Formula 1 - Who is the Greatest Driver of All Time?

The BBC Sport asked this week Who is the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time? The article pulls together some great stats normalising the data using current points systems to make the data more comparable over time. The article present league tables of some of the key stats and leave you to form your own conclusion as to who is the greatest.

The author states "One of the great lessons of this exercise is to underline the dubiousness of using only statistics to back up any argument about who is the greatest racing driver of all time."

Is that another way of saying ignore the stats if they do not back up your preconceived notions? 

To really figure out who is the greatest we should combine the league tables into a single view, and then the greatest jumps out at you from quiet a distance, put points per start and overall point side by side and Michael Schumacher is there in a league of his own. I am leaving out pole positions as this is a means to an end and wins ratio is interesting but no substitute for overall points which win world championships.

Of course  if you buy into consistent sustained success over time as a measure of being Greatest, Schumacher is remarkable. Get well soon. 

As a nod to the greats of yester-year who did not have anything like the modern volume of races to stack up the points I have include another chart which shows who you would least like to line up on the grid against if you wanted to be world champion. This viz elavates win ratio and points per start to show who is likely to leave whom in the dust in a Champion of Champions once off race if such a thing could be arranged.

Lets watch Raikkonen, Alonso, Hamilton and Vettle's movement on this chart with interest as the 2014 season unfolds!

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Rugby Player Numbers - Part 2

How many players does it take to win a world cup?

Based on the ruggerblogger data, lets have a closer look at the player numbers from the various counties, but particularly the 4 countries which have won a World Cup or two, how do these nations compare in terms of volume of players?

From the viz below you can get a feel for the numbers and in particular we can spot that England has far and away more resources in terms of pure player numbers than any of the other World Cup winning nations. Maybe this is what it takes for a Northern Hemisphere side to win the World Cup, pure weight of numbers, draw your own conclusions.

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Rugby Player Numbers - Part 1

A tweet by Sir Clive Woodward on 26 February 2014 brought to light a long lost Rugby Viz from ruggerblogger blogged prior to the 2011 RWC in New Zealand. A number of replies to the tweet noted the huge number of English non-senior players relative to other countries. However, as a number of comments on the original blog noted the viz is misleading in the scaling of the circles... for example it looks like France has more senior players than England, is this true?

To visualise this in a more definitive way I have remix the data into a more easy to compare format and while I was at it I added in the populations of the countries in question to see what proportion of the population are playing rugby. Also, have a look at the 6 Nation, former Tri-Nations countries and World Cup winners. Remember this is 2011 player number data, if anyone can point me to more uptodate data from the  IRB data that would be great. Let me know what you think!

Wow sometimes charts and graphs like this do make you think !? pic.twitter.com/QLBB6wXBfN. -- would love to see the football equivalent
— Sir Clive Woodward (@CliveWoodward) February 26, 2014

Then see Part 2 here, how many players does it take to win a world cup?

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