The Phoenix Scorecard -- 2016

Hey there, Internet!! It's Guido, coming back at you with last weekend's scorecard from the Desert Diamond West Valley Phoenix Grand Prix. As usual, we'll hit the scorecard and the quick hits, but I'm also going to spend a minute or two talking about how and why we put these Race Scores together.


The Scorecard

Finish	Driver	Grid	Led	Completed	R.R.P.	Race Score
1	Dixon	6	155	250	2.20	93.09
2	Pagenaud	10	0	250	7.07	68.08
3	Power	9	0	250	4.67	67.17
4	Kanaan	2	0	250	3.27	55.66
5	Rahal	19	0	250	9.77	68.54
6	Newgarden	7	0	250	10.30	46.52
7	Chilton	8	0	250	7.97	48.54
8	Bourdais	15	0	250	10.43	52.37
9	Montoya	3	56	250	8.13	42.11
10	Hunter-Reay	12	0	250	6.73	47.37
11	Castroneves	1	39	250	12.63	23.94
12	Kimball	4	0	250	9.40	25.15
13	Andretti	11	0	250	12.83	27.53
14	Rossi	14	0	250	12.67	29.29
15	Sato	20	0	249	17.20	28.42
16	Daly	18	0	249	17.43	22.02
17	Aleshin	13	0	248	13.30	17.66
18	Hinchcliffe	22	0	248	19.57	18.75
19	Hawksworth	17	0	246	19.13	8.84
20	Filippi	16	0	243	20.33	2.58
21	Carpenter	5	0	195	5.17	5.20
22	Munoz	21	0	116	16.27	5.55

Quick Hits

- Let's all just sit back and enjoy Scott Dixon. This man does zero things wrong. His execution is spot on. He rarely makes mistakes. He has good equipment, and gets the most out of it. We don't often see Race Scores in the 90s, and it's a testament to Dixon's ability that he's put up several since I've been doing this.

- Second best score of the day goes to Graham Rahal (with, as I'm fond of saying, an "excellent display of Rahalsmanship"). Rahal, over the course of 2015 and into this season, has really begun to come into his own as a Verizon IndyCar Series competitor. I'm going to keep my eye on him.

- When I do the number dives this week, I'm going to look at the rookies again. I'll just quickly say that I find it impressive that they each seemed to get exactly what was possible out of their cars. We have an actually impressive group this year.

- Finally, the quickest of hits: Josef Newgarden gets zero breaks. We'll number dive how he managed to overcome them later this week.

Hows and Whys

Now, a couple words about why I do this, and how it happens. Part of this, you can read in my first ever blog post here. The short version goes like this, however:

- Back in 2012 (before I started writing this blog), I was just an everyday IndyCar fan, who wanted to consume as much information about the sport as possible. Being in my last year of seminary with some time on my hands, I started tinkering around with some spreadsheets.

- Eventually, I settled on a way of bringing together race finish and positions gained/lost on track into a single number that I called a Race Score (with a bonus for leading laps), so I started this blog in 2013 to share that knowledge with the "world" (realistically, like seven people on Twitter).

- Later in 2013, I realized that my formula was missing something. I needed some way of measuring what was happening in the middle of the race, not just the end results. So, I inserted Average Running Position as another factor in tabulating Race Scores. Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to that data point, so I had to tabulate it by hand, resulting in my plugging a WHOLE LOT of numbers into individual spreadsheet cells. This was not fun.

- 2014, I continued plugging away. Not much happened.

- Last year in 2015, my life got a lot crazier when the Littlest Guido was born. This meant that I just didn't have the time to manually enter thousands of data points. (I still don't, by the way, so consider this an invitation to let me know how I can get Average Running Position without manually entering position via a lap chart. Thanks!) This resulted in me not completing as many scorecards as I wanted last year, and made me generally sad.

- To combat this, I invented a way to save me some time called Representative Running Position. For races longer than 150 laps (or so), I tabulate running position based on "Representative Laps" consisting of roughly  1/8 of those run in the race. I still have to manually enter these data points, but it isn't quite so bad. You'll see that term used in the Phoenix scorecard above.

- So, here's a quick vocabulary lesson, so you can quickly break down a scorecard:

Finish -- A driver's finishing position.

Driver -- The driver.

Grid -- The position where the driver started the race.

Led -- The number of laps a driver leads in the race.

Completed -- The number of laps a driver completes in the race.

A.R.P. -- Average Running Position (usually used on road/street circuits).

R.R.P. -- Representative Running Position (usually used on ovals).

Race Score -- A number used to compare the drives of various drivers. It takes the following into account: Finish; Positions Gained/Lost from start to finish; Average (or Representative) Running Position; Laps Led; and Laps Completed. If a driver leads every lap from pole, that driver would receive a Race Score of 100.

Stay Tuned

Well, that was a lot. Hope you enjoyed the scorecard. And, I hope you enjoyed the race. If not, go watch it again. It was a fun IndyCar race. OK, off the soapbox. I'll see you later this week for some number dives!

-- Guido