F1 Fanatic

So, I’ve been working on something for the past two weeks. I always liked to compare drivers by how many points they scored, but it was always something hard to do and became almost completely meaningless with the points system introduced in 2010, so I thought it would be agood idea to convert all points to a single point-scoring system. This spreadsheet is the result of it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvO4ewlFHGzVdC14SVdhaGtKVjh4UlRnUHE2cF9yUWc&hl=en_US

As you can see, I plotted how many times each driver finished in each position throughout their careers, and also how many times they retired/not-classified and how many times they were disqualified from a race. After doing that, it is easy to convert the finishes into a single points system, or, more accurately, three different points systems. I decided to use the pre-2003 system (10-6-4-3-2-1), pre-2010 system (10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1) and the current one. Also calculated are points as a percentage of total available and retirement rates.

But then I figured I could calculate a few other thins besides points and retirements. In the other spreadsheets on that same file, you can find ranks on things like wins and podiums, points, points finishes, races started, retirements and races started, everything with total numbers and percentage.

I have stats on all drivers who raced at least one race between 1989 and 2011. Naturally, drivers who never started a race, such as Gary Brabham, Giovanna Amati and Perry McCarthy are not present. Current drivers are highligthed in bold.

Hopefully I’ll have all drivers included before the year is out, and then I’ll work on a teams chart. I think I’ll not put drivers who only raced in the Indianapolis 500, as for all intents and purposes, they weren’t F1 drivers. If you think I should, let me know. Also let me know what do you think of this data, how it is displayed and so on :)

I’m working on the ultimate F1 results database from 1950-present.
I use wikipedia as my main source and then tot up how many 1sts,2nds…24ths a driver has, FLs, poles, entries, starts, retirements, DNQs, DNPQs DSQs and then work out how many points they would have in todays system (FL point doesn’t count and half point races count as full points in my chart)
I’m on about 700 of 800 drivers, now around the early 90s.
But Fangio is well out ahead 16 points per entry with Schumacher at 13 having scored something like 3500 career points.
Hamilton is at about 12pts per entry with Vettel on the verge of surpassing Senna at around 11.5

One thing you guys will want to look at – points average WITH and WITHOUT retirements. With reliability better than ever before, that favors the drivers of today.

Interesting that Hamilton’s point-scoring rate is over 70%. Do you have his podium-finishing rate? Schumacher is something like over 60% (I remember it was at 67% or something similarly crazy-high at the end of 2006).

I must add, my list may have some errors even though i double checked each driver

Also i may have inconsistancies as it took so long to do, eg a Did Not Arrive or a Did Not Practise may be given as an entry for some and not for others

Inconsistancies may also lie in the early years where you had shared drives

And the 1962 german GP i think F2 cars could enter but weren’t classified, but i may have put some down as an entry as they were in the race.
Same with some drivers who raced but only 1 car in their team was eligable to score points. I count this as a normal entry and normal points

And races where half points were given i count as full points

I’d like to publish it but I’m not sure how to and i couldn’t use excel as my version only allowed like 600 columns when i needed 850 (because theres been 850+ races)

Cheers, will get it uploaded.
Its up there but how would you be able to access it?

Finally, I finished it! Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvO4ewlFHGzVdFYzQ3JablR2ekhaOFZIOFZHWjJsQXc

All 629 drivers to have started a race, plus a list of 180 drivers who are credited with taking part on a race meeting, but did not meet my criteria for making it to the list. As 91jb12 said, there are inconsistencies regarding shared drives, and in some cases it makes some painful statistics. For example, a driver named Dorino Serafini raced only one race, shared his drive Alberto Ascari, and was credited with a second place. Thus, he is the only driver to have a 100% podium rate.

So here are some notes:
-Shared drives are considered as individual results.
-Drivers who are credited with multiple results in the same race due to shared drives have only their best result counted in my list.
-Drivers who raced F2 cars in a year other than 1952 and 1953 are not counted.
-Drivers who withdrew their entries before racing in a session or were never granted a super license are not present at all – sometimes you can find these names on the internet, but not on my list.
-No Indy 500 results here. If a driver has resutls in both Indy and other World Championship events (Troy Ruttman), only the World Championship results are present here
-Drivers confirmed for 2012 are in bold.

I hope you all enjoy it!

@91jb12
I don’t know if you’re still interested in showing your chart to us, but if you’ve uploaded it to google docs, simply open it there, and in the upper right corner there must be a button that reads “share”. Click on it, select the visibility option “anyone with the link”, accept the changes and paste the link to us :)

@ph
Thank you for your tips, even though it made give up completely on doing a teams chart :P Doing the drivers chart was hard enough with it’s inconsistencies in the ’50, so trying to do that with teams, sorting and nitpicking through the results would be simply too much work.

This is, hands down, the single most-mindblowing document of F1 and/or statistics I’ve ever seen.

WOW. Well done, @Guilherme .

Paul di’Resta has the best rate of retirements (excluding one-time drivers I assume).

I didn’t realise that if Barrichello doesn’t find a drive (fingers crossed) and Schumacher has a good 2012 and stays on a year, he’ll retake the lead in most starts.

Very nice job.