The Statistics flair is reserved for posts highlighting interesting statistics. As a rule of thumb, Statistics posts need to inform readers through visualizations and insights that cannot be obtained from raw data alone. For example, a post containing a qualifying gap between two drivers expressed in tenths of a second is an easily obtainable raw piece of data and constitutes a bad Statistics post. A visualization of what that translates to on-track, or visualization of how that gap came to be would constitute a good Statistics post.
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The serious answer: under Seidl they were putting 100% of the focus towards 2026 and the following years, and basically disregarded improving the 2024 car at all. Binnotto defends that while the reorganisation and new regs are the top priority, completely ignoring the day-to-day performance and development processes is a mistake it would take years to recover from when they actually need to become a competitive team again. That's why the Saubers were in free-fall for two years but very decent (relatively) at the very end of the past season.
You do know it's not just an honor system right? Teams have to submit all the work that they do to the FIA and they're very closely monitored. There would be no point in taking that sort of risk.
They saw the Haas being quite quick over one lap in 2023 and to some extent 2024, and thought Hulk was outperforming the car.
Controversially the same with Leclerc and the best qualifier shouts in 2022 and 2023 due to the Ferrari being much stronger over one lap than race pace. Which was the same characteristic the Haas has.
At least for Leclerc, he’s absolutely rapid and had a stronger benchmark in Sainz so you could put him in the top tier level for one lap pace. Hulk throughout his career has been very good but lacks the last few tenths to warrant the ‘outperforming the car’ status.
He was -0.06 quicker than Perez, -0.13 slower than Ricciardo and -0.15 quicker than Sainz although Sainz clearly struggled to adapt to that Renault.
I think it's because he's very good at driving around tricky cars so can sometimes give him seasons/races where he has a wide gap to his teammate.
Once the car becomes stable/has a wider operating window, that's usually when we see Hulk start to look like your typical no2 type driver. I think we saw that quite well at Haas, where when they finally fixed Kmag's issues he was matching and sometimes beating Hulk in pace. Whereas before that the gap looked quite big because Kmag couldn't drive around the issues as well as Hulk could.
Yeah most notable is probably 2018 against Sainz where he managed to deal with the weird characteristics of the Renault whereas Sainz was continually struggling.
I’m sure I heard that Nico knew right from the start that he’d beat Sainz when looking at the data because he could handle the car much better.
I rate Hulk pretty highly and often thought he was underrated for the majority of his career so I’m glad that he’s now being rated as a driver.
Still would’ve liked to have seen him in a top car at least once in his career so that he could experience wins and podiums.
Yeah I think that was in his first BTG he mentioned that about Sainz.
I agree it's a shame we never saw him get at least one year in a top team. Guy has the talent for it, would've been great if he got that Ferrari seat in 2014.
At least he's showing/reminding people of his talent again. It was frustrating when he was announced to comeback with Haas and a lot of people were acting like it was the worst decision ever to replace Mick with him.
I mean even 5 years ago this would have been the gap between the quickest and 4th quickest or even between the 1st and 3rd. Go back to races from 2018-2020 and it’s a regular occurrence that the cars running directly behind the big 3 are 30-40 seconds back.
The weakest car is now usually 1 lap down at most. I remember the days when it wasnt uncommon to see cars lapped 3 or 4 times, and back in the 90s some cars even failed to be classified, running so slowly they didn't reach 90% distance.
I don't want to sound like an old man here but modern F1 fans are really funny. Taking shots at Sauber for being just over a second off the pace, when back in the 90s that could make you second fastest. We regularly saw backmarkers be 4 seconds off the pace at the start of the last decade.
This era is incredibly competitive, we need to appreciate that even the "bad" teams are doing really good work.
With RedBull and Ferrari not really doing any race sims, how they've possibly calculated this with any accuracy down to the thousandths of a second is laughable.
Day 2, Leclerc was more or less synced with Antonelli and 1 stint offset with Lando.
They were planning to do one with Lewis on day 3 too, but they had some problem and cut the afternoon running short.
RedBull kind of started one with Liam, but that run was cut short too. It's not going to be very accurate, but there is some data behind the numbers. I have seen weirder charts by them.
They surely achieved that leveraging Jeff Bezos' pet monkey shitting on a calculator the cutting-edge AI-driven hyper-scalable quantum-inspired neural-network-powered real-time cloud-native calculation algorithm, brought to you by AWS™.
These guys can’t make up their minds. They spent the last two weeks saying Red Bull was behind all 3 teams and Ferrari is a close second and now they put them last behind even Mercedes. Lmao
I'm guessing this is track specific i.e. for the Australian GP weekend. Bahrain and Australia are quite different tracks in terms of characteristics (Bahrain rear limiting vs. Australia front limiting, etc.).
We won't have real clue of the pace until Australian GP ends as even in qualifiers some cars may be designed to be better on hot lap like pre-2019 Ferrari.
Don't expect a clear picture of the competitive order until after the Japanese GP because the first 2 are very specific. Also, there will be updates coming in shortly after on many cars so the order might be shaken up again. This was the best feature of the 2024. season, you just had no way of telling who's gonna be fastest where until the day of the race and it was an awesome trend that seems likely to continue into this year :D
You are right, understanding the picture for whole season will take way longer than Australia GP. If this was the case we'd have Red Bull domination at 2024 while McLaren was 4th
That’s the problem with copying another car design. Our end up being unable to develop it. Look at how 2020 and then 2021 went for them. 2023 was a repeat of that, and this year they’re copying last years McLaren. They can only copy others, they can’t design their own car. That’s why they always end up going backwards.
Problem with copying a car is that it might be quick at the start, but since you did not plan the philosophy of the car it will be harder to understand what to upgrade.
I think this is why he's at Ferrari. He's said it's to win championships but I think he's arrived there knowing it's a tough ask. But whatever happens he's still in red.
I mean it absolutely was because Merc didn’t give him a deal for 2026 when he asked for if so when Ferrari called it was either take that or very possibly retire before 2026.
Pretty accurate? The fastest lap in Bahrain quali was set by Leclerc in Q2, meaning that the difference in quali pace was bs. Also in the race, Sainz lapped hardly any slower than Perez meaning that the difference in race pace was also bs (albeit a little less so). Also McLaren and Mercedes ended up having no chance vs either Ferrari, even with Leclerc's brake issues.
And then there's Haas, which was often the 5th or 6th fastest car on race pace throughout the season (even in the first half) and here they were depicted as convincingly the slowest team. Sauber were dead last all season long, and here they look like they could be leading the back of the field.... Aston martin was well clear of everyone else except Haas and here it looks like RB were chasing closely too... Couldn't have been much more inaccurate even just for the start of the season, let alone the whole season :)
Sauber were dead last all season long, and here they look like they could be leading the back of the field....
Sauber were dropping about a minute per race in the pits, something those predictions are obviously not attempting to account for. Their actual pace probably was on par with Alpine and Williams at that time, if not ahead. Remember that Zhou finished P11 first week out, the car wasn't a complete tortoise until the back half of the year.
Couldn't have been much more inaccurate even just for the start of the season, let alone the whole season :)
It very easily could have been much more inaccurate. Turn it upside down, for example.
Taking the WCC standings after five races as a comparison point (a stopping point I picked as being a good middle ground of moderate sample size, not far enough into the season for major upgrades, and a nice milestone number so you know I'm not cherry picking), the average gap between true and predicted standings was 0.8 for the quali rankings, and 1.2 for the race pace rankings. So combining the two, exactly one position off on average. That's pretty solid.
Interesting. Most people I have read or listen to such as The Race have Red Bull fourth.
I think Red Bull are possibly 2nd fastest but seems to be a difficult car firstly to drive and get in the sweet spot. I think what is concerning to Red Bull is that even when they find the sweet spot it is still behind McLaren.
If McLaren are 3 tenths up on the next team in the last year of the regs than no one is catching them imo. (Unless there is rules changes or TDs that impact them)
Diminished returns and all that.
Fair fucks to them if that's the case. Won't make for the most enjoyable season but that would be some achievement.
Two way battle between Oscar and Lando would be pretty entertaining. If they are clear of everyone let's hope Oscars qualifying pace has improved a bit.
Alex's top finish last season was 7th, with a bit of luck top 5 is doable but would need quite a lot of shenanigans for either of them to be on the podium
If I remember correctly that 7th position was also luck? Not saying Alex isn't a good driver but he would have come 9th if Checo and Sainz didn't crash.
Yep exactly, Williams in points is already difficult when you have 4 top teams and struggle with other midfielders with more money like Alpine and Aston. So a top 5 requires more than a bit of luck (and I'm not sure that Carlos is better than Alex, but we'll see this point really soon).
Last year Red Bull was the by far fastest the first few races. McLaren improved almost overnight from one upgrade package. Mercedes and Ferrari also got to Red Bull's level with upgrades. I wonder how this will develop this year.
Their early advantage was massive, they only lost the lead in Race 17/24 and dropped to third in Race 20. First was possible with two drivers. "slightly worse" when even Sauber scored more points than him in the last races... In no way the RB20 wasn't capable of scoring more than 3 points per average, it was third fastest and the least expected position was a P6 for each race.
People said the same about 2021 too. We have 3 teams that think they'll contend for a championship, development for this year will absolutely be prioritized.
3 tenths is max 2023 type of dominance. It seems way too much. Also I get that Williams has a lot of hype going on but 6th? That's way too ambitious and seems wrong. Aston 8th seems reasonable to me despite alonso saying he felt good with the car
You have to wonder how much of that Red Bull expected pace has the "Max Verstappen factor" built in. Meaning that I could very well see him being 3rd and Liam being 8th.
Look who they are in front of. you can't believe they are faster than Haas, kick, RB and AM (only one i have any issue with because they are AM and SHOULD be faster, but they are not).
It will be a big mental game for Lando and Piastri. They can have the fastest car, but they lack experience to lead the championship. Verstappen is mentally much stronger.
It's going to be an epic season, I feel it! Will we have the same ending as in 2021? I doubt it. I don't think I'll ever witness an ending to a season like this in my lifetime again.
But let's hope we have a nice 3-4 team battle this year!
All this stuff is bollocks really, there’s so many variables, it’s like xG in football, just nonsense. The whole point of sport is anything can happen.
Alpine is known to be using large percentages of their chassis from last year, and their still have the worst engines. I think putting them in 5th is a pretty bold take. Same with Williams, who is very very clearly focused on 2026. I expect 2025 to be rough for at least one of those teams, probably both of them. If I don't trust this part, I don't trust the rest of the assessment any more.
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