2015 gearing from onboard videos

[hollus]

This is from Hamilton's pole lap in Melbourne (in colors), compared with Mercedes' second gearing set from 2014 (in gray). 8th and 7th came out almost identical and probably are really identical, so the lines superimpose. Then 6th, 5th and 4th seem to have gotten a bit shorter than last year. I am not so sure about the 3rd gear data, Melbourne sucks for this type of job, and I ignored all the data points for second, likely they all had wheelspin and the resulting gear made no sense, no overlap with 3rd whatsoever at any sensible revs. It is interesting to note that with this being a pole lap supposedly run with aggressive maps, he barely ever went over 12000rpm. This might have been an artifact of the telemetry feed, with a lot of smoothing going on around gear shifts, but the gear overlaps seem to actually allow for that, at least between 5th and 8th. If that's the case, then peak power must happen well before 12000rpm.
Incidentally, these gears are very, very similar to what Williams ran all of 2014. Funny to think that Pat Symmonds got worried that they had gotten it all wrong when he first saw the gears Mercedes had in Australia 2014!



More to come slowly, but gearing in 2015 might turn out to be quite uninteresting

[Juzh]

Good effort. Engines also don't rev any higher than last year, contrary to what some people expected.

[Harsha]

Can you give us the your assumed gear ratio values as well

[hollus]

I am getting, from 3rd to 8th:
9.953 (tentative value, possible wheelspin)
7.950
6.586
5.691
4.982
4.402

[Phillyred]

And do we know if they are "locked in" yet with final gear ratios etc?

[hollus]

The gear ratios are locked in for the season, according to the rules. My numbers are not though, they could have plenty of errors, it is a very small sample for now

[mikeerfol]

Hopefully this will help you guys to find more about gearing

[hollus]

Gigantic thanks to Mikeerfol for that perfect video. Even 1st gears are easy to extract.
On a more annoyed note, 2015 gears prove to be very uninteresting, as all teams seem to have converged to a common optimum. I'd make the usual graphs, but if you've seen the Mercedes one above... you've pretty much seen them all!
Instead, since folks here like gear ratios, I've graphed that.

There are some differences in 1st, 2nd and 3rd, but since in those all cars are traction limited anyways, it matters little. And then by the time they hit 4th, the largest difference between teams is a mind numbing 3%, the equivalent of 6km/h. In 8th, the largest difference is just 2%, again a huge 6km/h, with Ferrari having an off trend (slightly) longer gear, probably to look good in monza! Other than a slightly longer 6th for Red Bull and Toro Rosso, I cannot see anything of interest there.

These are the calculated gear ratios:

Gear	Merced.	Willia.	Lotus	F.India	T.Rosso	R.Bull	McLaren	Ferrari	Sauber
1st	13.58	14.74	14.67	13.58	14.55		14.52	13.36	
2nd	11.86	11.46	11.13	11.62	12.22	12.35	11.97	10.79	11.02
3rd	9.56	9.35	9.03	9.43	9.87	9.56	9.34	9.15	9.22
4th	7.89	7.80	7.80	7.80	7.91	7.80	7.67	7.72	7.77
5th	6.58	6.67	6.74	6.55	6.48	6.49	6.55	6.66	6.71
6th	5.69	5.72	5.79	5.70	5.50	5.48	5.63	5.76	5.81
7th	4.98	4.97	4.97	5.00	4.90	4.89	4.91	5.00	5.04
8th	4.41	4.42		4.43	4.44	4.43	4.39	4.35	4.38

And just to prove how they all seem to have found the optimum, these are the ratios between each two consecutive ratios:

Up from	Merced.	Willia.	Lotus	F.India	T.Rosso	R.Bull	McLaren	Ferrari	Sauber
1.00	1.15	1.29	1.32	1.17	1.19		1.21	1.24	
2.00	1.24	1.22	1.23	1.23	1.24	1.29	1.28	1.18	1.20
3.00	1.21	1.20	1.16	1.21	1.25	1.22	1.22	1.19	1.19
4.00	1.20	1.17	1.16	1.19	1.22	1.20	1.17	1.16	1.16
5.00	1.16	1.17	1.16	1.15	1.18	1.19	1.16	1.16	1.15
6.00	1.14	1.15	1.16	1.14	1.12	1.12	1.15	1.15	1.15
7.00	1.13	1.13		1.13	1.10	1.11	1.12	1.15	1.15

They seem to have gone for something very close to maximum overlap. Funny how they tried to be clever last year, when the best solution is, apparently, to employ math and physics to give the driver flexibility and let the human interface chose the best option in any given moment.

[mikeerfol]

It's mikeerfol, don't call me a fool

[gruntguru]

Instead, since folks here like gear ratios, I've graphed that.

Not me - I love kph/1000rpm or similar. Much easier to understand/visualise.

[Cold Fussion]

Instead, since folks here like gear ratios, I've graphed that.

Not me - I love kph/1000rpm or similar. Much easier to understand/visualise.

I agree. Presenting the ratio means I have to do some work to see what is all means.

[itix]

Instead, since folks here like gear ratios, I've graphed that.

Not me - I love kph/1000rpm or similar. Much easier to understand/visualise.

I agree. Presenting the ratio means I have to do some work to see what is all means.

Agree with above gentlemen (or ladies... I shan't be sexist here)!

A sterling job just as last year I must say! Thanks a lot.

[hollus]

OK, so by popular demand...



I've tried to capture the amount of gear overlap by considering the 10500-12000 rpm window as an arbitrary ideal window. Gears are identified by colors, each with two symbols: an open one at 10500rpm and a closed one at 12000. It can be seen that teams rarely need to abandon that window by much, at least not once they get into 4th gear, with mostly Red Bull and Toro Rosso sacrificing overlap a bit in many gears.

And a simple version showing only the speeds at 12000rpm in each gear: