A First Attempt at Looking at F1 Timing Data in Google Motion Charts (aka “Gapminder”)

Having managed to get F1 timing data data through my cobbled together F1 timing data Scraperwiki, it becomes much easier to try out different visualisation approaches that can be used to review the stories that sometimes get hidden in the heat of the race (that data journalism trick of using visualisation as an analytic tool for story discovery, for example).

Whilst I was on holiday, reading a chapter in Beautiful Visualization on Gapminder/Trendalyser/Google Motion Charts (it seems the animations may be effective when narrated, as when Hans Rosling performs with them, but for the uninitiated, they can simply be confusing…), it struck me that I should be able to view some of the timing data in the motion chart…

So here’s a first attempt (going against the previously identified “works best with narration” bit of best practice;-) – F1 timing data (China 2011) in Google Motion Charts, the video:

Visualising the China 2011 F1 Grand Prix in Google Motion Charts

If you want to play with the chart itself, you can find it here: F1 timing data (China 2011) Google Motion Chart.

The (useful) dimensions are:

• lap – the lap number;
• pos – the car/racing number of each driver;
• trackPos – the position in the race (the racing position);
• currTrackPos – the position on the track (so if a lapped car is between the leader and second place car, their respective currtrackpos are 1, 2, 3);
• pitHistory – the number of pit stops to date

The timeToLead, timeToFront and timeToBack measures give the time (in seconds) between each car and the leader, the time to the car in the racing position ahead, and the time to the car in racing position behind (these last two datasets are incomplete at the moment… I still need to calculate this missing datapoints…). The elapsedTime is the elapsed racetime for each car at the end of each measured lap.

The time starts at 1900 because of a quirk in Google Motion Charts – they only work properly for times measured in years, months and days (or years and quarters) for 1900 onwards. (You can use years less than 1900 but at 1899 bad things might happen!) This means that I can simply use the elapsed time as the timebase. So until such a time as the chart supports date:time or :time as well as date: stamps, my fix is simply to use an integer timecount (the elapsed time in seconds) + 1900.