Tinkering with Stage Charts for WRC Rally Sweden

Picking up on some doodles I did around the Dakar 2019 rally, a quick review of a couple of chart types I’ve been tweeting today…

First up is a chart showing the evolution of the rally over the course of the first day.

This chart mixes metaphors a little…

The graphics relate directly to the driver identified by the row. The numbers are rebased relative to a particular driver (Lappi, in this case).

The first column, the stepped line chart, tracks overall position over the stages, the vertical bar chart next to it identifying the gap to the overall leader at the end of each stage (that is, how far behind the overall leader each driver is at the end of each stage). The green dot highlights that the driver was in overall lead of the rally at the end of that stage.

The SS_N_overall numbers are represent rebased overall times. So we see that at the end of SS2, MIK was 9s ahead of LAP overall, and LAP was 13.1 seconds ahead of LOE. The stagePosition stepped line shows how the driver specified by each row fared on each stage. The second vertical bar chart shows the time that driver lost compared to the stage winner; again, a green dot highlights a nominal first position, in this case stage wins. The SS_N numbers are once again rebased times, this time showing how much time the rebased driver gained (green) or lost (red) compared to the driver named on that row.

I still need to add a few channels into the stage report. The ones I have for WRC are still the basic ones without any inline charts, but the tables are a bit more normalised and I’d need to sit down and think through what I need to pull from where to best generate the appropriate rows and from them the charts…

Here’s a reminder of what a rebased single stage chart looks like: The first column is road position, the second the overall gap at the end of the previous stage. The first numeric columns are how far the rebased driver was ahead (green) or behind (red) each other driver at each split. The Overall* column is the gap at the end of the stage (I should rename this and drop the Overall* or maybe replace as Final; then overall position and overall rally time delta (i.e. the column that take on the role of Previous column in the next stage). The DN columns are the time gained/lost going between split points. This  often highlights any particularly good or bad parts of the stage.  For example, in the above example, rebased on Lappi, the first split was dreadful but then he was fastest going between splits 1 and 2, and fared well 2-3 and 3-4.