Usually I call these pieces ‘practice analysis’, but it’s a little difficult when the second practice is washed out as this is when the race simulations (usually) take place. So I’ve taken the opportunity to do a little work to see what we’re missing – and it turns out that Friday practice has been a… [Read more…]
May 15, 2012
There is a lot more to this one than meets the eye. Another exciting race with passing moves (at Barcelona!) all the way to the end, variations in strategy, different cars at the front and a new winner. But behind the surface view of the race, there is a huge amount hidden in the data,… [Read more…]
May 12, 2012
If the Spanish Grand Prix is anything like qualifying, then we are in for a fantastic race. Personally, I am disappointed that Hamilton won’t be in the mix at the front as it was a stunning lap, and a McLaren-Williams-Ferrari-Lotus top four is like something from when I started watching F1. Rename the Sauber team… [Read more…]
May 11, 2012
At the last Grand Prix in Bahrain, the fastest cars in the long runs in Friday Practice were the Lotus cars. Comfortably. Despite this, I saw no predictions suggesting that Lotus were going to be fastest in the race. I had them as good as McLaren/Red Bull and with better tyre degradation, but even though… [Read more…]
May 8, 2012
From the winter testing, especially the tests in Barcelona, it was possible to pick out some reasonably decent trends on the relative performance of the cars. We could see that Sauber and Mercedes were reasonably strong, and that Ferrari were weak. We could pick out that Force India and Toro Rosso were not as good… [Read more…]
April 24, 2012
There were many surprises in the Bahrain Grand Prix. The sheer pace of the Lotus cars, fifth place being almost a full minute behind the winner, the slow pace of McLaren, a two-stop strategy that worked, the lack of progress of Michael Schumacher. In fact, it was a continual stream of unexpectedness from the moment… [Read more…]
April 23, 2012
Much has been made of the fact that Kimi Raikkonen elected to save a set of tyres instead of making a second run in Q2, which left him 11th on the grid. As the race panned out, it seems that Raikkonen may well have decided not to run at all in Q3, and to start… [Read more…]
April 21, 2012
This has all the hallmarks of a race of the kind we saw in Turkey last year – but better, because the underlying pace of the cars is much closer. From the Friday data, and I haven’t seen anything which changes the view in the Saturday data, the tyres are struggling in the heat, and… [Read more…]
April 20, 2012
This is going to be an interesting one (if it goes ahead). Whereas the Chinese Grand Prix Friday could be taken pretty much at face value with most of the teams doing similar programmes (only Mercedes pace turned out to be misleading), the programmes seem to be much more varied in Bahrain. It is certain… [Read more…]
April 17, 2012
This is a complicated one. Usually, the gaps between the cars become large enough that the analysis can be done a few cars at a time, and traffic effects are mainly significant in the first stint. But here, and this is entirely due to the fact that F1 2012 is extremely close, pretty much every… [Read more…]
May 25, 2012
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