Difficulty rating of the circuits

[olegg]

 

[olegg]

Hardest circuits as seen in Teammate gaps
"The theory being that if two drivers have the same car, then on a less challenging circuit, their times will be close together as there is little opportunity for one to shine. But on a really tough track, the better driver will eke out a few more tenths.
So if we take this lens, this is what we see. The metric is qualifying gap as a % of average for the year. So if the average qualifying gap for 2012 was T%, then we would expect it to be 1.2T% at the Buddh Circuit.
...
Metholodogy:

• Ergast ( Ergast Home Page ) database was used to pull all qualifying times from 1994 onwards
• Qualifying gap was defined as the gap between teammates' times in the last qualifying round that they both participated in (thrown out if >20s, because I think some crashes were kept in the data as times)
• The median gap (as a % of faster teammate's laptime) laptime was taken for each circuit and for each year.
• Those were divided to give the overall result. Edit: this second normalization is necessary because absolute qualifying gap has come down a lot since the 90s. I'll publish this separately.
• Clustering was applied to divide the tracks into 5 groups

"

 

[Ruslan]

The gap could also be affected by weather, both rain and heat, car differences/reliability, and favoritism towards driver (especially later in the season). Still, a very interesting approach.

 

[F1Brits_90]

im unsure at them as some of comparsions are weird. no is telling me that Fuji is toughest Japanese Circuit above Suzuka & also Jerez is tougher than Monaco

 

[Ruslan]

im unsure at them as some of comparsions are weird. no is telling me that Fuji is toughest Japanese Circuit above Suzuka & also Jerez is tougher than Monaco

Well, it is an interesting methodology, but is subject to a much greater degree of random variation if there are only one or two seasons of data used as opposed to 20+. So Jerez only has one season of data and Fuji only has two. A couple of drivers having a bad day can bias the results.