As part of a partnership with cloud platform Amazon Web Services, F1 has rolled out a number of statistics and graphics over recent years – but their presence has divided opinion among fans.

While some have liked the added details and predictive nature of the information, others have scoffed at their accuracy or the way they take the drama out of the live action.

The latest additions mean there will be a total of 18 graphics on offer by the end of 2021.

From this weekend's Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, there will be a new 'Braking Performance' graphic, which will show the varying style of braking of each driver over the course of a lap.

The data will examine how late each driver is braking, and how their apex speed varies as they deal with the corners.

Rolling out later this season, five other graphics are planned:

Car Exploitation: From the Canadian Grand Prix, the graphic will show when drivers are pushing their cars to their performance limits of grip, braking, acceleration and cornering during a race.

Energy Usage: From the British Grand Prix, this will explore when drivers are using their battery power, and how much they have left in reserve.

Start Analysis: From the Italian Grand Prix, this will compare the getaways of each driver, both in terms of reaction and distance gained on rivals.

Pitlane Performance: From the Japanese Grand Prix, this will look at the time lost or gained in the pit stop outside of the moments when the car is stationary.

Undercut Threat: From the Australian Grand Prix, this will analyse the potential benefits that a driver could have by making an early stop to undercut a rival ahead of him.

The AWS graphics use Machine Learning and AI tools to interpret and analyse data that is produced from 300 sensors that run on each F1 car.

F1's chief engineer Rob Smedley said he believed the new graphics would help fans get more immersed in the details of the sport.

"With this new set of racing statistics for 2021, we are going deeper than ever before," he said.

"New Insights like Braking Performance and Undercut Threat peel back additional layers of race strategies and performance and use advanced visualisations to make the sport of racing even more understandable and exciting."

CANADIAN GRAND PRIX FIRST TO FALL OFF 2021 F1 CALENDAR

Paul Velasco

15 April, 2021

Radio-Canada is reporting that the Canadian Grand Prix, scheduled for June 13 in Montreal, has been cancelled after Montreal public health authorities concluded that even behind closed doors without spectators, the risk of spreading COVID-19 during the Formula 1 event is too high.

The report stated: “Earlier this week, Radio-Canada reported Quebec public health would allow the Formula One event to take place under certain conditions. One of those conditions was to ensure the risk of spreading COVID-19 was kept to a minimum.”

“F1 officials wanted to bypass the mandatory 14-day quarantine for the hundreds of staff, crew members and drivers. They said they would instead rely on private medical staff to keep COVID from spreading among the personnel.

“They had also proposed creating a bubble, where the members of different teams would stay in hotels, use private transportation and be tested regularly.”

“However, they would have been in constant contact with hundreds of volunteers who would be outside the bubble. Montreal public health, faced with those issues, decided to cancel the event.”

Last year’s race was postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19, but expectations until last week were high that the event would happen. This reduces the 23-race F1 calendar to 22. F1 have yet to comment.

New pits and a major overall upgrade of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve took place in 2019.

Report in progress…


https://www.grandprix247.com/2021/04...f-f1-calendar/

Aston Martin team principal Otmar Szafnauer wants the FIA to change the aerodynamic regulations for this season and has hinted his team could consider legal action if that doesn’t happen.

The Nurburgring is "open" to filling in for a postponed or cancelled Formula 1 race in 2021, a spokesman has admitted.

The news comes amid rumours that the fabled German circuit is the hot favourite to step in for June's Canadian GP, which looks set to be cancelled for a second consecutive year due to covid.

"We really like to drive in Germany - it's our home," said Mercedes boss Toto Wolff at Imola. "That would be great."

The Nurburgring also stepped in for a cancelled race in 2020, and a spokesman said the same scenario this season is also now a possibility.

"Should Formula 1 wish to hold an event under conditions similar to those in 2020, for example due to cancellations at other circuits, we are open to any discussions," a spokesman told f1-insider.com.

"Our position on this is unchanged - it must be guaranteed that at the end we at least break even.

"And of course we have to check the feasibility, because shortly before the date that is being talked about, the largest motorsport event in Germany, the 24 hours, will take place here," he added.

The Australian has had a challenging Imola weekend so far, with teammate Lando Norris quicker than him over the two days of action.

And although Ricciardo outqualified Norris, that was only because his teammate had his best time deleted due to a small track limits infringement at Turn 9.

Ricciardo has confessed to needing more confidence in his McLaren, and he thinks to deliver that he needs to wipe away a lot of the approach he had to driving different cars previously.

“I try not to say as excuses from the past, but there are probably still some old habits that I need to still flush out a little bit, and things that perhaps don’t work as well for this car,” said the Australian, who will start sixth for Sunday’s race.

“I think each lap I turn it is getting better. So when will I perfect it? Hopefully sooner rather than later, but I think naturally the more laps I do, the faster and faster I’ll get.

"Hopefully then we’ll start to see the real potential because it’s encouraging to be up in the mix.

“There is a lot to be excited for this year – I think the sport in general is all pretty tight, so I’m okay with it.

"I’m certainly happy with the progress we’ve made [so far this weekend], and there’s still more to come. I’ll be patient yet persistent.”

Ricciardo says that he is not sensing any frustration that he has not got on top of the car’s characteristics yet, and instead is simply encouraged that the new MCL35M is quick.

“I think the thing that gives me confidence is looking at the potential of the car – it’s there, and it’s pretty good, and it can do more than I think it can, as far as just carrying more speed through the corners and the car’s going to stick.

“So I think there’s a little bit of trust in the car [to come], but I don’t think it’s just like turn in and close your eyes and it’s going to stick. A lot of it is technique as well.”

Stewards determined the Alfa Romeo driver breached regulations having failed to enter the pitlane for the restart of the race after the red-flag period caused by the clash between Valtteri Bottas and George Russell.

On the lap prior to the restart following the race suspension, Raikkonen spun his Alfa Romeo at Turn 3. Sporting regulations dictate that a driver may retake his position as long as this is achieved prior to the first safety car line.

If this is not completed, then the driver must enter the pitlane and rejoin the race once the entire field has passed on the restart.

As a result, Raikkonen has lost his ninth place finish, dropping him to 13th, while promoting the Alpine duo of Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso to ninth and 10th respectively. It ensures two-time world champion Alonso will score a point in only his second race back after two years away.

"On the lap before the re-start following the race suspension, Raikkonen spun at Turn 3. Art 42.6 indicates that the driver may retake his position, so long as he does so prior to the first safety car line (SC1). At first the team instructed him to do so, but then told him to hold his position," the stewards report explains.

"Art 42.6 then indicates that should a driver fail to take his position he must enter the pit lane and can only re-join the race once the whole field has passed the pit exit.

"Art 42.12 indicates that during a rolling start, once the safety car turns its lights out, "No driver may overtake another car on the track until he passes the Line..." In this case, the driver caught up to the cars ahead of him between Turn 13 and 14, but the safety car turned its lights out at approximately Turn 10.

"This would appear to be a contradictory instruction and the team instructed the driver to not regain his position, fearing that this would create a safety issue in the wet conditions. They radioed the Race Director, but there was no time for a response between their call and the restart.

"The Stewards consider it to be a further contradiction that when the cars are behind the safety car during a safety car period, the are prohibited from passing, but when they are behind the safety car for a restart, they are permitted to – even though the reasons for a rolling start are that the track conditions don't permit a standing start.

"However, the rule requiring a car to enter the pit lane if it fails to regain its position is consistent amongst several championships, has been in the FIA Formula One Sporting Regulations for several years and has been consistently applied."

The sanction follows a five-second penalty for Aston Martin's Lance Stroll, who was judged to have gained a lasting advantage by passing Pierre Gasly while off the track.

The Canadian has been demoted from seventh to eighth on the official race results.

Mercedes escaped from Imola with its lead of both Formula 1 world championships still intact, but the team is under no illusions of the gap to Red Bull that remains.

Lewis Hamilton scraped pole position for Mercedes on Saturday, aided by mistakes from both Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez behind. A rocket start by Verstappen then put Red Bull in control of the race, leading to its first win of the year, with a brilliant - albeit fortunate - recovery to second place sparing Hamilton’s blushes after a rare error.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin conceded after the race that it was a “relief” to still lead the drivers’ and constructors’ points standings, and that there remains a performance deficit to Red Bull that must be overcome.

“They will win this championship if we don’t improve our car very quickly,” Shovlin said of Red Bull. “That’s really our mindset - that we are still the ones chasing.”

Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner said after the race that he expected the title fight to be settled by marginal gains between the two teams, with one early battleground in 2021 surrounding tyre management.

Mercedes may have struggled with rear-end instability on the W12 car as a result of the downforce cuts for 2021, but the team has worked to remedy the issue over the first two races. Valtteri Bottas said he felt “a lot happier” with the car after topping both practice sessions on Friday, giving the Finn hope of taking the fight to Red Bull.

But Bottas’s weekend unravelled in qualifying due to a very different issue. After setting a time in Q1 that would have been good enough for fourth on the grid had it been set in Q3, his pace plummeted, leaving him a lowly eighth on the grid.

Bottas said after qualifying that he was struggling on corner-entry, marking a new issue to that encountered in Bahrain, which Mercedes later related to tyre warm-up. The problem was even more noticeable in the race as Bottas struggled to get his tyres into the right temperature window in the cool conditions, leaving him stuck behind Lance Stroll in the first stint. George Russell was able to gain time on the Finn by virtue of his warmer slick tyres - fitted two laps earlier than Bottas’s own mediums - before their race-ending crash on the approach to Turn 2.

It marks a change in fortune for Mercedes. The team has traditionally fared better in cooler conditions and struggled more in the heat with its recent cars. Now, it has the opposite issue.

“Over the years, we quite often struggle in hot conditions, and cold has been normally good because we’ve had good tyre warm-up,” Bottas said. “We’ve been really trying to develop the car, but didn’t overheat the tyres, but obviously with the negative that if we need to get quickly into the tyres, then maybe some other cars can do it better than us.

“For me personally, for example compared to Lewis, it’s on such a knife-edge in qualifying, that sometimes you get it to work - like me in Q1, when I did a much faster time than in Q3, I got them to work.

“It's all about one or two degrees of surface or tyre temperature. It’s hard to explain. Obviously track temp was changing a bit, depending how much cloud there was, so maybe that had a bit of a factor.”

Shovlin said the tyre warm-up issue was something Mercedes had to go away and work on in order to help Bottas turn around his tough start to the season.

“The thing with tyre temperature, it’s often a very small difference has a very big impact on grip,” Shovlin said. “Unfortunately for Valtteri, he was just the wrong side of a lot of cars, and that gave him a very compromised start position. That’s one thing we’ve got to go off and work on with him, and help him understand.

“In the race, he was struggling following and being able to overtake, just because he was losing front-end in the tow, but also the rear wasn’t strong, and again it was that theme that warm-up was a problem for him.

“On the transition to medium, the warm-up meant that he got caught in that bunch of cars where some backmarkers, Max was there as the leader coming through, and that is what really triggered the sequence that ended his race.

“I think all the negatives have come down to this issue of warm-up in those conditions, and we need to find a solution to that, then I think if we do that, the rest of it should click into place.”

But while tyre warm-up might be a current Achilles’ heel for the W12 car, its tyre management as a whole is in fact one of the areas Red Bull believes it trails on.

In Bahrain, Hamilton was able to keep his hard tyres alive for half the race and hold on - with some thanks to the track limits controversy - to beat Verstappen, who was running much fresher tyres.

Horner felt a similar picture unfolded at Imola towards the end of the first stint on intermediate tyres. Hamilton had hung around five seconds back from Verstappen throughout the first half of the race, only to then bear down as they neared the crossover point to switch to slicks.

Verstappen was radioing his engineer lap after lap, asking when it was time to pit, and managed to get a one-lap advantage on the Mercedes by coming in early. It caused the gap to grow again to five seconds, only for Hamilton to quickly close up before his mistake at Tosa.

“The pace is obviously very close with Mercedes and I think there are strengths and weaknesses of the cars in different areas,” Horner said.

“I think if you look at the performance on the inter, we were quicker at the beginning of the stint, they were quicker at the end of the stint. The wear pattern across the tyres looks quite different between the two cars and I would say.

“Once they're on, obviously the same spec of tyre, in clean air, [Mercedes] looked very, very competitive. Indeed, he got the fastest lap.

“It's very tight and it's about getting the most out of the car on a case-by-case basis. But I would say Mercedes again, like in Bahrain, looked a bit stronger at the end of the stints than we did.”

Shovlin explained how Mercedes worked the balance between quick tyre warm-up and keeping the compounds alive for a long stint, leaving him unsure just how much of an advantage Red Bull had.

“It’s always a bit of a compromise between the warm-up and then the longer run,” Shovlin said after the race. “Whether we got that compromise right, we need to go off and have a look at it. The glimpses we saw on the inter, it looks like yes [Red Bull] did [have better warm-up] - although Lewis has obviously sustained that damage.

“On the medium tyre, it’s not so clear. I thought we were actually pretty good on warm-up there compared to them.”

As F1 heads towards the European summer, it could be the warmer conditions naturally help solve some of the tyre warm-up issues - and help Bottas in particular.

But for now, it is a trade-off that Mercedes is trying to manage as it aims to protect its points advantage against faster opposition.

Lewis Hamilton tested Pirelli’s 18-inch 2022 tyre compounds at Imola on Tuesday, becoming the latest driver to test the larger tyres and making Mercedes the third team to sample the new rubber.

After finishing second at Imola – shaking off a trip through the gravel that cost him a shot at victory – Hamilton returned to the track on Tuesday and continued the Pirelli 2022 tyre test programme with 55 laps in the morning, as Formula 1 prepares to switch from the current 13-inch tyres for next season.

The reigning champion will turn more laps on Tuesday afternoon, before Valtteri Bottas takes over on Wednesday.

Every team bar Williams will test the 2022 compounds, with Ferrari having kicked off the programme at Jerez, Spain, in February. The Scuderia tested again after the Bahrain Grand Prix in March before Alpine tried out the 18-inch compounds.

Alpine will again test them on May 11 at Barcelona along with Red Bull and Alfa Romeo, after the Spanish Grand Prix. In 2022, not only will teams use 18-inch tyres but a new era of F1 will dawn with a sweeping set of rules changes.

But before that is the Portuguese Grand Prix on May 2, with Hamilton leading the championship by one point over Max Verstappen, who took victory at Imola in a thriller on Sunday.

The combination of wet weather, an old-school circuit and what’s shaping up to be the closest grid in years meant that the race at Imola - or the ‘Formula 1 Pirelli Gran Premio del Made in Italy e dell’Emilia Romagna 2021’ to give the race it’s amusingly long proper title - was action-packed from start to finish. Conditions were especially tricky at the halfway point when the track had started to dry, with the combination of slick tyres and a surface that was still damp in places rewarding precision and patience.

It was during this part of the race that seven-time champion Hamilton made one of his extremely rare mistakes while lapping the Williams of George Russell. In his efforts to get past quickly and keep pace with leader Max Verstappen, Hamilton locked his brakes on the damp surface at the Tosa hairpin and slid unceremoniously into the gravel.

With not enough steering lock to drive out and a bootful of throttle only serving to send him lightly into the barrier, Hamilton had to do something that you don’t often see an F1 car do - reverse. If it were up to the teams, then chances are the cars wouldn’t have a reverse gear at all, but it’s written into the regulations as a mandatory function for safety reasons. After all, it’s better for a car to get itself out of a tricky situation than it is for marshals to go onto the track.

Because it’s so rarely used (some drivers might go years without ever needing to engage it), the reverse mechanism is generally kept as small, light, and weak as possible and positioned in the best place for weight distribution to maximise performance while still satisfying the rules.

Until recently, drivers would generally be discouraged from using reverse at all as there was a chance that it could end up damaging the rest of the gearbox (unscheduled gearbox changes result in a penalty in F1). But, with improvements in reliability and advances in manufacturing processes, it’s no longer the risky shift it once was. Plus, with the minimum weight of F1 cars swelling from 605kg in 2009 to 749kg in 2021, there’s a bit more leeway to make a reverse gear that’s actually usable and not just a vestigial rule-satisfier.

Still, that doesn’t mean that getting reverse is an easy thing to do: in Imola, Hamilton was stationery for some 40 seconds before he finally engaged gear and backed out of the gravel.

“It just wouldn’t go to reverse,” he explained after the race. “I was holding the reverse button and it took forever to engage. I didn’t think it was going to work. I tried reversing and tried to do a burnout spin to get going but ended up back in the barrier. It took a long time to get it back into reverse.”

On the Mercedes steering wheel, reverse is activated by holding the neutral button for a set amount of time. And if you don’t use reverse often, knowing exactly how long to hold it for isn’t going to be a piece of information in the forefront of the driver’s mind - especially in a slightly panicked scenario like trying to back out of the gravel in the middle of a race.

Plus, there’s the actual process of reversing. With head movement limited and tiny mirrors, simply knowing where you’re going is a challenge. This became apparent during the 2019 Azerbaijan GP, when Daniel Ricciardo tried to reverse out of an escape road and backed straight into the side of Daniil Kvyat’s car. Oops.

Ricciardo was given a penalty on that day. But in Imola, Hamilton was not because the race director was satisfied that his engineer guided him out safely enough. Hamilton returned to the pits for repairs, went a lap down, and was faced with a difficult run for minor points positions from then on. However, he was thrown a lifeline when teammate Valtteri Bottas and Russell’s Williams crashed heavily at the first corner, bringing the race to a halt with a red flag to clean up the mess.

That allowed Hamilton to get his lap back and charge through the order. Verstappen’s Red Bull was long gone at the front in what is shaping up to be a close title battle between the two, but Hamilton recovered to a strong second ahead of the impressive Lando Norris in his McLaren, marking the first time two British drivers shared a podium since the 2012 Chinese Grand Prix.

It was a very impressive recovery from Hamilton and showed that sometimes, you do indeed have to go backwards to go forwards.

Formula 1 is set to debut the Sprint Qualifying format at three Grands Prix in 2021, following an agreement reached between the FIA, Formula 1 and all 10 teams on the grid – with two European venues and one non-European one set to host the format, with those venues to be announced in due course.

Sprint Qualifying will see the drivers battle it out over 100km on Saturday afternoons of the selected Grand Prix weekends, with the result from Sprint Qualifying then deciding the starting grid for Sunday’s full distance Grand Prix.

The new format will also see the grid for the Sprint Qualifying decided on Friday afternoon, using the current qualifying format, with cars entering Parc Ferme conditions from the start of Friday qualifying – while there’ll be one 60-minute practice session on both Friday and Saturday mornings.

It’s been decided, meanwhile, that the top three finishers in Saturday’s Sprint Qualifying will receive points – three points for first place, two points for second and one point for third.

“We are excited by this new opportunity that will bring our fans an even more engaging race weekend in 2021,” said Formula 1 President and CEO Stefano Domenicali. “Seeing the drivers battling it out over three days will be an amazing experience and I am sure the drivers will relish the fight.

“I am delighted that all the teams supported this plan, and it is a testament to our united efforts to continue to engage our fans in new ways while ensuring we remain committed to the heritage and meritocracy of our sport.”

FIA President Jean Todt, meanwhile, commented: “I am pleased to see that Formula 1 is seeking new ways to engage with its fans and enlarge the spectacle of a race weekend through the concept of Sprint Qualifying. It was made possible thanks to the continued collaboration between the FIA, Formula 1, and all of the teams.

“F1 is showing itself to be stronger than ever with all stakeholders working together in this way, and much has been done to ensure that the Sporting, Technical and Financial aspects of the format are fair.”

The Sprint Qualifying format in full

Friday

• 60-minute First Practice in the morning with two sets of tyres for teams to choose freely
• Normal Qualifying format in the afternoon with five soft tyre sets available only

Saturday

• 60-minute Second Free Practice in the morning with one set of tyres for teams to choose freely
• 100km Sprint Qualifying in the afternoon with two sets of tyres for teams to choose freely

Sunday

• Full distance Grand Prix with two remaining sets of tyres

Brivio left his position running Suzuki’s MotoGP squad off the back of last year’s world championship victory to take up a senior F1 role with Alpine.

The Italian serves as the racing director for Alpine, jointly running the outfit alongside executive director Marcin Budkowski following its restructuring of its management team.

Discussing his first two races working in F1, Brivio said that one of the biggest things he had to get used to following his move was the use of team radio to stay in constant contact with the drivers.

In MotoGP, teams can only communicate with riders while they are out on-track via short messages on the dashboard of the bike or by using a pit board.

“It’s maybe a funny a thing, but the biggest difference is the radio,” Brivio said.

“You are in contact with the driver constantly, the race engineer telling them to do this, to do that, wait a little bit, whatever.

“[In MotoGP] once the race starts, the rider is by himself. You just sit down and you watch television, that’s all you can do.

“Here, you’re constantly in contact. You’re almost in the car. You are much more a part of what is going on in the track, I think.

“You’re not just enjoying it. You enjoy it, but not as a spectator. So the radio was the biggest difference, but interesting and very exciting.”

Brivio said that he was surprised by how quickly F1 races went by once underway, typically lasting around an hour longer than MotoGP events.

“I experienced the first race in Bahrain, at the beginning I would say, 'wow, 1h40m, 1h45m, whatever it is, it will be long’.

“But it went quickly, because you’re so busy, listening, checking, analysing. So it’s very interesting, a great experience.”

Brivio has also been impressed by the greater complexity of the technology and the data collected in F1 compared to MotoGP.

“I’m not an engineer, but I can really appreciate from the technology,” Brivio said. “It’s very interesting, and this one of the reasons why I decided to join, because I couldn’t understand everything from the television or when you come as a guest.

“There are many similarities I would say. Riders and drivers, they have the same up and down motivation. [They are in] good shape, bad shape, complaining, not happy, whatever. So from this point of view it’s OK.

“Just maybe the technology, it’s more complex. The car is bigger, it’s many more parts, much more information and things you can measure, and therefore as a consequence, many things you need to analyse and check.

“It’s very interesting and I'm very excited to get in.”