Hello World!
This project stemmed by the intersection of different interests of mine (among everything my love for Ferrari and Formula 1 in general, as well as programming and data science) while giving me the opportunity of developing skills in many different domanins: from data science and data visualization, to programming, writing, and story telling.
What and Why
I would like in this blog to bring a not necessarely freshly new nor original contribution to the (already immense) field of data science applied to Formula 1. I’ll try to investigate and analyze publicly available F1 data in order to obtain insights and a clear point of view of what’s actually happening during an F1 race.
There’s a famous saying in Italian stating that “also the eye wants its part”, that is to say, you can make several pie charts, histograms and whatnot, but a well structured, tailored and visually appealing plot will always defeat 10-0 the formers.
As I painfully understood in my short Academic experience, data visualization is an often overlooked art; human beings are mostly visual learners and therefore most of our efforts should be addressed in this domain. (see below bibliography section for some interesting resources)
Most of the considerations and plots/figures that I’ll present will not necessarely be original nor outstanding and I’ll try to from time to time to also reproduce some beautiful plots that I might stumble upon (I’ll try to be thorough and to cite all articles and sources; I don’t want to steal credits from anyone).
Comments about the data
All data that I’ll present (unless otherwise specified) are coming from the impressive fastf1 API, that gives us access to F1 lap timing, car telemetry and position, tyre data, weather data, the event schedule and session results.
Final comments
As many data science projects, the biggest part of the job is absolutely taken by the two following steps:
- (data harvesting and) data cleaning
- data visualization
Other resources
https://allending.ca/Formula1_RacePace_FastF1
https://theoehrly.github.io/Fast-F1/#
https://github.com/theOehrly/Fast-F1
In case you want to practice as well with the fastf1 API, you might want to start from here: https://github.com/theOehrly/Fast-F1
Bibliography
- Munzner, Tamara. Visualization analysis and design. CRC press, 2014.