Visualising F1 performance and budget
Formula 1 teams invest millions of dollars each year in order to compete. The level at which teams actually do ‘compete’ is closely linked to the amount each team has in its budget. The more money a team has in its budget, the more it can spend on testing and developing its car. Typically, this extra investment results in a better performance on the track.
I am interested in trying to visualise some of the discrepancies between teams in the sport and potentially identifying any underperformers or overperformers. I have found data for team budgets for the 2019 season from racefans.net and have used python (specifically matplotlib and seaborn) to formulate the graphs and used Inkscape to edit them to aid their aesthetic.
A good place to start is to see how each team performed in the 2019 season. Each team enters two cars in each Grand Prix, if they finish in the top 10 they earn points for themselves (in the drivers’ championship) and their team (in the constructors’ championship). Below I have created a chart to show the number of points each team earned in 2019.
We can immediately see in the graph that there are varying levels of performance between the teams. There is a clear top 3 in Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull, followed by a number of teams who are fairly close together. Potentially there is a clear 4th in McLaren and a clear bottom 2 in Haas and Williams.
Obviously points only go to the top 10 positions out of the 20 racers so it's potentially harder to differentiate between worse-performing teams. This is because a driver who finishes 11th in every race would objectively be better than a driver who finishes 20th, but in the scoring, they would have the same amount of points.
If there is a clear correlation between performance and budget, we might expect that a similar chart mapping all teams budget would be similar to the one mapping their points.
For the most part, this chart follows how we might expect it to look. The top 3 in points were also the top 3 in budget, and with Red Bull just behind. McLaren and Renault have a higher budget than the bottom 5, who are all around the same budget. This value of around $150m could potentially be the minimum value required to supply and field a team.
There seems to be a clear correlation between budget and the number of points. To see more clearly how teams performed “pound-for-pound”, we can calculate for each team the amount of money they invested per point won. Before beginning to plot this we expect there to be one problematic value, and that is for Williams as they only got a single point.
Just as we thought, Williams proves problematic. To get a better idea we can remove them and note that they are a clear underperformer based on their points accumulated compared to teams of a similar budget.
This is much better. We can see the difference between values for teams in the same budget bracket. Renault seems to have underperformed based on their budget compared to the teams around them. Also Ferrari, who had the highest budget, performed relatively worse than Mercedes who had a similar budget. Toro Rosso appears to be the best performers of the teams with a budget of around $150m.
The opposite, points gained per million spent, could also be plotted but it shouldn’t expose any extra insight.
As expected, the only information that is clear to see could already be identified in other graphs. The points per million value looks to be higher for teams with higher overall points values. I believe this is due to the ‘top heavy’ nature in which points are distributed in F1. As alluded to earlier, it is harder to differentiate between the performances of lower placing teams whilst higher ranking teams gain a multitude of points. Looking instead at an average finishing position for the team could provide more insight.
