Inconclusive testing?

[NowyszRacing6]

I've been thinking about something but haven't seen any of the teams or drivers comment on it during testing, both for this year and ones before: Why are the best lap times of everyone so inconclusive? I know most of testing is for finding out car behavior and how to make tires and fuel loads work the best, but wouldn't each team want to at least throw on a set of each type of tire with a low fuel load and see how fast they actually are? Are the drivers really not on the limit for most of testing? I would think that how the car feels and works at 100% would be very important to find out, especially for qualifying. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't see why testing makes everyone's speed such a mystery. In my experience with kart racing at least, you don't know that you've made an improvement to your setup until you go out and do a faster lap than your best one before. So what do you guys think?

[Pup]

I guess that sadly there's little point in testing for ultimate speed these days. Since the teams can't use a specific qualifying setup, they have to set the cars up for the race, which is all about tire management, reliability and aero. For the top teams, even final qualifying is on heavy fuel loads. So that's what they test for. I suppose there's some incremental value in seeing how the car handles in an all out effort, light fuel, etc., but with limited testing I suppose they'd rather spend their laps doing other things.

But yes, even just a few years back the last few days of testing were much more exciting than today.

[Jersey Tom]

Why are the best lap times of everyone so inconclusive?

It's not scheduled like a race weekend. The amount of "grip" the track has will change over the course of the day or the whole test as temperature changes, as the track takes rubber, etc. If Team A tests their best configuration early on Day 1 and Team B tests their best configuration late on Day 2, the ambient and track conditions will certainly be much different. Not to mention state of tires.

I would think that how the car feels and works at 100% would be very important to find out

Do you think the car feel at 100% is different than it is at 99%? 98.5%? 95%? If you can get the same feel for balance and improvements at 95 as 100, then why go all out and destroy your set of tires, etc?

In my experience with kart racing at least, you don't know that you've made an improvement to your setup until you go out and do a faster lap than your best one before.

Sometimes it's not all about the stopwatch.

[oT v1]

My guess, apart from the obvious wanting to hide any advantage, would be there is too much to work on and test to simply go for the top times. Some of the sand bagging is just weird and i dont get it, 2.4 from RedBull.......

I dont think its fair to say they're not pushing though, just different limiting factors, like fuel, stop any correlation between teams. We need a trackside view of how they behave around the long corners and out of the fiddly bits more than times i think

[NowyszRacing6]

It's not scheduled like a race weekend. The amount of "grip" the track has will change over the course of the day or the whole test as temperature changes, as the track takes rubber, etc. If Team A tests their best configuration early on Day 1 and Team B tests their best configuration late on Day 2, the ambient and track conditions will certainly be much different. Not to mention state of tires.

True, I wasn't thinking about that too much, but you'd think each team would be able to factor that in to when times were set to see who was really fast. If you were going for a 100% run, tires wouldn't be an issue since you'd most likely put new ones on.

Do you think the car feel at 100% is different than it is at 99%? 98.5%? 95%? If you can get the same feel for balance and improvements at 95 as 100, then why go all out and destroy your set of tires, etc?

Definitely. If you're at 95% for example, you may not notice that the car starts to understeer or oversteer at 98%, which could change your speed (and probably tire degradation too). I'm sure they do a lot of running at slightly below 100% to conserve/test tires and other parts though, since that type of driving would happen in a lot of the race.

[Jersey Tom]

True, I wasn't thinking about that too much, but you'd think each team would be able to factor that in to when times were set to see who was really fast.

Why does it matter though? As a team, you have your test schedule of what you have to bang through - you're going to evaluate A, B, C, and D. Whether you're 0.2 sec faster or 0.5 sec slower than the competition isn't going to change your test plan. Really nothing more you can do about it at that instant.

Do you think the car feel at 100% is different than it is at 99%? 98.5%? 95%? If you can get the same feel for balance and improvements at 95 as 100, then why go all out and destroy your set of tires, etc?

Definitely.

Well, I definitely disagree My general experience is once you get anywhere close to the limit, you know what the limit trim is going to be. Not to mention, even during a race.. drivers aren't doing 100% laps 100% of the time. Nowhere near. I can't imagine a car's balance changing dramatically in the last few tenths or hundreths of a G of performance. This is why there are test / development drivers on teams even if they're not particularly great racers. Maybe they can't get all there is out of a car battling against other drivers - but they're better at assessing changes and communicating them.

[Tim.Wright]

One thing I've learnt about testing cars is that you never get conclusive results. You always need to factor in different temperatures, setup changes, slightly different specs of part X because there is never the time to only change one thing at a time... So in the end, quite a bit of skill is then required to really extract a decent conclusion.

This is why all the current discussions on the pre-season testing are an utter waste of time.

[R_Redding]

With the pace of in-season development , the big teams spend most of winter testing making sure they have a good correlation between simulation and reality and mechanical reliability.

If simulation and reality are relatively close , they can derive a philosophy and design parts without having to pound laptimes,and develop more quickly.

But Ferrari showed last year what can happen when the two are a mismatch.

Rob