I think you have a rather strange idea of what constitutes cherry picking. And an equally strange one for comparing datasets. It should be plainly obvious that the most accurate comparison is to use as similar a dataset as possible. Comparing 1 year to 3 is not that.

By this rationale, if Kimi had beaten Vettel in the points in 2016 and 2017 you would still conclude that Vettel dominated him by the same margin as Alonso...

Ah OK! I meant same as Vettel, sorry if that wasn't clear. Even when he is close to, or even beats, Vettel in qualifying, he ends up running much, much slower in the race. I don't really get it. His race pace these days is sometimes quite embarrassing. I don't know if it's Seb being that good or Kimi being a bit washed up?

Mind you, lately Bottas hasn't been that good either in that regard. He's dropped off a lot since the beginning of the year

Well that would put a completely different spin on things, though, wouldn't it? I mean Kimi has never come close to beating Seb, so I don't think that's realistic. If Rosberg beat Lewis two years running, then people would probably view their partnership differently, too. If, if, if...

I don't see how you can think comparing one driver pair over a single year vs another over a three year period is a fair and accurate way to do it. There are literally three times as many opportunities for things to affect the results.

The point is that you look at whatever data you have. Throwing data out for no reason is not in any way logical. The larger your sample size, the more valid your conclusions.

I agree but that's more luck than skill though. Kimi got taken out in Spain,Singapore,Baku and Malaysia through no fault of his own and could have won two of them. (Malaysia being a lot trickier than Baku granted but still possible).

I think Bottas was clearly better before Monaco, and his quali in Monaco was spot on but since then he's been not much if any better at all for me, it's just they've had polar opposites of luck.

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"Clark came through at the end of the first lap so far ahead that we in the pits were convinced that the rest of the field must have been wiped out in an accident."
-Eddie Dennis, describing the dominance of Jim Clark in the Lotus 49 at Spa 1967

No bother, When I read it back I thought it looked like you meant Seb, no idea why I thought it was one of the other two first time around, must have misread it,lol.

I think it's probably a bit of both. When Seb's on it he's hard to live with and Kimi is pretty sensitive at the best of times so I can imagine if he has a bad stint or something goes wrong he can slip a fair bit or switch off like I think he did in Monza. Whenever he starts well and has something to chase he seems not to shabby and more like he used too but he's had a fair amount of bad luck to deal with as well.

I really think his qualifying has returned to a decent level since 2016 though but he gets not much credit for it.

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"Clark came through at the end of the first lap so far ahead that we in the pits were convinced that the rest of the field must have been wiped out in an accident."
-Eddie Dennis, describing the dominance of Jim Clark in the Lotus 49 at Spa 1967

I would tend to agree with you. Since Austria the gap between Bottas and Hamilton has really widened dramatically. Kimi could easily have a lot more points than he does right now. Unfortunately Kimi is often weakest during the times when it is most easy to gain positions (qualifying and at the start). He always seems to be stuck in traffic.

I do think Lewis is making it look even worse fwiw, he's been on another level since the summer.

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"Clark came through at the end of the first lap so far ahead that we in the pits were convinced that the rest of the field must have been wiped out in an accident."
-Eddie Dennis, describing the dominance of Jim Clark in the Lotus 49 at Spa 1967

If I compare one year Alonso still did better, this wanting to disregard certain years and second guessing what may have happened in future years is not the way you go about working out such things.

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Hill > Villeneuve > Frentzen > Hill

It is kind of important to look at context in teammate battles, especially since if you don't, you end up with an illogical loop like the one above.

Raikkonen's 2014 was his first year back at Ferrari and (by his own admission) he disliked the car. It's not beyond the realms of logic to suggest that if the car got better and easier to drive, Kimi would improve relative to Alonso.

Vettel in his first season dominated Raikkonen by the same margin Alonso did, he outperformed him in all but two races (like Alonso). Either Vettel has got worse, or Kimi has improved a bit. These days Kimi doesn't complain about how much he dislikes the handling of the car (something he did frequently in 2014), so it would be logical to assume that he just likes the Ferrari car better these days.

Again, you are free to dismiss it if you want. But remember, if Rosberg left Mercedes at the end of 2013, would you have accepted the fact that Hamilton is barely any better than him?

I don't think that Kimi would really get criticised in a situation were the Mercedes was seen as being the faster car?

Hamilton > Bottas 0.42s (6-2)
Vettel > Kimi 0.26s (5-2)

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Indeed and that would be cherry picking.

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Alright, since you seem convinced that it's not humanly possible that Kimi could have improved relative to Alonso like he did relative to Vettel:

Do you think that Webber was clearly a better driver than Rosberg like 2006 showed?

Because Vettel dominated Webber by a bigger margin than Hamilton dominated Rosberg by.

Of course you could argue that Rosberg was a rookie in 2006 and he could have improved relative to Webber if they had stayed teammates, but since you don't actually have any evidence, does that conclusively prove that Webber > Rosberg and therefore Vettel > Hamilton?

Like Kimi equalling Vettel in qualifying in 2016, will we throw that in the bin and forget about it.

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Villenueve was a rookie, you make allowances for rookies, Vandoorne for instance is now starting to perform better at McLaren.

I year data points are not ideal, the more years the better, regarding Kimi and Alonso it actually is what you would expect given that they both had several years against Massa.

This idea of Kimi improving were is the evidence, the performance gap between him and Vettel shows a driver that is not really performing, he's performing better now than in 2014, there's no defining evidence for that.

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Has Kimi improved, the perfomance difference this year is no different than in 2015.

If we make no allowances for rookies then Mercedes might as well dispense with Ocon's services because I'm sure they are looking for a driver who can beat Perez.

Even with Verstappen we can see that he's improved from last year to this year and this is his third season in F1.

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Im lazy, Can anyone calculate the difference in qualifying times over the season where they've both done q3? And possible compare this to other pairs.

As a Dan support I am going to defend Dan's performance.

Both Max and Dan were good this weekend. Max got a good pass on a struggling Lewis, while Dan got a good pass on a, at the time, faster than Lewis, Bottas.

Dan lost 10 seconds to Max while behind Bottas and once he passed lost a further 1.5 seconds to Max over the rest of the first stint, they left Dan out which cost him a further 6 seconds: +18sec at start on second stint.

Dan held this deficit give or take 1 second until he defended Seb. Finished +22.

I think their pace in clean air was similar most of the race.

Max was better, just, compared to Dan. Obviously didnt have to deal with fairy cakes strategy call.

Max won it when he didnt let Bottas pass. If Dan had achieved the same I reckon it would have been a 1-2. Dan was unlucky with the wet side of the start grid.

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Aussie :: Ricciardo

I see you just did your usual ignoring trick. The most accurate was to compare is to simulate each experience as closely as possible. Both pairings first year is ideal for that. Picking any other year is cherry picking

No. You are completely wrong on this one I'm afraid

No, he didn't. I don't think you understand how comparisons work

Yes I'm in complete agreement on his qualifying. He does show a reasonable turn of speed but, as you say, this often gets dismissed. Usually it's on the lines of "Vettel even got beaten by Kimi," whereas the same doesn't appear to happen whenever Bottas does well.

For me, though, the races tend to be one disappointment after another. I can't remember the last time I felt he was actually a threat to anyone

The more data points the better, that much is true. But you need to get the best common denominator when making a comparison between two sets of data. E.g. if both have five years' worth, why would you only use one for one party? But if one has less, then you need to match that in the other to get any kind of accurate comparison. This should be elementary

Completely disagree. You just have to bare in mind one set of data will be more accurate than the other. You still use all the data because that's going to paint the most accurate picture overall.

Imagine if Vettel had his 2016 season in 2015? If you were only allowed to compare that seasons to Alonso's 2014 how misleading would that be? Vettel would look bang average compared to Alonso.

I agree that Spain wasn't Kimi's fault. But as it was classed asa racing incident and Kimi and Verstappen retired and Bottas got away with it, I somehow can't say Bottas was responsible. I can say he triggered the oppertunity. I think it was alright for Kimi to do what he did, but Verstappen going on the outside when 2 were on the inside was not a good idea. Bottas ran out of space. He didn't run wide as some say he did. But he only ran out of space because Verstappen didn't go wide enough to allow Kimi to give Bottas enough room. Although Bottas admitted he could have braked later which would have meant this didn't happen, there is nothing wrong with braking early and it wasn't his fault that the others both chose to attempt to go by at the same time.

In Baku, I can agree Kimi certainly was unlucky. But as we discussed earlier, we disagree on the incident on the start. Bottas suffered more than him from that at the time and that was classed as a 50 - 50 racing incident. It was well after this that Kimi was very unfortunate. Bottas was lucky with the safety car, but other than that, here and Britain showed he can be pretty good at recovering from further back. Kimi was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Force India's came together. But I can't hold him responsible for that.

Imagine my surprise...

I don't think you quite get how these things work. If Vettel had had his 2016 season in 2015 then it would have been an accurate representation. Because it would have been his first year against Kimi, as Alonso's was. That's the only accurate basis for comparison

The one thing you don't take into account, however, is that there was absolutely no incentive for Verstappen to go any faster than he did once he got a good enough gap on Hamilton. The entire second stint was just managing the gap. Do you really think Dan was content in running slower than he could, while Vettel was managing 1s/lap faster than him and on target to reach him a good number of laps from the end?

You can't just compare the race pace of a controlling leader with a comfortable gap to the race pace of someone that could've gone for second at first and then came at great risk to losing the podium.



This could be correct.

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Go Vandoorne - Verstappen - Vettel!

The fact is that it doesn't make sense to disregard part of the data set. That makes no sense at all. Sure, you wish you had a larger data set for Alonso to match the one you have for Vettel but you do the best you can with what you have and acknowledge that you have a more accurate representation with Vettel v Raikkonen. That doesn't change the fact that Kimi has, at times, been competitive with Vettel while he was never really in the picture with Alonso throughout an entire season.

Offhand I'm not sure my system would do exactly as you ask but I have the gap at 0.14s in Verstappen's favour.

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and he wasn't in the picture against Vettel throughout his entire first season, either. That's also a fact. It's also a far more appropriate comparison

No it isn't having the need to pick put 1 particular year is cherry picking, the more data the more accurate the result, people who crunch numbers know this.

Also for your information doing as you ask makes Alonso 0.04s quicker than Vettel but of course you will throw in the caveat that Kimi would have done so much better in his second year against Alonso despite the fact he actually got hammered by Vettel but then the caveat is that Vettel did better against a much improved Kimi.

Overall data makes it Alonso 0.08s quicker than Vettel, bearing in mind that Ricciardo beat Vettel by 0.17s so it's not like that could be unbelievable, however I do except that 1 year match ups are not ideal without correlation data to back it up.

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Wins: Canada 2018, Abu Dhabi 2017
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So if Kimi beats Vettel then he also beats Alonso?

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No it works by you deciding which years you chose to pick and ignoring other years, Alosno still did better than Vettel anyway.

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I have absolutely no idea how you reach that conclusion.

It's ridiculous to throw out any data.

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No-one is "deciding" anything. Just taking a straightforward comparison between the team mates under as near identical conditions as possible. Which in this case means their first year together. It would be cherry picking if any other year for Vettel was used as a comparison. This is not rocket science

no, it's ridiculous to try and make a comparison between two drivers using unequal sets of data

Because you have already determined that Alonso and Vettel are close to equal.

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no need to make things up, thanks. I'm not interested in what Kimi may or may not have done.

People who crunch numbers also know that any scientific comparison relies on samples being as close in size and scope as possible. Otherwise the figures for one may be distorted. As mentioned before, this is elementary.

As to Alonso being 0.04s quicker than Vettel, if true that pretty much confirms to me that they had almost identical results vs Kimi. Less than half a tenth is nominal, which just confirms what was being said anyway.

If I merely do that then Alonso is 0.04s quicker than Vettel.

If such things are so defining then Ricciardo is 0.17s quicker than Vettel.

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2017: 9th Place
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Wins: Canada 2018, Abu Dhabi 2017
Podiums: (8)