Autosport Plus

Numbers game

In our series of Best of 2005, this is Mark Hughes' column from Autosport Magazine, which was published on February 3rd 2005.

Autosport Magazine Nov 23, 2005, 12:47 PM

A few weeks ago I penned a feature for Autosport magazine about the fastest five F1 cars in terms of the leaps they made over what had gone before. The arbiter was something called the Pomeroy Index, invented many decades ago by Laurence Pomeroy Jr as a way of comparing lap time capabilities of cars that never raced against each other.

He took the lap speed capability of the first winning grand prix car - the 1906 Renault - as an index figure of 100. For the purposes of the feature we updated the index up to 2004 where the Ferrari F2004 had a calculated index of 234.7, meaning it could theoretically get around any given track 2.347 times faster than Ferenc Szisz's old Renault.