Across two seasons of dry qualifying, the same driver in the same car was 0.825% faster in Q3 than in Q1. On a 90 second lap that is about three quarters of a second.
Nothing on the car got better. It is the same machine, forty-five minutes later.
At Monaco in 2026 the improvement was 1.965%, the largest of any session we measured.
What we compared
For every qualifying session we took the drivers who set a time in both Q1 and Q3, and compared each driver against themselves. Same car, same afternoon, same driver. That gives
