2023 gearing

[saviour stivala]

Avery choosy selection of what to let through and what to hold back which goes to show the real and actual intensions.

[michl420]

A bit of an opening in the new (2024) regulation.

9.7.2 Each Competitor must nominate the forward gear ratios (calculated from engine crankshaft
to drive shafts) to be employed within their gearbox. These nominations must be declared to
the FIA technical delegate at or before the first Competition of the Championship.
In the event the Competitor obtains the Gearbox from another Competitor as a TRC, the gear
ratios used must be the same between those two Competitors unless the customer
competitor opts to continue with the ratios used in the previous Championship Season.

[Juzh]

Purpose being? Costs?

[hollus]

Say that Honda (RB) decedes to gear extremely long, since they are slippery, or that Renault (Alpine) decides to gear extreme short, since they are draggy.
A team with a slippery car would be handicapped moving to Renault, while a team with a draggy car would be wasting the long Honda gears.
This way they prevent the worst extremes as you always have an “as you were” backup, without encouraging any development work.
Half way, half-in solution for a half problem as usual from these rule makers patchers.

[Juzh]

Supper slippery williams didnt mind merc's short ratios. In any case it wasnt put there without a reason, so we should be mindful if something obvious pops up in testing.

[Tzk]

What if a team uses last years gearbox, just like AT did with the RB gearbox? If i read the 2023 rule right, they've had to adjust the '22 gearbox (used in '23) to the gearing used on the '23 RB gearbox. Now (in theory they) can use the '23 gearbox with '23 gearing in the '24 season.

Or is using last years part an exception as the part was homologated for the last season and must stay that way?

[ConnorP501]

I grabbed full race data for all drivers from Jeddah and it would appear there have been no gearing changes over what everyone was running in the last half of 2022. In the charts below, 1st and 2nd gears are best fit to time rolling in/out of the pit lane; 3rd & 4th include a lot of longitudinal slip in the data, so I targeted somewhere near the top of the cloud (assume there will be less long slip on engine braking than on power); 5th-8th have much cleaner data.

Still appears to be the situation with 5 unique gearing sets: Ferrari, Alpine, Honda/RBPT, Mercedes (standard set shared by MB, AM, & Williams), plus McLaren doing their own thing.

EDIT: Image links didn't seem to work. Trying again.

How did you obtain/calculate these?

[padajacaba]

You can get this data using the Fast-F1 python package. It's the same data behind sites like the awesome f1-tempo
https://github.com/theOehrly/Fast-F1

The script I use looks something like the one below, which will grab a bunch of data points from the driver(s) and session you pick and dump it out to a CSV. From there it's just a simple relationship of tyre rolling radius and overall gear ratio to engine rpm; play with numbers to get a good match to the session data.

Looking forward to running the same job next week after the test sessions. I don't expect we'll see any changes compared to last year.

# Import the required packages
import os
import pandas as pd
import fastf1
from fastf1.core import Laps
# Enable caching to avoid unnecessary strain on the API
# Replace "fastf1cache" with your cache location
fastf1.Cache.enable_cache('fastf1cache')
# Use variables year, wknd, ses, and driver to specify the race, session and driver
year = 2023
wknd = 1
ses = 'R'
driver = 'VER'
# Obtain and load session data
session = fastf1.get_session(year, wknd, ses)
session.load()
# Select fastest lap for specified driver
lap = session.laps.pick_driver(driver).pick_fastest()
# Write telemetry data for lap to tel variable
tel = lap.get_telemetry()
# Export telemetry to current working directory as .csv file
cwd = os.getcwd()
tel.to_csv(cwd + "\\VER_23_race.csv")

[Juzh]

Looking forward to running the same job next week after the test sessions. I don't expect we'll see any changes compared to last year.

I'd love to see that, but keep in mind test session data will not be available for replays, you have to capture everything live. At least that's been the case so far.

[padajacaba]

Well color me surprised. Mercedes and Alpine have brought some new gear sets to the test. Mercedes had famously short gearing last year, and you'd see them (the Williams, especially) spinning up to 13,000rpm at Baku and Monza with DRS open. Looks like they've lengthened 7th and 8th closer to what's used by the Ferrari and RBPT. Alpine had the longest gearing last year by a few %, and they appear to have done a CWP change to shorten everything so 8th gear looks equal to the Ferrari.




Ferrari, RedBull/RB, and McLaren are unchanged from last year. Some subtle differences on individual gears (usual disclaimer that we're fitting to noisy data in lower gears), but convergence comes for all.

[Juzh]

Great job. Yeah merc was weirdly short last few years. Still, I dont think it impacted them meaningfully.