Visualising F1 Timing Sheet Data

Putting together a couple of tricks from recent posts (Visualising Vodafone Mclaren F1 Telemetry Data in Gephi and PDF Data Liberation: Formula One Press Release Timing Sheets), I thought I’d have a little play with the timing sheet data in Gephi…

The representations I have used to date are graph based, with each node corresponding a particular lap performance by a particular driver, and edges connecting consecutive laps.

**If you want to play along, you’ll need to download Gephi and this data file: F1 timing, Malaysia 2011 (NB it’s not throughly checked… glitches may have got through in the scraping process:-(**

The nodes carry the following data, as specified using the GDF format:

• name VARCHAR: the ID of each node, given as driverNumber_lapNumber (e.g. 12_43)
• label VARCHAR: the name of the driver (e.g. S. VETTEL
• driverID INT: the driver number (e.g. 7)
• driverNum VARCHAR: an ID for the driver of the lap (e.g. driver_12
• team VARCHAR: the team name (e.g. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes)
• lap INT: the lap number (e.g. 41)
• pos INT: the position at the end of the lap (e.g. 5)
• pitHistory INT: the number of pitstops to date (e.g. 2)
• pitStopThisLap DOUBLE: the duration of any pitstop this lap, else 0 (e.g. 12.321)
• laptime DOUBLE: the laptime, in seconds (e.g. 72.125)
• lapdelta DOUBLE: the difference between the current laptime and the previous laptime (e.g. 1.327)
• elapsedTime DOUBLE: the summed laptime to date (e.g. 1839.021)
• elapsedTimeHun DOUBLE: the elapsed time divided by a hundred (e.g. )

Using the geolayout with an equirectangular (presumably this means Cartesian?) layout, we can generate a range of charts simply by selecting suitable co-ordinate dimensions. For example, if we select the laptime as the y (“latitude”) co-ordinate and x (“longitude”) as the lap, filtering out the nodes with a null laptime value, we can generate a graph of the form:

We can then tweak this a little – e.g. colour the nodes by driver (using a Partition based coluring), and edges according to node, resize the nodes to show the number of pit stops to date, and then filter to compare just a couple of drivers :

This sort of lap time comparison is all very well, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us relative track positions. If we size the nodes non-linearly according to position, with a larger size for the “smaller” numerical position (so first is less than second, and hence first is sized larger than second), we can see whether the relative positions change (in this case, they don’t…)

Another sort of chart we might generate will be familiar to many race fans, with a tweak – simply plot position against lap, colour according to driver, and then size the nodes according to lap time:

Again, filtering is trivial:

If we plot the elapsed time against lap, we get a view of separations (deltas between cars are available in the media centre reports, but I haven’t used this data yet…):

In this example, lap time flows up the graph, elapsed time increases left to right. Nodes are coloured by driver, and sized according to postion. If a driver has a hight lap count and lower total elapsed time than a driver on the previous lap, then it’s lapped that car… Within a lap, we also see the separation of the various cars. (This difference should be the same as the deltas that are available via FIA press releases.)

If we zoom into a lap, we can better see the separation between cars. (Using the data I have, I’m hoping I haven’t introduced any systematic errors arising from essentially dead reckoning the deltas between cars…)

Also note that where lines between two laps cross, we have a change of position between laps.

[ADDED] Here’s another view, plotting elapsed time against itself to see where folk are on the track-as-laptime:

Okay, that’s enough from me for now.. Here’s something far more beautiful from @bencc/Ben Charlton that was built on top of the McLaren data…

First up, a 3D rendering of the lap data:

And then a rather nice lap-by-lap visualisation:

So come on F1 teams – give us some higher resolution data to play with and let’s see what we can really do… ;-)

PS I see that Joe Saward is a keen user of Lap charts…. That reminds me of an idea for an app I meant to do for race days that makes grabbing position data as cars complete a lap as simple as clicking…;-) Hmmm….

PPS for another take of visualising the timing data/timing stats, see Keith Collantine/F1Fanatic’s Malaysia summary post.