Red Bull were the surprise of Friday. Can the 2014 race winners maintain their charge?
Firstly, the results for this article have been made after the FP2 session. The predicted race laptimes have been calculated on an Excel sheet which has been an ongoing project of mine since Jerez testing. Why Excel? I don’t know how to use anything else to be honest. The spreadsheet uses 370,000 data cells per driver, and can handle 8 drivers at a time before the lag becomes too bad!
From the 2015 Austrian GP
In brief, laptimes over the duration of a race stint decrease because of a lightening fuel load, and increase due to the tyres losing performance. The loss of pace from qualifying to race comes from conservative power unit modes and driving style. The effect these variables have on the drivers’ laptimes can vary themselves from race to race.
Origin is top right.
Y Axis is the lap of stop 1.
X Axis is the lap of stop 2.
Red staircase area = pitting after race finish
Let’s analyse the top 8 contenders for the Hungarian GP. The pairings from Mercedes, Ferrari, Williams and Red Bull. The spreadsheet calculates the fastest pit strategy for each driver by accumulating the laptimes for every possible scenario of a two stop race until the first stop exceeds lap 35. To give you an idea to how many possibilities this is, the image (best I could do with the time, sorry) on the left shows Hamilton and Raikkonen’s races where the strategy is Option-Option-Prime where each rectangle is the time taken to complete the race. The fastest times are the most green.
Red Bull showed promise with both low fuel and heavy fuel. Kvyat continued his recent form by going faster than his team mate again to place 2nd, 3-tenths behind Lewis Hamilton’s benchmark. Hot temperatures have historically helped Red Bull and it was boiling hot for the session. The track also masks the deficit that the Renault power unit has – boosting their chances this weekend.
Kvyat wins!
OK its not that simple. This doesn’t simulate traffic, and even a lap behind Jarno Trulli could take this total beyond that of Hamilton’s. Calibrating Red Bull’s tyre degradation to their previous races was also difficult because they have often been in traffic when using the soft and medium tyres.
The average ’15 multiplier from qualifying to race
The other reason why common sense kicks in to write off RBR’s chances (Sorry C. Horner) is that Red Bull have a lower average FP2 to Qualifying time multiplier than rival teams. Applying the multiplier for races supported by GP2/3 events the predicted qualifying order looks like this:
| Team | Qualifying Time |
| Mercedes | 01:22.2 |
| Red Bull | 01:23.0 |
| Williams | 01:23.6 |
| Ferrari | 01:23.7 |
| Toro Rosso | 01:24.1 |
| McLaren | 01:24.7 |
| Sauber | 01:25.0 |
| Lotus | 01:25.1 |
| Manor | 01:29.1 |
| Force India | Unknown |
So it is likely Mercedes will lock out the front row.
For all the 8 drivers, a soft-soft-medium strategy was the fastest 2 stop, however for Ricciardo a soft-prime-soft was only half a second slower, and for Kvyat just 3.8 seconds.
Notice how Kimi is the latest pitter again, as he was in Bahrain and China to give himself a greater pace advantage at end of the race when the degradation curves are accelerated most.
Lewis seems to have the advantage over Nico. The four-time Hungary GP winner says the track might be his favourite. It certainly seemed that way in FP2. I expect Nico to make up ground for qualifying however the Brit said this time last year that he has a few tenths in hand at this place should he need them. His advantage at the end of the race is 17.9 seconds.
Vettel is faster than Kimi, but it is closer. There is a difference of 13 seconds between Massa and Bottas. The Finn has the sole new front wing but gained only 1.7 seconds to Massa’s 2.0 when putting on the soft tyre in FP2. I’ve adjusted it to 1.85 seconds for Bottas for this forecast. I also gave Vettel an increase due to his spin and Ricciardo for his slower than expected time. Whilst Williams may have had the 2nd fastest car at Silverstone, the Hungaroring is a different kind of animal, a honey badger.
So the prediction tells us the most likely winner of this race is the same as gut instinct… Lewis Hamilton, although Kvyat and Ricciardo will impress if they can qualify well. If those two tried an alternate strategy (soft-medium-soft) then they may have the pace to overtake Mercedes power towards the end of the race in turn 3 as Ricciardo did on his way to victory in 2014. The graph on the left shows the battle for the lead in this scenario.
Thanks for reading.
Edit: Post FP3 it looks like the Red Bull low fuel times will be closer to the Ferrari’s than in the table.
