In another attempt to try to differentiate drivers and their performance from simply looking at wins, poles, podiums, points and glory, I have spent some time trying to analyze their performance from the perspective of their race lap times. What started out as a simple data collection exercise for my own personal F1 database gratification morphed into something like a wave of infected humans from 28 Days Later charging at me from all directions … several large EXCEL files and a slew of output firing off in all directions that my poor small brain couldn’t quite understand (not an unusual occurrence per the wife of ZakYak).
To set the scene … in simple terms:
Starting from Brazil 1984 at the now sadly defunct Jacarepagua circuit to last weekend’s Monza shootout I have collected race lap times for each driver in each race:
Laps excluded from analysis are:
After the ‘cleaning’ above we arrive at a data set for each race that has taken out the ‘obvious’ non racing laps. We have complete race lap data for each driver who is able to finish the race, but we can also include data to account for “he was leading the race comfortably until Huub Rothengatter skidded across the track backwards at the Variante Alta and skewered him with his Zakspeed”.
With this data we can:
So bearing in mind that there is a boatload of data to monkey with … and the time spent on this could well be directly proportionate to me working (literally) on Elbow’s “cocktail called grounds for divorce”… I want to start by posting some general stuff … to which I will start adding some interesting stuff over the next few weeks / months …
To start ... by season, the race winners ranking by Median, Mean and Standard Deviation ...
To set the scene … in simple terms:
Starting from Brazil 1984 at the now sadly defunct Jacarepagua circuit to last weekend’s Monza shootout I have collected race lap times for each driver in each race:
- 30 seasons
- 502 races
- 533,089 completed laps
- 514,536 completed laps used for analysis
Laps excluded from analysis are:
- All Safety Car period laps
- Any "Safety Car" affected laps
- Any lap time that is >45 seconds of the drivers median lap time for that race
- Any lap time set by cars that were Disqualified either during or after an event
- Any lap time set by cars that were Excluded (from the result)
After the ‘cleaning’ above we arrive at a data set for each race that has taken out the ‘obvious’ non racing laps. We have complete race lap data for each driver who is able to finish the race, but we can also include data to account for “he was leading the race comfortably until Huub Rothengatter skidded across the track backwards at the Variante Alta and skewered him with his Zakspeed”.
With this data we can:
- Calculate the median, mean and standard deviation for each race
- Calculate the median, mean and standard deviation for each driver in each race
- Calculate the number of laps faster or slower than the driver mean for each race
- RANK each driver by median, mean and standard deviation for each race
- COMPARE each drivers median, mean and standard deviation to the race median, mean and standard deviation
- And a whole lot more stuff that my small brain is still trying to figure out …
So bearing in mind that there is a boatload of data to monkey with … and the time spent on this could well be directly proportionate to me working (literally) on Elbow’s “cocktail called grounds for divorce”… I want to start by posting some general stuff … to which I will start adding some interesting stuff over the next few weeks / months …
To start ... by season, the race winners ranking by Median, Mean and Standard Deviation ...
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