Hallo
I'm here without the usual race pace charts. There's almost no point in calculating race pace in Monaco. In this track quali is more important than race pace. We already saw Ricciardo a few years ago holding up the field with a damaged MGU-K that cost him a ton of performance.
Instead I'm showing you a chart that shows the delta between the fastest Leclerc lap vs the fastest lap done by Max during the FP2 session of the 2024 Monaco GP.
I stopped working with telemetry data for years because many aspects of the raw telemetry are, well, wrong. The distances are improperly calculated—which causes the data points to be out of sync—the interpolated speed uses a very basic algorithm that creates unrealistic data points, and unfortunately the end product is not good enough to do proper data analyses.
I've worked very hard for the past few weeks into properly post-processing the data to obtain a dataset that is usable and that can be used to do precise F1 analyses. I go into a bit more detail in my blog, but
the main point is that this data isn't the same that you see on other sites that provide telemetry.
I'm willing to stake my reputation on the claim that my data is unique and far more accurate than that provided by other sources. If it weren't, I wouldn't dare to post it.
Regarding this FP2 analysis, it's hard to say why Verstappen was way slower than Charles. The telemetry trace shows that Max just didn't have the same top speed that Charles had between T8 (Portier) and T10 (Nouvelle Chicane). While Max had the same initial acceleration, the top speed wasn't there. It looks to me that Red Bull were running a higher downforce package than Ferrari, which could also explain the car getting increased compression and bouncing against the tarmac.