F1 2021 - British Grand Prix

 I'm with the people who say the crash was a racing incident.

- Could Hamilton have avoided Verstappen?  Yes.  Could he have avoided Verstappen and still been a racing driver?  No.

- Could Verstappen have given Hamilton more space and avoided being hit?  Yes.  Could he have done that and still been a racing driver?  No.

That's basically the definition of a racing incident.

The race also puts to bed the whole "this year's Mercedes isn't that good."  It's 3.9 seconds plus a 10 second penalty better than the third best car on the grid.  It's still good.

Discussing the third best car on the grid, it's so frustrating that the minute Hamilton got to within DRS range it was obvious he was going to win.  The DRS button kills joy.

I was torn between giving the Ferrari performance a cookie but I decided that coming so close to winning (and how terribly sad Leclerc sounded), I am awarding Ferrari a smiley face.

F1 Sprint Races

After the first one, I am underwhelmed.

Part of the reason I am underwhelmed is not Formula 1's fault.  The other half really is.

Things that aren't Formula 1's fault - Saturday's sprint race clashed with the Challenge Cup final, which featured my home town team.  Sorry, F1, you cannot compete with this.  (Saints won, oh yes they did.)

Things that are Formula 1's fault - 

1 - Friday qualifying - you know what I do on Friday afternoon?  I work.  You know what most people do on Friday afternoons?  They work.  Having something that means ~90% of your audience can't watch is sub-optimal.

2 - the Saturday sprint race itself - Vet, Ham, Bot, not exactly an unusual top 3.  Because shortening the race is not going to alter the basic problem that 4 of the cars are significantly faster than the remaining 16, and no one can overtake any more because the cars are too wide.

Tour De France 2021 - Data Doodles - Week 3

Yup, it's worse than last year.  But not that much worse.

Almost half of withdrawals were mid-stage abandonments.

The abandonments were mostly in the first and second week 

All the "over the time limit" exclusions were in week 1 and week 2.

DNSes were more evenly spread:

Week 1 was evenly split between abandons and OTLs

Week 2 was mostly abandonments:

By week 3, most withdrawals were DNSes, probably as the damage caught up to people.

The by-stage number view of withdrawals shows how damaging stages 9 and 11 were, even if they no longer make up more than half of all withdrawals.

Arkea-Samsic were the worst hit team, but only 4 teams didn't lose any team members.  Then again, those teams include UAE Emirates, who had the winner and Deceuninck – Quick-Step, who held the green jersey (sometimes literally up those mountains).  I think keeping as many team members in the race is an advantage.

A different view of the same data

Kaplan-Meier diagram split by teams

It shows it was that middle week that did for people.

Tour De France 2021 - Data Doodles - Week 2

 I think the take home message is that this year's race is worse in terms of attrition.

As suspected, stage 9 has had after-effects.

Looking at just this year:

Stages 9 and 11 contained more than half of all withdrawals

Most of this week's withdrawals have been abandonments (I really don't blame them).

Three teams are down to 50% or less of their starting squads.

You can see the disaster happening to Arkea Samsic and stage 12 being very bad to Team Bike Exchange.

Euro 2020 - Interconnectivity diagram for the final

 I feel justified in calling this "the Chelsea final".

Chelsea are the only team guaranteed to have someone on the winning team.  Chelsea are also the team with the most players left in, with 5, versus 4 for Juventus and Manchester City.  The numbers makes sense given who the Champions League finalists were.  Juventus just have a lot of excellent defenders, and Chiesa the second.

It does lead to an aesthetically pleasing unlabelled diagram.

(I am torn who to cheer for.  On the one hand, the England players appear to be lovely young men, from 1 to 23.  On the other hand, the England fans will be impossible if they win.  Italian colleague has the same problem.  Likes the Italian team plenty, just thinks the Italian fans will be impossible if they win.  We decided the only solution would have been Belgium to have beaten Italy.)

Tour De France 2021 - Data Doodles - Week 1

Following on from last year's posts (week 1, week 2 and week 3), I am doing the same thing this year.

The post has been delayed by real life, football and fencing.  (Fencing's back, let's do the dance of joy)

These visualisations cover week 1, which was nine days long because *shrug* Tour de France organisers.

Most of the withdrawals were mid-stage abandonments, but there were a lot, more than a 3rd of the total, that were riders outside the time limit

By the end of "week" 1, Groupama-FDJ were the worst affected team, losing 40% of their riders,

That most of the team withdrawals were on stage 9 is clearer to see on the total riders version of the diagram

But stage 9 happened to a lot of people (seriously TDF organisers, WTF?!)

Quite how large a chunk of the withdrawals came on stage 9 can be better seen in this image.

You can see stage 9 happening to the teams in the individual team Kaplan-Meier diagrams.

You can see stage 9 happening in the overall Kaplan-Meier too

But, is the overall attrition rate any worse than last year?

Not particularly, although the fact that the rate was slightly higher might affect teams more and increase the total attrition rate at the end of the race.  (Spoiler, after two days of week 2, it has.  But I think that has more to do with today's stage.  Again, TDF organisers, WTF?!!)

Euro 2020 - Semifinal Network Diagrams

 One of the semi-finals is a match I'd been hoping to avoid.  Because on the one side, there is England, and the lovely Marcus Rashford and Harry Maguire who I am also quite fond of, and on the other, there is Denmark, and everything and the lovely Kasper Schmeichel who I have, to an extent, grown up with.

I am not exaggerating about that, I come from a family of Manchester United fans (Mum remembers paying 20p to watch Denis Law and Sir Bobby Charlton play), so when boy cousin got a Manchester United annual, and I, inevitably got bored and ended up reading it, I became accustomed to seeing a young boy in goalie gear following after his giant father.  And obviously, as time passed, the boy grew and is now the Danish national goalkeeper himself (rather beautifully summed up by the Danish coach here).  It's very hard not to want Kasper Schmeichel to do well, especially after he helped Leicester win a title.

I am going to hate every minute of the game, although I fear I will be on match-monitoring duty because L thinks I'm less of a jinx than he is.

The semi-final diagrams look like this.

I've increased the repulsion strength slightly to make it clearer.

Manchester City are the team with most player left in, with 11, followed by Chelsea with 10 and Borussia Dortmund with 9 (here I must apologise to Dynamo Kyiv who had 10 players left in the last round, but I didn't mention them because I have to get the numbers by skim reading through a column.)

Spurs are just about the club team closest to the centre, Denmark are the national team closest to the centre.

The community view looks like this:

Leeds, Chelsea, AC Milan, Atalanta and Spurs are their own communities, while Manchester City aren't (no, I don't know why).  This split is clearer on the unlabelled diagram.

F1 2021 - French Grand Prix and Styrian Grand Prix

No, I hadn't forgotten about the French Grand Prix, although given how badly Ferrari did, I think I'd be justified.

11th and 16th is just not good enough, especially that wasn't an incident-and-accident marred 11th and 16th, it was a "that's as good as the car is on a power circuit" performance.  Ferraris with no power, I never thought I'd see the day.

The red card from the French Grand Prix is for the team, for that absolute lack of pace.

The red card from the Styrian Grand Prix is for Charles Leclerc only.  Charles, the overtakes are lovely, but if you didn't crash into three cars on the first lap, they wouldn't be needed.  Be more like Sainz jnr, who is doing his job and getting solid results and the best out of the car.