F1 history: points won during qualifying vs. races

This Jupyter Notebook (Python) analyses the history of F1, in terms of how teams are incentivised.

Getting the dataset

We use historical F1 data from The Ergast API. The SQL database can be downloaded here.

To run this analysis, download the database image from Ergast. Load it into a local MySQL database (see StackOverflow)

What are we analysing?

I wanted to know whether F1 racedays are becoming more or less competitive. I had a feeling that we needed to look at the relative importance of qualifying vs. racedays, in terms of how many points per (effectively) won on each day. The thinking was that: if most points are "already won" in qualifying, teams would make less race-competitive cars (since they only need to be qualifying-competitive).

For more interpretation, check out this Medium post.

The result is a graph that looks like this (as of August 2017):

Installation

You'll need python, jupyter, jupyter notebook, pandas, matplotlib, numpy, mysqldb.