2017 F1 cars are not the fastest, cornering wise

[Juzh]

I'm guessing the Redbull of 2010 had more downforce than any current car of today.

Unlikely. The car was more than 100 kg lighter.

[Juzh]

Grosjean was the fastest car trough turn 13-14 in 2017, faster than even vettel's ferrari (not kidding).

Yeah, I saw that on the Australian data from the site. Hamilton was the fastest on T14, with Grosjean close behind, as said above, but Grosjean was the fastest on the fast chicane, at the begining of S3. But the gaps, from the top two drivers in each corner, were very small and within the "margin of error", iirc. Lewis was quite far behind on the fast chicane but the site/author claimed it to be partially related to him not running over the curb, as did Grosjean and Vettel.

Sorry, I meant turn 11-12.

[Artur Craft]

I'm guessing the Redbull of 2010 had more downforce than any current car of today.

Not necessarily, as Juzh said, Red Bull RB6 was much lighter. On pure downforce, I guess the 2017 ones are the highest in history because they have very big and low, the latter being very important, front wings (almost certainly the most df generating fw ever) and a wider floor than any car(at least since the 70's, if I'm not mistaken). The diffuser and the rear wings are not the biggest ever but they are not far from it.

Maybe the 1993 cars had more df as their ride heights were not controlled by any wooden plank(which makes a big impact on the downforce of a car) and it's diffuser volume was bigger than now. But maybe not, as their shapes were far less refined(FWs were mere flat surfaces).

What is certain is that the 2017 cars are among the F1 ones with the highest df ever and coped with modern fat tyres, some people expected like 6 or 7Gs of sustained lateral force, which didn't happen as the current tyres are not remotely as grippy as expected now that Pirelli isn't making tyres to fastly degrade anymore.

I have the audio trace from the video which is essentially converted into a speed trace for both 2006 pole and 2017 pole, I just need to correct the gear ratios for 2006 and we can all have a proper data based comparison to look at.

Do you need speed reference for all gears? If you need only the speed trap info(which I suppose happens on max RPM/highest audio frequency) it's 304.8 kph for Alonso, during his pole lap, at the very end of Q3.

[mrluke]

Okay this isn't perfect but its pretty close.

If I could get Ferrari telemetry I could tidy up the gear ratios but this gives a pretty smooth slope so its there or thereabouts.

Not entirely sure whether the section between 1500m and 2000m is correct, looks a bit odd but the rest mostly fits.


F1 Bahrain Pole 2006 vs 2017

Click the link to expand it enough to read.

Whats notable is that in the low speed 2006 and 2017 are pretty much the same, medium speed 2017 is a bit quicker and high speed corners are again about the same. Between 3500m and 4000m is a high speed corner, 2017 has to lift whereas 2006 doesnt.

2006 has traction control and around 100kg lighter car.

You can see 2017 gains in all of the acceleration zones from around 200kph.

DRS zones give the 2017 car a good boost on top speed although without DRS it is likely they would run slightly less drag.

It looks like the 2017 Merc is running out of electrical energy on the finish straight in the run up to the line.

So unsurprisingly I guess, the answer to the question "are the 2017 cars the fastest ever in the corners" is a resounding "it depends." In some corners they definitely are, while in others not so much.

[Wass85]

I reckon that if Vettel had decided to make a last minute stop and bang in some qualifying laps he would have been very close to breaking the lap record.

[senja]

I decided to open a thread because, from what I read, it's generally believed that the current F1 cars are the fastest ones ever around the corners but I've stumbled upon a site that demonstrates that this is not true, actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN6lenTKRdg&t=1

There is even more info on the site:
http://motorsportzone.blogspot.com/p/ca ... aking.html

The author makes a very good point there. The RB6 Red Bull and the 2006 cars have a good margin of extra cornering force than the 2017 when you consider all the points made there.

I think that's why the cars didn't improve the 5s that they were predicted to. The comparison that the site made of Bahrain's qualifying laps shows that these wide slick tyres have quite underwhelming grip when compared to the narrow, grooved ones of 2006.

From the same channel, Spanish GP Qualifying, with slower tyres than ones from preseason testing:

[Artur Craft]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8k-D9-AZoo

New comparison, now between a 1994 Benetton and the SF70H 2017 Ferrari, at Monaco.

I counted around 37s of braking and cornering time through that lap and assuming that the pole lap improvement of 1.7s came solely on such moments, it means a 5% increase in performance. That is, the average cornering should've been 5% faster during the 1994 pole lap.

This backs up the claims of huge downforce of those 1994 cars(this was before the FIA's actions to reduce the downforce of the cars). They were light(605kg) but I guess that should've been compensated by modern compounds on wider tyres as well as a "grippier" tarmac.

It will be interesting to see how much speed these new breed of cars will gain over the years.