I was going to write my season wrap up last week but I am glad I held off as I would have ended up having to write a supplementary post anyway now that Rosberg has announced his surprise retirement.

Reflections on Model

Overall I am really pleased with the 2016 model work.  It is as simple as it can be but now scalable and pretty robust going forwards.  More importantly I reckon it was capable in its current design of predicting the top 3 teams for the Constructor’s Title from about mid season.  The one design adjustment that had tom be implemented was coping with drivers switching teams mid-season.  But the work done to address this has made the preparations for 2017 Model a little easier as the thinking has now been done.  Whilst this model was not required to predict that Mercedes were going to win from the off, it was able to dismiss the Ferrari hype far earlier than most commentary out there.  Further, whilst we did not need a model to predict that Red Bull would have a much better season, the model indicated far earlier than wider commentary did that they would beat Ferrari but of particular please to me was that it told us that Force India would beat Williams.

Implications for 2017

OK, so I guess a lot are asking how the regulation changes for 2017 will impact the model?  Well, I am not sure it will because the model is still focussed on some pretty atomic data and fairly basic logic which is mutually exclusive to the regulations itself, that is the beauty of it.  This enables the model to be run meaningfully on F1 data back to the 1950s if required.  However, it is probably only meaningful back to the 90s when most of the key players of today were just starting out.  And that is the clue to how we will move the model on into next year.  The drive swop in 2016 forced us to change the model to account for drivers not being tied to a team for a whole season (and thus making the model simpler).  We had to add a ‘team’ factor to each set of race results for each driver.  Now that that is done it is fairly easy to scale this to take into account other key personalities in the team’s make up and results.  We will start simply with just the Chief Engineers and Strategists and see where it goes.  The key thing is that we will be able to calculate a new team coefficient and see how key individuals score when working with others.  F1 is a small world and the results and thus these individual’s impact on the sport as they have rode the merry go round are all available back to the 90s so we should be able to see some trends.

Again you don’t need a model to know that Ross Brawn and his magic worked pretty much wherever he went regardless of budget.  Ferrari are currently the antithesis of this in 2016.  However, F1 will continue to move personnel around the teams and we will hopefully be able to assess in advance the impact of these HR decisions in advance through next year’s model.

Of course, Rosberg’s untimely departure has beaten me to the work!  However, I am not convinced that driver selection is the main route to success that many believe.  Again Ross Brawn’s profile is indicative of this assumption.  It is of course great media fodder for the off-season and it will certainly impact Mercedes somewhat going into 2017.  However, I think the key position’s at Mercedes already are a winning formula and Mercedes governance will restrict much of the speculation.  If I had to predict?  Probably Bottas or Werhlein.  I cannot see at this stage how deals can be done outside of this?  And knowing the German decision making I think they would probably like to make the Bottas option work.