With the aim of trying to correct for seanyb's point I looked at the distribution of lap top speeds across the race. To see how it varied.
Charts show every lap and the top speed from that lap. They are ordered from fastest to slowest. We didn't have much yellow so nothing really to worry about here.
Hot takes:
- There is a lot going on here. Not all of it helps. In fact I would say very little of it does!
- The only real takeaway is that you can see that discrete nature of the data. The measurement is very much not continuous. Which is fun.
Other takeaways? Well there is, er, somethings...
- There are clearly some laps that show a good tow.
- Oddly the effect seems to vary by car!
- Cars from the same team have big differences - now pretty much for every two car team, one car had a problem. However I would have expected the fastest few laps would be similar. See the Toyota, Ferrari and Porsche charts
- Some cars are slower with their fastest laps, but then win later on and have a stronger "tail". See Toyota/Caddy.
- There seems to be a Hypercar and LMDh difference here. This could decent drop off of speed, the LMDh are much more consistent. Something to so with the way the hybrid works/energy conservation. Which probably means that looking at these top speeds is a blind alley when it comes to comparing the classes.
- The Caddy Porsche one is interesting.
So, my main takeaway is that looking at top speeds would not help you do any BoPage. But I doubt the rule makers are, they have much better data. We don't so it is worth a look - but I don't think there is much here. At least not between the classes.
Some cars are obviously slower than others (privateer/non hybrid) and the Porsche. However this later difference isn't that much different to what you see between team cars.