An in-depth analysis of the F1® Belgian GP 2022
Monday, 29 August 2022
Thanks to Versor, the official AI Partner of the Australian Grand Prix.
An utterly dominant performance at the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix saw World Champion Max Verstappen accelerate to victory in his Red Bull and crush Ferrari’s and Mercedes’ hopes of any championship revival.
Verstappen had already served notice of Red Bull’s massive performance advantage during qualifying by beating his nearest rival, Carlos Sainz, by 0.632 seconds, the largest qualifying gap between Red Bull and Ferrari. However, Verstappen started from 14th position on the grid due to penalties incurred for engine and gearbox component changes. Such was Verstappen’s dominance in the Red Bull that the outcome never looked in doubt. He climbed five positions on the first lap and by the end of the 8th lap, he was in 3rd position. It was a truly commanding drive on one of the great Formula circuits.
Spa-Francorchamps is usually one of the most exciting races of the season, which both drivers and fans look forward to. Located in the picturesque Ardennes region in Eastern Belgium where the weather is notoriously variable and unpredictable, the circuit is the longest on the GP calendar at 7.004 km and has the greatest altitude change of 102.2m. With iconic corners such as the first corner hairpin La Source, at the end of the short start/finish straight followed by the Eau Rouge/Radillon combination where a rapid elevation change of 35 meters from lowest point to the blind summit requires skill and courage but offers an opportunity for a long tow up the hill.
The overall race lap time telemetry illustrates Verstappen’s consistent speed throughout the race.
The Red Bull had a clear advantage in all aspects of the race; Verstappen was able to maintain control over the other drivers through overtaking almost at will and managing pit stops in response. To emphasise Verstappen’s complete superiority, his fastest lap was 1.410 seconds faster than Sergio Perez on similar tyres, and a monstrous 2.623 seconds faster than pole-sitter Sainz’s fastest lap.
It is not uncommon for the top Formula 1® teams to gain a technical advantage over their rivals, but the magnitude of Verstappen’s win at Spa is unusual. By comparing some previous 2022 races where Verstappen was victorious using “Violin Plots” of lap times, it offers an interesting visualisation of the distribution of the lap times for the Ferrari and Red Bull drivers.
Unlike a box plot that can only show summary statistics like the mean/median and interquartile ranges, a Violin Plot is a hybrid of a box plot and a kernel density plot, providing summary statistics and the full distribution of the data. This is of particular value when the data distribution is multimodal (more than one peak), as violin plots show the different peaks (most frequently occurring lap times), the position (actual lap time) and the relative amplitude of the peak (how many times the lap time occurred). The white dot shows the median, and the thickened grey bar in the middle represents the interquartile range, and the thin grey line represents the rest of the distribution.
The 2022 Miami GP shows two types of distinct distribution: one elongated distribution for Verstappen and Charles Leclerc suggesting a consistent distribution of lap times, with Lerclerc shading it marginally. The other distribution shared by Perez and Sainz has a smaller number of fast laps, making the distribution skew towards the right-hand side. What is notable is that Leclerc and Verstappen are quite evenly matched.
The plots for the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix show bi-modal distributions for Verstappen, Leclerc and Sainz which would have been due to tyre changes impacting the lap times significantly, whereas Perez was more consistent with his tyre use. Again, all drivers are quite evenly matched.
Finally, the Belgian GP shows the dominance of the Red Bulls, and especially Verstappen. Verstappen’s distribution is significantly more consistent and faster than everyone else. The reason for the flatter peaks is that there are only 44 laps in the Belgian GP, so it is a smaller set of data. Note also, that each lap is much longer so the scale is also compressed.
As mentioned in previous posts, this season has seen radical rule changes to Formula 1® car aerodynamics, with the purpose of improving overtaking and wheel-to-wheel racing. The new rules have produced the desired improvements, but they have also created undesired side-effects for some teams in terms of “porpoising”, the rapid vertical oscillation of the car at high speeds due to airflow beneath the car stalling and restarting. Unfortunately, not only has this affected the performance of the cars, but it also impacts driver safety with concerns about the immediate distraction to the driver and the long-term effects on the brain of violent jarring movement.
Therefore, the FIA intervened with a limit for an acceptable amount of vertical acceleration during the race. They also introduced another technical directive to suppress violent porpoising and discourage teams from exploiting the flexibility of the floor. Maintaining high downforce with the new rule changes requires changing the underfloor and running the cars closer to the ground to take advantage of ground effect – sucking the car onto the ground. It was suspected that some teams might have been running the plank illegally soft to improve downforce through the deformation of the floor.
The Belgian GP was the first race where the technical directives were implemented. Both Red Bull and Ferrari were concerned that these directives would impact the performance and development of their superior cars. Red Bull’s performance has put to rest to any such concerns and will only cause bigger headaches for the other teams.
