Lap times for the 2014 F1 United States Grand Prix

With only two races left to call an end to the season, Lewis Hamilton scored his 10th victory of the season —ahead of team mate Nico Rosberg— extending his lead in the world championship to 24 points. With this victory, Hamilton becomes tied on race wins with Fernando Alonso which is fighting helplessly this season to score as many points as he can for the team.

The final podium position was for Daniel Ricciardo, who has been outperforming his team mate Sebastian Vettel the whole season. Felipe Massa was fourth after, ahead of team mate Valtteri Bottas, who was ahead at the grid. Behind them, Fernando Alonso managed to keep sixth place struggling against Jenson Button and Sebastian Vettel. A Sebastian Vettel who —despite a tyre change scarcely 10 laps towards the end of the race that was to leave him off the points— was closing on Alonso when the flag fell.

Button eventually faded leaving only Magnussen to claim points for McLaren. Behind him, Jean-Eric Vergne made some risky manoeuvres which were offset by a place in the points. Pastor Maldonado took advantage in the frenetic battle by overtaking Vergne on the final lap —both drivers were handed a five-second penalty for pit-lane speeding and —. The other Frenchman, Romain Grosjean, was caught by surprise and finished in a frustrating 11th position.

Another driver who missed the points was Adrian Sutil. After a fantastic qualifying, he was harpooned by Sergio Pérez’s Force India on the first lap bringing out the safety car. The Mexican was handed a seven place grid penalty for Brazil due to the incident.

Following, I provide some plots so you may draw your own conclusions.

Contents

Average pace

This plot shows the difference to the average pace of the race winner. That is, the difference to the average lap time, including pit stops.

The steeper the curve, the faster the lap; and as the curves are generated from cumulative sums of lap times, a negative slope implies a lap time which is quicker that the average.

Position

This one is straightforward; it shows the position of the driver each lap.

Lap time statistics

This is a box-and-whiskers plot. It depicts each driver’s laps through their quartiles. The whiskers represent the lowest datum still within 1.5 IQR of the lower quartile, and the highest datum still within 1.5 IQR of the upper quartile. Suspected outliers are more than 1.5 IQR but less than 3 IQR above Q3 or below Q1 and are represented by an open circle. Anything 3 IQR above Q3 or below Q1 is represented by a filled circle.

Driver championship points

This plot lets us see a drivers progress during the season in terms of points towards the championship. Both Hamilton and Rosberg are alarmingly increasing their gap with the rest of the drivers.

Team championship points

This plot shows us the teams’s progress during the season in terms of points towards the championship. Mercedes is a large step ahead of the rest.

Finish status

Here we have a bar chart showing each drivers finish status, i.e., whether the car finished the race or what was the cause of the retirement.

Source: Ergast Developer API

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