Here are the qualifying match ups with team-mates of seven of the great drivers of the last few decades: Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc.
The comparisons are expressed in percentages to pole positions for their best qualifying times relative to the fastest qualifying time. Every race where a fair comparison has been possible has been chosen and then averaged for each season.
In the era of qualifying where cars ran in Q3 with their opening race stint fuel loads (2003-09), the times have been corrected to reflect the different fuel loads, using the exact weight penalty correlation for each individual track as used by the teams at the time. On the few occasions where this wasn't possible, the comparison has not been counted.
Qualifying is of course just one dimension of driver comparison and a far from definitive one at that. The laptime is derived from more than just the drivers' relative performance on the day, but also myriad unmeasurable factors: their status within the team, engine differences, tyre allocations (in the days when that was at the team's discretion) etc.
It is also notable that the pre-telemetry part of Senna's career shows some enormous offsets, way bigger than would be the case in later years when team-mates were able to study telemetry and identify where the laptime was being won and lost.
But the numbers reflect a precise snapshot of history and some interesting points emerge. Of the seven drivers chosen, only two - Senna and Leclerc - have outqualified every team-mate throughout their careers (to date, in Leclerc's case obviously).
In the outrageous differences between Senna and Satoru Nakajima/Johnny Dumfries there are probably a lot of unequally prepared Lotuses in there (something for which the team was renowned) and a lot of differing turbo settings/tyre allocation, permitted number of laps, testing hours, access to engineers etc for what were two very blatant support drivers.
To give some idea of the difference in that era to now, Marc Surer once described how, during his part-season at Brabham in 1985, "Getting to talk to Gordon Murray for just a couple of minutes was a huge achievement. He was always with Nelson [Piquet]. You felt like the third driver in a two-car team".
It can be imagined that the scenario at Lotus with Senna was quite similar. Compare that to the multiple layers of data and engineering access available to both drivers in modern F1 and it's easy to see we are not really comparing like-with-like when we move through the eras.
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In a comparison where drivers are being compared to the thousandth of a second over a lap, the performance of neither the main driver nor his team-mate will be a constant. Sounds obvious, but it's often forgotten in such discussions.
The most obvious apparent example of this comes with Michael Schumacher. In his first F1 career (1991-2006) he outqualified every team-mate, but in his three comeback years he was comfortably outqualified by Nico Rosberg.
But even from one season to the next, one car trait to another, one driver-team relationship to another, there can be big variations.
Performances are never a constant. Just take a look at Vettel's super-close comparison to Leclerc in 2019 and his utter collapse alongside him in 2020 (when before the season had even begun he'd been told by Ferrari he would not be required for 2021).
It just underlines that the numbers should only be taken as a guide and without context can be rendered relatively meaningless. There is no way Vettel suddenly lost around half-second in ability between one season and the next. But the numbers paint that misleading picture.
Drivers who have outqualified a 'great' over a season at least once include Tonio Liuzzi (on the rookie Vettel in 2007); Rosberg (on Schumacher but never on Hamilton); Jarno Trulli, Jenson Button and Esteban Ocon (on Alonso); Alonso and George Russell (on Hamilton); Daniel Ricciardo and Leclerc (on Vettel); Carlos Sainz and Ricciardo (on Verstappen).
There's quite a quality variety in the calibre of team-mates between each driver. Vettel and Hamilton have had a particularly strong set of team-mates. Alonso and Verstappen less so. This has an obvious impact on the margins.
Incidentally there are three team-mate omissions: Alonso to his 2001 Minardi team-mates Tarso Marques and Alex Yoong. And Vettel to his Sauber team-mate Nick Heidfeld in Vettel's debut at the 2007 United States Grand Prix.
With the Minardis, no fair comparison is possible as the second team car was to a different spec all season, significantly heavier and with less aggressive engine settings. With Vettel's debut, the fuel weight comparison is unknown, as Heidfeld's locking up and flat-spotting his tyres in the race meant he made his first pitstop many laps earlier than he was fuelled for.
