F1 Fanatic

As a part of my final year of High School next year I need to research a topic of our choice. This is a compulsory part of my Yr 12 certificate and I must complete:

- A Proposal outlining what I want to research and how I will go about it.
- A journal keeping track of my findings
- A research outcome summing up my findings
- An evaluation of my research and my findings.

While next year may seem ages away, we need to choose our topic and complete our Proposal by the middle of September which isn’t that far away.

As an F1 Fanatic I’m wanting for my research topic to be related to motorsport. So far I’ve come up with a few possible ideas:

- What impact does watching motorsport have on young drivers?
- How would one go about getting a job with a Formula One team?

And that is where my ideas run out..

Does anyone have any other ideas? Even just broad suggestions of topics. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thankyou :)

Nah I’m in Adelaide, Australia :)

If anyone is bored and wants a bit of ‘light’ reading, checkout the South Australin Certificate of Educations website. It has all the ins and outs of what we must do..

http://www.sace.sa.edu.au/subjects/stage-2/cross-disciplinary/research-project

Team Orders could be interesting. What aspects of them did you talk about?

If you want something topical, why not something about F1 moving to Sky? You could talk about other sports and how they’ve moved to F1, and perhaps the demographics that watch Sky and follow F1 etc.

@Jonny: That sounds like a very interesting essay, it certainly wouldn’t have been hard to fill the word limit on such a topic! What was your conclusion, for or against?

i agree with ed24f1, the sky deal is recent and i imagine there will be plenty to write about and many opinions as well as stats to go with it, good luck!

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

While the Sky deal is current and topical it doesn’t really affect me as our broadcaster will (as far as I am aware) be taking the feed from Sky.

I quite like f1paddocks suggestion about how safety has improved over the years but then I also like jonny’s suggestion about team orders.

I’ll have a chat to my teacher tomorrow and see what she thinks of the topic ideas.

Any more suggestions will be greatly appreciated! :)

@Doance: PLP is a MASSIVE waste of time. I completely agree with you on that one. You failed your Research Project? What topic did you do?

As of today I have decided on a topic;
How does the layout of a Formula One circuit impact on the amount of overtaking?

I plan on analysing the number of overtakes from a variety of GP’s and then analysing the layouts of these circuits to see if there are common characteristics that the circuits with high levels of overtaking all have. I will most likely ignore GP’s where the race or qualifying where rain affected.

I then plan on comparing the 2009 and 2010 Bahrain Grand Prix’s to see what impact the circuit extension in 2010 had on the number of overtakes during the race.

As for obtaining the overtaking and circuit data, I was thinking of contacting the FIA and asking them as one would assume they would have this data available. Would they be the best place to ask? Or would there be better sources of information that I could contact?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)

http://cliptheapex.com is a good source for overtaking statistics & analysis. As far as I know it is sometimes quoted even by such magazines as F1 Racing.