Hello welcome to this blog and today we are going to look at something we havnt looked at yet in this blog. Formula 1. I have watched F1 since 1997 and often wondered when ever they say we reviewed the data, what exactly the data they review and what process they use to review it. Now sadly I don’t have access to anything like the data F1 teams have (one day maybe!) however the main piece of data is freely available. The qualifying time. I decided I wanted to have a look at the competitive picture and now we are 4 races in that’s a decent sample size.

So to do this analysis I took each drivers fastest lap for the 4 qualifying sessions so far. I then added it all up to get each drivers qualifying time. The result plotted the below graph:

So after 4 races Vettel has the lowest total qualifying time, closely followed by Hamilton. What is clear from this is the large gap between the top 6 drivers from the top 3 teams and the rest. Also apart from Ferrari and Mercedes being mixed up every other team is 2 by 2. This is surprising considering the small gaps between teams in the midfield. The next question I had was differences between team mates as in formula 1 your main rival to beat is always your team mate.

The graph above shows the difference between each teams drivers with points at the top right smaller difference then at the bottom left. The team with the clearly the closest matched drivers are Red Bull with 0.07 seconds between them. This is good news for Ricciardo in particular who can use this information to increase his value in his contract talks. At the other end there is big pressure on Stoffel Vandoorne and Kimi Raikkonen. Both have been over a second in total behind there team mates which if it carries on could see them losing their seats.

I’m going to keep this dataset up to date as the season goes on and I have similar information for total race time. I think there’s more information you can derive by this such as whose developing their car the best. Please let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions i like to hear feedback.