It would be easy in all the excitement this week to have overlooked a curious story in The Mirror.

Blink and you may have missed it in all the squabbling over Qualifying Formats.

It immediately reminded me of the purpose of the data analysis model here at this website, ie. to use the freely available data to better understand F1 Strategic Decision Making.  It is easy to get distracted with the easy tasks of taking the latest data, adding it to the machine learning model an produce some charts which make the model easier to understand whilst at the same time forget that the whole reason we are going to this bother is so we can use it to better understand/preempt F1 Team decisions.

Back in 2014 when this work was at its embryonic state, we wanted to concentrate first on establishing a solid Value model for the teams as a whole.  Without a Value model, it was going to be difficult to understand how the drivers contributed to the Value as a result of their efforts and thus how the Teams would retain/trade them.  Because of the skew of effort, we merely took a punt at the driver trading that was taking place based on experience and the primitive figures the Value model was producing at the time.  The curious thing when I saw this article was it backed up some of the hypotheses we were notionally running at the time.  The data and the observed Performance and thus Value of Alonso suggested he was on the move, the questions was where to?  We were not convinced that Mercedes would do a swap deal, although Hamilton despite being on winning form was not happy with the way things had been managed at times.  When you are an asset like Hamilton who would not be tempted by Ferrari if under that pressure?  It is of course interesting that this story has emerged now and from Alonso!

Focussing back on Team Strategy it was all credit to Totto Wolf and probably Niki Lauder more so that the drivers were mentored back to the Mercedes’ main effort, something other teams should take note of.

It has also given me pointers for this years work behind the scenes on this White Paper.  Building on the solid foundation of the Value model, we will now start looking at historic and current drivers contracts and associated commercial outcomes balanced against the Value model.  More to follow in later blogs.