Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
fair point...i guess the follow up to that however would be, what would be an accurate indicator of performance difference be?
|
My opinion is that there are no "casual" or "easy" indicator as to relative engine performance. Especially if you are looking to not just rank, but measure change of performance over time.
The easiest thing to say is that whoever is leading the championship... likely has the best power unit. If you are dominating the championship, then there is less doubt as to if you have the best power unit or not. So this puts Mercedes at the top (few would argue otherwise). Anecdotally we say Ferrari is next and then we can argue the order of Honda and Renault after the first two.
If pressed to pick a single "easy to access" metric... I would lean toward top speed on the longest straight. But even that is governed by factors beyond that of the power unit. That includes individual car aero efficiency, aero setup (low or high downforce setup), did the driver get a tow, etc. And then that only speak to top end power which is just one attribute of the power unit. Driveability, qualifying mode performance, harvesting efficiency, etc. are also very important. Given that both the best and worst team right now use the same powerunit, that should illustrate the difficulty of extracting understanding based upon basic car performance.
Sadly... I personally think that real understanding of things like this is generally outside of the realm of the vast majority of fans.
Not that they can't understand, but that the topic is complex and generally they don't have the technical skills or time to extract and analyse the information themselves. For most of us, the primary method is to rely upon someone else to do that analysis for us and provide some type of aggregated and (hopefully) informed opinion.
Typically that source is the mainstream motorsports media. My opinion is that the quality of their analysis can range from poor to excellent. With the best being science/data based analysis. But sadly, deep analysis is not very common. Probably given the amount of work that is required. And when you need to crank out stories on a daily/hourly basis they may not have the time to do it on a regular basis.
In my opinion, what we get most of the time is "gut based" pontification. Sometimes that is informed (backed by data), sometimes not. I personally think that some of the best analysis that is happening today is done by dedicated and talented fans. They don't operate on deadlines and have the time to go as deep as they dare.
I saw some fan based data analysis recent that was impressive. They were recording the output of the F1 app's video of individual car qualifying (such as best lap). Then using open source OCR libraries to extract frame by frame data for RPM, Speed, Throttle, Brake, Gear selection, etc. Taking this information, you can integrate the velocity to generate an approximation for distance to generate track position. You now have decently good car based telemetry to do comparison between cars, drivers and teams. In the end... it's just data. So someone has to extract some type of conclusions from it. And the fans can be hit or miss on their conclusions just like anyone.
Example of fan's telemetry analysis...
https://unendinginsight.wordpress.com/
Example telemetry graph from above site...
Showing how telemetry extraction is done (don't think it's the same guy as the link above)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUgvhnQawbw
Richard