Latest F1 tool recorded 'angry mood' at 2022 Austrian GP amid extensive abuse complaints

F1's chief technical officer, Pat Symonds, spoke about a new tool that they used this season to evaluate the apparent 'mood' of the fans during a race weekend. While explaining how the tool works, he revealed that fans were 'angry' at the Austrian Grand Prix. What's more interesting, however, was that it was recorded even before the race had started.

This is rather strange, because usually when fans are upset it is due to a boring race or a bad decision by the stewards. Nonetheless, they soon realised that it was because of the flares that were used by fans, blocking others' views. Symonds told Auto Motor und Sport,

"We registered a kind of angry mood before the start of the Austrian GP and wondered what in heaven might have happened there. After all, the race hadn’t even started yet. Upon analysis, we found that people were upset about flares.”

The operation of this F1 tool is rather interesting. Fans of the sport regularly update their social media during a race, and these posts (Tweets, usually) express the mood of the fans. Symonds revealed that this new 'tool' that F1 uses analyzes these posts and then renders the apparent 'mood' of the fans.

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Pat Symonds feels more data during races is essential for F1's growth

New regulations were introduced for the 2022 season, which affected the aerodynamics of the cars in a major way. This allowed cars to follow each other more closely than before.

Speaking on the same, Symonds stated that even during races when there were relatively fewer overtakes, a lot of duels were going on. He also revealed that the data that was collected during the races essentially helped them to understand if the regulations were effective. He said,

“We do a lot of analysis to figure that out. During the race, we measure how well drivers can follow another car in a 200-meter area, and we look at how good the chance of an overtaking maneuvre was."

He also stated that in some of the races, surprisingly, there were fewer overtakes in comparison to last season. While this goes in the exact opposite way where the engineers wanted it to be, Symonds justified it by saying that the data collected wasn't purely on the basis of overtaking maneuvers.

All things considered, the new measuring tools introduced by the sport are bound to provide interesting insights to fans and experts alike.