The slight changes to the aerodynamics of the single-seaters imposed by F1 and FIA between the 2020 and 2021 seasons have surprisingly brought the performance of the various teams closer together during the current championship. The many who during this winter predicted a championship with a similar outcome to the one played during the pandemic have had to change their minds. The decline in performance of Mercedes and the clear increase in performance of Red Bull, which gave continuity to what was shown in the second part of the last championship, are helping to make this year one of the most spectacular and fun of the last 20 years of Formula. 1.
However, the Milton Keynes team was certainly not the only one on the grid to make a notable leap forward in performance compared to the seven-time world champion team. A clear improvement in fact also concerned Ferrari, desolately sixth among the manufacturers in 2020 and fourth this year, a handful of points behind McLaren to rejoin the top-3 world champion. German site Auto Motor und Sport has lined up the qualifying performances of the various teams over the past two seasons and the evolution of many teams’ performance compared to the silver arrows is evident. The Red Bull in qualifying went from 0.574 seconds of average gap to just 0.110. Ferrari and McLaren, respectively, recovered 545 and 565 thousandths on the Mercedes.
However, it was the AlphaTauri who recorded the major delta. The team from Faenza, which this year is fighting against Alpine to finish fifth in the constructors’ classification, has in fact recovered – compared to the world champions – as much as 0.622 seconds. The Italian team went through in qualifying from a gap of 1,202 seconds to ‘only’ 580 thousandths. Finally, according to the study of the German site, only two teams have worsened compared to Mercedes from 2020 to 2021. Aston Martin and Haas, which fell by 7 and 46 thousandths respectively in one year.
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