Lap times for the 2014 F1 Brazilian Grand Prix

Just one race left and any of the two Mercedes’s drivers can become World Champion. Rosberg shortened Hamilton’s lead on the Championship and everything will be decided at the season finale in Abu Dhabi. It’s the fifth victory this season for Nico while Hamilton, who felt he was the quicker of the two, spun when pushing to jump ahead during the second round of pit stops.

Felipe Massa took his first podium of the season ahead of Jenson Button despite being handed a five second time penalty and pulling into McLaren’s pit box by mistake. Button had enough in hand to hold off Vettel to the flag while, just over ten seconds behind, Fernando Alonso had to fight his way past Ferrari team-mate Raikkonen in the latter stages.

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