“You can’t learn anything from laptimes during testing”. This phrase is often heard during the winter and repeated so often that it has become more or less accepted as fact. But is it true? Try telling it to the Team Strategists and see their response.

Far from discounting testing time analysis as meaningless, every team in the pitlane pores over the data as it emerges in order to build up a picture of the competitive pecking order. Using techniques that have been built up over a number of seasons it is possible to figure out, with surprising accuracy, what lies beneath the headline laptimes that we see during winter testing.

It is true, of course, that the strategists face a considerable string of unknowns. Fuel load, engine mode, tyre performance and driver pushing level play havoc with the laptimes and all of them are either unknown, or partially known. However, testing times are far from meaningless. If you look at them long enough, they gradually give up their secrets.

We start from things we do know. We know the lap time. We know the number of laps. We know (with good accuracy) the fuel that will be burnt in every lap. We know (from our simulations) how much faster a car will go with each lap of fuel that it burns. We also know (with adequate accuracy) how much slower a tyre will get with every racing lap that it is subjected to. We have estimates of the laptime difference between all the tyre compounds which gradually get more and more accurate as the test proceeds. With this in our hands, we can start to calculate things.