F1 is celebrating its 70th edition in 2020. Due to the worldwide pandemic situation, the sport was affected as many others and the season is now in progress with a very unusual calendar. It is evident from the first few races how Mercedes is dominating the competition, a result somewhat expected after winning the last 6 constructor titles.

As the season unfolds, it can be expected some other team will have their day on some tracks but the curiosity about how dominant the team is remains.

In this notebook, we will look at the historical performance of drivers and constructors to see what dominant seasons look like and how 2020, in all its peculiarity, compares to these seasons. This is by no means an attempt of finding who is the best driver in history or similar exercises, but rather observe how, year by year, how a driver or a constructor won the championship changed, making a season more thrilling than another.

Moreover, we will be looking at thrilling races (when we have data about it) and give an idea on how data can capture this aspect of an F1 race

The best drivers and the best cars

To compare cars and drivers of different eras we have to take into account a few things:

• The point system changed
• Some years the fastest lap was awarded one extra point, thus giving one more reason to aim for it
• Each season has a different number of races

Therefore, we assigned all the points with the current system (25 to the winner, 18 to p2, etc) and consider some statistics by weighting them on the number of Grand Prix of each season. Since the lap time was not recorded consistently across the years, we ignore the extra point for the fastest lap.

The 2020 season has been already a very peculiar one due to reasons outside of the F1 control. However, we will see how the Mercedes dominance in 2020 is somewhat unprecedented in the history of the sport.

In these plots, we see how the best driver in each statistic performed year by year. For example, in 1952 the driver that won the most Grand Prix was Ascari with 6 wins and his percentage of victories in one season is still unbeaten. Moreover, we observe that

• The 2002 and 2004 seasons were both golden seasons for Michael Schumacher and its Ferrari, collecting an unprecedented number of points, podiums, and victories. He even beats the legendary 1963 season of Jim Clark in Lotus.
• On the other hand, the 1982 season is the one won by the driver that achieved the lowest number of points, podiums, and victories per GP. We will see later how peculiar such season was.
• In qualify, the absolute dominance of Nigel Mansel and its Williams in 1992 and of Sebastian Vettel in Red Bull in 2011 is evident, with 14 and 15 pole positions. Under this aspect, the 2020 season has not been exceptional, given the rivalry between the Mercedes drivers.
• On the other hand, Sebastian Vettel was the driver with most poles in 2009 but also one of the drivers that achieved the least pole positions among the top drivers of each year.

Another way to read the charts above is considering that the higher the top driver of a season ranks in those statistics, the more he dominated the competition that year. And the lower a driver ranks, the bigger (or the closer) the competition was that year.

2020 has been so far a pretty uncompetitive season, which is evident to anyone watching the Gran Prix and the dominance Lewis Hamilton is showing in terms of points, podiums, and fastest laps.

If we have a look at the constructors.