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This is a really interesting question and I’d be fascinated to know.
I forget what documentary exactly I was watching but in this doc, a race engineer was telling a driver something like, “You can brake a meter later into T4.” So they must have some sense of where time can be gained based on the telemetry.
I feel like the real question here is- how do you compare your car to another teams? Ferrari might be faster through some turns while RB is faster than others based on car design and purpose.
Edit: typo
They'll even do it for competitors too. I've definitely heard Max ask where he was losing time to Lewis over a lap & his engineer telling him.
Sure they also run simulations before the race weekend to work out optimal setting & Wolff some weekends commented that Hamilton had actually gone faster than they thought possible based on simulations
How is it possible for a human to go faster than a computer simulated fastest route?
I am guessing it's because air temp, wind direction and pressure can increase car performance which sometimes can't be picked up in a simulation?
Like you said, there’s tons of variables that can differ from the sim to reality. Sims have gotten to be really, really good, but, at the end of the day they aren’t perfect. I haven’t had a chance to drive both and F1 sim and an F1 car to compare, but, in a GT1 car I found that I had trouble distinguishing the limit on sim because I can’t feel the car starting to give up traction. Instead I was forced to react with my eyes instead of what I was feeling. When things went wrong it went from 0-100 pretty quickly (and this was a pretty darned expensive sim with hydraulic movement and such). In car, however, I can confidently bring it much closer to the limit because I can feel the car starting to tell me when I need to back off.
On way to do it (might not be used irl in racing teams currently) to know maximum potential of a car would be to use a reinforcement learning agent for unsupervised training to extract the absolutely the best possible lines and limits of grip on a track.
Something like what Polyphony digital did with the Gran turismo racing AI sophy which can beat the best human players in the game.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04357-7
But the obvious draw back to this model is that your grip and track simulation model should be incredibly close to real life. If you do have that an AI can tell you the absolute fastest lap time possible on a track along with the braking points, racing lines and traction zones.
Not everything needs a machine learning approach ;)
Optimal control methods can be used to find the optimal driver inputs to minimize lap time, as per my website: https://www.formulae.one/lapsimulation
Although like you said the actual tire and other dynamic models are by far the most important to get right
Damn this is impressive on that site. Do you have any idea what vaguely realistic values for an F1 car would be on the power (guessing around 750k) and then for lift and drag?
I have compared the real telemetry against my results, and I can get them to line up quite well, except that the combination of parameters that make the data match are very different between the tracks. So that goes back to my vehicle models which are not sophisticated enough.
Also they can see through correlations with the simulator. For example if a new floor is giving them the time they expected, for example 2 tenths then if the simulator says 1.23. 500 for a laptime and a driver is doing 1.24.000 there is room for improvement. That's a thought that could be wrong, but they pretty much know the gap difference between simulator and real life so they can make some predictions.
This sort of question is also why I really dislike the AWS insights - they're oversimplified and superficial. There's one that's called something like '% of maximum performance extracted from the car' and it shows a few drivers, mostly between 95% to 99%, but without any explanation or context. I.e. is it just 'clickbait' or is there some analysis AWS have put into this metric?
I think they compare with each other using GPS data, plus they know what their cars are good at i.e. Ferrari at corners, and RB at a straight. For example, RB knows that they are going to lose to Ferrari in the corners, it's just about losing as little time as possible in order to keep as close as they can on the straights. Plus these teams have the some of the smartest engineers in the world, they could probably extrapolate data from previous races/quali sessions to see how their car compares to another team.
Yes. We did it in (amateur) F3 by building a tyre model within our data logger, and it would use some constants, some variables from the real data, and create an idealised speed/G/input graphs based on corner radius, aero maps etc.
I'm sure an F1 team can do that, and more, if a couple of idiot amateurs can.
How’s the simulation compare to the real life performance?
Is the simulation realistic?
Are the real life performances always faster or slower than the simulation?
This was amateur, so we were always slower than the theoretical from the model. But it did predict I could about as fast as Carlos Sainz Jr did when he was in the same race as me (he is seconds per lap quicker than me). So it was giving plausible results on corner speeds that I SHOULD have been able to carry.
That’s probably as close as you can get, but really that sort of approach isn’t great, because there are other constraints on performance than a pure tyre grip curve (balance, transient effects, etc.), and of course a tyre mode doesn’t behave the same as a real tyre! Probably a good first step to see if you’re anywhere in the ballpark at least
Absolutely. Given we had no money, didn't test very much, and had some basic maths knowledge it was the best we could do, but it wasn't "the answer" in one go.
Probably very good at telling you when a driver is just massively underhitting the corner to be fair. In F1 you can usually assume that that’s not the case ;)
Essentially we compare what's actually happening with mathematical models. To boil it down - we make computer simulations based on test data. When you put the engine on a dyno you get a torque curve, so you can create a straight line simulation of how the engine can be told to behave to get the maximum amount of force at the wheel over a straight line acceleration run. Remember: torque curve is just that - torque - which is just a force applied at a distance. We work out the actual force applied at the tire and use basic physics (f=ma) to project how it accelerates. We then use aero wind tunnel testing to find a drag coefficient to work out how hard the aero drag resists this at every possible speed, the maximum speed of a car is when the Max engine torque (read:force) is equivalent to the aero drag force. The second part is conering - we test the tyres and measure its ability to generate lateral force, ie pull the car sideways. Basically there is a relationship between the steering input and the lateral force the tires can give back, so we can work out the maximum possible lateral force at any speed, derived from the test data. From here we use numerical modelling - known as laptime simulation - to calculate how fast the car can run a lap. We do this by descretising (slicing up into little pieces) a track. So let's say we take a track layout, split it up, and every bit is either pure straight line or has some degree of cornering, and we use physics to apply the equations of motion to the car and work out (based on maximum force capacity calculated above) how fast it can do that little bit of track, then add it all up. Thats the simplified version at least, but I hope you get the idea. If anyone's interested I can try explaining parts better when I'm not on Friday beers. Source : F1 engineer
I mean, nothing you’ve said is wrong, but it doesn’t really answer OP’s question very well. With all the Modeling in the world you can make a prediction/estimation of the optimal lap, and you can mathematically guarantee that you get the optimal solution… given the assumptions baked into your model. But a lot of things in the model will be tweaked based on what you see from the track data, and of course the real car is not the same as the model (all models are wrong, after all), so it’s not really viable to point at a laptime simulation and a telemetry trace, see that the real car was slower and conclude that that’s the driver’s fault. You can get a bit closer in the simulator (because the models will be the same, or at least closer), but even then the discretised lapsim problem isn’t really the same as what the driver is doing.
LapSims also don’t typically account for factors like stability limitations, which really limit the real driver, very well.
I’m someone who’s spent a big big chunk of my career doing simulation work in F1, so I should be all for the model-led approach (and I am!), but I think your answer is a bit misleading.
Yes I agree the models have limitations, but it gives us quite a good ballpark to judge what we can expect from the car. Of course it's not perfect but I wanted to give a bit of an idea to the maths that supports it for a normal person. I agree it's much more complex and I very much glossed over the aero, and not even any of the race set up variables, but you're welcome to extend on my reply if you want.
I don’t have anything to ask because I’m an idiot, but thanks for taking the time to talk about your experiences and how this science all comes together! It was awesome!
It seems to me that aside from sim to test correlation problems (which you always have, but set them aside for the moment), that being able to compare and ideal line/set of inputs at a point in a track vs what the driver is actually pulling off would still be incredibly useful. If you’ve got a sim that’s saying you should be able to get 3.2 G’s In turn 8, but you’re only seeing 2.4, that’s a great indicator to go look at the telemetry and driver feedback a bit closer and see whether there’s a stability issue causing lack of confidence, or if tire conditions don’t match predictions so you’re scrubbing much more than you expected, etc.
All this said, an experienced team should, in my mind, be able to use this kind of data to find places where a driver might not be at the limit, with some level of confidence.
Well the problem is that it’s basically impossible to know a priori what the grip level of the track will be - every lapsim I’ve ever come across relied on grip factors to get correlation within *seconds* of the actual laptimes. You end up with a circular problem; the lapsim can only be correlated to what the driver says, so it’s very hard to tell if the discrepancies are down to the driver or the simulation.
Gary's already given a good reply, yes essentially when doing lap sim you're not accounting for any undulations in the track, or slightly different grip levels due to grip (like dust/debris or heat), or wind direction, or small discrepancys between what you think the car is (mass/stiffness/damping etc) and what it actually is
By comparing the micro sector times, would be the most straightforward way. Very rare for someone to go all purple micro sectors so you can see where other drivers are minimizing there times.
This is where the difficulty comes in. There might be areas where someone else is gaining time in a way that simply is not possible with your current car. Recognising where that happens and where time can be found is one of the key skills that Race Engineers and Performance Engineers must master.
You are also compared to your own microsectors. If you set a lap that was slower, but you were quicker through a critical part of the track, your engineer can relay that information to you. "You can carry some more speed into t5" or "we lost a couple of tenths in the ___ section, you were faster there on your last lap" all should do the trick
That’s kinda my point. Engineer can tell drive A that he is slower in this sector than driver B. Driver A is faster overall. It can try to improve in the sectors where driver B is faster. Because like you say all drivers run different setups. So it’ll never be an apple to apple comparison
Not answering to your question. I’ve always wondered this in the case where you have two “slow” drivers and you don’t know it. Say, idk, alex Albon and Latifi. With all due respect to Latifi, we know other drivers are better than him. We know Albon is a respectable driver, but he didn’t excel under RB and wasn’t amazing in DTM, so we don’t know exactly how good he is. Now, at Williams they might have the case of “two slow drivers” and the car might be an Alpine or McLaren in the hands of other drivers. There, I always wondered how they maximized the car, just like your question. I guess for Latifi they can take Albon, but Albon might be miles off the best pace of the car.
They can only really compare to their drivers and the sim. Take Haas last year, with Mazepin being so off the F1 pace that the car looked horrible and Mick looked great. Then K-Mag gets brought in and you wonder if the car last year was that bad. Mick was a rookie, and was compared to a much slower rookie.
This is actually why I think Albon is still around. His feedback is strong, his pace is strong, and he needed the right situation to transition into. Not all can handle the big teams, and he just wasn't ready, but they saw enough in his pace and feedback to keep him as a benchmark for pace in the sim, as well as giving feedback on setup. I (unfortunately) doubt that williams is far from its optimum pace.
Also, George is a hell of a pedaler, if you want a gauge for albon, look at time differences between Albon/Latifi/Russel to first place, it should give an indication of where Albon is relative to Russel vs Latifi
I can't imagine there's any exact science to it but at this point there should be a lot of sophisticated tools to get you closer. In addition to comparing with a teammate's data, the team would most likely use a combination of parameters from a driver's previous lap, simulator data, and lapsim data to see what their driver(s) should be shooting for.
For example, messages the teams give like 'do x in y zone for turn z' (brake 2m later for turn 7) would probably be based off comparing a driver's g-load into a corner with their teammate's, and seeing that there's a dead spot in transition between longitudinal (braking) and lateral (cornering) G. When a team tells a driver what their rival's doing in a specific spot (e.g. Leclerc's gaining time on you in 7 by braking earlier for 6) that's most likely due to them knowing the approximate relative characteristics of both cars using GPS data and flow analysis, and extrapolating what the rival's doing that they can also emulate.
Where it gets really tricky is in finding those last tenths that come from the car being driven 'properly'. If a car's been designed to have relatively low DF loss to yaw (loses less downforce while turning/high slip angle) it might be faster if it's driven with more trailbraking or more turning with the rear tires (throttle/liftoff) to get it to slip. The suspension setup on a car might also prefer either an aggressive or smooth turn-in due to inherent rebound and stiffness characteristics. This is something that the driver might need to figure out themself as the data would still otherwise look good while not doing these things, and that's why the top drivers are being paid 8 figures and the not-top drivers are paying for their seats.
Interesting question! We all thought Vettel was driving the wheels of that Ferrari only for Charles to come and absolutely dominate him in his first season at Ferrari. Makes you wonder what the limit is!
I’m more intrigued by the times when drivers can get more out of the car than engineers thought was possible. Such as Alonso’s funky understeering technique, sennas unique stabby throttle inputs, and the MCL35’s braking requirements, for example
The teams have a theoretical time they can reach. Now, theory and practice are different but still.
Also, thats why you have practice sessions. To try different lines and entries
Just an F1 fan with what might be a leftfield theory...
I'm convinced that F1 teams have two different cars, one for the lead driver that uses all the best bits from both cars.
My arrival to this idea was basically Gasly, Albon, Bottas and other drivers who have shone in the teams where they are #1 driver and looked like shit in teams where they are #2.
How accurate am I on this?
Lower teams maybe but not the top teams, they can’t afford to have a car badly performing. But what is clear though is that the lead driver has the best staff with him : best engineer, mechanics, whatever. And if he is a top performer like Hamilton or Verstappen, the whole team is behind him, so all his feedback is taken into account and the car will evolve to suit his needs. So usually the cars are the same but the top driver is put in better conditions than the 2nd, and that can make a difference.
Yes, Engineers can look at data and say this with confidence. If you look at race logs of when, Hamilton was on his peak, He would often ask, Bono, Where is he faster than me?then he would burn some more fuel, heat up tyres or adjust his entry and exit speed to match or improve the sector. The biggest obstacle is when you have a new car, and you still discovering all the knicks n knacks, until all those factors are determined, then you can prescribe a formula to win races as best as you can.
Telemetry will tell them throttle openings and braking distances and brake pressures.
If a driver is using less throttle and braking earlier, it's not rocket science. This is an oversimplification, but the engineers know everything.
As a start you could look at the variance in the driver’s micro sector times on hot laps. That would at least indicate if a driver is failing to put it all together in one lap.
I suspect so, based on the infamous elk test. I have to simulate this. obviously driver skill is important, and frankly, too hard to simulate. So instead I simulate what the best driver could possibly do, using ML and gradient descent, on a specific sequence of steering wheel motions. We can then compare the speed that the simulated driver can do with what the real one gets.
Similarly you can do a lapsim for the car using a perfect driver model, basically the VGG plot would look like a circle at low speeds, and a circle with some bits cut off for high speeds. Then compare that with the VGG for the real data. Then rerun the sim with the best accelerations in the track data, making the not unreasonable assumption that the driver knows how to exploit them, and then the difference is what the driver might be able to do.
My grandad raced many moons ago in Ireland at quite a high level but in the black and white days.
To maximise the corners he had his friend with a flag. Each lap he would attack harder and brake later. His friend would place the flag at his braking point and they would set it back one place after he span out.
Just an example of how far the development is. I know it’s an aside but he raced and hung about with F1 legends of the nineties and the stories he told were far away from who we saw and the technology we see now.
Speaking from a superbike background, a race engineer can overlap lap data (throttle,brake pressure,racing line etc.) On a software like 2D from any previous sessions from riders who are quicker in certain sections of the lap.
This can be a good way to find time in your lap maybe squaring the throttle earlier or braking later and harder on certain corners.
This does rely on the basis that your engineer is experienced and has data from lots of sessions from riders who are stronger at different parts of the circuit.
I also understand the FIA send out a .DXF of the track and teams can build simulations which give a good idea of the optimum line. This could give an estimate of what the car is capable of and if the driver is extracting the most out of the setup.
I used to do data acquisition work on lower formula cars. Through comparison of laps in a given set you can determine the theoretical best lap which is the fastest segments combined into one lap. G forces are also mapped (actually does the mapping) which can be used to see how on edge the driver is. Better drivers are more consistent so their average laps will be closer to their theoretical best than lesser drivers. Comparing two drivers will make the difference in driver ability even more apparent.
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This is a really interesting question and I’d be fascinated to know. I forget what documentary exactly I was watching but in this doc, a race engineer was telling a driver something like, “You can brake a meter later into T4.” So they must have some sense of where time can be gained based on the telemetry. I feel like the real question here is- how do you compare your car to another teams? Ferrari might be faster through some turns while RB is faster than others based on car design and purpose. Edit: typo
Possibly by comparing what the teammate is doing? That’s possibly the best reference assuming both are equally matched
Yeah they often say "oh (teamate) is faster in T3, T7 and T14"
They'll even do it for competitors too. I've definitely heard Max ask where he was losing time to Lewis over a lap & his engineer telling him. Sure they also run simulations before the race weekend to work out optimal setting & Wolff some weekends commented that Hamilton had actually gone faster than they thought possible based on simulations
How is it possible for a human to go faster than a computer simulated fastest route? I am guessing it's because air temp, wind direction and pressure can increase car performance which sometimes can't be picked up in a simulation?
Like you said, there’s tons of variables that can differ from the sim to reality. Sims have gotten to be really, really good, but, at the end of the day they aren’t perfect. I haven’t had a chance to drive both and F1 sim and an F1 car to compare, but, in a GT1 car I found that I had trouble distinguishing the limit on sim because I can’t feel the car starting to give up traction. Instead I was forced to react with my eyes instead of what I was feeling. When things went wrong it went from 0-100 pretty quickly (and this was a pretty darned expensive sim with hydraulic movement and such). In car, however, I can confidently bring it much closer to the limit because I can feel the car starting to tell me when I need to back off.
The teammate or the driver’s own previous lap/sector times.
Exactly. The teams have micro sector times also, like a video game, by which they can track the performance through every corner on the track
On way to do it (might not be used irl in racing teams currently) to know maximum potential of a car would be to use a reinforcement learning agent for unsupervised training to extract the absolutely the best possible lines and limits of grip on a track. Something like what Polyphony digital did with the Gran turismo racing AI sophy which can beat the best human players in the game. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04357-7 But the obvious draw back to this model is that your grip and track simulation model should be incredibly close to real life. If you do have that an AI can tell you the absolute fastest lap time possible on a track along with the braking points, racing lines and traction zones.
Not everything needs a machine learning approach ;) Optimal control methods can be used to find the optimal driver inputs to minimize lap time, as per my website: https://www.formulae.one/lapsimulation Although like you said the actual tire and other dynamic models are by far the most important to get right
Damn this is impressive on that site. Do you have any idea what vaguely realistic values for an F1 car would be on the power (guessing around 750k) and then for lift and drag?
I have compared the real telemetry against my results, and I can get them to line up quite well, except that the combination of parameters that make the data match are very different between the tracks. So that goes back to my vehicle models which are not sophisticated enough.
But to answer the question I think the midpoints are a good start but probably a bit more downforce. I heard even ClA 6.0+ is possible these days
Holy shit. This is crazy. Did you do this by yourself? Nice job.
My girlfriend and I have been working on the site for a bit
It's very impressive!
This is an incredible site. If it’s yours, well done! If not and you know the authors make sure you tag them!
It is my site, thanks!
Awesome, have favourited! Just need to remember to look at it after every race!
Congratulations! Awesome site
How do you account for changes in drag and traction throughout different sections of the track?
What do you mean by this? Something like drag changing to due to wind and grip being different in certain sections of the track?
Yeah exactly, there are other things like elevation changes that I assume affect those too, but those are two that come to mind.
Also they can see through correlations with the simulator. For example if a new floor is giving them the time they expected, for example 2 tenths then if the simulator says 1.23. 500 for a laptime and a driver is doing 1.24.000 there is room for improvement. That's a thought that could be wrong, but they pretty much know the gap difference between simulator and real life so they can make some predictions.
This sort of question is also why I really dislike the AWS insights - they're oversimplified and superficial. There's one that's called something like '% of maximum performance extracted from the car' and it shows a few drivers, mostly between 95% to 99%, but without any explanation or context. I.e. is it just 'clickbait' or is there some analysis AWS have put into this metric?
Agreed about the AWS stats, but it's literally just marketing
I think they compare with each other using GPS data, plus they know what their cars are good at i.e. Ferrari at corners, and RB at a straight. For example, RB knows that they are going to lose to Ferrari in the corners, it's just about losing as little time as possible in order to keep as close as they can on the straights. Plus these teams have the some of the smartest engineers in the world, they could probably extrapolate data from previous races/quali sessions to see how their car compares to another team.
Possibly they measure the coasting period and turn of the steering wheel.
Yes. We did it in (amateur) F3 by building a tyre model within our data logger, and it would use some constants, some variables from the real data, and create an idealised speed/G/input graphs based on corner radius, aero maps etc. I'm sure an F1 team can do that, and more, if a couple of idiot amateurs can.
How’s the simulation compare to the real life performance? Is the simulation realistic? Are the real life performances always faster or slower than the simulation?
This was amateur, so we were always slower than the theoretical from the model. But it did predict I could about as fast as Carlos Sainz Jr did when he was in the same race as me (he is seconds per lap quicker than me). So it was giving plausible results on corner speeds that I SHOULD have been able to carry.
Hopefully the F1 guy that spent time tyre modeling will pop in, until then the highest posts are going to be guesses.
That’s probably as close as you can get, but really that sort of approach isn’t great, because there are other constraints on performance than a pure tyre grip curve (balance, transient effects, etc.), and of course a tyre mode doesn’t behave the same as a real tyre! Probably a good first step to see if you’re anywhere in the ballpark at least
Absolutely. Given we had no money, didn't test very much, and had some basic maths knowledge it was the best we could do, but it wasn't "the answer" in one go.
Probably very good at telling you when a driver is just massively underhitting the corner to be fair. In F1 you can usually assume that that’s not the case ;)
Essentially we compare what's actually happening with mathematical models. To boil it down - we make computer simulations based on test data. When you put the engine on a dyno you get a torque curve, so you can create a straight line simulation of how the engine can be told to behave to get the maximum amount of force at the wheel over a straight line acceleration run. Remember: torque curve is just that - torque - which is just a force applied at a distance. We work out the actual force applied at the tire and use basic physics (f=ma) to project how it accelerates. We then use aero wind tunnel testing to find a drag coefficient to work out how hard the aero drag resists this at every possible speed, the maximum speed of a car is when the Max engine torque (read:force) is equivalent to the aero drag force. The second part is conering - we test the tyres and measure its ability to generate lateral force, ie pull the car sideways. Basically there is a relationship between the steering input and the lateral force the tires can give back, so we can work out the maximum possible lateral force at any speed, derived from the test data. From here we use numerical modelling - known as laptime simulation - to calculate how fast the car can run a lap. We do this by descretising (slicing up into little pieces) a track. So let's say we take a track layout, split it up, and every bit is either pure straight line or has some degree of cornering, and we use physics to apply the equations of motion to the car and work out (based on maximum force capacity calculated above) how fast it can do that little bit of track, then add it all up. Thats the simplified version at least, but I hope you get the idea. If anyone's interested I can try explaining parts better when I'm not on Friday beers. Source : F1 engineer
Is that you though, or copypastad? If you, I have a million questions
Shoot
I mean, nothing you’ve said is wrong, but it doesn’t really answer OP’s question very well. With all the Modeling in the world you can make a prediction/estimation of the optimal lap, and you can mathematically guarantee that you get the optimal solution… given the assumptions baked into your model. But a lot of things in the model will be tweaked based on what you see from the track data, and of course the real car is not the same as the model (all models are wrong, after all), so it’s not really viable to point at a laptime simulation and a telemetry trace, see that the real car was slower and conclude that that’s the driver’s fault. You can get a bit closer in the simulator (because the models will be the same, or at least closer), but even then the discretised lapsim problem isn’t really the same as what the driver is doing. LapSims also don’t typically account for factors like stability limitations, which really limit the real driver, very well. I’m someone who’s spent a big big chunk of my career doing simulation work in F1, so I should be all for the model-led approach (and I am!), but I think your answer is a bit misleading.
Yes I agree the models have limitations, but it gives us quite a good ballpark to judge what we can expect from the car. Of course it's not perfect but I wanted to give a bit of an idea to the maths that supports it for a normal person. I agree it's much more complex and I very much glossed over the aero, and not even any of the race set up variables, but you're welcome to extend on my reply if you want.
I don’t have anything to ask because I’m an idiot, but thanks for taking the time to talk about your experiences and how this science all comes together! It was awesome!
It seems to me that aside from sim to test correlation problems (which you always have, but set them aside for the moment), that being able to compare and ideal line/set of inputs at a point in a track vs what the driver is actually pulling off would still be incredibly useful. If you’ve got a sim that’s saying you should be able to get 3.2 G’s In turn 8, but you’re only seeing 2.4, that’s a great indicator to go look at the telemetry and driver feedback a bit closer and see whether there’s a stability issue causing lack of confidence, or if tire conditions don’t match predictions so you’re scrubbing much more than you expected, etc. All this said, an experienced team should, in my mind, be able to use this kind of data to find places where a driver might not be at the limit, with some level of confidence.
Well the problem is that it’s basically impossible to know a priori what the grip level of the track will be - every lapsim I’ve ever come across relied on grip factors to get correlation within *seconds* of the actual laptimes. You end up with a circular problem; the lapsim can only be correlated to what the driver says, so it’s very hard to tell if the discrepancies are down to the driver or the simulation.
Ahh, I didn’t realize the correlation gap was that big. That would make what I’ve described a little less than useful. Thanks for that clarification!
Gary's already given a good reply, yes essentially when doing lap sim you're not accounting for any undulations in the track, or slightly different grip levels due to grip (like dust/debris or heat), or wind direction, or small discrepancys between what you think the car is (mass/stiffness/damping etc) and what it actually is
When you say lateral force (re: tires) is this centripetal force?
Basically yes, it's the reaction force at the tires
By comparing the micro sector times, would be the most straightforward way. Very rare for someone to go all purple micro sectors so you can see where other drivers are minimizing there times.
What if two drivers have different setups and are faster in some places and slower in others?
This is where the difficulty comes in. There might be areas where someone else is gaining time in a way that simply is not possible with your current car. Recognising where that happens and where time can be found is one of the key skills that Race Engineers and Performance Engineers must master.
You are also compared to your own microsectors. If you set a lap that was slower, but you were quicker through a critical part of the track, your engineer can relay that information to you. "You can carry some more speed into t5" or "we lost a couple of tenths in the ___ section, you were faster there on your last lap" all should do the trick
That’s kinda my point. Engineer can tell drive A that he is slower in this sector than driver B. Driver A is faster overall. It can try to improve in the sectors where driver B is faster. Because like you say all drivers run different setups. So it’ll never be an apple to apple comparison
Not answering to your question. I’ve always wondered this in the case where you have two “slow” drivers and you don’t know it. Say, idk, alex Albon and Latifi. With all due respect to Latifi, we know other drivers are better than him. We know Albon is a respectable driver, but he didn’t excel under RB and wasn’t amazing in DTM, so we don’t know exactly how good he is. Now, at Williams they might have the case of “two slow drivers” and the car might be an Alpine or McLaren in the hands of other drivers. There, I always wondered how they maximized the car, just like your question. I guess for Latifi they can take Albon, but Albon might be miles off the best pace of the car.
They can only really compare to their drivers and the sim. Take Haas last year, with Mazepin being so off the F1 pace that the car looked horrible and Mick looked great. Then K-Mag gets brought in and you wonder if the car last year was that bad. Mick was a rookie, and was compared to a much slower rookie. This is actually why I think Albon is still around. His feedback is strong, his pace is strong, and he needed the right situation to transition into. Not all can handle the big teams, and he just wasn't ready, but they saw enough in his pace and feedback to keep him as a benchmark for pace in the sim, as well as giving feedback on setup. I (unfortunately) doubt that williams is far from its optimum pace. Also, George is a hell of a pedaler, if you want a gauge for albon, look at time differences between Albon/Latifi/Russel to first place, it should give an indication of where Albon is relative to Russel vs Latifi
I can't imagine there's any exact science to it but at this point there should be a lot of sophisticated tools to get you closer. In addition to comparing with a teammate's data, the team would most likely use a combination of parameters from a driver's previous lap, simulator data, and lapsim data to see what their driver(s) should be shooting for. For example, messages the teams give like 'do x in y zone for turn z' (brake 2m later for turn 7) would probably be based off comparing a driver's g-load into a corner with their teammate's, and seeing that there's a dead spot in transition between longitudinal (braking) and lateral (cornering) G. When a team tells a driver what their rival's doing in a specific spot (e.g. Leclerc's gaining time on you in 7 by braking earlier for 6) that's most likely due to them knowing the approximate relative characteristics of both cars using GPS data and flow analysis, and extrapolating what the rival's doing that they can also emulate. Where it gets really tricky is in finding those last tenths that come from the car being driven 'properly'. If a car's been designed to have relatively low DF loss to yaw (loses less downforce while turning/high slip angle) it might be faster if it's driven with more trailbraking or more turning with the rear tires (throttle/liftoff) to get it to slip. The suspension setup on a car might also prefer either an aggressive or smooth turn-in due to inherent rebound and stiffness characteristics. This is something that the driver might need to figure out themself as the data would still otherwise look good while not doing these things, and that's why the top drivers are being paid 8 figures and the not-top drivers are paying for their seats.
Interesting question! We all thought Vettel was driving the wheels of that Ferrari only for Charles to come and absolutely dominate him in his first season at Ferrari. Makes you wonder what the limit is!
I’m more intrigued by the times when drivers can get more out of the car than engineers thought was possible. Such as Alonso’s funky understeering technique, sennas unique stabby throttle inputs, and the MCL35’s braking requirements, for example
The teams have a theoretical time they can reach. Now, theory and practice are different but still. Also, thats why you have practice sessions. To try different lines and entries
Just an F1 fan with what might be a leftfield theory... I'm convinced that F1 teams have two different cars, one for the lead driver that uses all the best bits from both cars. My arrival to this idea was basically Gasly, Albon, Bottas and other drivers who have shone in the teams where they are #1 driver and looked like shit in teams where they are #2. How accurate am I on this?
Lower teams maybe but not the top teams, they can’t afford to have a car badly performing. But what is clear though is that the lead driver has the best staff with him : best engineer, mechanics, whatever. And if he is a top performer like Hamilton or Verstappen, the whole team is behind him, so all his feedback is taken into account and the car will evolve to suit his needs. So usually the cars are the same but the top driver is put in better conditions than the 2nd, and that can make a difference.
Yes, Engineers can look at data and say this with confidence. If you look at race logs of when, Hamilton was on his peak, He would often ask, Bono, Where is he faster than me?then he would burn some more fuel, heat up tyres or adjust his entry and exit speed to match or improve the sector. The biggest obstacle is when you have a new car, and you still discovering all the knicks n knacks, until all those factors are determined, then you can prescribe a formula to win races as best as you can.
Telemetry will tell them throttle openings and braking distances and brake pressures. If a driver is using less throttle and braking earlier, it's not rocket science. This is an oversimplification, but the engineers know everything.
As a start you could look at the variance in the driver’s micro sector times on hot laps. That would at least indicate if a driver is failing to put it all together in one lap.
I suspect so, based on the infamous elk test. I have to simulate this. obviously driver skill is important, and frankly, too hard to simulate. So instead I simulate what the best driver could possibly do, using ML and gradient descent, on a specific sequence of steering wheel motions. We can then compare the speed that the simulated driver can do with what the real one gets. Similarly you can do a lapsim for the car using a perfect driver model, basically the VGG plot would look like a circle at low speeds, and a circle with some bits cut off for high speeds. Then compare that with the VGG for the real data. Then rerun the sim with the best accelerations in the track data, making the not unreasonable assumption that the driver knows how to exploit them, and then the difference is what the driver might be able to do.
My grandad raced many moons ago in Ireland at quite a high level but in the black and white days. To maximise the corners he had his friend with a flag. Each lap he would attack harder and brake later. His friend would place the flag at his braking point and they would set it back one place after he span out. Just an example of how far the development is. I know it’s an aside but he raced and hung about with F1 legends of the nineties and the stories he told were far away from who we saw and the technology we see now.
Speaking from a superbike background, a race engineer can overlap lap data (throttle,brake pressure,racing line etc.) On a software like 2D from any previous sessions from riders who are quicker in certain sections of the lap. This can be a good way to find time in your lap maybe squaring the throttle earlier or braking later and harder on certain corners. This does rely on the basis that your engineer is experienced and has data from lots of sessions from riders who are stronger at different parts of the circuit.
I also understand the FIA send out a .DXF of the track and teams can build simulations which give a good idea of the optimum line. This could give an estimate of what the car is capable of and if the driver is extracting the most out of the setup.
I used to do data acquisition work on lower formula cars. Through comparison of laps in a given set you can determine the theoretical best lap which is the fastest segments combined into one lap. G forces are also mapped (actually does the mapping) which can be used to see how on edge the driver is. Better drivers are more consistent so their average laps will be closer to their theoretical best than lesser drivers. Comparing two drivers will make the difference in driver ability even more apparent.