Hey Guys,
Great race today! Really enjoyed it and I hope we get to see a lot more like it in 2010 (pray for rain eh?)
Here is a summary of my Driver Consistency analysis from my blog 'Making Up The Numbers'. If you want to read the full post then please click the link here:
http://f1numbers.wordpress.com/2010/03/ ... australia/
It’s Driver Consistency time for the Australian Grand Prix – and what a race! It was action aplenty from the first corner, with wet weather causing crashes, overtaking, big strategy calls and an action-packed race
Before we start, if you’re new to this or need a reminder on how this analysis works, then check out my page on
Driver Consistency Explained. Now to the graphs:
The first thing of note is that you can see that the guys at the rear of the field are those who did not make it far in the race. You see this a lot in a wet-dry race where some guys retire early – they appear to be much slower than they are. This includes Vettel who retired before half distance.
On that note, the drivers who retired on the first lap have not been included, but I have also excluded Senna as he retired under the Safety Car.
The rest of the field appear to be very close in terms of lap time. However, I like to also remove the pit stop and Safety Car laps to ascertain who was fastest on average under pure racing conditions:
Now things look a lot more interesting. We can see who was faster than their strategy entailed, because a lot of the ‘faster’ guys on average here are two-stoppers.
So what we see here is that while the two stop strategy was a little bit faster, even with shorter pit stop times due to lack of refuelling it’s better to try and save your tyres and stay out with one stop. It might well be that the two-stoppers also felt that they had to push a little bit harder to make up for the deficit, ruining their tyres?
Finally, let’s have a look at the fastest laps from today:
So Webber got fastest lap then? Had he not fallen back at the start, or had got a better pit stop, maybe today could have gone better – or at least he could have avoided the kerfuffle at the end. It’s worth noting that Webber’s best result at his home Grand Prix is fifth, which I believe was in his debut Grand Prix for Minardi in 2002.
Also, note how the Mercedes were mighty quick today – even though Schumacher was stuck at the back for most of the race, he was still fourth fastest. But for a bit of bad luck, Schumacher could have really figured in today’s race. Also Rosberg too – I guess his excuse must have been the tyres going off…
Alonso and Massa did not look too quick today, but we know that their tyres were going off as the track improved. Also Vettel’s Fastest Lap was slower because of his early retirement, so don’t read too much into that…
One final comment is that in these sort of Wet/Dry races, the data gets a bit more skewed than usual, because of the constantly changing track conditions. So a pinch of salt should be taken when looking at the guys who didn’t make it to the end…
So that’s all from Melbourne then. I might have a look at the lap times of the McLarens versus the Ferraris if I have time this week – but I am on holiday this week so I am a little busy. Because I am away for the Malaysian Grand Prix, I will not be able to post my analyses until the week after the race. But never fear, they will appear though
I hope you enjoyed the race today – I thought it was an absolute blinder and I thought it had everything an F1 fan could ever want. I don’t think it answers the question of whether this year will be a good year or not, but if rain = awesome then I want to see every race a wet race
Cheers,
//RubberGoat
http://f1numbers.wordpress.com/
Thru his whole F1 carrier he had someone else (Macca) taking care for him and making the calls for him. No surprise he could not make a call himself, thou he is already in his 4th F1 year in a top team and he should have learned that. Actually, the only call he made himself was in the Hungary 2007 quali and we know what that call sparked