No, that track's my favourite!

mnmracer

Points Scorer
I've done some calculations to check the merrit of Marko's claim, though one that most of us have opted at some point: Webber can be the fastest driver on the day, but he is very much geared towards his favorite tracks.

Since Mark Webber joined Red Bull in 2008, he has raced 93 Grand Prix' on 24 different tracks (21 tracks more than once).
He has scored 904 points ('08-'09 points system adjusted).

He has scored 250 of those 904 points, or 28%, on just his 3 favorite tracks: Silverstone, Monaco and Sao Paolo.
He has scored 426 of those 904 points, or 47%, on just his 6 favorite tracks: Silverstone, Monaco, Sao Paolo, Barcelona, Istanbul Park and Shanghai.

So, in an average 24 race season, he would need almost 18 races to score as many points as in his 6 best races.
This is not too unsimilair to 2012, where he scored 95 points in his best 5 races (53%, 19 points per race), and 84 points in the other 13 races he finished (7 points per finished race).

To compare:
In 2012, Sebastian Vettel scored 125 points in his best 5 races (40%, 25 points per race), and 156 points in the other 13 races he finished (12 points per finished race, 1.7x Mark).
In 2012, Fernando Alonso scored 111 points in his best 5 races (40%, 22 points per race), and 167 points in the other 13 races he finished (13 points per finished race, 1.8x Mark).
 
Nice bit of number-crunching there, mnmracer.

How does that stand up at Red Bull and pre-Red Bull in isolation? Just exploring the possibility that Red Bull might have "favourite tracks" too. I might be throwing in a Red Herring, though. Just something that came to mind.

[Edit] It has just occured to me that the points system works on a semi-exponential curve in terms of points differences between finishing positions, and so finishing positions rather than points might work as a better measure and be more telling, or accurate, with regards to percentages. Especially as we are spanning multiple points systems.
 
Since Mark Webber joined Red Bull in 2008, he has raced 93 Grand Prix' on 24 different tracks (21 tracks more than once).
He has scored 904 points ('08-'09 points system adjusted).
As this comparison does not benefit from the semi-exponential points system, for the purpose of comparison I have calculated using a '1=10pt,2=9pt...10=1pt' system. In this system, Mark Webber would have scored 475 points.

He has scored 95 of those 475 points, or 20%, on just his 3 favorite tracks: Monaco, Silverstone and Sao Paolo.
He has scored 224 of those 475 points, or 47%, on just his 6 favorite tracks: Monaco, Silverstone, Sao Paolo, Barcelona, Istanbul Park and Hungaroring.

So, in an average 24 race season, he would need almost 18 races to score as many points as in his 6 best races.
This is not too unsimilair to 2012, where he scored 44 (adjusted) points in his best 5 races (46%, 9- points per race), and 52 points in the other 13 races he finished (4 points per finished race).

To compare:
In 2012, Sebastian Vettel scored 50 (adjusted) points in his best 5 races (38%, 10 points per race), and 81 points in the other 13 races he finished (6.2 points per finished race, 1.55x Mark).
In 2012, Fernando Alonso scored 47 (adjusted) points in his best 5 races (36%, 9+ points per race), and 83 points in the other 13 races he finished (6.4 points per finished race, 1.6x Mark).
 
That's cool. cheers, mnmracer, and very interesting. I might have to go and work this out for LH this evening. Reason being that until recently he was regarded as an oddball in this area with very few repeat wins. Canada has certainly emerged as a favourite for him but I remember some old discussions, which may now be invalid, about the inconsistency between where his wins and other successes came from. I'm taking us off topic, but your post has inspired further thought. Perhaps it deserves it's own thread.

[EDIT] Is there a reason why Webber is measured on his 6 favourite tracks (since 2008) and alternatively Vettel and Alonso are measured on their best 5 races in 2012?
 
Yeah, I wanted to work that out myself too. Maybe we can coörporate on that.
Reason I didn't include Lewis this season though, is that his misfortune skews the results immensely. So I'm gonna try and figure that out before putting more drivers to it.
 
ExtremeNinja - I may be jumping the gun here, but Webber's 2012 is measured for 5 races too, because Istanbul was not part of the 2012 programme.

As I recall, Hamilton won his first 9 races at different venues, and Alonso has a record of winning almost everywhere three or less times. I'd imagine Massa would strongly favour some circuits, Raikkonen and Button would both have one clear favourite but be broadly consistent elsewhere.
 
Cheers for the clarification guys. Would be cool if we could start a side-thread on this because its going to be difficult to keep the focus on Webber. I do like this analysis, though. I think there could be some real learnings and patterns we might discover. Some may even surprise. :thumbsup:
 
That it is indeed :)

I've been thinking about what would be a good outset to get as clean an analysis as possible. Of course this was some initial doodling, but if we want to get a good indication of a driver's performance on a track, we should try to separate that from the results. For instance, Mark Webber's 5th place finish in Australia in 2002 in a Minardi, I think was more impressive than his 4th place finish this year. Or for instance Räikkönen in Spa; his 2008 crash from 2nd, and his 2001 and 2002 DNFs should not take away from his performance on that track.

So what I propose is the following outline (agree that we do this in Excel? I'll make a template once we agree on the outline):
  • Starting position (for driver and team mate)
  • Finishing position (for driver and team mate)
  • Actual points scored per track (for driver and team mate)
  • Average actual points per participated race
  • Adjusted points (1-10 scale) scored per track (for driver and team mate)
  • Average adjusted points per participated race
  • Performance position (in case of DNF or known issue -i.e. Hamilton's astro-turf adventures in Korea)
  • Adjusted points (1-10 scale) scored per track (for driver and team mate)
  • Average adjusted points per participated race
The actual points and adjusted points will mostly be interesting for an overall 'statement', like "Mark Webber scored scored 95 of his 475 points on his 3 favorite tracks: Monaco, Silverstone and Sao Paolo." I mean, there is a point to "cream always rises to the top", and I think even without the context, it'll give interesting insights.

Now if we want to analyse the performance of a driver on certain tracks, and mostly, how reliant their performance is to a certain track, we'd need to separate that from the actual points score. For that, I'd suggest taking the average race performance position for driver and team mate and make a season delta. As the focus is one the main driver, that driver's delta should be something like 'AVERAGE(Driver+Driver+Team mate)' and then we compare the Performance Positions to the season delta to either give a positive or a negative score. i.e., the season delta is 4rd, and the drivers performance position is 3rd, he scores +1 point for that track. We calculate the score per track, per season that way, and add them up.

Thoughts? ExtremeNinja teabagyokel
 
Sorry for disappearing off of this thread. It will take a little investment from me to jump in on this fully. I'm prepping for my first race of the season but may be able to get a bit more involved after the weekend. In still keen.
 
This is gonna take more time then I thought, unless I want to do a lot of extra work (Excel doesn't cut it, so I'm gonna have to upgrade my MS Access knowledge). Before the start of the season, I'll try and do the same for Vettel/Alonso/Hamilton/Button/Massa/Räikkönen as I did for Webber, so only based on absolute race results. A project for the rest of the year (next winter) will be the thorough one then.
 
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