Is this the week Schumacher beats Rosberg? Schumi is supposedly getting a different chassis with a longer wheelbase to help better distribute weight. He likes his cars more twitchy and with more oversteer. I always thought it was shorter wheelbase cars that tended to be more tail-happy. It's obviously more complicated than that.
I think Schumi will be closer (how could he get further behind) to Rosberg but he'll still be out-qualified and out-raced this weekend in Spain by his teammate.
Any thoughts?
AFAIK, both drivers are receiving the revised wheelbase, the change is reportedly being achieved by revising the suspension, and introducing a smaller gearbox, as opposed to actually lengthening the chassis (presumably because the tubs are homologated now at the start of the season and cannot be changed).
Schumacher is just receiving a different chassis (the pre-season test chassis as opposed to an entirely new one) as it's been reported that he's been running with a damaged race chassis since Australia.
With regards to the length of the wheelbase, shorter ones tend to be naturally more edgy, but you've answered the question yourself really, it's more to do with allowing them to better redistribute the ballast, which will allow them to adapt the set-up to suit Schumacher's driving style more, which is based around a super-pointy front end, with little to no understeer whatsoever
completely unlike the car he has at the moment.
I suspect he'll be close again to Rosberg, China was abnormal
but he's been desperately unlucky really, with the wheel nut failure in Malaysia and then been wiped out of 4th place by Alonso and Button's brain fart in Australia, it's difficult to really gauge his current performance, because we've not been able to see it since Bahrain, where he was really evenly matched with Rosberg on race pace.
