As is the tradition, I have kept my thoughts internal until at least 3-4 races in, but I now feel ready to say something meaningful ahead of the 4th race.
As you may have seen some new charts have been constructed over the winter break. The automation in R and the API to Plotly is very efficient. We seem to be only held back by analytical ideas now. The top page of the White Paper now has a team performance ratio breakdown which tells the story of the whole season in one go quite nicely.
On the Team Value pages we also have a nice visualisation of how closely matched the drivers are in the teams. One to watch as the pundits speak through the season as sometimes things aren’t always what they seem.
So, I guess finally it may be worth a few words on what we have witnessed so far and whether the new 2017 regulations have really changed anything?
Whilst the Driver’s competition has a different dynamic this season (how long that will remain who knows), I am yet to be convinced how much will change for the teams as the season progresses. Ferrari have no doubt improved the engineering offering but we have yet to see Red Bull at full tilt yet. The most interesting part of the Team competition is probably in the 4-5th place area. So far Force India are being very consistent and it would be great to see them maintain that position again.