F1 2012 United States Qualifying Summary

A quick summary of qualifying at the 2012 Formula One US Grand Prix.

Here's how the practice and qualifying sessions went:


Does that table need to have the y-axis reversed so that first is at the top? I think it does, doesn't it?

How about progress through the actual qualifying sessions?




How close to ultimate lap times did each driver get?



In response to a comment from MartinB, here's that same chart with the laptime axes reversed so the fastet laps are top right:

Does that work? Convention is to read axes as increasing value, so we break that here... but maybe the chart does make more sense? If anything, I guess it shows how you really would need to take care when reading axis titles and labels... Below the line is now slower than ultimate lap. Would it be more useful if Ultimate and personal best axes were flipped? Or maybe we should just focus on deltas between personal bests and personal ultimates?

How about this - looking at deltas vs the personal best time?

The different axis scales really make a big difference here - VET was "way off" his ultimate laptime compared to HAM. But a problem with this chart is that we can't easily tell whether HAM would have beaten VET if HAM had driven his ultimate lap compared to VET's personal best lap?

How about with flipped x-axis so fastest is to the right:

Any good?




If drivers had driven ultimate laps during qualifying, would the qualification classification have been any different? RAI would have moved up a place, it seems...


Here's how the best sector time deltas stacked up - drivers are ordered by qualifying classification, so it should be easy enough to spot anyone who drove good sectors on different laps, but didn't hook them up in a single qualifying lap:

Are the drivers performing particularly well or badly in any particular sector?  MAL and ALO are making up ground in sector 1 compared to their overall classification, but MSC is losing places. In sector 2, HUL does well but WEB is down. In sector 3, MAS is up, GRO and HUL are down.

We can also look at deltas to the fastest time in each sector, again arranged by overall classification (rather than rank in sector). WEB and GRO both lose time in sector 2.

How do the session times vary from the ultimate laptime (and did anyone fare better in an earlier session than a later one?)? Seems like BUT did better in Q1 than Q2... and ALO did better in Q2 than Q3:

How did speeds compare?

How slow are the Red Bulls?!

Any obvious (to the eye) relationship between speed and ultimate laptime?

I guess the next thing to do is to start trying to tie these data views into session reports, such as this one form f1fanatic: Vettel takes pole as Alonso struggles to fourth row. What we really need to support session write-ups of that form is the timing data for each qualifying lap. This is available from the FIA media centre, but I've been laying off the PDF scraping for the second half of this season...

F1 2012 United States Grand Prix Third Practice Summary

Sketches around P3 of the 2012 Formula One United States Grand Prix...

First, how to the deltas for each driver's best sector time compared to the best overall sector time stack up? Drivers are ranked by session classification, so we see that Button is out of position. WHilst he pulled in some good sector times, presumably he couldn't hook them up together?

If we look at the delta between best lap time and ultimate laptime, we should therefore see that BUT is way off...

...as indeed he is..

If we look at the ultimate vs. personal best laptime, we should see BUT out of postion - we can get a feel for the ultimate laptime ranking by look at how drivers are ordered along the y-axis:

 This is a little cluttered - let's zoom in:

Now we see that if drivers drove their ultimate laps, BUT would have moved up three positions.

How does each driver fare by sector? 

If we order by driver number, we can get a feel for how each driver fared as well as team behaviour:

One thing that jumps out for me in this chart is how much time can be lost in sector 2? The Red Bulls seem to be nailing it in sector 3 compared to everyone else?

If we compare sector rankings with overall classifications, we can get a feel for drivers who are particularly quick - or slow - in a sector:

So in sector 1, GRO is fast, and HUL slow. BUT is up in sector, wheres WEB is down. In sector 3, WEB picks up places, as does RAI, but MAL seems to be slow?

How do the deltas compare in each sector (delta from fastes sector time)? Again, lets order by overall classification so we can see folk who are out of sorts:

So in sector 1, we see HUL is slow and GRO picks up time. Sector 2 is all over the place, but WEB's bad time stands out. Similarly, in sector 3 we see MAL mess up, but RAI makes up time.

If we view the same sort of chart order by sector ranking, we can get a better feel for whether there are any breaks in the team performances, as well as as whether any sectors present any particular problems to any given team (you need to know driver pairings to detect team patterns though...)

Looks like sector 2 spreads them out...

By the by, how do speeds compare?

Red Bulls are *slow*, aren't they?

Does there appear to be any relationship between speed and ultimate laptime?

How about speed and overall classification?

Can we spot any relationships between speed and sector times?

Maybe we'll see something if we group the driver's deltas and plot them against speed?

Hmmm... I'm not convinced I can easily spot any patterns there...? Thought I'm not totally sure what to look for... (That is, this view may not be meaningful at all;-)