J
johnnoble1990
Guest
This is something I've been considering making a thread about for a while. I've been quite frustrated over the last 2 years by the fact that people seemed to think Sebastian Vettel was pulling half a second gaps to drivers like Lewis and Fernando Alonso purely on skill. Two years of pole domination can not be ignored, but those gaps in my personal opinion are not possible between such gifted drivers without a supremely superior car because those drivers are so close to perfect, that simply finding half a second over them would nearly defy the laws of physics. Instead, what I feel is impressive in quali is when it is tight as it has been this season and drivers find those finest of margins in order to get pole, as we have already seen from Seb and Lewis this year. Grabbing a pole when the top few rows are within a few tenths of each other tells you how good their lap had to be, because when it is that tight there are no margins for error. If a driver has an advantage, they will have to use every hundredth of it to secure pole position.
That leads me on to the question of where does everyone see each driver relative to each other? I want to discuss this in the hope that people will see how close these drivers are to each other when you really think about it. Ant mentioned in free practice today that he thinks that the whole grid will be spread across 7-8 tenths - similar to what I was already thinking - so that even Hispania's times can't be explained purely for drivers (although I would say that the margins would be greater if you put everyone in an Hispania, compared to a Red Bull).
So, where would everyone put the drivers to the nearest tenth of a second. To simplify this, I am thinking purely of 1 lap quali pace, and have ordered drivers from top end of that time to bottom. You may personally spread the drivers over a greater amount of time, but I'd be interested to see if we could apply the wisdom of crowds for this. Even in my head alone a had a great deal of debate on this subject; so, I am very interested to hear of others opinions.
0.0 Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso
-0.1 Kimi Raikkonen, Nico Rosberg
-0.2 Jenson Button, Mark Webber
-0.3 Michael Schumacher, Paul Di Resta, Nico Hulkenberg, Romain Grosjean, Sergio Perez
-0.4 Felipe Massa, Kamui Kobayashi, Heikki Kovalinen, Daniel Ricciardo, Timo Glock
-0.5 Jean-Eric Vergne, Pastor Maldonado, Vitaly Petrov
-0.6 Bruno Senna, Pedro De La Rosa
-0.7 Charles Pic
-0.8 Narain Karthikeyan
That leads me on to the question of where does everyone see each driver relative to each other? I want to discuss this in the hope that people will see how close these drivers are to each other when you really think about it. Ant mentioned in free practice today that he thinks that the whole grid will be spread across 7-8 tenths - similar to what I was already thinking - so that even Hispania's times can't be explained purely for drivers (although I would say that the margins would be greater if you put everyone in an Hispania, compared to a Red Bull).
So, where would everyone put the drivers to the nearest tenth of a second. To simplify this, I am thinking purely of 1 lap quali pace, and have ordered drivers from top end of that time to bottom. You may personally spread the drivers over a greater amount of time, but I'd be interested to see if we could apply the wisdom of crowds for this. Even in my head alone a had a great deal of debate on this subject; so, I am very interested to hear of others opinions.
0.0 Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso
-0.1 Kimi Raikkonen, Nico Rosberg
-0.2 Jenson Button, Mark Webber
-0.3 Michael Schumacher, Paul Di Resta, Nico Hulkenberg, Romain Grosjean, Sergio Perez
-0.4 Felipe Massa, Kamui Kobayashi, Heikki Kovalinen, Daniel Ricciardo, Timo Glock
-0.5 Jean-Eric Vergne, Pastor Maldonado, Vitaly Petrov
-0.6 Bruno Senna, Pedro De La Rosa
-0.7 Charles Pic
-0.8 Narain Karthikeyan