SmallSoldier wrote: ↑04 Aug 2020, 18:37
Your calculation is a better representation of the pace difference for both teams
Perhaps. Hopefully (otherwise I'm wasting a lot of people's time).
Would it be worth breaking it down further?
The first few laps are confused and teams may well have been shooting for different strategies. Perhaps RBR were aiming to go long and so were going slower than they could have. Fortunately, the race is neatly equalised with the second Safety Car causing the key players to pit on the same lap and bunching them up nicely. I think we can also be confident that everyone was going to try to go to the end from there so the strategies should be equal too.
Looking at just lap 19 to lap 47 (I've chosen there because Hamilton's times drop by nearly half a second on lap 48, his slowest lap for 16 laps, and Bottas has already started dropping time due to tyre issues so it's not unlikely that Hamilton was slowing as a precaution):-
Hamilton crosses the line after the restart with a gap of 1.52 seconds. He crosses the line at the end of 47 with a gap of 14.794 seconds.
That gives us
0.458 seconds per lap.
If we assume that drivers would have their cars turned up to push more in the first half of the stint to open a gap / close for an overtake and that the pace would be more representative of both cars fighting, the average gap would be
0.568 seconds a lap.
To add some detail. The table below contains the figures for the average time (per lap) at the end of that lap (
not the individual lap times).
E.g. On the 'Lap 20' line, the figure of 1:30.453 for Hamilton is the average of his Lap 19 lap time (1:30.534) and his Lap 20 lap time (1:30.371).
On the 'Lap 21' line the figure of 1:30.364 for Hamilton is the average of his Lap 19 lap time (1:30.534) and his Lap 20 lap time (1:30.371) and his lap 21 time (1:30.188).
The same applies for Verstappen (e.g. Lap 21 time of 1:31.420 is the combination of his Lap 19 time of 1:32.334, his lap 20 time of 1:31.096 and his Lap 21 time of 1:30.830).
Lap 19 is confusing because the average time is also the lap time (the only lap this is true of).
The 'Pace dif.' column indicates the average difference in pace from the start of lap 19 to that point in the race.
I suspect I've explained it poorly
Maybe some graphs would help? The first is the graph of the table above. The second is the traditional lap time graph.
I wonder how much of that first lap is DAS? Something to keep an eye on (I'll see if I've got time to look at the various other restarts). As a comparison, Bottas pulls c.1.4 seconds on Verstappen that lap.
Lap 41 is also a little weird (1:29.070)...
All feedback /corrections welcome. I'm bound to have made some mistakes and there may be too much info (or too little) and it might (almost certainly) be poorly presented.
*It's all speculation of course, who knows what modes the various cars were in.
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