Hamilton unlucky or not: how about a statistic model.

[ringo]

To me its not the number of failures. Its when the failures happen. Look at that statistic and you will see that he isnt as lucky as some think. Qualifying failures. Start grid, failing from the lead and so on. Even when it cones to blatant stategix blunders from the lead he's at the brunt of it.
The eeason behind thia bad luck is simply the people who he has to work with in the team. It's their commitment to doing their jobs right that determines if a fuel pipe is coupled properly or if a brake dis was inspected thoroughly. This has nothing to do with the complexity of an f1 car or it being a prototype as these failures arent design failures. The failures are purely down to quality assurance and control. And one guys garage simply doesnt care as much to work as hard as they can to uphold the same standard as the other side. Maybe toto isnt policing hamilton's side as much to get the best out of the mechanics or not much supervision is put into lewis' side and so quality drops. So in my opinion it's a management and humanresource issue relating to many things, one being the perception of hamilton.

[turbof1]

To me its not the number of failures. Its when the failures happen. Look at that statistic and you will see that he isnt as lucky as some think. Qualifying failures. Start grid, failing from the lead and so on. Even when it cones to blatant stategix blunders from the lead he's at the brunt of it.
The eeason behind thia bad luck is simply the people who he has to work with in the team. It's their commitment to doing their jobs right that determines if a fuel pipe is coupled properly or if a brake dis was inspected thoroughly. This has nothing to do with the complexity of an f1 car or it being a prototype as these failures arent design failures. The failures are purely down to quality assurance and control. And one guys garage simply doesnt care as much to work as hard as they can to uphold the same standard as the other side. Maybe toto isnt policing hamilton's side as much to get the best out of the mechanics or not much supervision is put into lewis' side and so quality drops. So in my opinion it's a management and humanresource issue relating to many things, one being the perception of hamilton.

While I do think this is a fair point, we are still discussing interpretations of data before we processed the actual data.
The topic starter proposed a normal distribution model. I'd like to see this before I want to start taking conclusions or even draw hypotheses with a 95% or 99% significance. Sometimes statistics give very surprising but very true views.

So, anybody up for the job? We need a sample pool, with the samples similar enough to eachother. Anybody suggestions on the criteria for that?

[Miguel]

In cycling, an abnormal ABP (athlete biological passport) value may lead to suspension when the confidence of the anomaly is beyond 99.9%. That's pretty damn high. You'll need a pretty large number of car failures on Hamilton's car in order to get anywhere near that confidence. Rosberg's car already failed in Canada (ok, less harshly, but he was in clean air after all) and Silverstone, and thus you'll need, what, about 16 failures in a row on Hamilton's car while Rosberg enjoys perfect reliability to get to the same confidence.

WARNING: I haven't done the math, so the numbers could be way off.

[tim|away]

It's all nice to speculate, but let's get some numbers on the table.

I took the data from formula1.com, as it is readily available and convenient. There are several limitations to this data, but it's better than nothing. From this we can extract mechanical DNFs on raceday. The data won't show mechanical failures in FP or qualifying, nor will it show mechanical failures on raceday that didn't lead to a retirement. Take it for what it's worth. If you feel it's not accurate enough, please provide better data yourself rather than to pick holes in it. I am dealing with what is readily available here to at least get some numbers on the table. Also, I excluded all retirements that resulted from accidents.

2007
HAM: 0 DNF
ALO: 0 DNF

2008
HAM: 0 DNF
KOV: 2 DNF (Japan, China)

2009
HAM: 1 DNF (Abu Dhabi)
KOV: 1 DNF (spain)

2010
HAM: 1 DNF (Hungary)
BUT: 1 DNF (Monaco)

2011
HAM: 1 DNF (Brazil)
BUT: 2 DNF (Great Britain, Germany)

2012
HAM: 3 DNF (Singapore, Germany, Abu Dhabi)
BUT: 1 DNF (Italy)

2013
HAM: 0 DNF
ROS: 2 DNF (Australia, China)

2014
HAM: 2 DNF (Australia, Canada)
ROS: 1 DNF (Great Britain)


HAM has retired due to mechanical failures 8 times in total since 2007. His teammates retired 10 times in total in the same period of time.

Again: This data has its limitations. Feel free to provide better data if you have it rather than to poke holes in it.

[zeph]

Well, today he didn't have DNF, but it was absolutely bad luck. Last weekend ditto. DNF's aren't the only manifestation of bad luck.

[marcush.]

you guys have short memory .
after all the restructuring we still have that team which was BAR some time ago ...and tell you something they had really worrying Stretches of only one Driver being affected with horrible reliability issues.
I remember Takuma Sato with such a bad string of results and also Michael Schumacher who had this 2011/2 years which was nothing short of outright horrible from a Team Performance side ..with missed dead lines to make a quali attempt to DRS failures ,lost wheels and and and ....
maybe one is a bit biased when it comes to counting the mishaps on one side of the Garage but it seems as if Lewis now has inherited Schumis luck in this Team -interestingly it was not like that last year at all..

[gray41]

Well the past 4-5 years the "lead" car by T cam has always had more bad luck compared to the "2nd" yellow T car, within the Mercedes Benz team.

[bhall II]

[...]
Michael Schumacher who had this 2011/2 years which was nothing short of outright horrible from a Team Performance side.
[...]
it seems as if Lewis now has inherited Schumis luck in this Team
[...]

That Schumacher's race and performance engineers (Peter Bonnington and Jock Clear, respectively) are now Hamilton's race and performance engineers might have something to do with it.

[turbof1]

so some ground rules...

*the intent behind this topic is to have a statistic model to see if Hamilton is either hit with bad luck or if there's something different going on.

*Some side talk is ok, but the priority is to get a pool of data, calculations around variances and standard deviations, and a distribution up.

*We understand that there are huge amount of factors that have influence on this, but getting a model up isn't going to hurt and might reveal some interesting things. Interpretations about it can always be made AFTER the model is up.

*No fanboyism and no complaining about fanboyism allowed. It's a number's topic. Any sort of idiocity inmediately warrants a warning.

*IF, and a big IF, this produces something meaningful and everybody cooperates, I'll write a front page headline, with all participant's efforts mentioned.

I also changed the topic's title.

[notsofast]

The wikipedia articles seem pretty comprehensive. Perhaps you could go through them and tally up the number of qualifying and the number of races in which a driver encountered a mechanical issue. From this, calculate the average and standard deviation for number 1 drivers and for number 2 drivers. Then see how Hamilton compares to other number 2 drivers. I suspect you'll find that, on average, number 2 drivers have more mechanical issues, and that Hamilton falls within the expected range, even if his total is higher than the average.

[GitanesBlondes]

Try as you might, you cannot have a valid statistical model for this.

Here's why.

Unless you can factor in how much, or how little, mechanical sympathy Lewis has when driving his cars, you will never be able to create any model. Keep in mind, you're also at the whim of whatever Mercedes claims is the cause of a mechanical failure. They may never announce what it actually is lest it point to a component that could be integral to their ability to field the car that they currently do.

For example, Nico was able to nurse his W05 home at Canada while Lewis was not able to do it. Does that speak to a lack of ability on his part to nurse failing equipment? Unless you can definitive answer to that, trying to create a statistical model is an exercise in futility as there are too many unknown factors.

[deterherligt]

This is an interesting topic. Not just in the Hamilton case, but also regarding other supposedly 'unlucky' drivers (Webber, Alesi, ...)

A few thoughts:

- Luck is a very difficult thing to define. Obviously we want to talk about reliability, but what about other things; Weather, Pitstops, crashes by other drivers, safetycars? Witch of these are pure luck, and witch aren't?
- Everything is relative. We want to compare to the teammate, but also reliability today is much greater than a few years ago.

[turbof1]

Try as you might, you cannot have a valid statistical model for this.

Here's why.

Unless you can factor in how much, or how little, mechanical sympathy Lewis has when driving his cars, you will never be able to create any model. Keep in mind, you're also at the whim of whatever Mercedes claims is the cause of a mechanical failure. They may never announce what it actually is lest it point to a component that could be integral to their ability to field the car that they currently do.

For example, Nico was able to nurse his W05 home at Canada while Lewis was not able to do it. Does that speak to a lack of ability on his part to nurse failing equipment? Unless you can definitive answer to that, trying to create a statistical model is an exercise in futility as there are too many unknown factors.

And we will include that premise. However, it can still bring us a useful view, even with the incompleteness in the back of our minds.

[iotar__]

[...]
Michael Schumacher who had this 2011/2 years which was nothing short of outright horrible from a Team Performance side.
[...]
it seems as if Lewis now has inherited Schumis luck in this Team
[...]

That Schumacher's race and performance engineers (Peter Bonnington and Jock Clear, respectively) are now Hamilton's race and performance engineers might have something to do with it.

Could you expand what you mean by that exactly, what Bonnigton and Clear have to do with today's engine problem for example? Or Australia engine problem? Or Canada brakes problem? Or Canada ERS engine/ERS problems, or Germany Brembo brakes failure.

BTW: if one to believe Wikipedia: Clear "previously he was race engineer for Nico Rosberg from (2010 to 2012)". What kind of a correlation can there be

[iotar__]

you guys have short memory .
after all the restructuring we still have that team which was BAR some time ago ...and tell you something they had really worrying Stretches of only one Driver being affected with horrible reliability issues.
I remember Takuma Sato with such a bad string of results and also Michael Schumacher who had this 2011/2 years which was nothing short of outright horrible from a Team Performance side ..with missed dead lines to make a quali attempt to DRS failures ,lost wheels and and and ....
maybe one is a bit biased when it comes to counting the mishaps on one side of the Garage but it seems as if Lewis now has inherited Schumis luck in this Team -interestingly it was not like that last year at all..

Excuse me, can you explain what kind of pseudo scientific thing "inheriting" luck is? What's the correlation between whatever happened to one of Mercedes drivers during previous seasons and 2014 Australia ENGINE problem (new, different engine), Hungary ENGINE problem (new, different engine), Canada ENGINE/ERS problem, Canada brakes problem (new brakes), Germany brakes problems of specific brand (new different brakes).

First thing with assessing "bad luck" would be to check if there's bad luck at all.