F1 2012 Mid-Season Review - Qualifying Analysis

Some summary charts comparing qualifying performance across the teams for the first half of the 2012 Formula One season.

First up, a smoothed plot showing qualifying laptimes of both drivers in a team normalised against the overall best lap time in the session:

We  can also look at a smoothed plot showing qualifying laptimes of the best driver in each team normalised against the overall best lap time in the session:

How about a comparison of the raw speed (as measured by the speed trap) for each driver across each circuit? A nice spin-off of this chart is that it allows us to compare fastest speeds across circuits (though bear in mind the weather may also contribute...)

How about if we normalise those speeds compared to the fastest time set in the trap during qualifying in each race?

 We can also compare the normalised speeds across the races for each each driver by team:

Code used to generate these charts can be found here.
Comments, suggestions, interpretations etc appreciated via the comments... or grab the code and run some analyses yourself (if you do take this route, please blog the results and post a link back here in the comments:-)

F1 2012 Mid-Season Review - Pit Stops

How have the teams compared in their pitstop efficiency over the course of the season? Let's see...

[UPDATE - I messed up on the race orders in the original version of this post (thanks for letting me know via the comments:-) - fixed now]

First of all, a quick histogram to see how the pit stop times were distributed... The height of the bars shows how many pit stops there were within a particular time window. (x-axis is pit stop time). The low value outliers represent drive thru penalties, so the fastest 'proper' pit stop is at the left hand edge of the major cluster.

So how do the teams fare? This chart compares teams by race - the time shown on the y-axis is the excess time over the fastest legitimate (non-drive thru) pitstop.
[UPDATE - arrghhhh... I think the first valid pit stop detector routine I used had a bug in it - using the 2nd fastest pit stop time more often than not...UPDATE2: having fixed the bug, the charts are now slightly off, eg Malaysia - sometimes a non valid pitstop appears to be creeping in... I need to tweak my algorithm...]

The colours represent driver within a team (orange is driver 1, green driver 2). So for example, in Australia, driver 2 was served badly by his team compared to driver 1 in that team.

We can see how the teams compare with each other in each race if we generate a boxplot distribution for the pitstop times recorded by each team. Although there's not really enough data for this view to be properly useful, it is a little easier to pick out pattern and structure than in the dot plot:

An alternative way of organising the plots is to look at how pitstop times varied within a team across all the races to date:

Again, a box plot can be used to give us a more striking interpretation of how the distributions vary across races - Mercedes performance seems as if it deteriorated quite badly over the last part of the first half of the season:

Finally, a loess best fit line through the times for each team. I'm not really sure how useful this is?

As ever, comments appreciated. The code used to generate these images can be found here.

F1 2012 Mid-Season Review - Grid/Classification Analysis

Rather belatedly, I've started looking at some of the results data to date, to try to get a feeling for whether or not teams are making progress over the season compared to other teams.

Here's a quick summary of the the classifications awarded so far, arranged by team. The different colours are used to distinguish the different drivers in each team. (The intention is that orange represents the first (lowest numbered) driver in a team, the green the second. So we see, for example, that driver 1 in Ferrari is outperforming driver 2 (within a column, which corresponds to a race, orange dots tend to be above green dots), and in Mercedes, driver 2 is faring better than driver 1 (green dots higher placed than orange dots).

I have a couple of ideas about how to make the in-team driver comparisons easier to see, but that's for another day...

The next chart shows how each driver fared in terms of grid position vs. final classification. A green line denotes an improvement on position, an orange line shows the driver lost places over the course of a race. Form a quick glance, we see Jenson Button had a few terrible races, (lots of orange) but Perez and Vergne appear to have had some pretty good races...

As ever, comments on how I might improve these graphics, as well as the sorts of stories you think you can see in them, much appreciated...

The source code used to generate the images can be found here.