It’s the start of the Formula One season. Lots of races for sports fans to enjoy, lots of potential data stories for those who like to viz out the F1 seasons. Such good data to play with.
So began the season and a comment I read from a driver about how “the cars are getting closer and closer in terms of time” stuck with me. After the qualifying session, I checked. And indeed, every car is inside a 2 second gap from pole position to the last. Pretty short times if you check out the link.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/2023/bahrain-grand-prix/results/qualifying
But what does that look like? So I though to plot it, use that length thing people are so good at to see if the gaps can been seen/understood better. Be fun, be easy since not much data and Tableau makes a Gantt chart well. Ohhhh was I wrong.
Seems that date functions in Google sheets, Tableau and others don’t handle microseconds well. Seconds yes, microseconds no. So some searching later, some other comments how bad its handled and I’m of with math. Ended up converting the time to numbers to handle the microseconds – so multiplied the seconds element by 1000 and worked with numbers, keeping in mind that the 1000, 2000 marks meant it was a new second. So math done, time to see it.
Got a reasonable view out in the end. The length shows the top 10 mostly grouped up together, some very very close drivers in terms of time, the inevitable large gap to Max Verstappen and clusters for the other two qualifying sessions. Added the previous year as well (same need to manually crunch, took less time since I know what to do) and you can see on the same track, for 20 drivers in 10 teams, they are indeed qualifying closer and closer to each other.
The remarkable thing, the whole top visual covers a span of under 2 seconds. The slowest driver in the slowest car is a less than 2 seconds slower over a lap (90 seconds plus) than the fastest. 2 seconds at nearly 200 km/hr goes by fast.
What next? Well, enjoy the F1 season. I might try to covert the time to distance to show in a different way just how close these cars are performance wise. And with lots of races, let’s hope for some interesting events in the season so each race generates some interesting data viz opportunities.
So, my tip for you. If you are going to work with short times, microseconds, be prepared to convert the minutes and seconds from time to integer numbers.
Vizology 