Brought to you by TheJudge13 Technical Analyst Tourdog
Sochi was once again marked by a lack of Pit Stops. Last year Rosberg went 52 of 53 laps on the Medium tyre, which raised a lot of questions about Pirelli’s tyre choice and the lack of testing prior to the first GP ever at the Russian track.
This year Pirelli brought tyres a step softer than last year’s to the Race, running the Super Soft and Soft instead of the Soft and Medium. This did not effect racing in the slightest however.
Hamilton was able to cover 32 laps on the Super Soft Tyre to open the race, this of course after using these same tyres for Qualifying. Fernando Alonso went from lap 13-53 on Super Soft Tyre, covering 41 laps. Perez covered 42 laps on the Soft Tyre in his second stint, and came in 3rd because of it.
It is apparent that the Soft Tyre could have nearly covered the entire race, much like the medium did last year. No doubt it would have taken some effort on the drivers part. Perez was complaining that his tires were starting to slide, but his lap times stayed pretty consistent at 1:42.000 (102.xxx sec) in the last stint.
Jenson Buttons lap times have been included to give you an insight into exactly how slow the Honda PU is. In the opening stint, between safety cars, on laps 4-11, both Hamilton and Button were running the Super Soft Tyre, and Ham averaged 3.3 seconds a lap faster over that distance.
In the second stint, laps 34-52, both were running the soft tyre, Hamilton had backed off, and yet he still averaged 2.5 seconds a lap less than Jenson.
The Ferrari’s have definitely made headway on the Mercedes. Sebastian was able to maintain a consistent 1.0 sec a lap loss to Hamilton, regardless of tyre. This is as close as Ferrari has gotten this season when all cars are running without issue. Sebastian ran the fastest lap of the race this time as well, a 1:40.071 on lap 51.
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TD, where’s the link to view these charts in a different window?
Fixed, whoops.
Ever thought of making the graphs interactive, so that we can easily compare various drivers?
Might happen next year. I have nearly hit the limits of google sheets capability at this point. Max is 2million cells, and I hit that a few weeks ago. That forced me to go back and reconfigure, reduce my cell count, and cut back some functionality of the pivot tables.
Next time I am going to do things a little differently, but making major changes this year will cause me to have to spend DAYS updating all the old table links.
Vettel did a brilliant race and if ferrari catches up to mercedes next year, we’re in for a lot of fun..
He did a good job assuming that the man out front was pushing flat out the entire race.
Your chart shows Hamilton as 1.020 seconds per lap faster than Vettel from laps 34 to 52, but he was actually 0.306 slower. Also Massa’s first name is Felipe 🙂
Any chance we could get Rosberg’s early lap times as a comparison?