So, here’s me. I’m a born-and-bred Hoosier. I grew up outside Lafayette. When I was in the second grade, my class had “Indy 500 Week,” and I've been fascinated ever since. Now, I say that I was fascinated, but I grew up in a more stick-and-ball focused household, so I didn't really follow IndyCar racing until after Re-Unification. I went to IU, where I studied religious studies, and did sports radio at the student radio station, WIUX. I’m an ordained Lutheran pastor, and I live in Wisconsin.
I think that’s enough incidentals. The reason that I started this blog goes back to my radio days. I was fascinated by the different emphasis that different people would place on different statistics when trying to evaluate teams and players against each other. Think of the classical baseball example, which matters more: On Base Percentage or Runs Batted In? Does it matter more that a player gets on base, so that he can score, or that he gets the runners that are on base home? What value, in basketball do you place on a player’s defense? So, I wondered to myself: how, in racing, can you determine who had the “best” drive of any given race? So, I made a list of factors that I thought should matter:
1) Race Finish. You've had a whole race to sort yourself out. Where you end up matters in how well you drove.
2) Positions Gained. It’s easier to win from the front than the back, and a third-place podium finish from the pole (while impressive, getting to the podium is hard) is less impressive than one starting P25.
3) Leading Laps. Leading Laps matters. It means that you either have a fast race car or that you’re trying to make something happen with strategy. I say that you should get credit for that.
So, I decided to cook those numbers together. I arbitrarily determined that a win, leading every lap, from the pole was worth 100 points. 50 points are given based on finish (divided in a linear fashion). Then I cook the positions gained and lost in my mathematical black box (I’m not averse to sharing my formula, but I didn't assume that it would be interesting to all of you. If I’m wrong, I’ll put it in a future post.) I multiply that by 50 (now, this number can wind up being greater than 50 or less than zero) and then add it to the points for finish. The result is the driver’s “Race Score.” There is, however, one factor that I want to consider that I haven’t mentioned yet.
4) Finishing the Race. I don’t want to unfairly punish drivers for getting taken out of a race or having a mechanical problem. Such a problem can cause a driver to finish in a very low spot from a high starting spot on the grid. In my book, a driver who finishes P25 after starting P1, who blows a transmission on lap 5; did not have as bad of a day as a driver who falls to P25 from P1 and is still running at the end (thereby finishing on the lead or just 1 or 2 laps down.)
So, for this reason, the second term of the Race Score (the one based on gaining and losing positions and leading laps) gets multiplied by the fraction of laps completed over total laps. This way, the negative numbers don’t bite drivers so bad, when they lose major positions to mechanical or contact issues.
The final thing that I want to take into consideration in quantifying driver performance is:
5) Qualifying v. Starting Position. With the 10-grid penalties for unapproved engine changes, I think that it’s important to think about both where a driver starts the race and the spot where the car actually qualified. (Now, this doesn't matter at Indy, but the rest of the year, it’s a factor.)
So, to account for this in races where there’s a difference between starting and qualifying. I've decided that positions gained/lost should be calculated against both qualifying and starting position. Then, the two Race Scores are averaged for an Aggregate Race Score. In this way, drivers aren't overly rewarded for gaining positions, which are gained as a result of losing starting spots to an engine change penalty (The driver with the penalty, at least theoretically, based on qualifying, has a faster car than those around him/her at the start, making these positions “easier” to gain.) At the same time, credit has to be given for actually gaining the spots. I think that going half-and-half basing the score on qualifying and starting does a good job of this.
Now, is this system perfect? No, but I do like it. Ideally, I’d be able to do something with average running position, but I can’t find the statistics for that anywhere on the internet (I’d also have to completely re-work the formula, not that I’m averse to doing so.)
So, in working with what I have, this is where I've come down. So, as a teaser, here are the Top Three Race Scores from last season’s opener at St. Petersburg.
Driver Race Score Race Finish Race Start Laps Led
Dixon 74.27 2 6 37
Castroneves 71.69 1 5 28
Pagenaud 59.62 6 16 0
Coming next week, 2013 IndyCar preview including last year’s full St. Pete results.
Later,
--Guido
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