Car Racing without Money

Chapter 786 - 320: Clash of Driving Styles

The HRT Team has been conservative with their strategy for many races, as they couldn’t qualify at the front rows, relying only on tire conservation and tactics for overtaking, leading to a sort of mental inertia among all members.When Odetto spoke this sentence, everyone in the pit glanced at him instinctively, then revealed a look of sudden realization.

This is the Monaco Grand Prix, a complete game for the brave!

Outsiders who don’t understand the sport might find the Monaco street race’s train queue boring.

In fact, it truly is so, as criticism of the Monaco Grand Prix has increased over the years.

However, the thrill of racing at two or three hundred kilometers per hour, skimming past the barriers, and flying across the land is a visual shock that other circuits can’t provide.

The graphic in the "Initial D" manga describes Fujiwara Takumi’s driving skill, where he manages to drift within 5 centimeters of the wall.

But this standard within the Monaco street race is still too conservative.

The top standard for Monaco is two 1s.

centimeter plus 1 millisecond!

The 1 centimeter standard is easy to understand, which is to squeeze out every bit of track space by being as close to the barrier as possible.

millisecond refers to the driver’s reaction time.

Based on the speed of an F1 car, even a 0.1-second reaction can run several meters away, only reaching a 0.01-second grip allows the driver to achieve centimeter-level precision in line accuracy.

Of course, this reaction time transcends human neural limits, and drivers achieve the standard through anticipation, and the muscle memory accumulated over the years of driving.

This extreme difficulty is why whoever claims Monaco can have their hard skills recognized by the world, which is a sort of unwritten rule within F1.

Just like how Perez in the later years of his Red Bull career had scores utterly disastrous, but after leaving the paddock for a year, when the new team Cadillac entered the fray, they still considered him their top signing.

His priority was even higher than Bottas’s, who had better historical scores.

The reason, besides Perez having won the Monaco championship, is that among his six career division wins, five were claimed within street races, with remarkable weight.

Just like F1 paddock potential looks at absolute speed, hard skills are measured by street race control, and the title of "King of Street Races" added many points for Perez, nearly like he bought a "pension insurance."

Otherwise, considering his late Red Bull performance, his "reemployment" probability within the F1 paddock wouldn’t be stronger than Ricardo, who won seven crowns. He would likely retire permanently without a chance to return.

"Understood, as fast as possible."

Chen Xiangbei shrugged and echoed, unexpectedly finding Odetto threw in a bit of black humor.

But when he donned his helmet and sat in the racing cockpit, Sawano Hiroyuki still came over with the tactical board to detail the instructions: "Mr. Xiangbei, the setup direction for Monaco Station conflicts with our car’s original design direction; this station requires your special attention, it might not be as easy as you imagined to drive."

The Monaco circuit places emphasis on extreme mechanical grip, whereas HRT Racing Car’s two core black technologies, whether the exhaust diffuser or the stalled wing, are fundamentally optimizations of aerodynamic kits.

And mechanical grip relies more on the mechanical quality of the car’s chassis!

To put it simply, it’s like many ordinary performance cars or civilian cars that like to install a rear wing.

You may say it’s useless, but when the speed reaches about two hundred kilometers, it indeed can provide some air downforce.

You may say it’s useful, but in reality, cars mostly don’t reach around two hundred kilometers per hour when driving!

F1 aero kits are similar, faster speeds can better exert the effect of guiding airflow, Monaco is a standard multi-corner narrow low-speed circuit, and the improvement provided by aero kits is very small.

Wanting to take corners at high speed relies entirely on the mechanical grip of the vehicle chassis itself and the accompanying excellent control response brought by the power unit.

The Toyota Racing Car chassis can only be said to be qualified, and since the power unit system has gone through several generations of optimizations, the overall control response speed is quite good.

However, the chassis is a project that demands years of adjustment experience; in this respect, Toyota can’t compare with many long-established big teams in the paddock, purely competing on the hard strength of the whole racing car, the HRT Team is at a disadvantage.

Most sections of Monaco don’t have buffer zones, losing control is equivalent to hitting the wall, the car needs to provide unmatched control confidence, so the driver dares to go all out.

It’s evident that the HRT Team lacks this confidence.

This is also why Odetto rarely doesn’t describe any setup plans and merely mentions a vague "as fast as you can."

He’s undoubtedly telling Chen Xiangbei that the team doesn’t have a standard answer for this circuit, and how fast you can go depends entirely on yourself!

"Got it."

Chen Xiangbei nodded to Sawano Hiroyuki, having never underestimated the Monaco Circuit, with a very clear understanding of the difficulty in his heart.

"Remember to give feedback on time."

Sawano Hiroyuki reminded again, the source of vehicle confidence lies in the driver being able to operate with precision like an extension of their body. Only then can one bravely approach the barriers and make aggressive steering maneuvers that limit the track space.

Any understeer or oversteer placed in the Monaco circuit is not good news, and both the team and Chen Xiangbei need absolute balance!