F1 2012 Singapore P3 Comparisons

Time differences between each driver's best sector times in third practice compared to the best overall sector time:

Comparing deltas compared to best overall sector time with sector based classification:

Summed deltas from best overall sector times:

Another comparison of sector times deltas compared to the best overall sector time:

Speed trap comparison:

Intra-team sector delta to best overal sector time comparisons:

Differences between personal classified time and team ultimate laptime:

(I need to check the code on this one - eg we could imagine the fatset ultimate comparing the ultimate lap of each driver in the team, or we might imagine constructing an artificial ultimate team lap based on the best sector time recorded in each team for each sector.)

Here's how the drivers compare within a team - the size of the bar gives the differences between the sector times of drivers within the same team. If the bar goes to the left, "driver 1" has gone faster than "driver 2".

F1 2012 European Grand Prix - Practice

Quick summary charts of activity during the Valencia F1 practice sessions.


Classification vs fastlap:

Laps run by session:

Day 1 Comparisons:

(oops.. there's a bug in these... need to check that the driver of a particular car is the same from session to session...)

Session utilisation:

F1 2012 Canada FP1 & FP2

Summary charts from the first and second free practice sessions from the Canada Formula One Grand Prix.

Session utilisation chart for first practice:

Lap times per stint by car in FP1 (long stints, 8 or more laps)

Session utilisation chart for second practice:

Lap times per stint by car in FP2 (long stints, 8 or more laps):

Lap times per stint by car in FP2 (zoom in on long stint, fast laps):

Scatter plot showing relative position of each car at the end of each session (FP1: x, FP2: y)

(It would probably make sense to swap the axes, then you can read from left to right to see who did best in FP2, and compare with the FP1 position by reading up the chart?)

Scatter plot showing fastest laptimes per car across sessions (FP1: x, FP2: y)

(I really need to use the same limits on the axes, and also plot an x=y line so we can see the extent to which times were improved, or not, across sessions.)

Scatter plot showing number of laps run per car across sessions (FP1: x, FP2: y)

Source code used to generate the charts available from CloudStat: F1 Practice Reports

F1 2012 Bahrain Practice - Results and Fastest Laptimes

A quick visual review of elements of practice 1, 2 and 3. Firstly, session utilisation charts, showing how each team made use of the sessions:

Here's how the teams did in terms of laptime and position:

Hmmm... for the positions chart at least, I need to choose symbols that allow you to see when one driver has the same position across multiple sessions... Here's a first pass:

But that's not right, is it? We lose HAM and SCH in FP2 for example... Hmm...

F1 2011 Japan Practice

A quick round-up of practice utilisation and raw laptime distribution:







I'll pop stats images relating to the weekend in this gallery.

F1 Practice Session Experiments - What's Going On?

You may or may not know that this week is National Motorsport Week in the UK (I wonder why they didn't mention it at the Isle of Wight Speedway last night???), Over on GoMotorsport the UK-based F1 teams have been taking it in turns to run a daily competition, and I think I may have picked up one of the spots on the Virgin Racing factory tour (not sure if I replied to the email invite quickly enough)...:-)



Anyway, on the off chance that I do have a place on the tour, I thought I'd do a bit of prepping around some questions I might ask... The obvious thing that comes to mind relates to the role of High Performance Computing and the use of CFD in the design of the Virgin car, as well some of the reasons why CFD might not be able to deliver all that wind tunnel testing does...

The visit is a factory tour, though, so I guess something about materials and maybe the use of 3D printing in prototyping may be appropriate?

The extent to which on-track captured telemetry data is used to replay stresses and strains on various bits of the car in various test rigs is something else I'd like to ask about (I assume this does go on...), as well as the role of the strategist over the race weekend...

But something else that's been niggling at me lately, and that I may get a chance to ask about (if I've got the place, and if the opportunity arises), is this: what goes on during practice, how is that information used to plan out race strategy, and is there anything in the publicly available practice timing data that the armchair strategist can draw on to tryi to figure out what might happen during the race itself?

To ground the question, here's a snapshot of Car 25's fast laptime data over the practice sessions from the 2011 European Grand Prix weekend:



The symbols denote stint and the colours practice session.

To pick apart the possible experiments I think there are several different sorts of regime that may be worth clarifying in terms of what we might guess is going on.

Here's the second practice session, and in particular the latter two stints:



So my questions would be these:

- does the first of those example stints provide us with a tyre model (for which tyre? Can we identify tyres from the practice timing sheets?
- in the second example stint, is there an experiment going on that accounts for the +0.6s delta in the fourth and seventh laptimes (diamond symbol)?

Looking at data from the (other) Spanish Grand Prix, we see similar signatures:



In the third stint, the crosses show a couple of "but one" tours that are a delta of 1 second or so off the pace - what's going on here? Is it the same sort of test? (Maybe not using KERS or DRS on the lap?)

And for the last couple of stints in this session:



do we again get information here that the armchair strategist can put into a crude tyre model?

As ever, any and all comments appreciated:-)

PS Bah - a gremlin in my config files means the fuel corrected laptimes are off - i was using settings for Monaco:-(