F1 2011 Review - Ultimate Qualifying Deltas

Given the fastest sector times for each driver during qualifying, we can calculate the "ultimate" lap time for each driver as the sum of their fastest sector times. If we then find the difference between this notional ultimate lap time and the fastest qualifying lap time recorded by for each driver, we can get an impression of how close to the limit each driver was performing during qualifying.



Here's the code:

require(RCurl)
require(plyr)
require(ggplot2)

#This is a hack - is there a better way?
nullmin=function(d) {if (is.finite(min(d,na.rm=T))) return(min(d,na.rm=T)) else return(NA)}

gsqAPI = function(key,query,gid=0){ return( read.csv( paste( sep="",'http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?', 'tqx=out:csv','&tq=', curlEscape(query), '&key=', key, '&gid=', curlEscape(gid) ), na.strings = "null" ) ) }

key='0AmbQbL4Lrd61dEd0S1FqN2tDbTlnX0o4STFkNkc0NGc'

###Calculating how far off ultimate pace each driver is
#Calculate the ultimate laptime
qualiSectors2011=gsqAPI(key,'select *',5)
ultimateQualiLap=ddply(.variables=c("race","driverName"),.data=qualiSectors2011,.fun= function(d) data.frame(d,ultimate=sum(d$sectortime)))
#Calculate fastest qualifying time for each driver
qdata=gsqAPI(key,"select *",4)
minq=ddply(.variables=c("race","team","driverName"),.data=qdata,.fun= function(d) data.frame(minqt=nullmin(min(d$q1time,d$q2time,d$q3time,na.rm=T))))
#Find the fastest overall qualifying time for each race
minq=ddply(.variables=c("race"),.data=minq,.fun= function(d) data.frame(d,qualimin=nullmin(d$minqt)))
qualiData=unique(merge(minq,ultimateQualiLap,by=c("race","driverName")))
#Order the teams
qualiData$team=factor(qualiData$team,levels=c("RBR-Renault","McLaren-Mercedes","Ferrari","Mercedes","Renault","Force India-Mercedes","Sauber-Ferrari","STR-Ferrari","Williams-Cosworth","Lotus-Renault","HRT-Cosworth","Virgin-Cosworth"),ordered=T)
#Order the levels in the race factor in terms of calendar order
qualiData$race=factor(qualiData$race,levels=c("AUSTRALIA","MALAYSIA","CHINA","TURKEY","SPAIN","MONACO","CANADA","EUROPE","GREAT BRITAIN","GERMANY","HUNGARY","BELGIUM","ITALY","SINGAPORE","JAPAN","KOREA","INDIA","ABU DHABI","BRAZIL"),ordered=T)


ggplot(subset(qualiData))+geom_bar( stat = "identity",position="dodge",aes(x=race,y=ultimate-minqt,group=driverName,fill=factor(ifelse(driverNum>13,1+(1+driverNum)%%2,1+driverNum%%2))), se=FALSE)+opts(title="F1 2011 Qualifying - Personal Ultimate Lap Delta",axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=-90))+xlab(NULL)+ylab("Fastest lap time vs ultimate lap delta (s)")+scale_fill_manual(name="Driver Order",values = c("red","blue"))+ facet_wrap(~team)