With the wraps off the new halo-adorned cars, we launch into 2018. There are several major sources of intrigue at the dawn of the season. Can Renault, with three top-budget teams now in their ranks, take the fight to the Mercedes or Ferrari works teams? By what margin can 2018 cars exceed the already record-breaking […]
As we wait for the 2018 season to fire up, and as Williams resolve the Kubica-Sirotkin-Wehrlein trilemma, it seems a good time to update the annual junior driver rankings. As in previous years, I’m using a simple scoring system that can be easily computed by hand. It takes into account the different tiers of junior […]
The 2017 Formula 1 season will be long remembered and debated. Could Vettel have stayed in championship contention with better reliability or fewer driver errors in the critical stages, or was the Mercedes advantage too much for Vettel or any driver to bridge? Is this a step on the road to recovery for Ferrari, or […]
Car reliability has always played a central role in Formula 1 — an inevitable consequence of teams not wanting to leave any potential performance unexploited. Mechanical DNFs at inopportune times have decided numerous championships. Who can forget Mansell’s puncture at Adelaide 1986 or Hamilton’s shock engine failure at Malaysia 2016? Many of the sport’s most […]
2017 marks one of the largest changes in the history of Formula 1. Not since 1966, when engine sizes were doubled, have the sport’s rule-makers introduced full-format changes with the primary intent of making the cars faster and more exciting. Instead, we have become accustomed to changes designed to curb speeds and improve safety, which […]
A key question at the end of every Formula 1 season is: who was the best performing driver? There’s never a straightforward answer to this question, and usually only two or three teams could realistically win the drivers’ title, regardless of the quality of their drivers. This year, it was probably just one team, such was the […]
As Formula 1 teams are making their final selections for 2017, it is a good time to consider the quality of the incoming junior crop, and identify who is likely to make headlines in coming years. Junior career metrics Over the past three years on this blog, I have presented and tweaked some metrics for assessing junior careers. […]
Who was a greater Formula 1 driver: Nigel Mansell or Elio de Angelis? Expert panels have uniformly selected Mansell. Raw statistics of success — wins, championships, and the like — also clearly favor Mansell. Yet, every mathematical model of driver rankings developed to date resoundingly answers de Angelis. Examining the data table below helps to […]
With testing finished, I continued my earlier analysis to form a clearer picture of the team hierarchy as we go to Melbourne. This time I have taken both tyre degradation and fuel loads into account. Making predictions in F1 is extremely difficult, as I found out in a previous analysis of F1 economics. Nevertheless, I think there are significant insights to […]
I was as excited as anyone to see the 2016 cars hit the track in Barcelona. After a winter of boasts from Ferrari, Renault, and Honda about the progress they have made, we finally have a chance to properly assess where they all stand. Often we are told that “testing times are meaningless”, but it’s important to […]
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