2016 F1 gearing from onboard videos

[hollus]

This is the gearing from most teams extracted from onboard shots. I am trying a new visualization this year which hopefully shows the overlap better. The usual caveats apply with data for 1st and 2nd gears being significantly less accurate than the rest.
I am showing the speeds possible in each gear within an "optimal" rpm band arbitrarily chosen to be 104000-12100 rpm. Of course the cars are not limited to that, but they stay there when they can.

Interesting things:

First, there are no very large differences, specially for the highest gears. It doesn't look like any team has a magic bullet or screwed up. To be expected in the third year of this formula.

Haas seems to have copied Ferrari's ratios. The very small differences are likely measurement errors. This is not the case with Mercedes or Renault customer teams.

Most teams chose to have significant overlap in the highest gears and much more separated lower gears. This kind of makes sense since they are grip limited up to 4th, but it seems a bit extreme. You'd think that a bit of flexibility in 4th and 5th would be good to help with traction out of most corners, but clearly not. For 1st, 2nd and 3rd this is likely a non issue as they are grip limited. Actually many teams prefer to stay in 3rd gear for very slow corners, going as low as 5000rpm in 3rd, rather than shifting to 2nd gear. This probably helps protect the tires.

The level of overlap between 6th, 7th and 8th suggests that the 1700rpm range I chose for the graph is already larger than the optimal rpm band (or do I have this backwards?). In fact most teams would shift up before reaching 12000 rpm in most gears, including the highest gears. I don't remember this from years past. Red Bull has an extreme amount of overlap in the highest gears, with the shortest 8th and the longest 6th. While this could suggest a very narrow power band in the Renault engines, the Renault teams has the most spread highest gears, with the longest 8th and the shortest 6th and 5th. Weird. Maybe RedBull is simply too fixated on short gearing from their winning years? They really seem to have compromised the 4th-5th-6h gear sequence to achieve this.

With that exception from Red Bull, Mercedes has the shortest 8th gear, together with Williams and Force India. So maybe there really is very little power advantage left?

Mercedes has by far the longest 1st gear, a lot longer than other teams. This is then almost overlapping with their 2nd gear which is pretty average, so it is only the 1st that is different from the norm. They do launch in 1st gear, so maybe we are in for a whole season of bad starts from Mercedes.

Top speeds: Mercedes has to go to 12104rpm to reach 340km/h and to 12816rpm to reach 360km/h, already way out of the optimum. Ferrari can do the same at 11942rpm and 12645rpm. A tiny bit better for overtaking, but hardly earth shattering differences. If anyone dares to try to reach 370km/h in Monza or Mexico, the worst equipped team is Red Bull which would need to reach 13205rpm, while the best geared team for the task is Renault which needs only 12892rpm.

And big thanks to Juzh for his help.

[ME4ME]

Thanks for sharing the info guys! Very much appreciated.

Toro Rosso and Manor didn't fit the graph? Or are they copying gears from their engine supplier?
About Mercedes long first gear, I'd imagine they do it to reduce wheelspin at the start, but now that they often start on a softer compound, there might be more grip available then they figured.. Just speculation on my part

Red Bull will probably make sure they never go beyond 12.5k rpm just by adding downforce once they get the engine upgrade. In their mind (probably righfully so) the laptime is worth more than the top speed in that case.

[Juzh]

Excellent work hollus, as always. As expected all teams are converging on a similar pattern. Only merc 1st gear remains questionable, but didn't they run similar in 2014? It will be interesting to see how they perform on starts and if a long 1st really is influencing this.

Toro Rosso and Manor didn't fit the graph? Or are they copying gears from their engine supplier?

No onboards with telemetry overlay yet for those 2 cars.

[toraabe]

Even though Mercedes has a shorter final drive, either the power band is quite wide, or they are sacrificing 10 km top speed, but the car will reach that speed quicker, and therefore better laptimes. The latter is the better. Top speed isn't all, but you need to reach the target top speed as quick as possible ....

[ChrisDanger]

I'm wondering how to interpret the gaps between gears. If you mention short-shifting into 3rd, or at least sometimes running into a lower rev range in 3rd gear, should there not be more of an overlap, rather than a bigger gap?

And for example, what gear would the McLaren be in at 130 km/h?

[hollus]

They would be in 3rd, but int the 9xxx rpm range. Almost all teams drop to 8xxx and 9xxx in 3rd. It is extremely rare so see revs above 12200, although some smoothing and averaging in the overlays might be masking brief spikes.

[toraabe]

Mercedes engined cars tend to drop more than the other three. I have seen Massa drop down to 5k in corners and just pulling out fast and controlled. This is also how the engine behaves at low revs. The Renault tends to oscillating at low revs as can heard in this video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKa2EQrGAMk and you can compare them in this video.

[hollus]

Gearing "changes" for the top 4 between 2015 (lighter colors) and 2016 (more solid colors).

Convergence is achieved and teams stick to their guns, including the small differences in style between them. Kind of interesting that even the two teams rumored to gain anywhere between 50 and 100HP between and during the seasons feel no need to adapt their gearing to that!
Two differences are most apparent:
One is that Both Ferrari and McLaren did make much shorter first gears for 2016, although there is a risk that this might be an artifact of sloppy 1st gear capture in 2015, when it was mostly done Loews during the race). No data for Red Bull during 2015. Mercedes stubbornly maintained their very long 1st from 2015. Maybe, just maybe, we are up for 18 more challenging launches from Mercedes.
The other change is that 4th gears have been made significantly (relative term) shorter in 2016, maybe aero evolution meant that they were no longer breaking grip so easily in 4th gear. Well, three of the four temas did that, again with the exception of Mercedes.
Other than that , I seem to find only minor changes.

[PlatinumZealot]

Like the teams mostly changed the 3rd and 4th gear this year.

For RedBull their top gears aren't really short per say. You data shows the top three gears are very close in ratio, and the 6th gear is actually taller than the other teams (judging by the speed range). Otherwise great job. =D>

[ME4ME]

Maybe, just maybe, we are up for 18 more challenging launches from Mercedes.

I think that myth is busted already. Hamilton had the best start in China, and Rosberg has had good starts in general. I think people read too much into the first race and Ferrari's start there.