Overview
This ‘Living’ White Paper is designed to give a feel for the thinking behind how Denken Technology Ltd think done through the vehicle of an alternative analysis of Formula 1 data.
We have been working hard through the winter ahead of the 2018 season with some new charts and associated analysis. The changes are small but as with F1 the increments all add up to better understanding and performance.
The 2017 charts will soon appear in a new archive section.
The first new chart of 2018 is the familiar ratio spread of performance by the teams:
In the 2018 Performance section continues with the Team by Team breakdowns.
We are primarily interested in how F1 Teams make strategic decisions and our hypothesis is that this essentially means at the highest level this is guided by understanding Performance and Value.
Using only the race results and the teams budgets a number of calculations/models are created as the season progresses to shed some real light on how well the teams and drivers are doing that the raw results can sometimes mask.
We only show the recent analysis here as it more interesting, however, we are using all of the historic F1 data to model past seasons in order to understand our main goal -how do these teams make strategic decisions?
In the meantime enjoy the Living White Paper as it develops here and the periodic blogs from late April 2018.
Performance
How well are the teams really performing? They maybe getting lots of points but is it as many as they could have got? Is the combination of all the teams efforts being undermined by mistakes? See what you think?
It may be great to have the biggest budget but how much do those points actually cost? The best team is that which spends the least to get the most points isn’t it?
So what do we mean by ‘Value’ in the context of this F1 analysis? Well at the highest level it is a simple as:
Value = Performance/Cost
Therefore while the majority of media focus is inevitably on Performance, and I have constructed a simple Coefficient for ‘Performance’ as an input to a Value Model, the ultimate analysis for each competing team is ‘Value’.
The main challenge for calculating Value in this model is that the budget for each team is not accurately known until the season has concluded and the prize money allocated according to the strange arrangements that F1 have in place. As a result we have to estimate at the beginning of the season based on the final figures for the previous season and then adjust at season end which usually makes a difference.