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View: Pace, accumulated race time
Normalization: Fuel & Tire use
Population: Top 6 drivers
X-Axis: Lap number in race order
Y-Axis: Time delta to reference
Reference: Race winner’s average lap
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Pace Domain — Converging Performance
When the race data is normalized into the Pace domain, removing the influence of strategy, pit timing, and track position, the competitive picture becomes remarkably clear.
The first observation is the very low tire degradation across the field. The pace curves for all drivers display nearly identical slopes, indicating that tire performance remained stable throughout the race. Melbourne therefore rewarded consistent driving rather than tire management.
More importantly, the four leading drivers — Russell, Antonelli, Leclerc and Hamilton — show almost identical pace trajectories. Their curves evolve in parallel from the first competitive laps through the final stint, confirming that the leading Mercedes and Ferrari drivers operated at essentially the same underlying speed.
This reinforces a key conclusion from the race domain: the fight at the front was not decided by raw pace.
Behind them, Norris and Verstappen form a second performance cluster. Their pace slopes follow the same degradation pattern, but the entire curve sits consistently above the leading group. In other words, the McLaren and Red Bull drivers were not losing time due to tire management — they were simply operating at a slightly slower baseline pace.
The pace domain therefore confirms the structural hierarchy observed elsewhere in the analysis: Mercedes and Ferrari at the front, with Red Bull and McLaren slightly behind but still competitive.
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View: Pace, lap time distributions
Normalization: Fuel & Tire use
Population: Top 6 drivers
X-Axis: Percentiles and Quartiles
Y-Axis: Lap time in seconds
Filter: 5%,10% excluded for scaling
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Pace Distributions — Hidden Push Laps
The pace distributions reveal a subtle but important detail that is largely invisible in the race timeline.
Russell and Leclerc both show notably faster extreme laps at the left edge of the distribution. These laps occur significantly below the typical race pace envelope, indicating moments where the drivers briefly pushed harder than the surrounding traffic conditions would normally allow.
This behavior is consistent with the early phase of the race when the two were directly fighting for track position. During this period, both drivers had a strong incentive to temporarily exceed their sustainable pace in order to gain or defend track position.
Interestingly, these push laps are not obvious in the Race domain. Early in the race the cars are still carrying heavy fuel loads, which naturally inflates lap times and masks small differences in absolute performance. As a result, the timeline view tends to smooth out these moments of aggression.
The Pace domain, however, removes many of these structural effects and exposes the true distribution of competitive laps. In this view, the early Russell–Leclerc duel becomes visible through the faster laps recorded at the edge of the performance envelope.
This is also a first glimpse of how energy deployment management may influence the pace distributions under the current regulations. Drivers can occasionally produce laps that sit well outside the typical pace envelope when energy deployment is maximized, creating a distinctive “tail” in the distribution curve.
In Melbourne, those laps appear to belong primarily to the early fight at the front.
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View: Pace, accumulated sorted time
Normalization: Fuel & Tire use
Population: Top 6 drivers
X-Axis: Percentiles and Quartiles
Y-Axis: Time delta to reference
Reference: Winner average pace
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Pace Sorted — Confirmation of the Competitive Order
When the pace laps are sorted by performance, the resulting distribution closely mirrors the structure already observed in the Race domain.
The leading four drivers — Russell, Antonelli, Leclerc and Hamilton — form a tight performance envelope, indicating that their underlying pace remained very similar throughout the race. The ordering within this group reflects small differences in execution rather than any decisive speed advantage.
Behind them, Norris and Verstappen again appear as a second cluster. Their pace distributions follow the same general shape as the leaders but remain consistently offset by a small but persistent gap.
Unlike the pace distribution chart, the sorted representation does not reveal additional dynamics beyond this clustering. Instead, it serves primarily as a consistency check, confirming that the competitive hierarchy observed in the race analysis also holds when strategy effects are removed.
In Melbourne, the Pace Sorted view therefore reinforces a simple conclusion: the leading Mercedes and Ferrari drivers operated within the same pace window, while McLaren and Red Bull trailed slightly behind.
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View: Pace, accumulated sorted time
Normalization: Fuel & Tire use
Population: Top 6 drivers
Sectors: Percentiles and Quartiles
Radius: Time delta to reference
Reference: Winner average pace
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Pace Dartboard — The Race at a Glance
The Pace Dartboard presents the same information shown in the Pace Sorted chart, but in a compact visual format designed for rapid interpretation.
Each ring represents the sorted pace performance of the drivers, arranged from fastest laps near the center to slower laps toward the outer rings. By plotting the curves radially, the entire pace distribution can be viewed simultaneously without the need to scan across a horizontal axis.
The resulting pattern immediately reveals the same competitive structure observed in the previous charts. Three clusters clearly emerge: the Mercedes drivers at the front, closely followed by Ferrari, with Norris and Verstappen forming the “best of the rest” group slightly offset from the leaders.
While the Pace Sorted chart is useful for detailed inspection, the dartboard representation compresses the same information into a format that can be interpreted almost instantly. This makes it particularly effective for quick viewing on smaller screens such as mobile devices.
In practice, the Pace Dartboard functions as a visual summary of the Pace domain, allowing readers to recognize the competitive hierarchy of the race at a single glance.