Quickest cars during the 2012 season

Duke

Duke

Duke

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F1 Fanatic has a nice interactive graph up, showing how close teams were each race to the quickest lap.

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You can see where most slowed development around Korea time.


http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2012/12/03/2012-f1-car-performance/
 
Cool little graph. Wish it showed which driver in the team set the fastest lap. I reckon Lewis, Alonso and Vettel set most of their teams fastest laps for their respective teams.
 
Spunkey said:
Yeah, it really shows what an open goal they missed this year. Fastest or second fastest car for every race bar 2.
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It does, and it doesn't, its essentially useless as fastest lap means quantatively... nothing at all.

Button has put in a few fastest laps at the end of the race, when anywhere from 3rd to 15th, because he has something to prove, while the guys at the front with a 2 second lead don't push on the final lap because a mistake will cost them a win. Second last race of the season was it, Vettel did a fastest lap on the last lap(button may then have beaten it, can't recall), Vettel was second with a huge gap, he could spin, miss a corner, come back on and finish 2nd, Hamilton could make one mistake and lose the win.

Fastest lap usually depended on who was where in the last couple laps, can lose it all... safe and steady, nothing to lose, hell for leather.

Look at the numbers, at races where Red Bull struggled in quali, and struggled throughout a race, they still often go top 2 fastest lap, when the car over race distance and qualifying was NOT the second fastest car.

Low fuel, that Red Bull was immense all season even when the car struggled in race and in qualifying, that car could still put in a fastest lap... though again, Red Bull languishing in a 4th-8th finish had less to lose and Vettel likes peeing around with fastest lap, but it also shows the car on low fuel was capable of those speeds, and how that means nothing for race pace at all.

You also have guys who had a problem pitted late and had stupid fresh tyres at the end and could easily post a fastest lap compared to those not doing it(that really mostly messed up everyone below Mclaren/Red bull as they have both the driver and most of the season the car that it didn't matter.

Say a Force India gets an issue, pits gets fresh softs and goes from 8th fastest to 3rd fastest at race X.

Mclaren had a very good car, most of the season, and a crap team to back it and put it into wins, fastest laps doesn't have any bearing on that though.
 
I doubt any of the fastest times over the weekends came from the race, so they wouldnt be affected by fresh tyres or anything. They are most likely qualifying times.

They are the best indication of pure pace comparisons that are available, and show how McLaren squandered a fast car.
 
This table compares the fastest lap time set by each team at each race weekend in 2012 (in any session) and shows how far each team was off the quickest last time as a percent.
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highly misleading then
 
It's basically a graph of best quali laps, it's hard to judge the race performance based on this. A better graph would have been Best average race lap time, excluding laps of incidence.
 
hmm thought i posted a response eariler however it didnt come through.

the graph wouldnt show finishing positions as it would be the average lap time of both cars over a race distance excluding laps of incidence.

This would show the most consistent team/car over a race weekend, as apposed to the fastest car over a single lap and how close everyone else was to said time. I would say it is a better gauge of overall car performance.
 
Skeeter said:
But then that would just be a graph of finishing positions :confused:
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Syla5 said:
the graph wouldnt show finishing positions as it would be the average lap time of both cars over a race distance excluding laps of incidence.
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It would take into account if someone drove 3 seconds a lap quicker than anyone else for 15 laps and then crashed, their average might still be faster than others who completed the race at a more leisurely pace.
Plus it wouldn't include laps surrounding a pit stop, so wouldn't penalise for a disaster with a wheel-gun.
It wouldn't be so skewed by people putting in blasts at the end on fresh tyres as well.
 
But that graph isn't meant to show 'fastest average race lap time', its meant to show pure pace, and it does, perfectly.

Average lap time would still be the finishing order, as its total race time divided by number of laps. Including people who didn't finish would skew the results.
 
But using qualifying times also skews things in certain circumstances. At some races, the final couple of minutes were affected by yellow flags, immediately meaning any car on a faster time than previous (likely to be their quickest time) would have to be slower to prove acknowledgement of yellows.

Plus as far as I can tell that only takes into account one fastest lap across both drivers, so if one driver outperformed the car (Alonso) compared to the other driver (Massa), this would not be represented.

Then, if the generally considered faster qualifying driver in the team (Vettel Grosjean, Rosberg etc) has an issue early on in qualifying and doesn't set a representative time, this will also skew the results. I am sure several times, many of these drivers had technical or traffic issues that meant they didn't get out of Q1 to set quick laps

As they say statistics can be made to prove anything you like, depending on the specifics of how they are put together.
 
Anyone massively out of place who didn't get out of Q1 would have likely set a fast time in Practice.

Its a best guess with the information we have, and its certainly better than trying to extract the few clean laps from the race and then average those.

Bottom line, the McLaren was a lot faster than the results at the end of the season suggest.
 
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