Things are still evenly matched at Alpine – where Alonso is, on average, 0.142s faster than Ocon.Īston Martin, Vettel leading Stroll by 0,146s in average. Looking at the average qualifying gap between teammates up to the Spanish Grand Prix – and taking away Imola’s wet qualifying, as visibility and traffic made the comparison less relevant – we find that Lewis Hamilton’s 0.02s advantage to Russell is the smallest gap on the grid, followed by Verstappen being, in average, 0.097s ahead of Pérez.
F1 2017 car design drivers#
No surprise, then, to find those three drivers have an edge over their team-mate, even though Pérez’s recent progress has brought him way closer to the World Champion that before. Now, though, most cars are very pointy – the style that served Michael Schumacher so well during his long career and is also favoured by the likes of Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris. Most drivers favour a bit of understeer in their cars and a very stable rear end, as that gives them more control on corner entry and the confidence to put the throttle down as quickly as possible. With the front end of this new generation of cars being quite sharp, most drivers are experiencing mid-corner snap oversteer and that’s something very few can handle at the limit. The solutions most teams have found has been to trim a bit of downforce, relying on the fact most downforce is now generated by the underside of the cars, and that has made the cars quite nervous mid-corner. With the DRS-flap being a lot more powerful than in previous years, straight-line speed has become even more important than before, so finding a compromise that makes your car quicker in the low-speed corners but also quite fast down the straights is not an easy one to find.
That, as well, requires a different approach to the way cars are set up. Heavier, stiffer, with a lot more suspension movement, bouncing enormously in some cases, the 2022-spec cars are also a lot faster around the medium to high-speed corners, due to the return of ground effect, while being way slower than last year’s car in the slower corners. There are almost as many theories as people talking about it, but the bottom line is that the 2022-spec Formula One cars handle very differently than the previous generation of Grand Prix cars and have very little in common with anything the 20 Formula One drivers have experienced throughout their career. Starting at Ferrari, where Carlos Sainz hasn’t been able to match Charles Leclerc in most weekends and ending with the biggest gap of all, between the highly experienced Valtteri Bottas and Chinese rookie Guanyu Zhou. More than in any other recent year, the average qualifying gaps between team mates are quite big in some cases. Daniel Ricciardo’s struggle to get to grips with his McLaren MC元6-Mercedes are painfully known to all Australian fans but the popular Aussie is not the only one that find himself massively outpaced by his team mate in this first third of the 2022 Formula One World Championship.
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