The Beginning of Surprises — Formula 1 Bahrain GP 2023
It’s lights out and away we go!
How excited we are for the Formula 1 season to start again. 2023, with some drivers changes, also second year of this new F1 era, made early of this season is something to look forward to.
Speaking of excitements, this is my first piece of writing! Especially about F1. I’m kind of interested in doing a bit of data analysis in between and just want to express my views and opinions about it (since people around me are not too keen).
Shoutout to fast-f1 library by theOehrly and Jasper for priceless tutorial, paving way for inspiration to look at data in Formula 1.
Starting Grid — Look what we got.
Redbull showed its dominance by placing two cars on the first row (1st and 2nd), followed by Ferrari on the second row (3rd and 4th). Surprisingly, Alonso was able to put Aston Martin in 5th position beating the Mercedes duo in 6th and 7th place. And Stroll, who just had a bike accident, could put his car in 8th place. This shocked many spectators and did not expect Aston Martin to deliver a competitive cars at the start of the season, considering the team was 7th place in 2022 Constructor Championsip.
The rest, however, are very interesting to note. Four teams were placed apart between teammates. Ocon got 9th place, while his new teammate in Alpine, Gasly, got 20th.
Hulkenberg, who just got his seat back after about 3 years off the grid, was able to take Haas into Q3 and placed in 10th position (due to DNF). Meanwhile, his teammate Magnussen couldn’t make it through Q1 and got 17th place.
Shock came from McLaren, where they couldn’t break Q3. Big talent, Norris, could only put McLaren in 11th place, and the rookie young talent, Piastri, only manage 18th. From these results, it seems that their car development progress is relatively slower (maybe not the slowest) compare to other teams.
Alpha Tauri, with Tsunoda as more senior driver in the team, could only manage 14th place, followed by his rookie teammate, De Vries, who couldn’t get through Q1 and settled for 19th place.
Alfa Romeo, with same driver lineup as the previous season, placed its cars 12th and 13th.
Williams seemed to show good development progress, where they could put the cars on the threshold of Q1-Q2. They got 15th and 16th position.
The Race — First, keep our expectation.
Verstappen led the race without a hitch and secured the victory in the opening race of 2023. Almost 12 seconds difference ahead of his teammate, Perez, who finished 2nd. It appears that the redbull car has much better progress in development than other teams, with a time difference of almost 27 seconds (or about 39 seconds from Verstappen’s position!) to 3rd place. The best result Redbull could achieve on the day.
Redbull’s domination aside, there was something else that stood out.
Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso, 41 years old, 2 times world champions, back on the podium! A good move by Alonso to transfer from Alpine, since it looks like Aston Martin can compete with the top 3 teams. After Alonso was nudged by his teammate at the first lap of the race, he was gradually able to catch up with the Mercedes by doing overcut on Russel on first stint, fighting with Hamilton on lap 38, and passing Ferrari’s Sainz on lap 45 to snatch the podium. Stroll, after his accident and showing dedication to the race, was able to take 6th place, beating Russel who took 7th place. This shows perhaps Aston Martin cars are faster than the Mercedes. Mercedes should be able to prepare its car for the races ahead.
Unluckily for Leclerc. After showing almost half the race trying to put Ferrari in 2nd place, yet being chased down by Perez, he was forced to retire due to problem in his power unit on lap 40. Quite disheartening for Ferrari fans who hoped the team could restore Ferrari’s glory by clinching the championship. But, hey! this was the first race. Don’t lose hope as there is still a long way to go until the end of season.
In between, the magic came from Gasly. He was able to pick up points after starting at the very back of the grid. Competing with other midfield teams, aided by the misfortune of some other drivers retiring, he was able to lead Alpine to points in the first race. It was quite worrying considering the multi-penalty given to Ocon and being forced to stop the race at the end of lap 41.
Wait, where is McLaren? Considering the historic team has won many championships and got many fans, we expect to see this team compete with the top teams. But as a result, Piastri was forced to retire on lap 13 due to electrical problem and Norris had to continue the race with a pneumatic leak (by doing pitstops every 10 laps or so). It seems McLaren has problems with the reliability of its cars so the results in this first race cannot meet the expectations of many people. Hopefully McLaren can address these issues for the next races.
Williams achieved a satisfactory result, with Albon finishing 10th and Sargeant, who looked in great form amongst the rookies, finishing 12th. With Bottas taking Alfa Romeo to 8th place, it will be interesting to see the rivalry among Williams, Alfa Romeo, Alphatauri, and Haas in next races.
Now, it’s fun to take a little look at the race through some data and numbers.
Data Analysis — Drill down the data.
In the race, we saw the Redbull duo way ahead followed by the Aston Martin, Ferrari and Mercedes drivers. But how about the rest of the pack? How do the teams compare globally?
Race Pace
I took each driver’s time on each lap, excluding the first lap and all laps with pit-in and pit-out. Afterwards, I removed the outlier lap data with the Inter-Quartile Range (IQR) rule. Slightly modified, I still included outlier data on the bottom to see the fastest lap data of each driver in boxplot.
Verstappen, Perez, and Alonso were the top 3 in pace average and it showed in race result. But in 4th place (ahead of Ferrari), is Alpine’s Pierre Gasly! This result may be influenced by Gasly doing 3 pitstops, so the time of each lap was influenced by fresher tyre. But, impressively, he started last and was able to finish and score points in 9th!
See the papaya between Mercedes? It’s McLaren’s Lando Norris! If we look at the race pace from all the laps, it looks like McLaren can compete with the top teams (or be top of the midfield). Just like Gasly, it looks like the pace was affected by the number of pitstops and fresher tyres used. The result was not good, but interesting to see how the McLaren performs with other midfielders in the future.
I didn’t pay much attention to Alphatauri when I was watching the race. After looking at the data above, De Vries’ race pace was at the lowest position (particularly in the late race). I don’t know if there was a problem with Alphatauri’s cars, but even his teammate Tsunoda couldn’t score any points. Beaten by the Williams duo who had a relatively better average race pace (also the race results).
To summarize comparison of each team, here is average race pace comparison when using laptime by team’s average for each lap. Interesting, right?
Car Characteristic
I’m curious about the differences between the top 4 teams. From the available data, I tried to create a GG Diagram (shoutout to @ F1DataAnalysis on twitter for providing the idea).
To see the peak performance of each team, I will use the fastest lap data from qualifying session. The 4 drivers representing each team are Max Verstappen (Redbull), Charles Leclerc (Ferrari), Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), and Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes).
From the GG diagram, the maximum acceleration and traction of Redbull is the best among the other teams. It can be seen from the most positive longitude acceleration, followed by Ferrari and Aston Martin which look equal and Mercedes begin inferior among others.
If we look at the speed-longitudinal G chart, we can see that Redbull has excellent power and traction on a straight track (straight line above the positive value) and a top speed that is equal to Ferrari (rightmost position point). Meanwhile, Aston Martin and Mercedes have lower top speeds but Mercedes came out on top during braking! It may also be influenced by the driving style of each driver, but the Mercedes had higher braking traction.
However, when we see speed-lateral G chart, Redbull came out on top in terms of traction in medium-speed corners, and Ferrari excelled in high-speed corners. Mercedes and Aston Martin have good traction in low-speed corners and are relatively equal.
Based on the data above, hypothetically Mercedes and Aston Martin have a higher relative drag than Ferrari and Redbull, given their lower top speed and stronger braking power. But when comparing Ferrari and Redbull, the downforce generated by Redbull is greater and drag relatively higher than Ferrari, due to better traction during acceleration and higher traction during medium-speed corners. It looks like Ferrari has the upper hand on long straights and high-speed corners.
Thank you!
That’s all from me, I hope you enjoy my writing. It would be great if you could give me feedback on my writing, since I’m still learning how to write well and extract data into a story.
