Okay, so I’ve been messing around with Formula 1 data lately, specifically pit stop times. It’s crazy how fast those crews work! I wanted to see if I could pull some stats together and maybe find some interesting trends. Here’s how I went about it.
Getting the Data
First things first, I needed data. I poked around a bit and found some websites that had historical F1 data. Some offered downloads, which was super helpful.
I grabbed a few CSV files that had race results, including pit stop times for each driver and race. It wasn’t perfectly clean, but hey, that’s part of the fun, right?
Cleaning it Up
The data, as expected, was a little messy. Some columns had weird characters, others were missing data. Nothing a little spreadsheet wrangling couldn’t fix. I used a program like Excel to do most of this, it help me a lot.
- I deleted some unnecessary columns I wouldn’t use.
- I fixed some of the inconsistent formatting, making sure all the times were in a similar format.
- I checked to make sure all times use the same format.
Crunching the Numbers
Once the data was looking good, I started playing around with it. I wanted to see things like:
- Average pit stop time for each team.
- Fastest and slowest pit stops overall.
- Maybe see if pit stop times have changed over the years.
I used some basic formulas to calculate averages and find minimum and maximum values. Nothing too fancy, just enough to get a good overview. It’s cool how easily these calculations can be done.
What I Found (So Far)
I’m still digging into this, but I’ve already noticed a few things. Some teams are consistently faster than others, which isn’t a huge surprise. I also saw that the really fast pit stops are getting quicker! They break records almost every year, and it’s awesome see that improvement in the data.
It’s a work in progress, but it’s been a fun little project. I might try to visualize the data with some charts later on, just to make it easier to see the trends. Or even create a basic database to practice more my coding skills.
