Goal

To find a better way to envisage what happens to each driver at each lap during Formula One Grand Prix car racing.

Preamble

As part of an original project which aimed to give pit engineers of V8 supercars the ability to advise the team drivers when the best time to pit, a clean way to see the progress of each driver was sought. This was then applied to F1 Grand Prix racing cars for a subsequent project, and the current analysis is the result.

Whilst this is not really classifiable as a project in it’s own right, nor as a machine learning or data science endeavour, I found it intriguing enough to share here.

Data

The data was derived from erdgast.com, where it is available either as a MySQL dump or separate csv files. It is updated shortly after each formula one race, and consists of 14 separate tables including driver statistics, lap times and pit stops amongst others.

Method

A python class file was written that contained a number of methods relating to race analysis. These included methods to list all winners, retrieve the driver names, retrieve the races won for a particular driver, retrieve the total points accumulated by a particular driver, retrieve the final race position for each driver, but most importantly a method for displaying a line chart of driver positions as they change throughout the course of a race. This last method is what we are interested in.

The chart display method utilised a mixture of the Seaborn and Matplotlib Python libraries.

Results

The resultant chart that was displayed looks like the following:

As can be seen, the chart is relatively easy to follow, with the starting order of the drivers appearing on the left (Y1) axis and the finishing order of the drivers appearing on the right (Y2) axis.

The X axis displays the lap numbers and the multiple charted lines represent the relative ordering of the drivers through the course of the race.

The ebb and flow of each drivers’ fortunes is easily discerned, especially given the strong color palette that has allowed easy differentiation between the drivers.

The lower-down the driver, the closer to the front they are.

Only the drivers who actually finished the race appear on the Y2 axis.

Note that the chart displayed above displays the results of the 2023 race run in Australia - at the Albert Park racing track.