Research Question:

“Why has Lewis Hamilton dominated F1 championships throughout the time he has been racing?”

We modified our research question in two ways. One way was to not focus in so much on a specific time period. This will allow us to go farther back in time to see how Lewis Hamilton has progressed through the different levels of racing, maybe not just F1. That way we will be able realize the relationship (or lack thereof) between the types of cars he drives. We also modified the question to not automatically pair Lewis Hamilton’s success with Mercedes. Yes, he is a Mercedes driver but that may or may not be the sole reason for his successes in F1 racing.

Data Description:

The sources on FIA F1, also known as Formula 1 Racing, comes from the website Kaggle. The URL to the source can be found here: F1 Data. The data is a collection of different databases and CSV files that capture information on race wins, qualifying times, constructors/teams as well as driver championships, and fastest lap times. The data ranges from the year of 1950 to 2020 and was last updated on December 14, 2020. Our project is focusing on the two specific data frames: fastest_laps_all_drivers_all_race_1950 and constructors_championship_1958. These data frames concentrate on the F1 constructors that have won the championship and the fastest laps.

The data was collected using web scraping methodologies that searched publicly available data from a variety of different F1 websites. Unfortunately, the original sources of the data were not documented so the data can not be validated against FIA data.

The F1 data is nevertheless very usable because it has already been pre-processed and updated over 25 times. However, we would like to emphasize the data is not coming from the original data sets and is rather a collection of data from unknown F1 sources. The collector of the data and the Dataset owner is the Kaggle user, Aadil Tajani. Our team has reached out to the author to try and gain additional knowledge on the source of the original data. We will of course provide updates when we ourselves get them.

Polished Results

Graph 1

wins <- read_csv("data_raw/race_wins_1950-2020.csv")
#head(wins)

wins_cleaning <- wins %>% 
  clean_names() %>% 
  mutate(date = dmy(date))

wins_filtering <- wins_cleaning %>% 
  filter(year(date) > 2007) %>%
  group_by(name) %>%
  summarise(count = n()) %>%
  arrange(desc(count)) %>%
  slice(1:10) %>%
  mutate(
    is_Lewis = if_else(
      name == 'Lewis Hamilton', TRUE, FALSE)) %>%
  ggplot() +
  geom_col(aes(x = count,
               y = reorder(name, count),
               fill = is_Lewis),
           width = 0.7, alpha = 0.8) +
  scale_x_continuous(
    expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c('grey', 'lightgreen')) +
  theme_minimal_vgrid() +
  theme(legend.position = 'none') +
  labs(title = "Grand Prix Wins by Driver between 2007-2020", 
       x = "Grand Prix Wins",
       y = "Racer") 

wins_filtering

As you can see Lewis Hamilton is quite dominant in the sport of F1 driving. He has led the field in Grand Prix wins by a large margin. Another interesting thing to note is that his teammates, who also drive Mercedes cars, are among the top 10 drivers in number of Grand Prix wins. One question we felt was important to dive into was, what really was the reasoning behind Lewis Hamilton’s dominance in the sport of F1. Was it that the car he was driving was far superior than his competitors due to money invested on the Mercedes racing team? Or was Lewis Hamilton that much more skilled than his racing competitors and no matter what he was driving, as long as it was comparative to his rivals, he would come out on top of the leader board. The about of Grand Prix wins are no doubt impressive, however, it does not help us answer why Lewis Hamilton has dominated.

Graph 2

wins_filtering_McLaren <- wins_cleaning %>% 
  filter(year(date) > 2007) %>%
  filter(year(date) < 2013) %>%
  group_by(name) %>%
  summarise(count = n()) %>%
  arrange(desc(count)) %>%
  slice(1:10) %>%
  mutate(
    is_Lewis = if_else(
      name == 'Lewis Hamilton', TRUE, FALSE)) %>%
  ggplot() +
  geom_col(aes(x = count,
               y = reorder(name, count),
               fill = is_Lewis),
           width = 0.7, alpha = 0.8) +
  scale_x_continuous(
    expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c('grey', 'orange')) +
  theme_minimal_vgrid() +
  theme(legend.position = 'none') +
  labs(title = "Grand Prix Wins by Driver between 2007-2013", 
       x = "Grand Prix Wins",
       y = "Racer") 

wins_filtering_McLaren