F1 2011 Monaco Race - How to Drive the Circuit

Following on from F1 2011 Monaco Race - Hamilton's "G-Force" Experience, where I used a capture of the Mclaren F1 live streamed telemetry data to show some basic charts capturing Hamilton;s view of the race, I thought it might be worthwhile seeing what sorts of chart might help us get a feel for the race from the circuit's perspective.

Ideally, this would be based on the use of GPS data, but that was a bit ropey from Monaco so we'll have to settle with an abstraction of the circuit - the distance round the track (the sLap telemtry measure), and see what we can learn from that.

To put things in a bit of perspective, here's a review of the circuit map, as taken from the FIA presspack for the race:

So - how does a tour of the circuit look when we "linearise" it?


The brake force versus the distance round the track:



The brake force versus the distance round the track, coloured by gear:



The throttle versus distance round the track:



The throttle versus the distance round the track, coloured by gear:



How does all this translate in to speed? Here's the car speed round the circuit?



And the speed coloured by gear:



To what extent might we be able to identify the corners form a comparison of the lateral and longitudinal "g-forces"? Here' gLat as we go round the circuit:



And gLong:



Is there anything of interest in the gLat plot, as coloured by gear?



To what extent might we be able to get a better understanding of how the drivers handle a particular corner? Let's consider turn 1...

First, the brake force:



And the throttle:



We can also plot these on the same chart:



The longitudinal "g-force" (to show baking and acceleration):



And the lateral "g-force" to show the car being flung round the corner:



Here's how fact the car was traveling round corner 1:



And the speed round the corner as coloured by gear:



So - that's a range of charts that are available. Which do you like (and why?) And what sort of commentary might be useful around them?

PS plots are generated using R and commands of the form:
plot(rThrottlePedal|pBrakeF~sLap,data=subset(HAMfull_mco_2011),main="F1 2011 Monaco - HAM Telemetry",col=NGear,xlim=c(0,500))
legend("right",c("1","2","3","4","5","6","7"),col=1:7,pch=1)

For the overplot (multiple data sets on the same chart, e.g. throttle and brake), use a recipe of the form:

plot(rThrottlePedal~sLap,data=subset(HAMfull_mco_2011),main="F1 2011 Monaco - HAM Telemetry",xlim=c(0,500),pch=3)
points(pBrakeF~sLap,data=subset(HAMfull_mco_2011),xlim=c(0,500),pch=2)
legend("right",c("Throttle","Brake"),pch=3:2)

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Telemtry data is grabbed from the McLaren F1 Live Dashboard during the race and is Copyright (©) McLaren Marketing Ltd 2011 (I think? Or possibly Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 2011(?)). Last year, I think that speed, throttle and brake data were sponsored by Vodafone; I'm not sure how it stands this year.
As ever, thanks to @bencc for grabbing the data.