Hi guys, I wrote an analysis on Verstappen's power loss and I thought you could be interested!
Verstappen retired after just starting lap 39 - but were there any symptoms in the previous laps, or was it a sudden failure?
I compared the previous two laps to find out: Yes, VER started to lose power halfway through its last lap.
Until the middle of lap 38 (in white), the pace was identical to the previous lap, both in terms of gap and speed profile; suddenly, however (yellow line), the engine began to lose power. We can see this both from the speed graph (seeing that the increase in speed is much more gradual, ending with a smaller peak) and from the gap graph (which increases considerably during the straight, in an increasingly 'steep' manner as the less powerful engine becomes less and less able to overcome the increasing aerodynamic resistance). The same happens on both subsequent straights.
But how much does this loss of power amount to? On the last lap, VER reaches only 305km/h under equal conditions, compared to 312km/h on the previous lap - a 2.3% loss. As the power required to reach a given speed increases with the cube of the speed, this power loss amounts to around 6.6% or about 65hp - Absolutely noticeable. However, for example, less than Ricciardo's in Monaco 2018, as the electric motor delivers a 160hp peak. The difference, however, is that in Monaco, the power affects the lap time much less, and the electric power is not available over the entire lap, unlike the power lost by VER's endothermic. Towards the end of the lap, there is also a possible braking error (red), not repeated at the next slow corner. Perhaps a distraction while trying to change settings?
Considering that roughly 10hp equates to about 0.15s/lap, this would have meant a loss of about 1.0s/lap if he had been able to continue with the problem - Considering that VER was in second place with 7.6s on PER, that there were 20 laps to go and assuming that VER would maintain the same pace as PER + 1s/lap over the remaining laps, VER would have finished the race in fifth place behind HAM but ahead of Norris, still racking up 10 valuable points.
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