2024 Statistics: Even More Numbers Than 2023

2024 Statistics: Even More Numbers Than 2023.

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 2024.

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 dividing line is between being almost brilliant and utter rubbish.

The “I’ve Got More Than You” title for the most class bests was bitterly fought, as it usually is, between Josh and Julian, Josh winning by 3 to 2 and claiming the cheap stick-on gold star to add to those he won in 2023 and 2022. As runner-up, Julian again had to make do with the backing paper from Josh’s gold star, his consolation being that he’ll soon have enough to wallpaper his pit box with.

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 2024, 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. Unlike last year when the green car was the clear winner with 52%, this year it slumped to third place behind the red and white cars.

The yellow car remained the dog of the bunch, although did at least go one better than its dire 2023 0% and manage a very modest 1% by sweet-talking Dexter into driving it faster than the others in the first Club Cars round of the year. Sadly, Dexter never recovered from the experience and, fearful of having his relationship with a dog exposed, raced just one more Club Cars round before abandoning Molesey for good.

The individual charts below show the lane-spread of fastest race laps for each driver in 2024. At a whopping 59% (it was 39% in 2023), Josh seems to have fallen head over heels under red lane’s spell. At the other end of the scale, this year’s club tart is David, who seems not to mind which slot he sticks his guide in.

And now we come to a feast of numbers first introduced in 2022; a chart still 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%.

New for this year are weeny little arrows and a couple of extra columns so you can see whether you’re becoming more or less consistent. It’s notable that most drivers have improved their score this year. The reasons for that can be endlessly argued, but many will agree that 2024 has been a particularly competitive year and that the friendly but fierce competition has played its part in raising the quality of driving.

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, race stoppages break drivers’ rhythm, and Terry and Simon’s high-decibel banter can be distracting, all of which can 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, how well he recovers from race stoppages, and how good he is at mickey-taking and driving at the same time. 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.

And finally, before we get to the results of Molesey’s official 2024 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 some Average Points tables, which are exactly what they say the are: the average number of points per race which each driver scored. There’s an overall table which covers all races, and five class tables.

Sadly these aren’t championships, so to make up for gold stars not being awarded, please give a loud round of applause to Julian for topping the overall and three class tables, and more modest applause to Josh and Lee for a class each.