Formula 1 - Miami Grand Prix 2023

I don't have Sky Sports so I "watch" formula 1 on the radio. That means I do tend to snatch up any opportunity I can get to watch it on the screen.

My mother, on the other hand, hates formula 1, very much in the spirit of "blöd im Kreis herumzufahren". She swears that both things that happened were accidents but thank to mother-derived-events, I managed to listen to 15 minutes of Miami Grand Prix and qualifying tops.

As a Ferrari fan, you'd be justified in saying that I didn't miss much. As an F1 fan, in general, it sounds like I didn't miss much. I'm perfectly willing to believe Verstappen drove well, but wouldn't it be nice if he had someone challenging him.

(Rumour also states we need to beware, very ware, of whatever they are planning for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, apparently they have promised more ridiculousness than the Miami Grand Prix.)

Formula 1 - Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2023

 (Sorry for the absence, I promise all of it was fun, and some of it will lead to content for the blog)

I didn't have "the BBC radio commentary team writes Fernando Alonso/Taylor Swift RPF live on air" on my bingo card.

On the other hand, it was probably the highlight of the race.

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix frequently has no racing (street circuit, cars too wide to allow passing, DRS zone chicken is the only sporting thing going on) but normally the Baku Chaos Bonanza makes up for that.  This time there was no chaos, so the race was duller than dishwater.

When the highlights of the race are wondering why the Alpha Tauri was so fragile compared to every other car that hit the wall and how long Hulkenberg's tyres would last (answer = not long enough), you know it's not a good race.

I may, however, have had a moment of personal illumination.  Something about the way one of the BBC articles was phrased made me realise that the new sprint format (which is rubbish) is designed to do away with practise to try to provide more excitement at the actual race because the strategy teams will have less data to predict performance with.  Ross Brawn has had to come up with something to fill the time.  I still think the sprints are rubbish, but at least I now appreciate the bounds he's working within.

Formula 1 - Australian Grand Prix 2023

(This wasn't delayed by advanced frustration with the whole thing, but because organising fencing competitions knocks the stuffing out of you. Friends shouldn't let friends be dragged into competition organising. Mine just laugh at me.) 

Where to start with the Australian Grand Prix? I was thinking of this gif:

Let Me Explain Sum Up GIFfrom Let Me Explain GIFs

but even that doesn't cover it. 

Once again, what could have been a half-decent race for Ferrari was ruined by factors out of their control. 

I say half decent, because half the team didn't make it past the first lap. Obviously, that was just a racing incident ... those happen on first laps. 

Much like the Alpine attack (on each other) - first lap after a restart, these things happen, no need to penalise anyone, especially not Pierre Gasly who is one offense away from a one race suspension. 

The thing I don't get, really, really don't get, is how those are just first lap incidents but Sainz jnr and Alonso is somehow someone's fault despite being on a first lap after a restart. 

It's almost like there's no consistency in how the race stewards are handling anything. Now I am used to this between races, because there's different stewards each race, but within the same race is pushing it. 

I'd dab the "even the FIA can't save you now" square, but that's for when Ferrari actually do something wrong, and aren't on the wrong side of screwball stewarding decisions.

In which we know that UEFA won't do anything about dual ownership but a girl can dream

This statement by Aleksander Ceferin about people owning more than one club (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/64971337) amuses/infuriates me. 

Partly it's the that they seem to only care now that it's "big" clubs affected (or pseudo-big, call me back when PSG actually win the Champions League), when there's been multi-club ownership for a while. 

The other part is "yes, Alexander Ceferin, head of the organisation in charge of European football, I don't know why the people in power, such as the organisation in charge of European football, haven't looked at it before. Why don't you tell yourself next time you look in a mirror?" 

I know that is not a helpful comment but football organisations don't make me feel helpful. 

I also know this is not going to lead to anything except, at most, some easily circumvented rules intended to establish ethical walls between clubs. 

But my brain decided to think, "what if?" 

For a lot of the conglomerates that own more than one club, the decision will probably be easy. I think the Belgian first and second divisions would see a sudden efflux of money. 

Other teams, such as Udinese and Watford, both owned by the Pozzo family, that could be more interesting, but I suspect they'd keep Watford. On the other hand, their whole business model is based on flipping players and maximising gain so would they even keep either team. (Okay, yes, I know, they're Italian football team owners, trying to guess what they'll do next is impossible.) 

Then the evil cackling began, because I realised this would put Red Bull in a truly awkward position. Because I understand why a Thai drink sold through an Austrian distributor has always made much of it's Austrian-ness, and particularly it's mountain-regions-of-Austria-ness because a lot of the extreme sports that Red Bull chose to build its brand around have strong Austrian presence (you have a sport that features going too fast, in a mostly downhill direction, you'll get Austrians. It seems to be a national problem.). And the factory is there. Which made buying Salzburg and rebranding it make sense. 

It also makes buying Hype-zig (sorry Leipzig) and rebranding it sensible - it was, at the time, a city riding high on a high energy, young, fresh'n'new vibe. 

Let us be honest about the relative strengths of the two leagues - your brand will look cooler doing well in the German Bundesliga rather than winning the Austrian Bundesliga, and it's easier to bring good footballers into a German team. 

So Red Bull are in a right pickle if this new rule is brought in because they would either have to do something really stupid financially (no really, the German Bundesliga team are the financially sensible option), or have to against years and years of marketing positioning. 

That would amuse me anyway, but the idea of Red Bull Salzburg being brought back down to Earth warms the cockles of my evil heart because I was brought up green and white and Rapid (I will accept Admira Wacker Mödling because ... the family friend who is an Admira sufferer has now gone through 56 years of hurt and I don't see it getting better soon). 

Finally, there is hope of not being run over by Red Bull. 

(Before anyone says anything, yes, I get the same sinking feeling in both football and F1, it is unfortunate.)

Would the real winner of the 3rd place trophy at Jeddah please stand up?

At time of press, Fernando Alonso was still the holder of 3rd place at the Saudi Grand Prix but that might change again, because, quite frankly I put nothing past the stewards at this point. 

What was a reasonably interesting race has been completely overshadowed by some very bizarre decision making on their part. 

What was looking like a half decent weekend for Ferrari was ruined by one of the odder safety car decisions of recent memory. Admittedly, given Leclerc's luck is looking like Webber's luck of old, I have no doubt that something else would have happened if they hadn't decided to use a full safety car to retrieve a car that wasn't even stopped on track (Chapeau to Stroll for parking it that well in an emergency. Did we ever find out what caused the emergency "stop the car now Lance" message?). 

Two failed ECUs and a half-decent Ferrari strategy shout getting ruined by non-Ferrari mistakes, all in two races, I'm not going to say Lady Luck is against us, but it's as good an explanation as any. 

It's particularly annoying because there are the green shoots of possible Ferrari recovery. 

Whisper it quietly, but, were it not for the safety car, that Ferrari strategy might have worked, and Ferrari had the fastest pit stop in Bahrain. 

Everything except the results seems to be coming together.

Formula 1 - Did the fastest lap and sprint points make any difference in 2022?

Last year, I looked at whether the fastest lap points and sprint race points had any effect on the 2021 Championships. The answer was no, as it had been for the fastest lap points for the 10 years previous. I’m feeling decidedly justified in declaring them a gimmick. 

I would expect them to have had very little effect in 2022 either, not least because of the size of Red Bull’s victory margin.

The fastest lap points winners from 2022 can be found below.    

7 different drivers and 4 different constructors won fastest lap points which is in line with an average season. 

The final standings for the Constructors' Championships, with and without the fastest lap points. Removing the fastest lap points makes no change in the Constructors Title. 

How about in the Drivers's championship? Once again, the fastest lap points lead to no changes. 

That means if we put together the calculated total points if there had been fastest laps from 2009-2018, and the actual results in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, 0 constructors results out of 149 have been affected by fastest lap points. 

In the drivers’ championship, the number of results affected is 11/327 (3.36% of all results), and none of those are in the top 3 of any given year. 

Let’s look at the sprint races, maybe they had an effect, especially with the extra points available in 2022, after the damp squib the sprint races had been in 2021. 

The sprint race points were as follows: Because there were points available for more sprint race places in 2022, I've also made tables for which constructors and drivers got points.  

Do the sprint race points have an effect on either championship?  

* and ¶ = teams whose positions swapped.

   

*, ¶ and § = drivers whose positions swapped. 

Giving points to almost half the field 3 times a year changes the position of 6 of the drivers. Only 2 of those drivers are really at the pointy end of the championship. 

So, what have we learned 

• The 1 point for fastest lap is too small to affect anything. I think that’s also why the top teams don’t really go for extra pitstops just to get it. 

• The increase in points for the sprint races in 2022 meant they did affect things. 

• But probably not enough to justify the extra time and effort 

• Plus it’s not like they actually produce more racing, either during the sprint or the main race 

• Help, I am agreeing with Christian Horner about something.

I hereby dub the Ferrari SF-23 "the Fretful Porpentine"

Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik 

Why am I calling it that? 

Because it too sheds spiky parts and is concerning. 

Possibly I am over-reacting to one race but I had my concerns after testing. 

Some of them were, I grant, less sensible than others. I like the Ferrari to be the prettiest car on the grid, but I fear the Alfa Romeo may be the prettiest car this year (https://twitter.com/F1/status/1622886779136184321). This year's Ferrari looks like this - https://twitter.com/F1/status/1625456362997129216 

(I am intrigued by the different shape of the rear wing for the Alfa Romeo and the Alpha Tauri versus the other cars on the grid - https://twitter.com/F1/status/1629425434109652992) 

Some of them were more wide-ranging. I see that Ferrari have a new team principal, which is normally a sign that Ferrari have run out of ideas. I have nothing again Frederic Vasseur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Vasseur), and I think he'll do a good job, but I don't think most of the problems last year were Mattia Binotto's fault. Maybe the changes Vasseur has already made will help, but time will tell. 

I was expecting more of a gap between testing and the first race. I expect F1 to kick off around St. Patrick's day; I think I've forgotten that there are more races per season now. This means I didn't post any of that before the first race in Bahrain (it also means my 75% finished post on the Tour de France Femmes is going to be delayed further). 

So qualifying in Bahrain starts, and Leclerc's car decides to shed aero parts causing a red flag. I rechristen the SF-23. Ferrari do something interesting with tyre strategy, and, I am happy to give them the benefit of the doubt here, because Leclerc made it sound like strategy, not an oversight, and we all know that he has no poker face. 

Then there's the race. 

I can live with Alonso getting past Sainz because Alonso was just having one of those races, because he's Fernando Alonso having one of those races. I am less happy with Perez blasting past Leclerc because Ferrari will hopefully be fighting against Red Bull this season and the ease of the pass does not bode well. 

Then ... then ... I am choosing to blame Channel 4, who were literally in the middle of saying there had only been one retirement when Leclerc's Ferrari went pop. Cue Leclerc making one of those anguished noises. Or, to quote Channel 4 after Leclerc's post-race interview, "I don't remember what happy Leclerc looks like." Which is a pretty damning statement. 

In response to that, because I can cope with people hating Ferrari or fearing Ferrari but not with them pitying Ferrari, I am bringing back the bingo card. Post-race inquest revealed that it was an engine failure, which is why that's been dabbed. 

I think Leclerc's post-failure radio message definitely counts as "that noise". 

Guys, it's first race in and there's already been three boxes dabbed. This is not promising. 

On the other hand, it could have been worse, either driver could have had Estaban Ocon's horror of a race.

The King; his Heir Apparent...and The Pharaoh waiting in the wings - Shearer, Kane and Salah, games and goals per season.

This started as either a drunken conversation, a disagreement or a follow up to a Match of the Day stat. How vague my memory of parts of it is suggests one option above the others, but it has also been some time since the conversation happened which might also explain it. 

Some time ago, Harry Kane missed a couple of matches due to an ankle injury, again. The "again" was the problem. It had become clear that if Kane had a weakness, it was his ankle not his game. Cue L saying that the thing that would stop Kane reaching Alan Shearer's goal-scoring records would be injuries, because once you start having to miss games due to recurring injuries to the same body part, the number of games missed because of it is only going to increase. 

L wanted to know whether the games per season Kane played up to this point matched Shearer's or not. 

I raised an objection, which is that Kane, playing for a decent Spurs team, probably has more chance of playing more games than Shearer had while at Newcastle, because while every team plays the same number of league games, there's cups and European games to consider as well. (Shearer at Newcastle, excellent example of 'the things we do for love'.) 

So, it was agreed to calculate percentage of possible games played for Shearer and Kane. Alongside their stats, I was asked to include Mo Salah because he was scoring at a ridiculous rate and might have beaten Kane to any given record. 

I used TransferMarkt's data for all the players. 

When Kane was 27 and Salah was 28 the data looked like this - dotted lines are polynomial lines of best fit.

  Obviously, for Shearer (blue dots and dotted line) we had stats for his whole career. The noticeable thing is that even at the end of his career, he was playing in a high percentage of Newcastle's games (in his last year he played in 85% of Newcastle’s games), but this might have been because Newcastle really never had a replacement for Shearer ready at the time. 

There is a reason he has a statue outside of St. James's Park.  

For the other two, the dotted lines are predictions and the lines look pretty different. 

Let’s look at it if we only use the data up to the age of 27, the maximum age all had reached at that point.  

The curve for Shearer is heavily affected by his lack of games at the age of 27 (due to a long injury layoff). 

You can see Shearer's curve is a very different shape to the other two. 

At the start of this year, when there was an extra year's data, the percentage of games played with extrapolation looked like this:  

You can see the addition of that extra year's data changes the shape of Kane's curve a lot. His curve was being brought down by one low percentage season. I don't think the difference is an artifact, because if you look at the shape of the curves from actual data, not extrapolated (below), the shape hasn't changed with the extra data.  

Okay so we have the data, but the point of a striker is to score goals, so how does goals per game look for the three? 

Looking to the projected stats at 27, they look like this: The two lower blue dots for Alan Shearer, at 27 and 30 years, reflect the years he had his worst injuries, which does suggest that injuries also reduce potency as you come back. 

If we look at goals per game only up to 27, it looks like this: The really interesting thing is that Salah's curve has a completely different shape to the other two, possibly reflecting his change from winger to striker, whereas the other two have always been strikers.

After the figure was updated to include the data once Kane was 28 and Salah 29, the goals per game curve (predicted) looks like this: The shape of the three curves is quite different, Salah's constantly increasing, Shearer's a parabola, but a fairly shallow one, while Kane's is a much sharper parabola. I'm not sure if that's because of low goals per game last season skewing the whole curve, that frankly ridiculous season he had at 18 or a side effect of Spurs playing him slightly deeper now. 

Looking only at data up to the age of 28 does suggest it's an effect of Kane's excellent year at 18, because in this view, his curve and Shearer's are very similar, while Salah's continue to show an increase, possibly due to him moving from wing to striker.  

It makes sense to combine the two analyses and provide the goals per possible games, because yes, Shearer had fewer opportunities. On the other hand, it may make Kane and Salah's data look worse unfairly, given the modern tendency to squad rotation. 

The extrapolated version at 27 looks like this: which is unexpected. I would have expected deleterious effects to hit Kane and Salah equally but Kane's curve really is warped by the poor year at 27. 

I think it's mostly the extrapolation going haywire, because if you look just up to 27 without it (below), Kane's curve and Shearer's again match. Salah's remains different (possibly reflecting that Klopp doesn't really do squad rotation).  

I updated this at the end of last season. The extrapolated curve from Kane being 28 and Salah being 29 looks like this: While it could be Kane's production dropping precipitously, I think it's the extrapolation because the curves without extrapolation look like this: Where can this go? Well, there are 3 possible future things I'm thinking of looking at. 

Going from most obvious to least obvious: 

1 - Yearly updates of this data, to find out a) how good the extrapolation was at predicting what will happen, b) find out if Liverpool's 'orrible year this year has any effect on that stunningly straight curve shape of Salah's, and c) see if the drop for Kane in the prediction is just a blip. 

2 - Include Wayne Rooney's data. He'd act as a nice control, retired player, whose position shifted from striker to something deeper. 

3 - Add Haaland. This is another suggestion from L. I don't think it's because he wants to drive me round the twist but I fear it's going to weird things to my graphs. 

@mixed_knuts for @statsbomb once gave a talk where he discussed the effect that year Burnley really outperformed expectations had on Statsbomb's analyses. Burnley's data was so different to everyone else's that after every analysis they had to check whether any outlier was a bug or just Burnley being Burnley. 

I think Haaland would cause the same thing. His goalscoring for his age is ridiculous. On the other hand, he's young enough there's no saying he'd be able to keep it up. That's the one advantage to the above comparison being Kane and Salah, they were already in the middle of their careers when I started it, there was a solid amount of data. Even from that, the very basic extrapolation done by Excel has problems fitting the data. I dread to think what it'll do to Haaland's data.

Benford's Law - From February 2021 to the end of August 2021

I never actually drop projects, I just don't update them for a while. So let us return to the Benford's Law project, with information about the first digits in the top news article on the BBC website on 26 out of the 31 days of August 2021. 

In those 26 articles, there were 398 numbers with leading digits. That's ~ 15 per day, which about the same as June, but more than July. 

 Most of those numbers came from the article on the 8th of August (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/58112331) which was about the performance of different sports at the Tokyo Olympics compared to their funding.  

No number appeared exactly as often as expected, 5 was the closest, but even that was 1% away from expected. 1 and 2 are the most different to their expected values, both are over-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 8.5, the highest since February itself. 

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 August, there have been 2258 numbers with leading digits.  

No number exactly its expected value, 5 is the closest. 1 is the number furthest away from its expected value and remains over-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 3.00, not reducing the way it should do with the addition of more first digits that obey Benford's Law. However, as 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. 

The test statistic continues to fluctuate rather than reduce which is interesting.

Film Review - Blinded by the Light

The year it came out, I named "Blinded By The Light" my favourite film of the year. I stand by that. 

I have no idea if it's a good film mind you, because it just blows past good, straight past all my critical faculties. 

It captures that teenage feeling of no-one understanding you except your band, in all its melodramatic glory. I mean it, that windswept scene, who hasn't felt precisely that? 

Maybe that's why I love the film - the way it reflects so many of my experiences. Not just "my favourite band are the only people who understand me", but the town in economic distress ('Luton is a Four-Letter Word' indeed), the friend you shared your music with, Leicester being the escape from your rundown town, so much of it. 

That's before we get to Roop looking so much like A who was my mate who shared his music with me. (No, seriously, that was uncanny, and means I get guilt for not keeping in better touch with A every time I think of the film.) 

The whole thing is filled with so much love, from Javed on down. Everyone is trying to get tomorrow and helpd each other as best they can (except Eliza's parents and the National Front, and fuck the National Front). 

The love is everywhere - find me a scene more filled with love than the one where Javed's Mum dyes Javed's Dad's hair. 

It would have been so easy to make Javed's Dad the boo-hiss disapproving Dad of legend, but he's not. He disapproves, yes, and he doesn't understand, but he's trying so hard and it's clear throughout that he loves his son. Even if he's terrible at showing it. 

The other thing I really like is that Javed is not over-idealised. As it's based on an autographical book, it must have been so tempting to make Javed super-sympathetic and always right, but he isn't. He gets to be mean, thoughtless and selfish at times. He's a teenager and feels like it. I also like that, unlike a lot of other Bildungsroman-type films, Javed grows through his own experiences and not the suffering of others. 

In short, I loved it.