A tight qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix saw a victorious Ferrari closely followed by RedBull, with Mercedes far behind despite the updated (low drag) rear wing. Although the stopwatch determines the starting grid, the lap time does not tell the whole story. To analyse the differences between the 3 cars and the different driving styles of the 3 drivers, I examined each car's longitudinal and lateral acceleration during the best lap and discovered some fascinating aspects...
Image 1 is the so-called 'gg diagram' because it shows both lateral and longitudinal acceleration at each instant, in multiples of the acceleration of gravity. The distance of each point from the centre of the graph is the total acceleration at that instant: a car with high grip will stay further away from the centre of the graph during the lap. The coloured broken line encloses all the points for each car: it, therefore, indicates the maximum grip, in the various directions, that the vehicle can have during a lap of that track! As written in the legend, LEC maintained a higher average acceleration (average distance from the centre) than VER, which beat HAM: this confirms what the stopwatch said! We also note that the Ferrari has excellent traction (it achieves very high positive longitudinal acceleration, the graph 'goes higher') and lateral grip (the graph is wider, and the car achieves higher lateral acceleration). The car is very complete, with top performance even under braking. VER does not have impressive maximum accelerations but manages to maintain them for a very long time: the car's low drag allows it to accelerate consistently all the way down the straight, as I will show later. The Mercedes inferior to the Ferrari, but it has very good braking capabilities.
However, a Formula 1 car, unlike a road car, does not have a constant grip. As speed increases, downforce increases, squatting the car on all four wheels and allowing it to brake and corner more intensely. Image 2 shows the lateral acceleration for each speed value: we see that as speed increases, the lateral acceleration the car can exert increases... we can finally see the effect of downforce! The Ferrari seems to have a very high downforce. In high-speed corners, LEC clearly outdistances the other 2, with an advantage of about 0.7g! On the other hand, HAM has very bad traction at low speeds: I'll show in a moment that at low speeds, his lateral acceleration is the highest; therefore, he has a driving style that sacrifices corner exit to maintain higher speeds!
Finally, in Image 3, I show the longitudinal acceleration as speed changes. For each car, the negative value increases as speed increases: increasing drag and downforce allows the car to break away more sharply. We also see HAM's lower lateral acceleration compared to the others: as mentioned earlier, this is related to his particular driving style. The most impressive statistic is the Ferrari's positive longitudinal acceleration at all speeds: the car, therefore, has both excellent traction and high power in the middle of the straight, probably due to a mix of higher peak power and a power management logic that favours the first part of the straight at the expense of the second. Finally, we note that the RB can reach higher speeds, thanks to lower drag.
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Notes on methods: I derived the longitudinal acceleration by doing the time derivative of the velocity signal and using appropriate filtering and processing of the data. I derived the lateral acceleration using the GPS trajectory of the individual car and the speed signal and using appropriate filtering and processing of the data.