Pre-race Statistics of the 2013 United States GP

‘MURICA! Only the second F1 race to take place at the Circuit of the Americas, but the 35^th United States GP and the 64^th F1 race in America.

At the last race at COTA Ferrari used some clever tricks to get both cars onto the clean side of the grid, and then Lewis Hamilton won the race after starting from the dirty side of the grid. The circuit is 5.516km long, with 56 laps in the race and a total race distance of 308.896km. There are 20 corners in total, the joint third most on the calendar with Spa.

There’s not really much point in telling you who the most successful driver or team here is, seeing as the track has only been raced at once. But if you can’t remember, Lewis Hamilton and McLaren. The last season where McLaren failed to win a race was 2006, the year before Hamilton joined. The last time that McLaren failed to finish on the podium all season was back in 1980, they gave Alain Prost his F1 debut that year. Prost left at the end of the season for Renault and went on to be a four time champion, three after a McLaren return and one at Williams.

The fastest race lap was set by Sebastian Vettel, last year of course, with a time of 1:39.349. An average speed of 200kph or 124mph. There are currently no American drivers in F1, but if Alexander Rossi or Conor Daly don’t make it in the next few years then something is wrong.

Kimi Raikkonen won’t be racing for the rest of the season so for the first time in 2013 there will be a driver change.

The Silly Stats

Last year I worked out that you would need 48,258 Big Macs to lap around COTA. This year I’ve decided to go with fries, and you would need around 61,288 of them.

But if you wanted to completely COVER the track surface, you would need 118,200,000,000,000. That’s 118,200 BILLION fries, which should be enough to feed all of the fans at the track.

For some more stats on the United States GP see my mini-stat page