The 'normalised' 2011 F1 Results

by The Badger on Sep 5th, 2011

Last week we invited fans to write in with their views for our weekly debate column "The Scrutineering Bay" and one of the published pieces, from Stewart Addison (@sxa555 on Twitter) talked about 'normalised' F1 results.  This intrigued us, so we quizzed him a little further on this concept and it turns out he's produced some impressive stats and charts.

For 2011 so far, here's how the actual results compare to the 'normalised' results - read on below for an explanation of how this works...

2011 Results So Far...

2011 Normalised Results so Far

Stewart's Maths explanation:

In terms of the calculation, after each race the leading driver is always ranked as 100 (as in 100%) and the other drivers points are plotted relative to that, so for example if Vettel has 135 points, Hamilton 90, Alonso 70 then They would get scaled to 100, so Vettel would have 100%, Hamilton 67%, Alonso 51%.

After each race each driver gets a new value based on the leader. This year's chart isn't as exciting as previous seasons because Vettel's always been leading. Although it does show in a fairly clear way that no one driver had got over 60% of Vettel's points since the first few races - i.e. despite him not having won a few before Spa he's still keeping the same relative level of advantage because no other driver is consistently attacking. More interestingly, if you look at say, last year, it's quite different because the leader kept changing.

Stewart's F1 fan explanation:

I played around with doing this visualisation a while back and it worked quite well for getting a feel for how drivers were doing relative to each other in the season and how much work they'd all have to do. And because it's relative to the leader, a driver can go up or down depending on what happens to the drivers above him, not just based on where he finishes.

It can get a bit messy at the start of the season where the relative points can change very quickly, but I think later on in the season it's a nicer way of charting than the straight points figures, and you can see the dynamics of each drivers performance better.

The 07 one in particular really shows how desperate it must have felt for Kimi seven races in!  See the past four seasons of 'normalised' results below: