Correlation doubts cause Lewis Hamilton to take a different approach in his preparations for the next round of the season.
With in-season testing a distant memory, the simulator is the main means by which teams prepare ahead of races and indeed throughout the race weekends, as test and res0reve drivers work through the night to help find the best set-up.
However, looking ahead to the Canadian Grand Prix, a race he has won seven times, equalling Michael Schumacher’s record, Hamilton says that he will avoid preparing using the simulator.
“I’m going to have a different approach in the next race because the way we’re preparing at the moment is not helping,” he said, “so we’ll see how that goes for the next race.”
Asked, as is often the case, this was due to correlation issues between the sim and the track, he replied: “Ultimately it’s always correlation, but we go on it and then we get to the track and the car feels different when it gets on track.
“I don’t like simulators in general,” he added, “but I sit at the simulator every week in the build up to this race, working on correlation constantly and you go on it, you prepare for the track, you drive it and you get the car set-up to a certain place and then you come to the track and that set-up doesn’t work.
“On the sprint weekend, for example, you’ve only got practice one,” he continued, “you don’t really want to veer off from your set-up too far, like with a big suspension change and so you stay with it and then you make a change going in to qualifying and then you’ve only got six laps to get on top of it.
“In an ideal world I should have started where Charles was at the beginning of the weekend on P1,” he said, referring to Miami, “and I think we would have just had a stronger weekend from there.
“So I’m not going to go on the simulator between now and the next race. I’ll still go and hold meetings at the factory and stuff, but I’m just going to back away from it for a little bit and see. Because when we went to China I had the best weekend without the sim.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said of Montreal, “but we need to see if we can cut some drag before the next race. Because on the straight line we’ve got that deficit and so we’ve got to have a look into that.”