FAST, FASTER, FASTEST
264.362km/h.
That’s 164.267mph for those who like to keep it imperial. Formula 1 cars travel faster in a straight line, but that’s only part of the picture: the true measure of a car’s performance is how much speed it can carry through the dips, climbs and curves of a full lap.
On 5 September 2020, Lewis Hamilton’s qualifying lap of Monza for the Italian Grand Prix – 1m18.887s, 264.362km/h – set pole position and established the Mercedes W11 as the fastest grand prix car of all time. All this after the FIA had tried to put the brakes on the W11’s dominance by banning the use of special engine modes during qualifying – because the W11 had more tricks up its proverbial sleeves.
Since the governing body regularly acts to keep car performance in check, F1’s hallowed speed record is seldom broken. Hamilton’s Monza lap edged past the previous best (263.587km/h) set in 2018 by Kimi Räikkönen in a Ferrari at the same venue. Until that point Juan Pablo Montoya’s record of 262.242km/h had stood since 2004, from the peak of the screaming 3-litre V10 era.
We’re conditioned to expect successive generations of F1 car to get faster, but the truth is they often don’t. Some innovations are outlawed. Cunning circumventions of the rules are forced back into the box. Teams might decide a particular car concept is running out of development runway, then over-reach looking for the next big idea. A rival’s performance spurt might push a pressured design team into loading their next car with untried new ideas which don’t pay off. All these pitfalls await than Räikkönen’s 2018 laptime.
