venkyhere wrote: ↑14 Feb 2026, 16:18
LionsHeart wrote: ↑14 Feb 2026, 15:17
SmallSoldier wrote: ↑14 Feb 2026, 07:59
And they aren’t wrong… Last year Mercedes finished first, Williams was actually third and Alpine 5th coming out of testing… and that couldn’t be more different than the actual pecking order during the season.
Bahrain is also a very particular track, not necessarily representative of the whole season… Doing well at Bahrain isn’t necessarily something that correlates to most races in the season.
Not only will doing well (or poorly) in a particular race won’t create correlation to other races, this season in particular will be one of rapid development for most teams and a potential constant change of the pecking order… It should be a fun one
Yes, I agree with that statement. But that's the way it goes year after year. Therefore, the test results can be taken as facts in themselves, and within these tests, one can simply speculate. The second and third races are Shanghai and Suzuka. These tracks will reveal a lot about the reality.
I am waiting for China T1-2-3 and Sector1 in Suzuka. In my mind, they are perfect benchmarks for an F1 car.
McLaren was on par with RedBull in the first sector of Suzuka back in 2019. Yet they were shockingly bad in slow & medium speed corners.
Those sections tell you who has the most usable peak downforce, but they're not necessarily the best benchmark, because there's usually not a lot of time to be gained in very high speed sections. You can think of it in terms of percentages. If the best car takes a very fast corner at 270 kmh, if the second best takes it at 265 then they're just 1.85% slower. However, if on a medium speed corner the best car takes it at 90 kmh, but the second best has to slow down to 85 kmh, that's 5.56% slower.
If you translate that into lap time, the difference becomes even clearer. Over a typical high-speed corner of around 300 meters, that 5 kmh deficit would only cost around 0.08s. But over a shorter 100-meter medium-speed corner, the same 5 kmh gap can cost around two to three tenths. Basically, it's because you're spending more time per meter at lower speeds, so percentage losses in medium and slow corners hurt lap time disproportionately compared to very fast sections.
That's why the best benchmark are usually the medium speed corners. Off-camber if possible. It's what has traditionally separated the best teams to the midfield. They're just much better on these tricky section where downforce is lower. Top teams generate more downforce at slower speeds than midfielders and they typically have a much better mechanical platform as well.
I guess corners that fall into this "benchmark" category would be corners like Imola 17 and 18 , or Melbourne T3. Or the last real corner in Bahrain. You could put T4 and particularly T5 in Barcelona in there as well. And many more.
There's basically a lot of such corners in the calendar where you can lose a lot of laptime for being a handful of kmh slower than the best car.
