- 15 Oct 12, 23:07#327498
I developed a quantitative measure that captures the extent to which the Top 8 drivers transform qualifying results into good race results.
The measure is fairly complicated since it is designed to measure the relative difficulty of transforming one qualifying result into a good race result.
For example, moving from 10th to 9th counts for a lot less than moving from 2nd to 1st. In fact, moving from 2nd to 1st wins you 5 times as many points as moving from 10th to 9th.
And moving from 2nd to 1st wins you 10 times as many points as moving from 20th to 19th.
The idea behind this is that for the top cars it shouldn't be that difficult to overtake the lower-tier cars in midfield so the measure shouldn't reward them for qualifying 15th, beating the Toro Rossos and finishing 12th as much as it rewards them for finishing 3rd, beating a top competitor and finishing 1st.
But there is another caveat:
Since driving at the sharp end of the grid usually = cleaner air and fewer backmarkers to work through, losing one of the Top 3 positions should be heavily penalized.
In fact, my measure penalizes losing pole position the most. If you are in pole and you finish 10th you lose 9 times as many points as you would lose if you started 10th and finished 20th.
Another reason for this is that if you have the car on pole, it should be fast enough to get a good race result. If you fail to get a fast car to get you a good race result you should be heavily penalized. I designed the measure to capture this intuition.
With all that in mind, here is a ranking of the top drivers in terms of how well they did in producing good race results out of their qualifying results through the 1st 10 races of the year:
1. Fernando Alonso
2. Mark Webber
3. Kimi Raikkonen
4. Nico Rosberg
5. Jenson Button
6. Romain Grosjean
7. Seb Vettel (very heavily penalized for failing to score points from pole in 1 race)
8. Lewis Hamilton (heavily penalized for losing 1st from pole position twice and failing to score points from 2nd once)
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I think this is very telling. In the 1st 10 races McLaren really screwed Hamilton up. There were two races in which he fell from pole and one in which he fell from 2nd all the way to 8th. These results are heavily penalized.
Same for Vettel. His score is particularly low after he retired from pole in one of the races. Such a result really wrecks your ranking according to my measure.
I think that's sensible since it's as bad as it gets- you had the car to get it on pole, you had the clean air at the start and you failed to even score a point- massive hit there.
On the flip side, Alonso and Ferrari nailed it. They worked their way up during the races and made very few errors.
I think this is pretty much the story of the 1st half of the season: awesome race performances by Ferrari despite a slow car/poor qualifying, while McLaren failed to capitalize on their remarkable pace early on.
The measure shows exactly this.
The measure is fairly complicated since it is designed to measure the relative difficulty of transforming one qualifying result into a good race result.
For example, moving from 10th to 9th counts for a lot less than moving from 2nd to 1st. In fact, moving from 2nd to 1st wins you 5 times as many points as moving from 10th to 9th.
And moving from 2nd to 1st wins you 10 times as many points as moving from 20th to 19th.
The idea behind this is that for the top cars it shouldn't be that difficult to overtake the lower-tier cars in midfield so the measure shouldn't reward them for qualifying 15th, beating the Toro Rossos and finishing 12th as much as it rewards them for finishing 3rd, beating a top competitor and finishing 1st.
But there is another caveat:
Since driving at the sharp end of the grid usually = cleaner air and fewer backmarkers to work through, losing one of the Top 3 positions should be heavily penalized.
In fact, my measure penalizes losing pole position the most. If you are in pole and you finish 10th you lose 9 times as many points as you would lose if you started 10th and finished 20th.
Another reason for this is that if you have the car on pole, it should be fast enough to get a good race result. If you fail to get a fast car to get you a good race result you should be heavily penalized. I designed the measure to capture this intuition.
With all that in mind, here is a ranking of the top drivers in terms of how well they did in producing good race results out of their qualifying results through the 1st 10 races of the year:
1. Fernando Alonso
2. Mark Webber
3. Kimi Raikkonen
4. Nico Rosberg
5. Jenson Button
6. Romain Grosjean
7. Seb Vettel (very heavily penalized for failing to score points from pole in 1 race)
8. Lewis Hamilton (heavily penalized for losing 1st from pole position twice and failing to score points from 2nd once)
------------------------------------
I think this is very telling. In the 1st 10 races McLaren really screwed Hamilton up. There were two races in which he fell from pole and one in which he fell from 2nd all the way to 8th. These results are heavily penalized.
Same for Vettel. His score is particularly low after he retired from pole in one of the races. Such a result really wrecks your ranking according to my measure.
I think that's sensible since it's as bad as it gets- you had the car to get it on pole, you had the clean air at the start and you failed to even score a point- massive hit there.
On the flip side, Alonso and Ferrari nailed it. They worked their way up during the races and made very few errors.
I think this is pretty much the story of the 1st half of the season: awesome race performances by Ferrari despite a slow car/poor qualifying, while McLaren failed to capitalize on their remarkable pace early on.
The measure shows exactly this.
