After just twelve races on the calendar, the fate of the 2023 sports season is clearly heading in a specific direction concerning both the drivers’ and constructors’ titles. Max Verstappen’s domination aboard the fantastic RB19 can only cause frustration among the competition, who have now resigned themselves to the superiority displayed by the Milton Keynes team.
In this regard, the easy overtaking of Mad Max against Lando Norris while the latter was leading in the early stages of the British Grand Prix was emblematic. Rivals are giving up on competing against a competitor considered to be in another league. This approach is sometimes suggested by the same track engineers, who encourage not to fight a lost battle in favor of the realistic weekend goal.
In this Formula 1 Web Magazine article, the extent of the Austrian team’s dominance has been analyzed, comparing the performance of the single-seaters currently occupying the top four positions in the constructors’ standings. The only session that can provide a realistic indication of the cars’ strengths is the qualifying session, the only phase of the weekend where the single-seaters are in the same conditions in terms of fuel quantity, tire degradation, and track conditions.
It is necessary to clarify that the evidence produced is not entirely transferable in terms of competitiveness over the 300 km distance of the Sunday race. The glaring example is offered precisely by Scuderia Ferrari, which, even in the 2023 season, has shown excellent performance under “low fuel” conditions but then faced significant problems in tire management and consequently in race pace.
Despite this performance disparity between qualifying and the race, the SF-23 is the single-seater that has made the least progress compared to the F1-75. Excluding rounds where the comparison is not applicable (due to weather conditions or track changes), the SF-23 has improved its qualifying performance compared to last year by just under half a second on average. Considering that qualifying was also in 2023 the session where the Project 675 expressed its maximum potential, the performance improvement was very limited. In two instances (Saudi Arabia and Monaco), the SF-23 recorded times slower than the F1-75 in qualifying sessions not influenced by specific technical or strategic problems. The interesting data is that even the “Evo” version has not shown a significant change in pace compared to the times of the previous season, improving the progenitor’s performance by about half a second.
F1: Red Bull and Mercedes have the same improvement level, but the gap remains unchanged. Aston Martin’s exploit.
One of the most interesting data from the comparative analysis is that Red Bull and Mercedes have improved their qualifying performance compared to last season’s models almost equally. From a certain point of view, the performance growth of the two teams has been similar, but the Milton Keynes team manages to maintain the competitive advantage gained in the first season of ground-effect single-seaters. In both cases, the average improvement in qualifying times is close to one second. Surprisingly, the Mercedes W14 showed a much more pronounced performance improvement before the debut of the “B” version at the Monaco Grand Prix.
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As for Red Bull, the comparison between the qualifying times of the RB18 and RB19 shows a significantly accentuated performance recovery in the first part of the season. The reason for this progress is due to the excessive weight of the 2022 single-seater, which was subjected to careful “weight loss” during the past season to reach at least the levels of Ferrari’s competition. In the Bahrain Grand Prix 2022, the Austrian single-seater was the heaviest among the cars on the grid, weighing 818 kg compared to the minimum weight set by the regulations, which was 798 kg. Such a high mass caused embarrassment to Adrian Newey, as he stated at the end of the last campaign: “The tires were heavier than expected, the hub covers, the side protection structure. We thought we were close to the weight limit, but in reality, we were well above it. It was embarrassing, and then we had a problem with the lateral crash test and had to strengthen the frame structure.”
Aston Martin’s exploit gives it the role of the most improved car. A progress rarely seen in a regime of regulatory continuity. The decisive shift towards the Red Bull aerodynamic concept, which started at the Spanish Grand Prix 2022, and the knowledge transfer guaranteed by the full operational capacity of Dan Fallows made it seem like a miracle, especially in the early stages of the season. The improvement in lap times between the AMR22 and the 2023 single-seater, in some cases, exceeded four seconds (Australia). It’s like something out of science fiction in Formula 1. However, the recent adjustments to the AMR23 and the simultaneous progress of Mercedes and Ferrari seem to place Lawrence Stroll’s team closer to the midfield than to the front pack.
These numbers do not claim to identify the reasons behind the performance of the teams analyzed, but they highlight the quality of the work carried out by the four teams in the past winter and throughout the 2023 season through the corrections made to their respective single-seaters.
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