When was Formula 1 closest?

Late last year, we ran a poll to try to decide Formula 1's greatest era, splitting its history into 1950-60, 1961-73, 1974-82, 1983-93, 1994-2005 and 2009-18, and getting six of our writers to argue the case for their preferred time.

Thousands of you voted, either on social media or by post. The Twitter poll ended with a narrow win for 1994-2005 over 1983-1993, while 1974-1982 was a runaway winner in the postal contest.

The extensive and varied response to our poll encouraged us to look a bit further into the state of Formula 1 over the past seven decades. And specifically, when was it really at its most competitive?

We looked at the number of winners and average margins in our original piece, so this time we thought we'd look at supertimes to see how gaps between leading cars have fluctuated in terms of raw performance.

Supertimes are based on the fastest single lap by each car at each race weekend, expressed as a percentage of the fastest single lap overall (100.000%) and averaged over the season.

No statistic is perfect and there are several caveats. Firstly, because they are based on the best lap time of a weekend, that usually means qualifying. And qualifying pace does not, of course, always translate into race pace.

For example, the Ferrari F2004's supertime advantage over the BAR 006 in second place was only 0.218%, yet it dominated - winning 15 of the 18 races. Partly that was due to its incredible finishing record - advantages further back in F1 history have sometimes been squandered by poor reliability - but largely it was because Ferrari's Bridgestones were better race (and worse qualifying) tyres than the Michelins on the rival cars.

The need to qualify with fuel loads required to start the race also meant some cars ran lighter than others, skewing the figures for the 2003-09 period for which those rules were in place.

Similarly, drivers are not constants, so they will also have an influence on some of the gaps. But if you agree that the margins between top drivers are always small, this should still give us a good idea of the relative pace of the top cars over the years.

This isn't an attempt at a definitive answer to when F1 was at its best. That's too subjective a question. How do you quantify the appeal of a screaming Matra V12, the sight of Ayrton Senna on a qualifying lap or a pass around the outside of Suzuka's fearsome 130R?

But hopefully these numbers give some interesting background to what fans remember, and perhaps challenge some assumptions too.

F1 eras supertime analysis

Comparing the eras

The gaps in our first era were huge compared to what came later. Only when the innovative Lancia D50 locked horns with the professional Mercedes team was the gap at the front truly close, although the competitiveness of the field did improve during the decade.

Given that the Lancia only appeared at the end of 1954, that season's gap could be read as the 0.464% margin between Mercedes and Maserati, rather than the 0.142% Lancia-Mercedes figure. The gap between Cooper and Lotus in 1960 was also small (0.042%), but that season was not close in reality, partly because of Lotus's poor reliability and also due to the fact that the quickest Lotus driver - Stirling Moss - missed three races following his serious crash at Spa.

Although the unpopular switch to 1.5-litre cars - an era that really split our voters as the cars were relatively slow but did sometimes provide good racing - gave Ferrari an initial advantage, it continued the trend of better competitiveness.

Margins increased when the three-litre regulations arrived in 1966 and when the game-changing Lotus 49 arrived the following year. But the field closed up as the Cosworth DFV became widely available from 1968.

It remained competitive until the end of the 1970s, though there were seasons for Niki Lauda-era Ferrari and Lotus (with ground-effects in 1978) when the gap at the front briefly rose again.

Overall, though, the 1974-82 era that won our email/post vote is the second-closest era in terms of the gap between first and second, and is the closest when it comes to the first-fifth figure. That, combined with poor reliability by today's standards, helps to explain why there were so many different winners.

The 1992 and '93 seasons were among the most one-sided in F1 history, harking back to the 1950s

The turbo era, which required manufacturer input to make the most of the technology, increased the gaps. Even the small 1984 gap between McLaren and Brabham is misleading, given how much better a race car the McLaren-TAG MP4/2 was than the Brabham-BMW BT53.

It's clear that the complexity of the engines provided a stark contrast with the DFV era, though for many fans it was the spectacle of the extra power - up to 1500bhp in qualifying trim - that provided them with their motorsport high-watermark.

But the biggest spreads of the 1983-93 period came after the return to normally aspirated engines in 1989. The margins came down to begin with, but as the development of gizmos - traction control, active suspension, anti-lock braking and even four-wheel steering - kicked in, the gap between the haves and the have-nots grew.

The 1992 (1.492% and 4.451%) and '93 (1.706% and 3.764%) seasons were among the most one-sided in F1 history in terms of speed, harking back to the 1950s.

The banning of the gizmos for 1994 immediately closed things up and, from 2000, the raw-pace gaps between the top teams stayed narrow, though the qualifying-with-race-fuel rules should be noted. That helps to explain why the 1994-2005 era, which topped the social media poll, actually produced the closest gap between first and second.

It is also worth noting that, long before this point, the difficulty of following another car thanks to the 'dirty' air had become apparent. The pace advantage needed to be bigger for a pass to become likely increased.

How F1 stands now

On the face of it, the 2009-18 period doesn't come out too badly. It's third-closest when it comes to the gap between first and second, and runner-up in terms of the first-fifth results.

But when looking at how F1 stands now, this 10-year period should really be split in two, which paints quite a different picture:

The gaps are around twice as big for the five years of the turbo hybrid era than in the previous five seasons with normally aspirated V8s. Two main factors explain the difference. The first is the much-publicised complexity of the modern hybrid engines. There can be no doubt they are more relevant for manufacturers and the wider world, but they have given F1 cost and competitiveness problems.

The second is that, from 2007, F1 had a freeze on engine developments, aside from the odd tweak, ostensibly for 'reliability reasons'. This took F1 close to the DFV era in terms of engines, and the result was F1's closest period on raw pace.

Despite the controversy over the double diffuser, the 2009 season was the closest ever from front to back. Slowest team Force India was 1.241% behind pacesetter Red Bull, a gap that only covered the big three in 2018.

Red Bull's ability to win four drivers' and constructors' championships between 2010 and '13 shows how good modern F1 teams generally are at making the most of any advantage they have, thanks largely to better reliability and the enormous amount of data that can be used to optimise cars almost every weekend.

It is clear that the field closes up when engines are less sophisticated and/or similar

The average gap between first and second over the 69 years of the world championship so far is 0.580%, making the 2018 gap of 0.118% between Mercedes and Ferrari look strong. Indeed, that is the closest gap since 2013.

But the average gap from first to fifth is 2.392% over the seven decades, with last year's margin between Mercedes and Renault standing at 2.018%. If the relatively uncompetitive years of the 1950s are excluded, the average falls well below the 2018 figure.

It illustrates once again how the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown too big since the introduction of the turbo hybrid engines, echoing the first turbo and gizmo eras of the 1980s and early 1990s.

This highlights two issues for those now considering F1's future.

It is clear that the field closes up when engines are less sophisticated and/or similar (or largely the same, as with the DFV era). That makes sense because it is essentially reducing a variable, but the direction of the automotive industry is currently largely about alternative and hybrid powerplants. How can you close up the field while at the same time allowing innovation? Is that even still possible?

The second is that the gap is too big between the big teams and the smaller ones, not helped by the uneven revenue distribution they receive. By and large, all the teams are now too good for there to be an opportunity for smaller squads to jump far out of their financial position - though Force India/Racing Point has been pretty successful in that regard in recent years.

And that is one of the other big questions facing F1: how to prevent the bigger teams simply spending their way to the front.