2023 Statistics – Lots and Lots of Numbers

2023 Statistics: Lots and Lots of Numbers.

It’s that time of year again, when your correspondent raids his grandchildren’s pencil cases, confiscates their calculator and sets about colouring in some charts and working out some statistics. Read on and prepare to be amazed by how incredibly brilliantly or appallingly badly you raced a slot car in 2023.

First we have the “I’m Faster Than You” charts, where those at the top can genuinely claim to be brilliant, and those below can argue where the cut-off is between being almost brilliant and utter rubbish. Three standing ovations for Josh and two for Julian.

Next we come to the ever-popular discussion about which of Molesey’s lanes is fastest and which drivers perform best in each lane.

The first chart represents the fastest laps recorded by every driver in every race run in 2023, excluding Club Cars rounds. In other words, if ten drivers raced in one race, then ten fastest laps were recorded. The RevoSlot Club Cars are excluded because they varied in performance and including them would have skewed the statistics.

The Club Cars get their own chart. Nobody will be surprised to learn that the green car was statistically the fastest, the yellow one the absolute dog.

The individual charts below show the lane-spread of fastest race laps for each driver who raced in 2023. At a whopping 63% (it was 61% in 2022), Lee’s fondness for green lane continues unabated. At the other end of the scale, the club tarts are Simon and Terry, who seem not to mind whose slot they stick their guides in.

And now we come to a special treat first introduced in 2022; a chart of dubious value which tries to illustrate how consistent a driver’s lap times are within a race.

For each race this year a ‘Consistency Score’ has been calculated, which is a driver’s fastest lap expressed as a percentage of his average lap. For example, if his fastest lap in a race is 9.500 seconds and his average lap 10.000, then his consistency score for that race is 95%.

The consistency score is just a bit of fun, so don’t read too much into it. If your score is 99.99% but you can’t lap faster than 12 seconds when everyone else is doing 8s, you’re still, bluntly, rubbish, just unusually consistent at being rubbish. All that really matters is who crosses the finish line first, but since that honour eludes most of us most of the time, a consolation prize is your consistency score, which will either confirm or deny that actually you’d be truly brilliant if only you could find a bit more speed from somewhere.

Drivers’ average consistency scores are shown in the table above, with individual race scores detailed in the large table below. Make of them what you will. Clearly crashes add time to a lap and hence affect the race average, so the consistency score reflects not only the ability of a driver to repeatedly lap close to his fastest lap, but also how prone he is to crashing. DNFs and individual race scores lower than 80% have been discarded so as not to skew the overall score.

If you’re peering at this on a tiny smartphone screen, click the button below to see the fully-detailed table, although bear in mind that you’ll need either a magnifying glass or to do a lot of scrolling.

Crash & Burn

Next we have Crash & Burn, which crashed and burned through lack of interest in mid-August, but not before some drivers had excelled and others had disgraced themselves.

A car of any type, usually something pretty diabolical, was provided each meeting. Drivers had to drive it for one timed lap, without any prior practice, using the same lane and hand-out controller as everyone else. Points were awarded thus: zero points for anyone who crashed, 20 for the slowest driver, increasing by 2 for each faster driver. Maximum points went to the fastest driver.

Curtis was statistically the best at not crashing, a feat he achieved by the simple expedient of almost never turning up. In the one event he did contest he managed not to crash.

If we ignore Curtis (sorry mate, but needs must), Lee was the best at not crashing, falling off just once in twenty rounds.

The biggest failures were Dexter, with an impressive crash rate of 37.5%, then David, Terry and Joss at 33% each. Dexter and Joss have an excuse in that they were new to slot cars this year, but quite what David’s and Terry’s are is anyone’s guess. Early-onset senility, probably.

And finally, before we get to the results of Molesey’s official 2023 Drivers and Class Championships (which anyone with at least one eye on this website will already have seen on the Championship Standings page) we have an Average Points table, which is exactly what it says: the average number of points per race which each driver scored. Sadly for Julian it’s not a championship, so no need to stand and applaud this time.