Lap times for the 2015 F1 Bahrain Grand Prix

Third win in four races for Lewis Hamilton, who extends his championship lead, while Rosberg, who started from the second row of the grid, was knocked off second position by Räikkönen in the closing stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Even though the German managed to spend most of the race in second position, overtaking several times both Ferraris, brake problems in the closing laps for both Mercedes compromised his race and could have jeopardized Hamilton’s victory. Nonetheless, Kimi’s last stint pace-wise impressive.

Vettel, who qualified in the first row of the grid, was making a fantastic race, challenging Rosberg until he ran wide damaging his front wing which required for an extra stop, sending him back a few positions. He couldn’t save the day and had to resign himself with P5, behind Bottas.

It was a difficult weekend for Bottas’s team mate, Felipe Massa. Massa had to start from the pitlane as the car struggled to fire-up. If we add up and incident involving Maldonado damaging his car and its handling, we could agree that he was lucky to grab one point for the team.

Also very lucky, Daniel Ricciardo whose Red Bull’s Renault engine blew up out of the final corner, but still able cross the line in sixth. Behind the Australian: Romain Grosjean, Sergio Perez, and Daniil Kvyat rounded out the points.

McLaren in improving race by race and had Alonso finishing eleventh at just 3.6 seconds from scoring a point. Unfortunately, Jenson Button could not take the start. Although the team promised to bring substantial improvements to the next Grand Prix in Barcelona, so we hope to see them scoring their first points of the season very soon.

Following, I provide some plots so you may draw your own conclusions. You can also compare with last year’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

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