With Ferrari leading in both Friday’s free practice sessions at Marina Bay and Red Bull absolutely dominating all season, one might expect a battle between these two teams for victory. However, they aren’t even the fastest in race pace simulations.
If we’ve piqued your curiosity, wait until you see the times from the second free practice session of the Singapore GP. If we only paid attention to the times achieved by the drivers and the resulting average pace, we would likely be discussing a Red Bull still ahead thanks to Perez, a struggling Ferrari, but still a fairly close group.
Red Bull leads in lap times, but the analysis reshuffles the deck
However, we’re not the kind of people who stop at the surface, so besides taking note of the values from the stopwatch, we hope you’ll follow us in the analysis we’re about to perform. Ferrari doesn’t seem to have set brilliant times, especially towards the end of the stint; Charles Leclerc‘s times go above 1’39”. Nevertheless, it becomes evident at a glance that the drivers behind the wheel of the SF-23 have completed more laps than the Red Bull duo. If at this point, you drew a line that’s about the length of Max Verstappen’s and Sergio Perez’s runs and recalculated the average pace of the Red duo, you would realize that the Maranello pair achieved a pace roughly equivalent to Max’s, around 1’38”450.
If we continue with the same line of reasoning, we can agree that Mercedes has done an excellent job with Hamilton and Russell. If we value the timed laps as they are, we would say they are clearly competing with Red Bull. Still, if we add the fact that the two have gathered more data than the Austrian team, we can say that they are among the teams to be most feared for Sunday (just take a look at the chart and what George Russell has done).
But surprises don’t end here. We’ve talked about Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes, but we haven’t yet reached the most in-form team this crazy Friday. Today’s star is Fernando Alonso, managing to maintain a pace equal to Perez’s with twice as many laps completed. Norris, on the other hand, turned out to be the fastest overall, but we must add that unlike the others, the Englishman used the Soft C5 tire (the competitors in this analysis used the Medium C4 tire). The table also includes Tsunoda, the first to stand out as a race pace behind the frontrunners. A very good AlphaTauri, at least for now.
Summary
In summary, if we were to create a ranking, we would put Alonso at the top, followed by Mercedes and the wildcard McLaren, with Red Bull, and then Ferrari bringing up the rear. However, being the tail-ender today is quite irrelevant. We have observed a difference of less than 4 tenths per lap in performance with fuel on board for the aforementioned teams. Any changes the engineers make from now until tomorrow could, therefore, make a significant difference in the on-track hierarchy.
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