Data Crunching in the Off Season

It's pretty boring when there's not another race to look forward to for a few months. I'm not sure what people do who live in climates where it snows. Probably drown their sorrows while watching horrible episodes of Pinks on SpeedTV.

I've been occupying my time shopping for faux fur on the internet and buying ridiculous wings on ebay (pics forthcoming, they'll be on the other blog). Unfortunately shopping can only consume so much time.

During the season, I keep a spreadsheet that tracks my expenses so I can thwart cost cutting efforts of the CFO (my wife). In addition to boring/depressing expense data, I also track what races I've done or plan to do. In the race schedule sheet, I also chunk away my fastest race lap time and the fastest race lap in the entire Spec E30 field. Early on I figured that I could look at the difference between the two over the season, and get a gauge for whether I'm improving or not. Every time I put that data into the sheet, I can see small improvements, which helps motivate me to keep plugging away.

Now that the season's over, I an look at the entire data set. I jammed it all into a chart, and here's what I got:

Throw out 8/23 as a clear anomaly: the headgasket was toast on my car, I was tangibly down on power and only did 2-3 laps per session:

Ah, much better looking :)

Things I observed:

• I'm getting better
  
• I'm always closer to the leader on Sunday (this may be due to who's running Saturday vs Sunday for some events, as some teams split days)

Just eyeballing the chart, the trend looks almost linear. If I was super cool I'd fit a trend curve to this data, then predict that in X races I'd be the winner. I decided to skip this exercise in unrealistic expectations. Now don't get all "Zen of Racing" on me and tell me I've got the wrong attitude. I'm being realistic. I know better than to believe that I'll continue to improve at the same rate. Getting faster is hard work, and it's only going to get harder as time goes on. I'll be ecstatic if I'm looking for tenths of seconds instead of whole seconds next season.

So to end on an up note: I finished the season with my fastest lap in the last race being 2.65 seconds off the fastest lap in class. That's about 5 seconds/lap improvement over the course of 13 races. I'll take it.