I'm not so convinced it was sandbagging by Toyota or Ferrari. My guess is they believe managing the tire performance over the 10 hours and developing their race strategy around that was the priority this weekend over outright pace. The comments to the media obviously sound a bit outlandish to us, but the intent seems reasonable - in a field with 19 cars (~10 contenders), a lot of things could happen during a long race, so it's as Ben Keating said: when there are a lot of high quality contenders, technically any individual car is a bit of a long shot.
However, I was very happy to see some of the younger generation of pros like Matt Campbell and Nyck de Vries really shine this session. Hopefully they are the basis of many exciting years of competition to come.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Truckosaurus
I might be being dull, but why is the race 1812km in length?
It doesn't seem to convert to a round number of miles, and 1812 isn't a year with relevance in the history of Qatar (as per a brief glance at wikipedia). It was a busy year in the Napoleonic Wars though, but I don't think that has any relevance to this race.
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The wiki page for the race itself says apparently it's in reference to Qatar's national day being on December 18, I guess that is the reason.