18 replies to this topic

[Graveltrappen]

So you've spent the winter building a highly engineered F1 car and engine... and then you put it in the hands of a couple of rich blokes to throw around the track.

On the timing screens. You're 0.2 seconds slower than the 'fastatest car'. Everyone ridicules you and writes off your season...

These margins are so tiny... if you try and count it you realise how small the differences that appear so huge when broken down into positions are. Braking a fraction too early could cost half a second...

Even when teams at the back of the grid are a few seconds off the pace, it's still amazing that they can be so close considering it's two sets of workforce, two different engines, two different drivers... and they're a tiny amount of time apart, so much so that if these cars were on the market, the difference in cost/performance would make you want to buy the Manor/Sauber rather than a Merc as overall the difference is tiny.

[Archer]

Well, from the faster driver of the grid to the slower not pay driver it can be 0.6s, in a track in what the best car does a lap in 1:20.0 the laptime are 80s, and having in mind that usually the best or close to he best drivers are driving the best cars we are going to suppose that 80s is the best time achievable for the best driver on the grid. So the worst driver should lap in 80.6s, lets do very simple math:

 

0.6 * 100 / 80.6 = 0.744%

The best driver on the grid represents only about 0.75% of the laptime, the car does about the 99.25% of the laptime.

 

All is relative in racing, the time differences are silly small, if you stop to think about it just a moment at a track as barcelona with 14 corners the difference from the best driver to the worst is

0.6 / 14 = 42.9 miliseconds ( 0.0429s) per corner, the difference in their driver inputs are absurdly small, just insignificant details.

 

The cars are all monsters, the difference in cost against the performance is a monstrosity. But it also happens in a lot of everyday aspects. Really a pair of 180€ shoes does so much more that a pair of 80€ ones as to justify almost twice the cost?.

Edited by Archer, 29 March 2017 - 10:13.

[Mark123]

Well il get bashed for this but so what..
I do sim racing me and my team mate in the same car at the same track same set up often are less than a tenth apart. Sometimes you extract the maximum a car can give.

[danmills]

They should implement a 'stig' style approach. Get an ex-driver like Jenson (or DC) to drive 3 laps of each car on a Friday.

 

Or just on the last test day, as a novelty.

Edited by danmills, 29 March 2017 - 15:13.

[Zava]

Well, from the faster driver of the grid to the slower not pay driver it can be 0.6s, in a track in what the best car does a lap in 1:20.0 the laptime are 80s, and having in mind that usually the best or close to he best drivers are driving the best cars we are going to suppose that 80s is the best time achievable for the best driver on the grid. So the worst driver should lap in 80.6s, lets do very simple math:

 

0.6 * 100 / 80.6 = 0.744%

The best driver on the grid represents only about 0.75% of the laptime, the car does about the 99.25% of the laptime.

 

All is relative in racing, the time differences are silly small, if you stop to think about it just a moment at a track as barcelona with 14 corners the difference from the best driver to the worst is

0.6 / 14 = 42.9 miliseconds ( 0.0429s) per corner, the difference in their driver inputs are absurdly small, just insignificant details.

 

The cars are all monsters, the difference in cost against the performance is a monstrosity. But it also happens in a lot of everyday aspects. Really a pair of 180€ shoes does so much more that a pair of 80€ ones as to justify almost twice the cost?.

well by that logic if the difference between the fastest and slowest car is 3 seconds, then:

 

3/83 *100% = 3,614% is the car, the rest is the driver.

[thegforcemaybewithyou]

That may be an interesting stat to look into. How are the qualifying gaps between the teammates distributed for qualifyings where both drivers take part without car failures.

[RPM40]

Well il get bashed for this but so what..
I do sim racing me and my team mate in the same car at the same track same set up often are less than a tenth apart. Sometimes you extract the maximum a car can give.

 

How do you know that is the maximum not two drivers under the maximum? 

 

The age old racing question.

[quaint]

How do you know that is the maximum not two drivers under the maximum? 

 

The age old racing question.

 

Age old question indeed, but unlike in reality, in virtual racing you can have thousands of drivers driving thousands of laps in identical conditions, so you'd think that eventually the world record inches towards the maximum.

[sean1111]

When you are looking at the top tier experienced F1 drivers currently (can argue about how many fall into this top group) there is nothing between them.  For these top few  guys it is all about the car they are given.

 

Hamilton won 11, 10 and 10 races respectively in 2014, 2015, 2016.   He scored 11 pole positions in 2015 and 12 poles in 2016.    Would he have done this had he stayed with McLaren from 2013 onwards.   No because the equipment was clearly not good enough when compared to the Mercedes AMG product he was furnished with in 2014,2015 and 2016.

 

For the top few drivers in F1 currently, who possess brilliant car control skills, it is all about the car.   But put a bunch of second tier F1 drivers in the top car and it's a different story.

[Alireza]

They should implement a 'stig' style approach. Get an ex-driver like Jenson (or DC) to drive 3 laps of each car on a Friday.

I would pay to watch that.

[Archer]

well by that logic if the difference between the fastest and slowest car is 3 seconds, then:

 

3/83 *100% = 3,614% is the car, the rest is the driver.

No, I never said that. I said that the driver skill can make only a difference in a 0.75% of the full laptime. Not that the driver inputs represent 0.75% of the complete laptime.

What you did isn't flawed either, the difference in car performance represents the 3.614% of a complete lap. There is no flaw in that logic, I was measuring one thing and you thought that I had measured another.

 

If you want to know the percentage of importance of the driver to the whole laptime delta between the faster and slower driver/car combos then:  0.75 * 100 / (0.75 + 3.614) = 17.186%

[Archer]

Well il get bashed for this but so what..
I do sim racing me and my team mate in the same car at the same track same set up often are less than a tenth apart. Sometimes you extract the maximum a car can give.

It well can be that both of you are just pretty evenly matched in skill and technique. To be reasonably sure of that you have hotlap competitions and rankings as the GPLRank for grand prix legends, RSR rankings for assetto corsa, Iracing I believe that have some kind of database with the best laptimes, and live for speed also had a database with the faster laptimes called lfsworld or something like that. If you can lap within a tenth of the top laptimes of any of those rankings then you're getting pretty close to extract all the car has, to get an equal laptime doesn't mean necessarily that both of you are alien skilled. But it can happen, it is just a very weird statistical coincidence that 2 aliens had met in the real life and got to be friends, because just in RSR there are registered right now 20188 people, but very rarely 2 of them can lap within a tenth of second of a world record of a given car track combo.

[Graveltrappen]

In F1 this year, it's accepted that Sauber (or McLaren) are the slowest team... by a matter of a few seconds though. If a 'top driver' was in the car, how much faster could it actually go... how does a team ever know that their driver has gotten the 'maximum' out of their car?

[minime]

Even when teams at the back of the grid are a few seconds off the pace, it's still amazing that they can be so close considering it's two sets of workforce, two different engines, two different drivers... and they're a tiny amount of time apart, so much so that if these cars were on the market, the difference in cost/performance would make you want to buy the Manor/Sauber rather than a Merc as overall the difference is tiny.

It would be surprising if it was any other way TTTT. The rule book designs the cars and most engineers think alike as they all had the same education and face the same restraints. 

[MattPete]

Indycar

[RECKLESS]

In F1 this year, it's accepted that Sauber (or McLaren) are the slowest team... by a matter of a few seconds though. If a 'top driver' was in the car, how much faster could it actually go... how does a team ever know that their driver has gotten the 'maximum' out of their car?

Just follow Nando in the McLaren.

 

/unriddled

 

edit: ...oh and speaking of, the true answer is 0,6 seconds.

Edited by RECKLESS, 30 March 2017 - 01:58.

[Tsarwash]

In F1 this year, it's accepted that Sauber (or McLaren) are the slowest team... by a matter of a few seconds though. If a 'top driver' was in the car, how much faster could it actually go... how does a team ever know that their driver has gotten the 'maximum' out of their car?

https://en.wikipedia...Prix#Qualifying

 

Just look at Alonso last week. Most people accept that he's still one of the top drivers and he did his sub par teammate by six places and 1.5 seconds. So, somebody like Grosjean or Hulk or Massa would likely be closer to Alonso but not quite at his level but still closer than Stroll.

[Requiem84]

Most striking example of the value of a driver was Alonso in 2012. He almost won the championship that year in maybe the third fastest car.

He was fast, he was aggressive when needed and he consolidated at the right moments. One of the best performances where a driver was better than his car.

[Lazy]

Well, from the faster driver of the grid to the slower not pay driver it can be 0.6s, in a track in what the best car does a lap in 1:20.0 the laptime are 80s, and having in mind that usually the best or close to he best drivers are driving the best cars we are going to suppose that 80s is the best time achievable for the best driver on the grid. So the worst driver should lap in 80.6s, lets do very simple math:

 

0.6 * 100 / 80.6 = 0.744%

The best driver on the grid represents only about 0.75% of the laptime, the car does about the 99.25% of the laptime.

 

All is relative in racing, the time differences are silly small, if you stop to think about it just a moment at a track as barcelona with 14 corners the difference from the best driver to the worst is

0.6 / 14 = 42.9 miliseconds ( 0.0429s) per corner, the difference in their driver inputs are absurdly small, just insignificant details.

 

The cars are all monsters, the difference in cost against the performance is a monstrosity. But it also happens in a lot of everyday aspects. Really a pair of 180€ shoes does so much more that a pair of 80€ ones as to justify almost twice the cost?.

 

 

well by that logic if the difference between the fastest and slowest car is 3 seconds, then:

 

3/83 *100% = 3,614% is the car, the rest is the driver.

Stick the 2 together and you get ~ 80% car and 20% driver, seems about right.