Having to preserve battery power has to some extent neutered the spectacle of qualifying – and the hidden algorithms that govern deployment is tying the drivers’ hands (and feet)
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This writer’s first working grand prix was Austria 2002, a race that for most sticks in the mind for reasons pertaining to Ferrari team orders.
A far happier memory is of borrowing a tabard for qualifying and venturing into the trees behind the pits, on the inside of the Jochen Rindt Kurve, where one could stand by the barrier and revel at the sight of Formula 1 cars being driven at maximum commitment and with thrilling precision.
Here, almost within touching distance, two cars stood out as they flashed by in a fury of controlled aggression: Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari and Kimi Raikkonen’s McLaren.
Qualifying ought to be among the defining expression of a racing driver’s art, a magical hour of high-stakes drama, a high-wire act in which the greatest drivers in the fastest cars push to the absolute limits. And yet it has now become a different sort of battleground.
F1’s controversial new regulations have left several elephants disputing real estate in the room, but among the biggest and noisiest is the problem of qualifying, where the drivers can no longer drive flat out. We do not need to call on logicians of Socrates’ calibre to see this defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Many drivers have complained about how pushing too hard through corners and using more electrical deployment is punished later in the lap through earlier de-rating on straights. But the problem runs deeper than that, into the vastly over-complicated bowels of the regulations governing how much electrical power can be used, and when.
So complicated is this regime that the real-time decision-making is now done by machine-learning algorithms, which has led to peculiar problems such as Charles Leclerc’s compromised qualifying in China and Lando Norris overtaking Lewis Hamilton when he didn’t want to in Japan.
Leclerc suffered a critical loss of energy in Chinese GP qualifying, after correcting a slide and getting back on the power
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What this has led to is drivers having to become more risk-averse in qualifying because if they have to back off the throttle to correct a slide, it in effect confuses the system.
“It depends how many laps you've done in practice as well,” said Norris during a conference for select media at McLaren’s factory this week. “The system has to learn about certain things and it can still change, it can do little things. If you compare it to last year, there was nothing really to have as an excuse for something happening, like the driver made a mistake or there might have been a fundamentally bigger issue with the car.
“But you're trying to brake as late as possible everywhere, you're trying to get on the throttle everywhere, you're trying to carry as much speed as possible in high-speed corners. Crack open the throttle, do those little things to be as much on the limit as possible at all times.
"It's still drive as quickly as you can, but within certain aspects, don't go on throttle here, don't go on throttle here, which is just not what you've ever done" Lando Norris
“And it's just that extra, who can push it is 1-2% more in qualifying, went away. But those 1-2% are the special 1-2% that make it exciting – that might surprise you in terms of this guy is suddenly on pole because he's taken those couple little risks.
“And you've kind of taken that element away. Japan, one of those places where you're trying to push the high-speed a little bit and you're really trying to fight the car, you've kind of eliminated some of those instances. The problem is sometimes, like we had in China and a couple of other places, sometimes when you make a mistake, sometimes it benefits you because the battery gets saved in some ways and then redeploys in a different place and you actually gain.
“In an ideal world, we just wouldn't have any of that. It's just drive as quickly as you can. It's still drive as quickly as you can, but within certain aspects, don't go on throttle here, don't go on throttle here, which is just not what you've ever done in single-seaters or GTs or anything really.”
Drivers have been having to grapple with previously unheard-of minutiae such as working out the optimal point to get to full throttle at the beginning of a qualifying lap – which, in a bygone era, would have been as soon as possible on the exit of the final corner. No longer.
Norris feels the very essence of qualifying has been lost in F1 due to the new cars
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There is also a strictly prescribed regime for throttle positioning during certain corner sequences, depending on track configuration, speed and battery levels. The reasons for this are complex and subtle, and bound up in the wider picture of policing safety and potential cheating.
Given the limited electrical power available, finding the optimal lap time becomes a question of where to ‘spend’ that boost – and it isn’t necessarily on the straights. More typically, a boost out of slow corners is more advantageous if a longer section follows, because it produces a greater net lap time gain than having more electrical power available on the straights, given the ramp-down regime as the stored energy dwindles.
The ramp-down rate varies from circuit to circuit and is clearly defined because of the potential safety issue of varying speeds as cars run out of power. To that end, the engine mapping is set to minimise deployment in so-called ‘power limited’ periods agreed with the FIA in advance.
Fonte original: Autosport F1