One of the last rally charts I sketched last year was a dodged bar chart showing “sector” times within a stage for each driver, either as absolute times or rebased relative to a particular target driver. This represented an alternative to the “driver subseries” line charts e.g. as shown here.
Re: the naming of driver subseries charts – this is intended to be reminiscent of seasonal subseries charts.
The original slit time data on the WRC site looks like this:
Taking the raw sector (split) times, we can rebase the times relative to a particular driver. In this case, I have rebased relative to OGI so the sector times are as shown in the table above. The colour basis is the opposite to the basis used in the chart because I am trying to highlight to the target driver where they lost time, rather than where the others gained time. It may be that the chart makes more sense to professionals if I change the colour basis in the chart below, to use green to show that the driver made up that amount of time on the target driver).
The dodged bar charts are ordered with the first split time at the top of the set for each driver. The overall stage time is the lower bar in each driver group.
Here’s how it looks using the other colour basis:
Hmm… maybe that is better…
Note that the above charts also differs from the WRC split times results table in the ordering. The results table orders results in order of start, whereas the above charts rank relative to stage position.
To generate the “sector” times, we can find the difference between each split for a particular driver, and between the final (overall) stage time and the final split time. As before, we can then rebase these times relative to a specific target driver.
This chart shows how the target driver compared to each of the other drivers on each of the “sectors” between each split. So we see OGI dropped quite a lot of time relative to other drivers on the fourth “sector” of the stage, between splits 3 and 4. He made up time against MEE on the first and second parts of the stage.
As well as just showing the split times, we can find the total time delta between the target driver and each of the other drivers on the stage as the sum of the sector times. We can use a lower graphic layer to underplot this total beneath the dodged bars for each driver.
The grey bars show the total time gained / lost by the target driver on the stage relative to the other drivers.
In a similar way, we can also overplot the dodged bars on top of a stage progress chart, recolouring slightly.
This increases the information density of the stage progress chart even further, and provides additional “delta” signals in keeping with the deltascope inspiration / basis for that chart type.
Again, this sort of fits with the warped hydraulic model: the dodged bars can be stacked to give the length of the lighter coloured bar underneath them
(I’m not sure I’ve ordered the drivers correctly in the above chart – it was generated from two discordantly arranged datasets. The final chart will be generated from a single, consistent dataframe.)
PS it strikes me that the dodged bars need to be transparent to show a solid bar underneath that doesn’t extend as far as the dodged bars. This might need some careful colour / transparency balancing.
OUseful.Info, the blog... 