Lap times for the 2015 F1 Australian Grand Prix

It’s been a really long time since my last update in this blog, and what better way to start blogging this year than with the lap times of the 2015 Formula One’s inaugural race in Melbourne?

There were some nice surprises this year such as Sauber securing a nice number of points this season after a disastrous 2014, with P5 for Nasr and P8 for Ericsson. Also, Carlos Sainz made the best début for a Spanish driver by finishing in P9, although he had the pace for P7.

Others did not start the season well. The most dramatic, McLaren on their worst qualifying since the 1983 Monaco Grand Prix. Manor did not participate in qualifying nor practice, and Lotus had no car on track after the first lap; Pastor Maldonado crashed out on the first lap and Grosjean suffered a power loss on the formation lap and had to pull out.

Mercedes. Nothing new. They started the season from where they left off, with unchallenged supremacy. Hamilton and Rosberg’s fastest laps were about 0.5s faster that Ferrari’s Vettel and Raikkönen’s fastest laps.

Following, I provide some 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.

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.

Source: Ergast Developer API

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