Saturday, March 29, 2014

Getting 2014 into Gear

Hello Internet! Guido here with another Scoring Indy update. First, a word of apology. Normally, during the season, I update every Friday. I was, however, on vacation over the last couple of Fridays. Going into vacation, I figured, "no problem, I can totally post on Fridays anyways." Once, I was on vacation, however, I thought, "I can totally post when qualifying is over on Saturday." So, that's what's happening now. Tonight, we'll look at: last year's St. Pete race, some observations from practice and qualifying, and a couple of tweaks to this year's RSWC. Let's get to it!


St. Pete 2013

Here are the St. Pete scores from last year, courtesy of Re-Scoring St. Pete, my post from last season (presented without comment):


Race FinishDriverGridLedCompletedRace Score
1Hinchcliffe42611076.73
2Castroneves54211080.82
3Andretti7011061.28
4Kanaan11011064.92
5Dixon20011069.73
6de Silvestro3011051.54
7Viso22011061.64
8Sato2011039.92
9Wilson13011049.20
10Tagliani17011047.01
11Bourdais21011047.94
12Kimball14011035.24
13Rahal15011034.10
14Carpenter23011039.98
15Jakes18011033.01
16Power12610728.55
17Servia121610424.92
18Hunter-Reay807914.16
19Hildebrand2407819.09
20Saavedra90728.21
21Vautier606910.93
22Beatriz250558.92
23Newgarden160507.75
24Pagenaud190262.74
25Franchitti100181.27


Observations

Now for some comments, based on those 2013 scores and what we've seen so far this weekend.

- Sebastien Bourdais was seriously miffed post-quals after getting bounced in Q1 (albeit in an incident-filled group 1). But, here's the silver lining for the new occupant of car #11, he has the ability to go back-to-front at St. Pete. He did it last year, he could again.

- I was worried about Mike Conway (Destroyer of Worlds) after the first two practice sessions. I just wasn't sure that his new team at Ed Carpenter Racing would acclimate to his style quickly. And, to be honest, I'm still a little worried. Conway went First Death Star on Alderaan on Q1 because it was run in the wet, where he is a wizard, but as soon as the slicks went on for Q2, Conway found himself at the back of the pack. Now, starting P12 is an OK place to be, but I'm just not sure that we're going to see more of 2013 Long Beach and less of 2013 Detroit out of the #20 car tomorrow, especially with zero chance of rain (so says the Weather Channel).

- Impressive work by the youngsters in qualifying. Perhaps I should have seen it coming from Saavedra, who actually backed up from his P9 grid spot in 2013 to start inside of Row 6 this year. But, I confess myself to be completely flummoxed by the performances of Hawksworth and Munoz. I knew from Lights last year that Hawksworth could drive, and I knew from the Indy 500 last year that Munoz is from another planet, but I just didn't see it coming together this quickly. We'll see how they hold together for 110 laps of the circuit.

- Impressed by Sato grabbing the pole. I figured he might be a real contender if the whole session was wet, but this was quality stuff from him. We've seen Sato qualify well before, however, and have it not pan out come race day. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

- Finally, I wouldn't sleep on Will Power. After narrowly missing out on the Championship in 2011 and 2012, Power had a rough year in 2013. He did, however, seem to really start to pick up momentum as the season wound down, ending the year with a win on the big oval in Fontana. I maintain that he'd have won St. Pete last year, too if he hadn't gotten run over mid-race.


Race Score World Championship 2014

After putting together my "What the Numbers Say" posts, I was not thrilled with my scoring system for the Race Score World Championship. The points system that I was using is the current points system for Formula One (minus any double point shenanigans). The problem was that said point system provides a lot of incentive for winning, which is good if you're the FIA and you want to put on exciting shows and have drivers try to win races. It's less good if you're me, and you're trying to get a picture of who is doing the best over the course of a season. So, I'm making two changes to this year's Race Score World Championship.

1) Instead of giving out points 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 for positions 1-10, I'll be giving points for positions 1-8 as follows: 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1. This, I hope, provides a better way of tracking consistency. Also, this way, half the field isn't getting points in any given race. (It's still over a third for most races, but it beats no change.)

2) I'm also going to keep a running track of each driver's average Race Score throughout the season. This will give us a chance to look at how our changes (and our system itself) track driver performance throughout the season.


Stay Tuned

Well, I think that does it for previews. I'm excited to see some racing get underway tomorrow, and I'm about to throw up some terrible race predictions on Twitter. So, be sure to follow @ScoringIndy so that you can mock me.

See you back here next week!

-- Guido

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