The first week of the Formula 1 winter testing has ended and the official Formula 1 website has published an interesting analysis of the data that has emerged after the first three days, as observed by journalist Lawrence Barretto.
“Traditionally, teams focus on reliability in the opening test, before turning their attention to performance, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pull out some trends to see who is starting to look strong in certain areas.
Take low speed corners, for example. Ferrari struggled in this area last year, but our data suggests they may well have found something of a cure for this issue, the red cars 0.38s quicker through these types of corners (there are two in Barcelona) compared to Mercedes.
In the medium speed turns, Mercedes appear to comfortably have the edge, with Red Bull their nearest challenger around 0.4s on average slower. In high speed, it was Alfa Romeo who impressed the most, 0.16s quicker than Mercedes in this metric.
Last year, Ferrari had the best engine and therefore performed very well in the power stakes. But in the first week of testing, they opted to run their engine at much lower levels, which explains the huge deficit to Mercedes. Honda did the same, but to a lesser extent, with Red Bull as did Ferrari customer Haas. In contrast, teams like Alfa Romeo and Alpha Tauri opted to push for high top speeds, and more power, as they pursued a very different run plan.
Expect all of the top teams to turn their engines up next week and shift their attention to running more of the softer compounds and chasing performance in low fuel trim. Then we’ll start to see a pecking order emerge.”
Leave a Reply