Lap times for the 2015 F1 Austrian Grand Prix

The race started with an accident between Kimi and Fernando exiting turn 2. Although the McLaren mounted the Ferrari and passed by at inches from Raikkonen’s head, neither driver was harmed. This called the Safety Car out; by then Rosberg was leading the race, a position he only surrendered for a lap during his single pit stop. There wasn’t much Hamilton could do to win back the lead. The race pace of the two Mercedes is very similar, plus Hamilton carried a 5s penalty for crossing the white line on the pit exit.

Despite the penalty, Lewis had enough advantage over Massa’s Williams, the third classified. The Brazilian climbed to the podium after Vettel’s pit stop was delayed due to problems with the rear right wheel nut. Ferrari’s pace was clearly superior, but not enough to overtake the Williams on track.

Valtteri Bottas got his Williams home fifth against Hulkenberg, who had to resign himself with sixth. Seventh developed into a tooth-and-nail fight between Maldonado and Verstappen in favour of the Venezuelan. Maldonado scared the hell out of Verstappen at the main straight forcing Max’s mistake at turn one just a couple laps before the end of the race. By then, Verstappen was already struggling as his softs began to lose their edge.

Daniel Ricciardo went late pit stop on lap 50 to get a set of supersofts and climb back into the points getting very close to Sergio Perez. A great result for Red Bull, as both cars had been penalized for using a fifth power unit element, forcing them to start from the back of the grid.

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

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