Data Analysis Fundamentals: Step 5: Analyse Driver Performance
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Step 5: Analyse Driver Performance
17.03
| 00:00 | - Step 5 is going through and analysing the driver performance so for a start, let's go through what we can look at inside the app itself before we move to looking at the data on the laptop. |
| 00:10 | First step is going to be going ahead and opening our data so let's go down to the file view here and let's open this session here. |
| 00:16 | Now as a really quick piece of analysis, the first thing we can do is come across to our video, we can select the lap we want to look at and look at video, just going to flip this over to landscape which is more how we'd be looking at it in the car. |
| 00:33 | So we do have the ability to customise the way this looks. |
| 00:36 | We can go ahead and show and hide different parameters. |
| 00:39 | So up here you can see we've got the map, I can click on map and not show the map so that hides it from the bottom. |
| 00:45 | Let's just keep showing that there. |
| 00:47 | Got the ability to hide or show the logo in the top left there. |
| 00:50 | We've even got the ability to flip the video depending on how you've got the phone orientated in your car but that's fine for how we're looking at it there. |
| 00:57 | We can also play the video to get an idea of how everything looked when the car was on track. |
| 01:08 | So we also have the ability to skip through to different parts of the lap if we want to look at something in particular. |
| 01:13 | Maybe we were trying to work on a specific section of the track on one lap, we can skip down to the hairpin for example down here. |
| 01:28 | So the idea here is it just gives us a really quick way to review that information, not all the time you're going to want to look at the log data itself. |
| 01:37 | Often using just the video by itself like this with a little bit of overlaid information you can do a lot just with this before you even get into using the graphs and everything. |
| 01:46 | So that's it for the basic part of the video preview. |
| 01:50 | If I want to look at things in a little bit more detail, I can simply select any of these laps on the detail button here. |
| 01:56 | And this is when things start to get a little bit more interesting for us. |
| 01:59 | So there's quite a lot going on in this screen so I'll try and talk through piece by piece what's happening. |
| 02:04 | So if we start with the default screen here we can see we've got a track map view and we've got a speed trace showing up here as well just for that one lap that we've got selected which we can see up here is lap three with this 2:01.561. |
| 02:18 | Now as you expect we can play, pause, we can use this time bar here to skip through different parts of the lap depending on what you want to look at. |
| 02:27 | So I'd say this is of limited use by itself. |
| 02:30 | Where it really becomes powerful is when we can start to do an overlay between them. |
| 02:36 | So let's put a comparison lap on there as an example. |
| 02:40 | So let's put this 2:03 on here straight away. |
| 02:44 | We can see our legend at the top here is where we've got our 2:01 is going to be shown in white and we've got a 2:03 shown in blue. |
| 02:51 | Obviously this is from the amateur's run just looking at their fastest lap vs one of their slower laps. |
| 02:57 | So we can come along here and skip to any part of the lap. |
| 03:02 | What I would say here is you can see that the GPS is of limited quality. |
| 03:07 | Now there's a couple of things going on here. |
| 03:09 | One of them is that this particular race track doesn't tend to have fantastic GPS coverage. |
| 03:14 | That's just because of where it's situated with some mountains and hills close to the racetrack. |
| 03:20 | You can see down here in particular, it's pretty poor information in some of these corners down here. |
| 03:26 | Now I know also that this would have got a lot better if we were using an external GPS rather than using the phone inside the car but regardless, I think all of this information is still very relevant and we'll show you guys how to use this stuff for yourself. |
| 03:40 | Now there's a couple more ways we can visualise the data here. |
| 03:43 | If we click on this i tab up the top here, we get a whole lot more options. |
| 03:48 | So let's go through one by one, we can turn off that secondary display if we didn't want to look at that and we just wanted to look at the track map. |
| 03:57 | We can use this turn analysis which is essentially a way of the app helping us with some statistics on where the turn in and where the apex and everything is happening for each car. |
| 04:08 | We've got some statistics about the log files so we can see the distance of the lap, the average speed, the slowest cornering speed, anywhere on the track, the top speed you got to and some information about the GPS quality there as well. |
| 04:23 | So this in itself is actually quite useful, particularly looking at something like lowest minimum speed, that is definitely a useful metric as well as that top speed in some cases as well. |
| 04:35 | We've got the option to show a GG plot which we can show our current position of if we go through the slider there. |
| 04:44 | We can look at the selected channel, and I'll come back to how we select channels in a second but at the moment we're still looking at that speed plot. |
| 04:52 | So we've got the option to plot vs time which as we went through in the course when we're doing performance stuff, we're very rarely going to be using a data vs time scale, we're going to be almost always using the distance plot which is what we're using in this one here so that's just plotting our channel of interest which in this case is speed vs distance. |
| 05:11 | We've also got the ability to look at raw data which can be interesting as well. |
| 05:15 | Particularly it's obviously showing us most of our information about what's been logged rather than necessarily performance parameters so things like time, the predicted lap time, latitude, longitude, altitude, stuff like that which may be useful to you in some capacities as well. |
| 05:34 | Now as far as if we go back to the plot vs distance, and we can cycle through different options for what we can show on the map here so we can show the simple map which is what's been shown now, we can show braking and acceleration, so it's showing us a heat map what's happening with different points on track. |
| 05:54 | We can do some summary on the speed zones there. |
| 05:59 | Some statistics about turns and G forces. |
| 06:07 | A little bit of elevation information there. |
| 06:11 | Sectors which we're not actually using. |
| 06:13 | And we've also got the ability to hide that satellite view as well if you don't want to look at that satellite information. |
| 06:21 | I find most of the time it is useful to have that on there just as a little bit of context. |
| 06:24 | So we've got the ability to change the plot options here as well. |
| 06:29 | So by default, it's showing speed, we can come in here and show anything we want. |
| 06:32 | So for argument's sake if I wanted to show altitude I could plot altitude. |
| 06:36 | Obviously that's not going to be partiucularly useful to us, speed is definitely always going to be one of our most useful parameters to look at. |
| 06:44 | So if we just go in here, select speed again. |
| 06:46 | Now we do have the ability to put a second plot on this axis as well. |
| 06:50 | So let's go ahead and do that. |
| 06:52 | Now these are all the channels we've got access to which is as I said, is, we've got no external data coming into this so it's all the default channels that you'll get access to. |
| 06:59 | If we did log external channels from something like the onboard diagnostics ports, we would have the ability to select them in here as well so this is where you'd come in to look at your, potentially your reliability data for argument's sake. |
| 07:14 | So one of the ones I want to chuck in here is a time gap which is what they're using, that's their term for that variance or time gain/loss channel. |
| 07:22 | So that's really just showing us how that difference in lap time evolves across the lap which is always a useful parameter to keep an eye on. |
| 07:33 | So we can see down here if we just drag the little cursor down here. |
| 07:40 | So you can see in this section, which is down here, this part of the track down here, you can see that, if I just drag it through there you can see where the cursors are, where we're starting to lose a whole lot of time. |
| 07:50 | This is what we call the bus stop at this particular track and this is just this little kink before this really long right handed turn here. |
| 07:57 | So we can see that the time variance plot there has got a pretty steep gradient on it. |
| 08:03 | So that's telling us straight away that our slower lap time is losing a whole lot of time through this section of the track here so this is actually quite nice in that we can drag the cursor along using our time variance plot as a guide for what's happening with the lap times and we can see really clearly with where the dots are showing on track, we can see where on track we're losing all that time. |
| 08:24 | So you can also see that in the speed trace there, if I just hide this for a second to make it a little more obvious. |
| 08:29 | We can see in this section of the bus stop here there's a pretty big difference in the way these speeds are evolving here, we can see that the faster lap time is definitely holding significantly more speed through that section down there as well. |
| 08:43 | And if we just hover the cursors there, we can actually send some information that's summarised for us as well, we've got 114 vs 110 km/h so it's nice to be able to read that information directly off the graph, let's go ahead and chuck our time variance back on. |
| 08:56 | Now the other section of the track where we've got a big time loss happening, let's bring it across to here. |
| 09:03 | Which is the, it looks like all of the braking into the hairpin so there's this little hairpin turn down here. |
| 09:09 | We can see we've got this big jump in the time variance, in our green line there, just doing another big jump so that's indicating that this is another part of the track where we lose a whole lot of time. |
| 09:18 | So it is just nice to be able to come back and see what's going on there with the different speed traces. |
| 09:23 | We can see in the blue line there it's getting a little bit hard to see but just starting to dip there in this section down here, we can see that the blue line is dropping away quite a lot so we've got a quite a lot lower minimum speed through that part of the corner. |
| 09:38 | So that was an example of going ahead and doing some analysis there right on the phone screen. |
| 09:42 | So obviously there's a trade off there between having access to the data really quickly because we've got it on the phone, we don't need to transfer it to anything, we can just look at it straight away. |
| 09:52 | Versus maybe transferring it to a laptop where we can dig into things in a little bit more detail, get a little bit more precision at the things we're looking at. |
| 09:59 | By taking that export from the phone we can then import the data into Race Logic's VBOX software and look at the data in a more conventional way than we'd be used to when we're using a normal motorsport style software package. |
| 10:12 | One of the big advantages that we'll see when we get into the analysis of this inside Race Logic's software is it gives us the ability to compare two different log files. |
| 10:20 | Now one of the limitations of looking at things on a phone logger, or in this particular app anyway is that we don't have the ability to compare two different runs. |
| 10:29 | So we've got a run there from a pro and a run there from an amateur and I want to be able to overlay them and while it is useful to be able to go ahead and compare different laps from a single log file like we did there on the phone, it's really even more helpful if we can go ahead and overlay between two different runs and that's one of the really great features that this particular app gives us by being able to export to an external piece of software. |
| 10:51 | In my opinion it's probably one of the differentiators from some of the other apps out there because I think being able to go ahead and export into an external piece of software like this actually adds a lot of value to the app. |
| 11:01 | Here we've got Race Logic's Circuit Tools software open and all I've done is go ahead and opened those files directly from the source that I've got them stored in. |
| 11:11 | So all you need to do there is go to the open directory and you can see I've got both of these log files that we went through in the phone, I've got them stored here on the computer's harddrive and I can see I've got that fastest lap there of 2:01.500 and then the pro lap of 1:59.500 so I've got both of those open here already. |
| 11:30 | Can see the pro lap is there and the amateur's lap is there. |
| 11:34 | So just to orientate you what's going on here, in the top left here we've got some information about the log files. |
| 11:40 | So each one of these lines here is a different lap time. |
| 11:42 | So I've got a 2:11, got a 2:03 and then our fastest lap down here of a 2:01 for that particular log file. |
| 11:51 | Then over here in the second tab which is where we go ahead and select the other log file from, I've got this 1:59.35. |
| 12:01 | For a start, let's stay on our, the same analysis that we did on the phone. |
| 12:06 | All the analysis we're going to be looking at today is really in this main section of the screen here which is where I've got the speed on the bottom shown down here and the time variance in that top channel up there. |
| 12:18 | So down in the bottom left I've got the different channels I've got selected so we can go ahead and look at different things as well, we can select the lateral and longitudinal acceleration. |
| 12:29 | To start with I'm just going to keep it really simple, just looking at the exact same channels that we were looking at on the phone. |
| 12:34 | The other thing to take note of here is that we do have a different colour convention. |
| 12:39 | You can come in here and actually select the different colours depending on which colour you want to use for each piece of data but in this case I've got blue as the 2:01, that faster lap and green as the 2:03. |
| 12:50 | So it's exactly the same sort of information here, we can come here and put the cursor at this section through the bus stop and turn one where we've got that big difference in the speed traces there. |
| 13:00 | By putting the cursor here at different points on the plots I can get some information shown to me as well. |
| 13:06 | So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to compress down the number of channels we've got showing here just to make it a little bit clearer and I'm just going to expand this out as well. |
| 13:14 | So we can see the values of both of these log files. |
| 13:18 | So if I put my cursor here, we can see on the green data we've got a speed of approximately 109 km/h and we've got 118 for the faster lap. |
| 13:28 | So that's just nice sometimes to be able to point out in terms of absolute numbers how different one of those pieces of data is. |
| 13:35 | We can see the exact same thing happening with the time variance. |
| 13:38 | We can see overall one of these laps is just generally faster than the other as far as obviously the driver's pushing a little bit harder on the 2:01 vs the 2:03. |
| 13:46 | But certainly this whole first section of a lap where there's this big time variance here, this is a pretty big difference in performance through here and there's this other step down here which is what we identified as the hairpin which we can see both in the speed trace, this minimum speed down here and we can also see the jump between this section here and this section here. |
| 14:09 | Now let's get to the bit that makes it a bit more interesting which is comparing the best lap of the amateur versus the best lap of the pro. |
| 14:16 | So in this particular case, the pro is shown in red and we've got the amateur shown in our original blue line. |
| 14:23 | So this shows us a lot more about what the car's actually capable of. |
| 14:27 | Now we can see, if we hold the cursor over here, let's have a look at those values again, we can see the pro is using even more speed through this section of track. |
| 14:35 | So at this particular point through this long right handed turn that we've got in this section here, we've got this relatively constant speed trace, we've got 115 km/h plays, so that's 122, so again a pretty big difference in speed there. |
| 14:50 | And we can see that really being shown really clearly in the time variance channel with it jumping up pretty steeply through this section of the track. |
| 15:00 | Again we've got that normal trend throughout the whole lap where one driver is consistently faster than the other which we've got the sort of general trend the whole way through the lap. |
| 15:09 | But we can see as we step through the data here, that one driver's definitely losing time pretty consistently to the other. |
| 15:18 | I would say, in this section of track here which is a bit of a complex section of two or three turns linked together, we've got the amateur driver actually giving back a little bit of time compared to the pro here. |
| 15:30 | Which is interesting but overall we can see that the pro is definitely just overall faster than the amateur in most sections of the track and it's pretty clear looking at that GPS speed plot as well they're just holding a lot more speed through most sections of the track. |
| 15:44 | Again we can see that that GPS quality isn't great, it's pretty notchy but overall it does still give us a pretty good readout that one driver is consistently faster than the other and we can definitely still see some detail about where one driver is carrying more speed and in this section here where they're braking later, in this section here where they're heading down a straight and they're consistently gaining time on them just because they've had a better exit out of one of the corners there. |
| 16:12 | That's it for the analysis section there. |
| 16:13 | Straight away you can see by making use of an external piece of software like we did there, it really does open up a whole lot more possibilities to look at that data in more detail and as I said before, I do think it adds quite a lot of value to what is otherwise quite a simple application just by expanding the ability for us to be able to look at that information on a laptop in a more normal motorsport style way. |
| 16:36 | It does add a little bit more overhead doing things in this way because we do now have to transfer that data off the phone, onto the computer somehow so that does add an extra step and obviously that does take a little bit more time so it really just comes down to what's more important to you, whether you just want to have things really convenient, just look at things on the phone or whether you want to open things up a bit more and have the ability to look at things in a little bit more detail on a piece of actual software. |
