This work displays a representative race lap time distribution comparison for the top 5 finishes in the 2020 Emilia-Romagna GP. In having to present this data some “outliers” have to be taken off from the raw lap times that are recorded. A data treatment process was first used and then the filtered data is plotted as shown in the ridgeline plots below.
Outliers in this context are laps that are vastly different from the average lap time per individual driver. These include but are not limited to the 1st lap, safety car laps, laps going into and out of pit stops, etc. While generally the higher variance is limited to these factors, there also is a possibility driver/car errors resulting in longer lap times. To best accommodate these outliers, I’ve used a modified IQR (Interquartile Range) method based off the average lap time (50th percentile) of each driver. For the upper outlier cutoff limit, I’ve used the a 1.7*IQR scaling (IQR being the difference between the 25th and 75th percentile) as opposed to the standard 1.5 equal factor to possibly include any naturally slow laps without skewing the data too much. The number of outliers are marked in the notes of each plot along with the IQR scale used to obtain the current filtered data. As for fast laps (lower time limit), no such cutoff limit was set (cutoff set to be large enough to include all fast laps) as this would practically be improbable. This takes to the fact that a fast lap, however much faster than the mean lap time, cannot be discarded form the representative data as such data would indicate a significantly better lap from a driver. IQR method has been briefly summarized in Figure 1 for clarity in data selection.
While it's clear from the data that the Mercedes due are clearly ahead of the others in stringing together faster laps more consistently, we also see Hamilton having a better performance in comparison to Bottas. Bottas is seen to have achieved a lower standard deviation in this lap times with a tighter grouping but this doesn't help him in that his teammate even with a larger stdev has a similar effort at faster laps. Hamilton also has a progressively better multiple one-off fastest lap attempts which he held for himself by the end of the race. The damage (Ferrari wing stuck on Bottas' car) probably restricted Bottas from extracting any more performance from his car. Based on the data, Kvyat and Leclerc seem to have had a very close lap speed distribution amongst themselves.
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