First part of an off-season offering for a new project I am doing for 2025.

While we wait for F1 to return, a look at one of the defining rivalries in F1. Senna-Prost, Prost-Senna, SPernonsat, PSreonsnta, however you want to make it.

Long read, obviously, and it is only Part 1, from the start to the end of 1983, before Senna gets to F1 and the fireworks begin.

hope you enjoy it and comments are welcome, obviously.

Why not have the entire #F1 schedule be a bunch of stupid Tilkedromes while the European races diminish until there are 3 slots left for all of them to rotate over? The fans will surely love that the sport is getting richer and richer. Yep, that is what will happen, obviously.

I am deeply thankful that Liberty brought F1 into the 21st Century, but their "money is all that matters" attitude towards where to race might be worse than CVC's.

As RBR loses more points to Ferrari in the battle for P2 in the WCC and VER is cruising to a title win, this seems relevant.

The winning WDC driver was not in the WCC team in 1958, 1973, 1976, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1994, 1999, 2008, 2009, and 2021.

Let's work backwards. In these years, the WDC driver's team was P2 in the WCC.

• 2021, VER, Merc WCC champ. - 2009, the Brawn year. (h/t @[email protected])
• 2008, McL would have won, but Spygate.
• 1999, Schumi breaks his leg.
• 1994, Senna dies and Hill carries Williams to the WCC.
• 1986, Williams wins WCC, Piquet and Mansell give the WDC to Prost.
• 1981, Piquet wins the WDC, Reutemman and Jones are 2nd and 3rd in WDC by 1 and 4 points, respectively, Hector Rebarque sucks for Brabham.
• 1976, Lauda-Hunt.
• 1973, Cevert dies before the last race, Tyrrell does not race, Lotus had one point advantage going into it, wins the WCC.
• 1958, Vanwall and Ferrari tie on points, Moss and Brooks are P2 and P3 to Hawthorn by 1 and 18 points (Jesus, Tony...). The rules however... One driver can score points, the FL lap point does not count to the WCC, Indy 500 does not count to the WCC, only 6 scores can be counted for the WCC. It was a glorious mess, honestly, Vanwall won the WCC by 8 points. It was not even called the WCC, it was the International Cup of F1 Manufacturers.

So, like everything else that is bizarre in F1 leads to, the answer is obviously 1982 (and 83).

Williams was 4th in the WCC while winning the WDC with Rosberg (with 44 points). The WCC winner was Ferrari with 75, and Williams finished with 58 pts courtesy of Mario Andretti (3 races, 4 pts), Derek Daly (15 races, 8 pts), and Carlos Reutemann (2 races, 6 pts) Worth pointing out, obviously, that Ferrari lost BOTH starting drivers during the season, so yeah.

Then it happened AGAIN in 1983, with Brabham scoring 72 pts to Ferrari's 89 to finish 3rd, while Piquet won the title with 59 points and the #2 driver was Ricardo Patrese with 13 points and 9th in the WDC. This has no excuse, Patrese was simply horrendous with a very good car, in a more spread out season.

Now the true question is this:

How sucky is PER? We cannot compare it with 82 because that was a revolving door in the #2 car, so we can only look at 83.

Patrese scored 18% of the teams points that year and the team scored 80.89% of what the WCC winner got.

So far, PER has scored 29% of the teams' points, while RBR has 89.32% of McL's points.

So PER is not historically terrible as a #2 driver, but man he is garbage.

RBR lost P2 in the WCC for being insane enough to trust PER would not suck this season as he did last season, and we get to watch another historical year in F1.--**

The rumour mill is spinning like crazy that Red Bull will announce RIC's gone then 10 minutes later that Lawson is in.

And there is the not-always-reliable Joe Savard soying PER will announce he is leaving after Mexico. [link] (https://joesaward.wordpress.com/2024/09/26/green-notebook-from-somerset/)

Updated the qualy battles plot, but did not want to burden the servers with it, so if you want to see a gif from the start to Singapore, here it is: https://i.imgur.com/KrbkqQF.gif.

And now we wait for the avalanche of stupid/crazy/ridiculous rumours about RIC until the next race.

Featuring Albon, Tsunoda, and Verstappen. Yet, here we are.

Telemetry Comparisons and Track Dominance plots

And, if you want to help me out, here are many Track Dominance graphics with different mini-sectors (numbers are under the images in the link): varied track dominance graphics What do you think is the most useful to understand where each car goes better?

Verstappen and Albon finally lost one this season!!!

Yes, Albon was pretty severely compromised in the last Q3 attempt by extra weight on his car, but still here we are. Williams and Red Bull no longer have zeros on the board (sorry, Logan, you remain at zero).

With a 30 points lead over Hamilton for points scored at Baku, Pérez will retain his lead, no matter what happens.

But with the current competitive state of the Red Bulls in tracks with slow corners, the lead could suffer a dent if Hamilton has a good weekend.

If Norris has a good weekend, he could jump a few spots, and Piastri could finally enter into the conversation, as he failed to score a point in 2023.

Anyone else surprised at the short gardening leave? Him starting in March changes things. I thought he would be out at least until September of 2025,which would hurt his participation in the 2026 design. If, however, he does start in March, he can absolutely be a major part of the redesign and that changes the calculations for who might be a force in 2026.

There are many ways to read the series, obviously, so I am curious as to what are people's preferred method.

I read them chronologically by publishing date the first time, then once by theme (Watch, Witches, and Moist novels first) and then been reading books here and there kinda randomly (although when I read one Watch novel, I tend to read all of them to the end, plus Raising Steam).

What do others do?

I have been toying around with F1 data and python plots, and got some average gap graphics in gif form, starting at Bahrain and up to Italy.

• Team Averages (only Q1): https://imgur.com/a/f4nBIO6
• Driver Q1 averages: https://imgur.com/a/kkJABGV
• Driver Q2 averages: https://imgur.com/a/VLhdOta
• Driver Q3 averages: https://imgur.com/a/ZFsGCzy

They are gifs, so check your wi-fi upon entering because there are many on each page, obviously.

Would have posted a few examples here, but apparently Lemmy is not keen on it. Hope imgur's servers do not crap out on me.

Examples:

• McL's averages: https://i.imgur.com/1nWQ1GT.gif
• Intra-team qualy battles: https://i.imgur.com/ayVxwJI.gif

Main points of the article:

Pirelli ran two tests of the 2025 tyres, one in Monza with Red Bull's junior team, one in Fiorano with Ferrari. It was wet in Monza and Lawson had some PU trouble in the VCARB01, while Fiorano was artificially wet for Bearman in the Ferrari.

Next up, Aston Martin will be the first to test the 2026 tyres at Barcelona after the Baku GP and then Mercedes at Magny-Cours with the 2025 tyres (1-2 October).

The irony of Fiorano being artificially wet and it was just raining in Monza is pretty great, yes.

Also, great practice for Bearman if he will indeed be in Baku in place of Magnussen.