Lap times for the 2014 F1 Spanish Grand Prix

Yet another cakewalk for Mercedes… nothing new under the sun. Nonetheless, there were some minor problems during Hamilton’s first pit stop followed by some over-steer during his second stint. This ran in favour of Rosberg, who with a different tyre strategy was able to close the gap and “almost” overtake his partner during the last laps.

Alonso would’ve been able to overtake Kimi after their first pit-stop if it were not for the traffic, but an early second stop to put on hards earned the Spaniard the sixth place, just in front of the Finn. Eventually, Kimi kinda gave up and was lapped by the two Mercedes.

And good news for Red Bull, who were able to place Ricciardo back in the podium after being disqualified back in Australia and are the best non-Mercedes team in the paddock, ahead of Ferrari and even ahead of other German-engined teams. But not only a good weekend for Ricciardo, but also for Vettel who finished 4th, staring from P15 having dropped 5 positions after changing his gearbox.

Williams opted for two very different strategies, with a two-stop for Bottas and a three-stop race for Massa. The traffic faced by Felipe during the first stint proved to be decisive relegating the Brazilian out of the points.

Lotus was able to place Romain 8th and Force India brought home three valuable points, with Checo Perez ahead of Nico Hülkenberg.

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

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 and Safety Car periods.

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 is 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.

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