Stats of the 2012 Season

Well the season is finally over, guess it’s time for some full stats of the 2012 season. You may remember me doing something similar a few weeks ago (here) but now it’s over I can give even more stats and info.

20 races, 25 drivers, which if you discount Jérôme d’Ambrosio replacing Grosjean at Monza is only the second time in F1 history that all teams used the same two drivers throughout the season, first happening in 2008. Eight different drivers have won a race this season, only two seasons have had more different winners, 1982 with 11 winners and 1975 with 9 winners.

A few records have been broken in 2012, the first season with 20 championship races, the most World Drivers’ Champions on the grid, 6, the most different drivers setting a fastest race lap, 12, beating the previous record of 11 set in 1976. Red Bull and Vettel have both set new records too, Red Bull became the first constructor to win their first three Constructors’ Championships in consecutive years while Vettel became the first driver to win his first three Drivers’ Championships in consecutive years AND became the youngest ever triple champion.

Lots of different drivers and constructors have been doing rather well in 2012, especially at the start of the season when nobody fully understood the tyres. There has been more of almost everything than the previous few years and no single driver has been fully dominant, as you will see in the table below.

Hopefully that table isn’t too cluttered, but as you can see, Vettel had the most wins and fastest laps, Alonso had the most podiums, Hamilton had the most poles and Räikkönen the most laps and furthest distance. If Kimi had not gotten lost in Brazil he would have completed every single lap in 2012, oops. Grosjean, Schumacher and Karthikeyan all had more than their fair share of bad luck, each retiring seven times this season.

Posting this one as an image, mostly because it has so many columns there’s no way it would fit properly on the blog, much easier to add as an image instead. Anyway, a lot of pit stops this year, but still a lot less than last year. Malaysia had the most stops, which isn’t really much of a surprise due to the terrible weather that weekend. After a few races once the teams got the hang of the tyres the number of stops went down quite a bit, started off with 2/3 stop races early on, ending with just 1 or 2 stops. d’Ambrosio obviously had the least stops as he only did the one race, but excluding him Romain Grosjean had 28, but he did miss a race and retire very early in five others. Both Pérez and Karthikeyan had just 32 stops while Heikki Kovalainen had the most pit stops in 2012, a whopping 52.

Towards the sharp end Vettel had 42 pit stops, Alonso 35, Räikkönen 38, Hamilton 36 and Button 41. Yup that’s right, Mr Aggressive Hamilton had fewer stops than Mr Smooth Button, yeah sure Hamilton had more retirements, but Hamilton averaged 93.943km on each set of tyres while Button averaged 92.104km on his.

That’s it for 2012, hopefully 2013 will be just as good, maybe even better, who knows.