Formula 1: Teammate Battles

In Formula 1, it’s always complicated and to some extent subjective determining if a good (or a bad) performance is due to the talent of the driver or to the quality of the car. That’s why the teammate battle is so important: the teammate is the only other driver on circuit that has the same equipment, and almost all the differences in results are due to differences between the drivers.

This chart shows the careers of the 2015 season drivers, displaying how many percent of his team’s points, in a given year, the driver was able to score. The math is simple: if the driver scored more than 50% of his teams points (a blue bar, going up), he won the teammate battle. If he scored less than 50% (a red bar, going down), he lost it. The y axis shows the percentage (the top of blue bars and the bottom of red bars), the x axis shows the corresponding season. Hover the bars to see more information (as the name of the team and the competing teammate).

Choose the driver:



Some additional explanations:

  1. In the dropdown menu, the drivers are shown according to the 2015 final point results.
  2. An exact value of 50% of the points, as the duo Hamilton/Alonso scored in 2007, will not render any visible bar. In those situations, I created a tiny red line (good luck trying to hover on that).
  3. I considered only drivers that have at least one complete season. That’s why Roberto Merhi and Alexander Rossi are not in this chart.
  4. When a driver had more than one teammate in a given season, they are named "various".
  5. Be careful when analysing these data. A big bar can sometimes mean nothing: for instance, imagine a really bad season for a team, in which driver A scored nothing and driver B scored a mere 1 point. In this situation, driver B scored 100% of his team’s points!

Source of almost all the data: www.f1fanatic.co.uk.