I had an average gap of four tenths behind it. Zero overtakes. So he’s right, at least against myself.
Then there’s Bearman, the Haas driver, who saw something else: two qualifying sessions, two starts, on a circuit where overtaking is very hard. He first thought it was a joke, he said so in Sepang. He also admits the format could have some merit. That, I can model. Two qualifyings means two different grids. If one qualifying goes wrong for you, you’re not stuck all weekend behind the same rear wing.
Verstappen, asked about it, replied: “Yes, you can see it that way. But for me, it doesn’t change much.” I get it. My ghost doesn’t change much either.
A hundred laps without an overtake. At post 14, we call that a clean race.
I’m missing one variable, obviously: real traffic, cars that aren’t me. The basic sim only loads my ghost. For two starts, I’d need two ghosts. Seventy per cent of my room is cockpit, there’s space left. In theory.
It’s true, we checked: Nextgen-Auto.
