So far, in evaluating driver performances in 2009, we have looked at Finishing Positions, Qualifying Performance and Fastest Laps.  Now we have finally arrived at the last category – Driver Consistency.

This is a subject which is particularly interesting to me, because I have been analysing this for most of the year.  If you are new to this blog, why not catch up on some of these posts by clicking here?  Also, if you need reminding on how these figures are calculated, please click here.  Please note that no allowances have been made for differences between teams here and if you want a closer look at the charts, you can click on them for a larger version

What I aim to do in this post is to present a series of charts.  The first two will split the field based on average rankings for 2009.  These are calculated by calculating a ranking for each driver based on his average lap time, summing all the races they competed in 2009 and then taking an average ranking.  So let’s have a look then:

It is interesting how there seem to be ‘blocks’ of drivers appearing with similar rankings here!  Button has the best ranking with Barrichello and Vettel forming a pair right behind him.  Webber is next followed by the first block of Massa, Rosberg and Hamilton.  The midfield is very close and Badoer languishes at the back.  Yet again no replacement driver beats the guy who he replaced!

The second set of graphs aims to look at how consistent a driver was.  I looked at the standard deviation for each driver and ranked them, averaging them out in a similar fashion.  Here are the results:

Now we can see a chart where things are a little mixed up

It is definitely not true that the fastest driver is the most consistent here!  But a few points of note first – I have included drivers who did not run a complete season, which will skew the results a bit as consistency is affected by changes in conditions.  If a driver does not run a complete season they may not experience these effects and therefore may appear better than they are.

Having noted that, we cannot conclude that Kobayashi was the most consistent driver – however impressive his performances for the last two races were!  However, we do have a surprise winner in Fisichella (for Force India), who did not have a great season.

Does the most consistent performance imply he drove well or just that the car was a safe and sturdy drive?  Personally I think it’s a bit of both, but I would love to hear your views on this in the comments…

Kimi Raikkonen finishes high up but as he is supposed to be known for his consistency I thought he would have done better, personally.

Also, Barrichello beats Button by nearly half a place – probably due to Button’s mysterious dip in form mid season.

Heidfeld ranks quite far down the order, which is very surprising considering he finished something like 42 races on the trot. I thought that would mean he is quite a steady driver, but apparently not according to this.  Well, he gets beaten by Piquet, so that cannot be a good thing!

It is interesting that pretty much all of the field average between 7th and tenth, which mean that most drivers must be remarkably consistent.  It’s only when we get to the back of the grid that the curve starts to rise almost exponentially.

But what do these graphs really mean?  Well, before I have a go at evaluating the driver’s total performance (that will be the next post), I thought this would be the last piece in the puzzle.  I can already see how this could be a flawed way of evaluating a driver performance though – it takes no account of car performance, which as we have seen in races this year, can vary over the course of a race or even over a stint.

Indeed, I have noticed this fact when comparing drivers for certain posts I have written, such as this graph for a post about Badoer or this one for a post about Hamilton Vs. Barrichello.  You can see on these graphs that even consistent drivers don’t hit their laps spot on every time, and there are so many different variables at work here that we cannot expect that.

I guess what we cannot see on this data is whether the driver was giving 100% or not.  That is a place where the numbers simply cannot go.  But it’s fun to speculate, so please do so in the comments…

P.S. – I plan to do a ranking of all the drivers based on a weighted scoring system – If you have any ideas on what percentages I should use, please leave a comment.  The categories will be those used to review the drivers, which were:

1. Average Finishing Position
2. Qualifying Performance
3. Fastest Laps
4. Driver Consistency (This Post)

I thought of doing 50-25-5-20.  Let me know what numbers you would use and I will try and include them

Now, this blog is primarily a statistics blog about F1, but sometimes I see stuff that is slightly off-topic and yet I feel I have to write about it and offer an opinion or two.

Today is such a day.

To much fanfare, AUTOSPORT have launched a new service called the ‘Castrol Driver Rankings’, which are apparently the definitive method of measuring who is the number one driver by using weighted rankings over some 47 series.

It sounds like a horrendously complicated system, but the way it seems to work is that various aspects of a driver’s performance in the races they participates in are scored and then a weighting is applied according to how prestigious the series is. If you would like to know more then check out their FAQ or watch this video:

If you guys like F1 News and Podcasts… well you won’t find them on this blog

However, my good friends over at Sidepodcast make some fantastic podcasts and also do F1 Minute – a great daily podcast made by Christine that talks about the best F1 news of the day – in just one minute

Sadly, because I am using the free version of WordPress, I cannot embed the F1 Minute player in the blog.  However, they have just started producing video versions of their podcast:

Over Christmas, we’ve been working on the idea of F1 Minute video. Similar to the minute’s worth of audio content you get every day, the video brings an added visual element to proceedings. We’re running a bit behind, because creating brand new video shows is not easy, but the first show is up and available for you to view now.

More info can be found on the new F1 Minute blog.  In the meantime, why not enjoy the first ever F1 Minute video right here?

Pretty cool eh?  I don’t know about you, but I like this idea very much and I think Christine and Mr. C. are going to make some very good videos

So far we have looked at Finishing Positions and Qualifying Performance, now it is time to look at Fastest Lap Performance.  But why do we want to focus on this when it seems to have no effect on the races or the championship?

Well, you have to be a fast driver to be a good driver, and in fact this speed is most useful on inlaps/outlaps when making pitstops.  So I decided to look at the absolute speed and rank them for each race just like I have in my previous posts.  Here are the results:

So Button ends up the fastest, but interestingly Webber pips Vettel and Barrichello into second place.  Rosberg is in fifth, and Raikkonen is faster than Massa.  Hamilton is comparatively low down the order, which surprised me, and Glock beat Trulli.  This is interesting because Trulli is known for his speed rather than his consistency.  There seems to be a larger gap between drivers in terms of fastest lap speeds over the other categories…

Fisichella’s outright speed is faster in a Ferrari and Badoer is made to look better by the fact that although he was slowest in both races he took part in, there were a lot of retirements in Spa.

Finally, a continuing theme through all of the Driver Data posts is that no rookie has beaten the guy that replaced him.

So, whilst this may not have too much meaning in the scope of driver performance, we have seen some interesting results here.  There is only one more category to evaluate now and that is Driver Consistency, which will be posted here soon.  Finally, I will be looking at a ‘weighted scoring’ method using all of categories evaluated in this series, so if you have any ideas on what the weightings should be, please let me know in the comments…

This post is the next post in the series reviewing the 2009 F1 Season from the Drivers’ perspective.  The first post was on Driver Classification and can be found here.  This time, we shall look at qualifying performance.

Average Qualifying Position

As per last time, I have made an average of each driver’s qualifying positions for the races in 2009 that they took part in.  The field has been split into two parts for ease of reading.  Here are the graphs, which if you click on them a larger version will open in a new window:

This post is the second in a series of posts designed to review the 2009 F1 Season by analysing the data from the races.  The first was on Fuel Usage Data for the engines and can be found here.  Originally I had planned to review all the driver data in one post, however I realised quite quickly that if I wanted to include all of the data then the post would be too long!

Therefore I have decided to split the posts into byte sized chunks of analyses for ease of reading – which I hope the lovely and learned readers of this blog agree is the right thing to do

The first category I want to look at is Driver Classification – where the driver finished in a Grand Prix.  Rather than just look at average points scored, I thought it would be better to look at the average finishing position as it shows consistency in a better way.  I will also include average points scored graphs for comparison at the end.

Average Finishing Positions

So let us start by looking at the average finishing positions.  I have split the field into two for ease of viewing.  Here are the graphs:

Dear all readers of this blog,

Thank you so much for you readership and support in 2009 – your comments and ideas are what keeps this blog fresh and what keeps me making these posts.  I have really enjoyed working on this blog all year and it is a real pleasure to see what people are saying about it.  I am looking forward to new ideas and new partnerships in 2010 (more later) which should keep this blog entertaining and relevant.

I sincerely hope you have a wonderful Christmas Holiday period and that you get to enjoy the time spent with your friends and family.  I shall continue to work on my 2009 review posts in between Eating, Drinking and being Merry, so keep an eye out for that as I am sure you will like what you see.

Finally, I thought I’d link to one of my favourite Christmas songs – yeah I know it’s cheesy Xmas pop but you gotta love Slade.  The sillyness of the song matches my attitude and how I feel  about Christmas.

So have fun, and see you soon when I post again.

Cheers,

Gavin

Quite a while ago I analysed the fuel consumption in the races over the season so far to see whether the fuel consumption figures quoted by the F1 Yearbook were correct.  At the time, I found that the F1 Yearbook figures were overestimating the stint lengths by about one lap on average.

So, now it’s time to revisit these figures.  This post forms the first of a series of posts reviewing the 2009 season with the other posts on teams and drivers – hopefully I will find the time to write them all before the 2010 season begins

As a bit of background on the calculations, please click this link.  If you trust my numbers however, read on!

To eliminate erroneous data, all stints shorter than expected by more than three laps were removed because when I looked at the data, this seemed to be where most of the stops happened.  Anything more than three laps short was deemed to be a strategic stop or a repair stop and was removed from the data.  In addition, any race that was wet or had a safety car before the first pit stop was not considered as wet races lower fuel consumption and safety cars usually force drivers to pit early.

However, even with a clean dataset, when we align the predicted stints with the actual ones from the races, there seems to be a difference, as shown by the graph below:

This graph shows the average figure calculated from all the data collected vs. the F1 yearbook data.

It’s my turn to choose the topic for this week’s ‘Thursday Thoughts’ question – a blog series started by Sidepodcast and I chose to ask “What do you want to get F1 for Christmas and why?”

The reason I asked this is because I think Christmas is a time of giving and sharing – and with such a rollercoaster year in the sport, I think there are a few people in F1 that could do with some Christmas cheer

So, it’s my turn to choose the topic for this week’s ‘Thursday Thoughts’ question – a blog series started by Sidepodcast.

I thought long and hard about this week’s question and I have decided to go with a rather seasonal topic. You see, it’s Christmas, and this is the time of year which is all about giving and receiving. So my question for your Thursday Thoughts is:

What do you want to get F1 for Christmas and why?

Now, I’m gonna leave this as open as possible here – you can give your ‘gift’ to anyone in F1 – it could be:

• A driver
• A team member
• Any other F1 personality
• A team
• A location
• A blogger or a website/service
• Heck, even the whole sport if you want!

So have a think, get writing and let me know what you think – you can post a comment here, link to your blog or maybe even comment on Sidepodcast if you ask Christine nicely

I will write a post tomorrow night too – look out for that and I can’t wait to hear from you all

Update: And here it is – enjoy

http://f1numbers.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/thursday-thoughts-what-f1-needs-for-christmas/