Sunday, May 29, 2011

F1 2011 Monaco Race - Driver DNA, Hamilton and Button

Last year, I started having a play around with the telemetry data (via by Ben Charlton) that the McLaren team were publishing via a live data feed. One the things I started to explore were "driver DNA chart".

I'd completely forgotten about these until I got thwarted with the ropey GPS data from today's telemetry that meant any maps I could produce were a bit all over the place and wondered what else I could do with the data. And what came to mind was a memory of Driver DNA:



So how do you read these? Each strip is a different measure. The colour intensity increases with increasing value up to the maximum recorded value. Within each strip, time flows down the strip.

The top, blue strip shows the gear (1 to 7); the green strip shows the throttle pedal depression (0-100%), and the red strip shows the brake (0-100%). The light blue strip is a composite of the previous three strips. The whiter the pixel, the closer it is to 100% throttle in 7th gear with no braking.

The bottom two traces show the longitudinal and lateral g-force respectively. For the longitudinal trace, red shows braking – being forced into the steering wheel; green shows acceleration – being forced back into your seat. You’ll see the greatest g-force under braking occurs when the brakes are slapped full on… (the red bits in the third and fifth traces line up). For the latitudinal g-force, the red shows the driving being flung to the left (i.e. right hand corner), the green shows them being pushed out to the right.

Here's Button's Driver DNA:



And here's a pairwise comparison between Hamilton and Button:




Data is grabbed from the McLaren F1 Live Dashboard during the race and is Copyright (©) McLaren Marketing Ltd 2011 (I think? Or possibly Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 2011(?)). Last year, I think that speed, throttle and brake data were sponsored by Vodafone; I'm not sure how it stands this year.
As ever, thanks to @bencc for grabbing the data.

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