Statistics & Probability: Head-To-Head Lewis Hamilton vs Max Verstappen

Statistics & Probability:

Head-To-Head Lewis Hamilton vs Max Verstappen

Since 2017

Mahran Maaloul

Mohamed-Amine Krim

Erkan Alat

Until 2017, the best F1 driver was Lewis Hamilton, but since 2017 with the beginnings of a new young F1 driver Max Verstappen, the F1 races have changed. According to many sports experts and journalists, Max Verstappen is considered the rising star of F1, he is a very great future driver. Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton are in competition for first place every year.

So, our problem is about Who of the German driver Verstappen or the English driver Hamilton will make the most impact in the history of F1?

Now we will analyze the statistics, the races, and the points earned the past years, and who is the favorite currently.

In order to analyze, firstly we are going to collect the statistics and points earned from both of them since 2017 and conclude which one of them is more favored.

Which player is more favorable for the races of the next year in F1 Races between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton ?

We are going to determine every type of statistics tool like, mean of points per year, mean of points for 5 years, the quartiles, the variances, the median, for both of them and we are going to determine the favorable driver for the next year.

With a total of 101 races, we found those result :

[pic 1]

We collect the number of point won by the two drivers the two last years;

We can notice that in 75% Hamilton won a minimum 15 points whereas Verstappen won a minimum 10,25.

Moreover, on average Hamilton wins approximately 20 points per race against 17 for Verstappen. Using the Law of large numbers we can say that the expectation is their average (n=37(>30) races to calculate their average). So, Hamilton is the favorite for the next races.

And when we look at the standard deviation we can notice that these are pilots who have about the same consistency. In this way, we can affirm that Hamilton is the favorite for the World Championship because he has more chances to win more points.

We can conclude that right now, Hamilton is more favored than Verstappen because his points mean, quartile and median are higher than Verstappen's result, also his variance is lower.

Those data are not relevant so we will concentrate on the last 2 seasons when verstappen and Hamilton were really in competition and to certify who is more favored we can use the box plots :

[pic 2]

The box plot of Hamilton’s points shows that he is still better than Verstappen the past 2 years because his mean of point win per race is greater,in 75% of his races he won more point than Verstappen and we can notice that he is very more constant than Verstappen because his box plot is less large.

Also the Frequency of earned points can prove it :

[pic 3]

Since 2020, they have won each one title of the F1 World Championship.

Now we know that Hamilton is more favored than Verstappen for the following years. But in a way a lot of people who know F1 will affirm it without any calculation.

But, what about Hamilton when he was younger ?

Because he is 13 years older than Verstappen he got more experience in the races, so what about Hamilton when he was 24 years old? Which of the two at the same time in their careers would have a better future?

For that we have collected the points earned :

From 2007 to 2013 for Hamilton, from his beginning to his 24 .

From 2015 to 2021 for Verstappen, from his beginning to his 24

And we found those results :

[pic 4]

We can see, it’s really close between them, but Hamilton is still better than Verstappen by little if we compare their careers from their beginning to their 24.

The two drivers have the same median, Q1, Q3. A very close mean and standard deviation. Moreover, if we calculate the confidence interval at 95% for the two drivers we get these one:

θx belongs to [-0,25 ; 2,252]

θy belongs to [-0,27 ; 2,143]

So, we can say that we expect barely the same performance for the two drivers. So, in this way we can say that at the same stage they will have approximately the same career. (Method:

We introduce two Random Variable:

1. ”Point win by Hamilton by race”

1. ”Point xin by Verstappen by race”

We don’t know the distribution of X and Y. But our sample size is big enough(n=143), to

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