Fastest Lap Stats

[Sev]

I was bored, procrastinating, and curious, so I decided to see how drivers/teams fastest laps compare to their actual point standings in the race, and one another.

Some quick calculations gave me this:

Driver                  AVG    STD
Lewis Hamilton         2.00    0.53
Fernando Alonso        2.29    1.03
Felipe Massa           3.57    2.19
Kimi Räikkönen         3.71    1.98
Nick Heidfeld          6.14    2.64
Robert Kubica          7.00    4.34
Giancarlo Fisichella   7.71    1.39
Nico Rosberg           8.57    2.56
Heikki Kovalainen      9.29    3.28
David Coulthard       10.50    2.75
Alexander Wurz        11.83    3.53
Jarno Trulli          13.43    4.30
Mark Webber           13.43    5.15
Jenson Button         13.80    2.79
Ralf Schumacher       14.00    3.27
Rubens Barrichello    14.00    0.58
Takuma Sato           15.29    2.81
Vitantonio Liuzzi     15.50    2.43
Anthony Davidson      16.29    2.49
Scott Speed           17.67    3.86
Adrian Sutil          18.17    1.95
Christijan Albers     19.57    1.50

The team order up front is definately unsurprising, although it shows the Ferrari/BMW gap as being bigger than I would otherwise imagine.

Renault comes next, followed by Williams, although here Wurz is far far closer to Rosberg than he is in qualifying.

After Williams comes Red Bull, who are the real losers when it comes to the WCC for their speed. This would be evidence of their lack of reliability.

Also interestingly for me is that Super Aguri are behind Honda, although my guess is a combination of consistency, driveability and reliablity gives them what appears to be the better car.

Hope someone finds this interesting.

* Side note: I counted Vettel's result in the US as part of Kubica's scores, since his placement was consistent (6th), and it helped keep the team's tally easy to read.

[Smurfer]

Thanks for that Sev, not really sure what it means.

On a side note, I noticed that the fastest laps for the top ten drivers was reasonably close. Now there are a million factors contributing to their lap times however wouldn't it suggest that many drivers should have been closer to the McLarens at the end of the race.

I'm guessing two of the main contributors were:

1. The McLarens look so poised so some of the other cars may have been on the ragged edge to record their fastest lap. The only argument to this point I can think of is that I'm sure Alonso was doing the best he could to beat Hamilton.

2. There were a few squabbles in the mid field which generally leads to slower lap times.

Rock on
Smurfer

[Dutton]

I guess we would need to look at the consistency of the various drivers'/teams' times.

It is always possible that a driver/team has a brief period when, for whatever reason, they run a lot quicker than normal. The truly good will consistently churn out high-end times.

Thus, over a race as a whole, the consistent quicker times of the better team will translate into a larger gap than may be apparent from qualifying/FL-list.

I was actually quite surprised about how close Ferrari managed to run to the Mclarens in the race (put another way, I was surprised at how consistently the Ferrari's were at a reasonably quick pace).