2020 Austrian GP: Ferrari’s pace per sector

Ferrari had a terrible day at the qualifying session. Sebastian Vettel was knocked out in Q2, while Charles Leclerc only managed to take 7th place. Can they recover tomorrow? Let’s take a quick look at their sector times during FP2 and quali and see if we can get some insights into their performance.

Methodology

For the FP2 analysis, the numbers are the same as the ones posted in yesterday’s article. I analyzed all the laps done by each driver in each sector and created a simple chart that summarizes the results. The methodology is simple. I aggregated all the sector times in a table for all the drivers that took place in free practice 2. Then, I filtered the data to keep only the stint that I considered to be the race simulation stint. Then, I removed the anomalies (according to the Generalized Extreme Studentized Deviation (GESD)).

The main purpose of removing the anomalies is to make the stint times representative. Let’s take Lewis Hamilton for example. His race stint consisted of seven laps. However, his 6th lap was considerably slower than the rest (1:14.328, when his other 6 laps were below 1:09.000). Since this lap may not have been representative of his race pace, the GESD analysis removed it since it was considered an anomaly. This is something that was done with all the remaining drivers, meaning that the resulting times should be fairly representative for all of them.

Finally, I calculated the average sector time for each of the drivers, sorted the data, and created a simple bar chart that represents the results.

For the qualifying session analysis, I filtered the laps to get the best lap time done by each driver, regardless of the qualifying session it was done in. Then I created a graph with the delta to the leader to easily visualize the performance of each driver.

Delta to leader per sector in Qualifying session

Ferrari showed a lack of pace in quali trim when compared to the defending champions, Mercedes Benz.

In sector 1, Vettel ranked as the 12th fastest driver of the day, losing 0.278 seconds compared to the fastest time of 15.993 done by Lewis Hamilton. Charles Leclerc was incredibly the 17th fastest driver, only beating Kevin Magnussen, George Russell, and Nicholas Latifi. In this first sector, the Monegasque was already 0.429 seconds behind Lewis Hamilton.

In sector 2, Charles Leclerc was the 6th fastest driver, while Vettel ranked as the 13th fastest driver. Leclerc lost as much as 0.334 seconds compared to the fastest time done in this sector (27.095 seconds done by Valtteri Bottas), while Vettel was down by more than 6 tenths compared to the same time.

Finally, in sector 3, Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel fared a little better than in the two previous sectors. Still, even then both drivers were behind Mercedes by a long margin, with Charles trailing by 0.275 seconds and Vettel by just over 4 tenths of a second.

Average delta to leader per sector in FP2

As we saw in yesterday’s post, Mercedes also dominated the times in long run stints. In race trim, the Ferrari drivers were even worse compared to the Silver arrows than in quali trim.

I won’t do much of an explanation here, but just take a look at the deltas. Just in sector 3, Ferrari was losing more than half a second per lap, while in their best sector (1), they were still behind by over 2 tenths per lap.

If the race simulation pace is representative of the actual race pace, Ferrari is in an even worse position to gain positions tomorrow than in today’s quali session.

Final remarks

It is pretty crazy to see Ferrari struggling so much against not only the Mercedes drivers but also against teams like Racing Point, McLaren, and Renault. However, the numbers do not lie, and Ferrari seems to be in big problems right now.

If today’s quali session was abysmal for the Scuderia, tomorrow’s race could be an even worse nightmare for them. Their race pace shown on FP2 was not promising, so it is unlikely they’ll be able to challenge for a podium position. Still, Formula 1 is unpredictable, but I wouldn’t be too hopeful of them grabbing a good result.

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