Saturday afternoon at circuit de Spa-Francorchamps brought us the first wet qualifying session of the 2021 Formula One championship, which as usual led to several unexpected results, such as Lando Norris very fast in Q1 and Q2 and George Russell even able to bring his Williams car back to the front row after many years.
Unlike the previous Grands Prix, this time there will be no real analysis between the 2020 and 2021 cars, given the difficult weather conditions that made it impossible to compare the data with the dry track lap times of one year ago. In general, we will try to make a comparison on how much the single-seaters lose in the various sectors between a drive on slick tires and one on wet tires.
Looking at the table at the bottom of the standings, all the various teams lost between 2.4 and 3.0 seconds in the first sector, between 10.4 and 13.3 seconds in the central one and between 2.7 and 4.1 in the final one, with times between 15.8 and 20.1 seconds slower than the qualifying session from last year. It must also be considered that the lower downforce available on the 2021 Formula 1 cars has contributed to increasing the overall times. In fact, in FP2, the best time of this year was 7 tenths slower than the equivalent of 2020.
For Scuderia Ferrari not even the change in weather could lead to an improvement regarding the final results, in fact from the SF1000 to the SF21 nothing has changed, with both drivers outside the Q2 stage. However, we have seen that this year’s car worked better in really wet track conditions, while with the Intermediates, the SF21 cars encountered a lot of difficulties. Compared to Aston Martin, which was faster by just a few thousandths, the differences show that the Maranello car is able to perform better in the fastest sectors, while in the slower one it loses all the advantage gained until that moment. Last year, in the dry, the comparison between the two was reversed with the SF1000 in trouble on the straights.
Source: funoanalisitecnica.com
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