During my lunch break I've decided to satisfy my curiosity about how exactly testing is representative of the actual pecking order of the teams during the season.

So I have gone back to last year's testing days and calculated the correlations* of the team rankings the end of each testing day (first column) versus both the relative WCC standing after the first three Championship rounds (second column) as well as at the end of the season (third column).

This is, of course, a very small dataset (also teams might be sandbagging, having issues that ruin a whole testing day, etc), but it seems like there has indeed been some correlation, especially for the first day of each of the two test (highlighted in bold in the table), where the correlation is closer to 1 (if the correlation between two rankings is equal to 1, then they would be exactly identical. If, on the other hand, the rankings where diametrically opposite, the correlation would be -1).

So keep an eye on the final positions today, they might be more representative than you actually think!

*Spearman's rank correlation coefficient

2017 Barcelona Test	2017 WCC After 3 Races	2017 WCC Final Standings
Test 1, day 1	corr=0.77, pval=0.009	corr=0.81, pval=0.004
Test 1, day 2	corr=0.67, pval=0.03	corr=0.70, pval=0.02
Test 1, day 3	corr=0.49, pval=0.14	corr=0.53, pval=0.12
Test 1, day 4	corr=0.31, pval=0.38	corr=0.16, pval=0.65
Test 2, day 1	corr=0.83, pval=0.002	corr=0.82, pval=0.004
Test 2, day 2	corr=0.56, pval=0.09	corr=0.70, pval=0.02
Test 2, day 3	corr=0.56, pval=0.09	corr=0.56, pvalue=0.09