The qualifying duals between teammates

We are already well over halfway through the Formula 1 season in 2020. There are still six races to go and whilst many driver have their own team qualifying battles won there are still some inter-team duals to decide.

The duels in Formula 1

The most important duel for a Formula 1 driver is the duel with his teammate. You never have a comparable car with your competitors in F1, so your teammate, who drives in exactly the same car, is the benchmark. If you are better than your teammate, you have a chance of getting a step up, but a lesser performance can also mean you are dismissed.

GPblog checks after every race who has won the qualifying game, but also the differences. In this way, the proportions within the various teams are as clear as possible. Who won the most and what was the average difference?

The top three

If we look at the top, we can see that Mercedes are doing very well. Lewis Hamilton is 8-3 in qualifying, but the average difference shows that Valtteri Bottas is often close to the Brit. The Finn loses an average of 0.258 seconds, which makes Mercedes the best of the lot.

At Ferrari it is getting further and further apart. Sebastian Vettel was able to stay close to Charles Leclerc at the beginning of the year, it is now 9-2 in favour of the young Monegasque and the average difference has already increased to four-tenths. 

However, the situation at Red Bull Racing is even worse and not worthy of a top team. The difference between Max Verstappen and Alexander Albon is as much as 0.641 seconds. The Thai driver doesn't come close to the Dutchman and has lost every qualifying session. This is only surpassed by Williams, but that's a team at the rear and not one fighting for the world title.

Tension in midfield

McLaren have done a lot better in this respect. Carlos Sainz is ahead in the duel with Lando Norris (6-5), but Norris is on average faster over the 11 qualifications. However, the gap is virtually nothing with Norris is seven-thousandths of a second faster than Sainz.

Renault are also doing nicely. Daniel Ricciardo has won almost every qualifying session, but Esteban Ocon has kept the average difference down. The Frenchman has an average of 0.248 per qualifying session. Racing Point and Alfa Romeo are also close to each other. Sergio Perez already won 6 qualifiers, but still allows an average of four-hundredths of a second on Lance Stroll. Raikkonen is on average the fastest at Alfa, although Giovinazzi has won one more qualifying session.

The big losers

With Haas, things are also going well, with a 5-5 position and a hole of 54 hundredths of a second in Romain Grosjean's favour. This small difference is not the case at AlphaTauri, where Gasly is clearly the better of Kvyat, with a 9-2 lead and a difference of almost four-tenths per qualification. However, as I said, the biggest gap is for rookie Nicholas Latifi. Once again, George Russell is unbeaten against his teammate.