Pre-race Statistics of the Brazilian GP

It’s amazing to think that 12 months ago, Sebastian Vettel was dominating the F1 season. This time around, the World Drivers’ Championship is going down to the final race, taking place in Brazil.

As usual before every race, here are some stats about F1 in the county (Brazil, in this case), which you will hopefully find interesting.

Track Stats

 Interlagos is situated in São Paulo, near (in relative terms for Brazil, a very large country) the east coast. The anti-clockwise track consists of 15 corners across the 4.309km lap. Of these 15 corners, 10 are left turns with the remaining 5 all right turns.

 29 races have taken place at Interlagos, out of 39 in Brazil. Of these 29 races, 10 have been won from pole position with a further 12 coming from second place. There have been 20 different winners at this circuit.

The race will have a total of 71 laps and a race distance of 305.939km. Michael Schumacher and Ferrari have been most successful in Interlagos, with Michael winning 4 times and Ferrari 8 times. The lap record was set by Juan Pablo Montoya in 2004, a time of 1:11.473, an average speed of 217kph.

Championship Stats

 The title is going down to the wire in Brazil. Sebastian Vettel needs to finish 4^th to win his third consecutive World Championship. The last two titles that were decided in Brazil required a 5^th place finish – Lewis Hamilton in 2008 and Jenson Button in 2009 (on a side note, both of these drivers also had car number 22 for their championship-winning year).

In 2010, Vettel won the title at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, despite being 15 points behind Alonso at the start of the race. In 2012, Alonso is 13 points behind Vettel going into Brazil.

For Vettel to win the title he needs to finish just 4th or higher if Alonso wins the race. If Alonso finishes 2nd in the race then Vettel only needs to finish 7th or higher. If Alonso is in third, only 9th or higher, so for Alonso to have any chance to win the championship he needs to finish on the podium and hope Vettel is some way behind.

The Silly Stats

 You would need 2,380 Ronaldinhos lying flat on the circuit foot to head to complete a lap of Interlagos. Or if you didn’t have 2,380 Ronaldinhos around the house, you could use 19,586 standard size footballs.

The largest bird in Brazil is the Greater Rhea, a flightless bird similar to an Emu or Ostrich, capable of running up to speeds over 60kph. Using 55kph as the average speed around the Interlagos circuit the Greater Rhea would complete a single lap in 4:42.044.

 

Many thanks to Jack who wrote the short intro and helped with some of the Interlagos and Championship stats as I didn’t have the time to write them all. He has an awesome blog that you can read here. You can also follow the blog’s very own Twitter account by clicking this link and pressing “follow”.