F1 2021 - Brazilian Grand Prix and Qatar Grand Prix

The Brazilian Grand Prix was interesting, wasn't it. 

I mean, the season was starting to boil nicely even before Mercedes's DRS failure, Hamilton's penalty, Verstappen's penalty for being a berk *and* Verstappen deciding to go all elbows out (even more than usual) on Hamilton. 

So now we have that, and the relative underdog for the rest of the season slightly ahead of the surging reigning champion, and the pot bubbling up. 

Part of the reason I didn't update after the Brazilian Grand Prix was because I couldn't decide whether Leclerc should get a yellow card for stirring it in the Verstappen vs Hamilton accident debate, or a cookie for stirring it in the Verstappen vs Hamilton accident debate. I do know that Ferrari are getting a red card for the complete lack of speed in Qatar.

Bad Ferrari, no cookie. 

I am reasonably sure that no matter what the official excuse, the virtual safety car at the end of the Qatar Grand Prix was to prevent any more tyre explosions, because it did get a bit

from Imgflip Meme Generator

The problem, of course, is that that's not going to encourage the teams to make safety stops in future. I mean, certainly, if I'm Alpine, I roll that dice every bit as much as they did. 

It's going to be interesting to hear Pirelli's report on the cause for the explosions.

F1 2021 - Mexican Grand Prix

via GIPHY

I'm awake, I'm awake! 

Although it confirmed the feeling of the end of absolute Mercedes dominance, exciting first two corners apart, that race was a snooze-fest. 

And the Mexican fans deserve so much better. They were so amazingly loud (and vehemently pro-Checo). Normally, when the radio commentary says "the crowd are very loud", because of the quality of the microphones these days, you can still hear the person being interviewed and you think 'yeah, right'. 

Not this time, the Mexican crowd did nearly drown Verstappen out. The Mexican fans deserve the best. 

In keeping with the dullness of the race, no update to the diagram. Ferrari were neither excellent nor awful.

Benford's Law - From February to the end of June

 In June, I recorded the first digits in the top news article on the BBC website on 24/30 days.  In those 24 articles, there were 353 numbers with leading digits.  That's 14-15 per day, which is a lot more than in March, April and May, but about the same as in February.

2 is appearing the expected percentage of times. 1 and 8 are the most different to their expected values with 1 being over-represented and 8 under-represented. If you add together the sum of all the values of (observed-expected)squared, all divided by the expected, the calculated test statistic is 4.9, the same as May.

The critical chi squared value for 9 items with only one line is ~ 15.507

The test statistic smaller than the critical value therefore the difference is not significant. This data does not disobey Benford's Law.

If we look at the rolling total from February to the end of June, there have been 1599 numbers with leading digits.

2 is exactly its expected value.  1 is the number furthest away from its expected value and remains over-represented, the next furthest away is 6 which is under-represented. If you add together the sum of all the values of (observed-expected) squared, all divided by the expected, the calculated test statistic is 2.71.

The critical chi squared value for 9 items with only one line is ~ 15.507

The test statistic smaller than the critical value therefore the difference is not significant. This data does not disobey Benford’s Law.

This is a reduction from the test statistic of the total to May, but it's not as low as it was before May.