Lap times for the 2015 F1 Chinese Grand Prix

Hamilton was in full control of the race by the time the safety car was deployed on lap 54 given Max Verstappen’s smoky halt on the pit straight. Mercedes was dominant the whole race with Ferrari closing the gap this season with three consecutive podium finishes.

Massa and Bottas finished right behind Ferrari without offering any challenge to the Scuderia. This also reflects the Constructor’s Championship where Mercedes leads with 119 points to Ferrari’s 79 and Williams’s 48.

Next comes Grosjean who secured P7, giving Lotus their first points of the season. Maldonado could not contribute anything to the team as he yet again had to retire after an incident with Button. An opportunity that Alonso would take to slip through and claim 13th before Verstappen’s retirement.

With Verstappen’s retirement Nasr took his place and his team mate Marcus Ericcson was promoted to the points also scoring for Sauber. In between, Daniel Ricciardo, who managed to grab some points for Red Bull after a horrendous start.

Also a not so good start of the race for Carlos Sainz who dropped several positions after spinning at Turn 1 on the second lap. Later on, gearbox problems slowed him. He was able to finish 14th far ahead of the both Marussias. Will Stevens 15th and Roberto Merhi 16th finished the race two laps down.

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