Some More Rally Result Chart Sketches

Some more sketches, developing / updating one of the charts I first played with last year (the stage chart and tinkering with something new.

First the stage chart – I’ve started pondering a couple of things with this chart to try to get the information density up a bit.

At a first attempt at updating the chart, I’ve started to look at adding additional marginal layers. In the example above:

• vertical dashed lines separate out the different legs. As soon as I get the data to hand, I think it could make sense to use something like a solid line to show service, maybe a double solid line to show *parc fermé*; I’m not sure about additionally separating the days? (They’re perhaps implied by *parc fermé*? I need to check that…)
• I added stage names *above* the chart  – this has the benefit of identifying stages that are repeated;
• stage distances are added *below* the chart. I’ve also been wondering about adding the transit distances in *between* the stages;
• driver labels – and positions – are shown to the left and the right.

As a second attempt, I started zooming in to just the stages associated with a particular leg. This encouraged me to start adding more detailed layers. These can be applied to the whole chart, but it may start to get a bit cluttered.

Here’s an example of a chart that shows three stages that make up a notional leg:

You’ll notice several additions to the chart:

• the labels to the left identify the driver associated with each line. The number is currently the overall position of the driver at the end of the first stage in the leg, but I’m not sure if it should be the position at the end of the previous stage so it carries more information. The time is the gap to the overall leading driver at the end of the first stage;
• the labels to the right show the overall positions and gap to overall leader at the end of the leg. The position label is in bold font if the driver position has improved over the leg (a switch lets you select whether this is a class rank improvement or an overall position improvement). Thinking about it, I could use italics for class improvement and bold for overall improvement to carry both pieces of information in the same label. The position is actually redundant (you can count…) so maybe it’d make more sense to give a position delta from the start of the leg (that is, the position at the end of the stage prior to the first stage shown in the current leg). The time delta is given in bold if it is better than at the start of the leg.
• the red dots depict that the gap to the overall leader had *increased* for a driver by the end of the stage compared to the end of the previous stage. So a red dot means the car is further behind the leader at the end of the stage than they were at the end of the previous stage; this indicator could be rebased to show deltas between a target (“hero”) car and the other cars on the stage. The green dot shows that the time to the leader did not increase;
• the grey labels at the top are a running count of the number of “wins in a row” a driver has had. There are options to choose other running counts (eg stage wins so far), and flags available for colouring things like “took lead”, “retained lead”, “lost lead”.

As well as the stage chart, I started wondering about an “ultimate stage report” for each stage, showing the delta between each driver and the best time achieved in a sector (that is, the time spent between two splits).

Here’s what I came up with at a first attempt. Time delta is on the bottom. The lower level grey bar indicates the time a driver lost relative to the “ultimate” stage. (The bar maxes out at the upper limit of the chart to indicate “more than” – I maybe need to indicate this visually eg with a dashed / broken line at the end of a maxed out bar.)

Within each driver area is a series of lollipop style charts. These indicate the gap between a driver and the best time achieved on the sector (first sector at the top of the group, last at the bottom). The driver label indicates the driver who achieved the best sector time. This chart could be rebased to show other gaps, but I need to think about that… The labels are coloured to indicate sector, and transparent to cope with some of the overlapping issues.

It’s also possible to plot this chart using a log scale:

This makes it easier to see the small gaps, as well as giving a far range on the delta. However, the log scale is harder to read for folk not familiar with them. It might be handy to put in a vertical dashed line for each power of 10 time (so a dashed line at 1s and 10s; the limit is 100s). It might also make sense to add a label to the right of the total delta bar to show what the actual delta time is.

So… tinkering… I was hoping to start to pull all the chart types I’ve been playing with together in a Leanpub book, but Leanpub is not free to play anymore unless you have generated over $10k of royalties (which I haven’t…). I’ve started looking at gitbook, but that’s new to me so I need to spend some time getting a feel for how to use it and to come up with a workflow /toolchain around it.