A good qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix noticed a victorious Ferrari carefully adopted by RedBull, with Mercedes far behind regardless of the up to date (low drag) rear wing. Though the stopwatch determines the beginning grid, the lap time doesn’t inform the entire story. To analyse the variations between the three vehicles and the completely different driving types of the three drivers, I examined every automobile’s longitudinal and lateral acceleration throughout the perfect lap and found some fascinating points…
Picture 1 is the so-called ‘gg diagram’ as a result of it reveals each lateral and longitudinal acceleration at every instant, in multiples of the acceleration of gravity. The space of every level from the centre of the graph is the entire acceleration at that immediate: a automobile with excessive grip will keep additional away from the centre of the graph in the course of the lap. The colored damaged line encloses all of the factors for every automobile: it, due to this fact, signifies the utmost grip, within the numerous instructions, that the automobile can have throughout a lap of that monitor! As written within the legend, LEC maintained a better common acceleration (common distance from the centre) than VER, which beat HAM: this confirms what the stopwatch mentioned! We additionally observe that the Ferrari has glorious traction (it achieves very excessive optimistic longitudinal acceleration, the graph ‘goes larger’) and lateral grip (the graph is wider, and the automobile achieves larger lateral acceleration). The automobile may be very full, with prime efficiency even beneath braking. VER doesn’t have spectacular most accelerations however manages to keep up them for a really very long time: the automobile’s low drag permits it to speed up persistently all the best way down the straight, as I’ll present later. The Mercedes inferior to the Ferrari, however it has superb braking capabilities.
Nonetheless, a Formulation 1 automobile, not like a street automobile, doesn’t have a continuing grip. As velocity will increase, downforce will increase, squatting the automobile on all 4 wheels and permitting it to brake and nook extra intensely. Picture 2 reveals the lateral acceleration for every velocity worth: we see that as velocity will increase, the lateral acceleration the automobile can exert will increase… we will lastly see the impact of downforce! The Ferrari appears to have a really excessive downforce. In high-speed corners, LEC clearly outdistances the opposite 2, with a bonus of about 0.7g! However, HAM has very dangerous traction at low speeds: I am going to present in a second that at low speeds, his lateral acceleration is the very best; due to this fact, he has a driving fashion that sacrifices nook exit to keep up larger speeds!
Lastly, in Picture 3, I present the longitudinal acceleration as velocity modifications. For every automobile, the unfavorable worth will increase as velocity will increase: rising drag and downforce permits the automobile to interrupt away extra sharply. We additionally see HAM’s decrease lateral acceleration in comparison with the others: as talked about earlier, that is associated to his specific driving fashion. Essentially the most spectacular statistic is the Ferrari’s optimistic longitudinal acceleration in any respect speeds: the automobile, due to this fact, has each glorious traction and excessive energy in the course of the straight, most likely attributable to a mixture of larger peak energy and an influence administration logic that favours the primary a part of the straight on the expense of the second. Lastly, we observe that the RB can attain larger speeds, due to decrease drag.
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Notes on strategies: I derived the longitudinal acceleration by doing the time spinoff of the rate sign and utilizing applicable filtering and processing of the information. I derived the lateral acceleration utilizing the GPS trajectory of the person automobile and the velocity sign and utilizing applicable filtering and processing of the information.