Formula 1 drivers are paid to do one thing: win races.
In this post, we’ll look at the data for driver pay and compare it to driver win rates and podium rates.
This will also be a demo of how to make some nice charts in R, which is considerably more fun than making them in (::shudder::) Microsoft Excel.
1. Driver Salary Data
Let’s start with a look at how much these guys are making this year.
First, gather historical driver compensation data from the trusty internet, put them on a .csv file and load into R as a data frame (table) called “salary”.
Here’s how our data frame looks:
To make a chart of the 2022 numbers, use the R library called ggplot2.
Each line is a command for an aesthetic feature of the chart.
“geom_bar” will make a bar graph out of chosen variable.
43 million dollars – Why didn’t I take that job?
Clearly there is a relationship with past performance and current pay.
Alonso and Vettel are currently in 9th and 11th place respectively for the 2022 season, but they are each repeat winners of the World Championship (Alonso: 2005 & 2006, Vettel: 2010 through 2013).
Let’s look at these numbers in the context of the last 6 years.
When you consider how repetitive the ggplot2 commands are, the code quickly starts to feel easier.
For this one we do need a little help from a library called “reshape” and a function called “melt”, which stacks our two variables (the two colors in the chart below) so that we can chart them both.
Here the cumulative earnings of 7 time Champion Lewis Hamilton starts to stand out – more than a quarter of a billion dollars.
He made more than any other driver in a single year in 2020 with a payout of $76 million.
The data begs the question, are drivers being paid for their past glory or their likelihood of winning future races?
Ricciardo of McLaren is the 5th highest paid driver this year, reflecting his career with Red Bull where he had a 3rd place finish in 2014.
This year he is in 12th place, McLaren dropped him, and he “maybe” will find a team in 2024.
2. Correlation with Performance
We have performance data for each year that we have salary data, in the form of “win rate” and “podium rate” for each driver in each season. (See the post “Dynamic Driver Performance: Regression Model Update” for details on those variables.)
Accordingly we can check the correlation between pay and performance, and how it has evolved over time.
Use to cor() function to get the correlations, and put them in a dataframe called “wincor”:
Now we have a time series showing how the relationship between pay and performance has evolved.
To visualize the trend, we use the ggplot2 library again, this time using geom_line instead of geom_bar, just for fun:
For completeness, we can do the same exercise with “podium rate” instead of “win rate”, where we see a similar trend.
It turns out the relationship has broken down somewhat this year.
I will offer a few hypotheses of why this may be the case (note again that driver salaries are exempt from the $140 million team budget cap, so we’ll assume that’s not the reason).
1. The field is cluttered with a few “former” stars who are getting paid a lot, such as Vettel and Ricciardo, mentioned above.
2. Lewis Hamilton is having a rough year, not getting a single race win. His numbers alone may be the reason for the lower correlation, considering he was the winner from 2017-2020.
3. There are some “lower” paid drivers doing very well this year, in particular the Ferrari drivers Charles LeClerc and Carlos Sainz (3 and 1 wins respectively), and Red Bull’s Sergio Perez (1 win).
We may expect this correlation to deteriorate further next year as races get more competitive.
A few potential reasons:
1. Red Bull will face performance headwinds due to their punishment for overspending this year and going over the budget cap (cheating) – they have to pay $7 million, which Red Bull chief Christian Horner figures will mean a 10% reduction in their ability to use the wind tunnel, which may cost 0.25-0.50 seconds of lap time.
2. Mercedes may return to winning races, having essentially ruined their 2022 season with a bouncy car.
3. Teams like McLaren and Alpine may start achieving podium finishes (c’mon Lando!).
As fans who love to see racing, we can certainly hope for these developments.
