Mysterious Percentages in F1-Racing magazine
Discussion
In the current (Feb 2013) issue of F1 Racing magazine on page 19, they've got this little statistics feature entitled Germany still dominates the F1 field. In it they print the following figures:
Germany 36.9%
Britain 26.8%
Brazil 26.0%
Italy 18.6%
Spain 14.1%
Japan 10.9%
France 9.1%.
Then, by way of 'explaining' what these statistics refer to, they say "The figures show an average percentage of the best-represented nations on the grid" (since year 2000).
Right - does anybody understand what they're on about??
At first I thought it meant that if you listed all the drivers from all the races over the last 12 years, then 36.9% of them would be German, and so on. But that interpretation is stuffed by the fact that the listed figures total more than 100%.
Next idea was: perhaps they worked out the percentage of drivers from each country taking part in each race over the last 12 years, then averaged out the percentages for each country. But that one is also kiboshed by the total of the list exceeding 100%, because if you did that calculation for every single country then the total of their average percentages would be exactly 100.
So what the heck do those figures actually mean??
Germany 36.9%
Britain 26.8%
Brazil 26.0%
Italy 18.6%
Spain 14.1%
Japan 10.9%
France 9.1%.
Then, by way of 'explaining' what these statistics refer to, they say "The figures show an average percentage of the best-represented nations on the grid" (since year 2000).
Right - does anybody understand what they're on about??
At first I thought it meant that if you listed all the drivers from all the races over the last 12 years, then 36.9% of them would be German, and so on. But that interpretation is stuffed by the fact that the listed figures total more than 100%.
Next idea was: perhaps they worked out the percentage of drivers from each country taking part in each race over the last 12 years, then averaged out the percentages for each country. But that one is also kiboshed by the total of the list exceeding 100%, because if you did that calculation for every single country then the total of their average percentages would be exactly 100.
So what the heck do those figures actually mean??
Edited by Tony2or4 on Friday 25th January 14:39
I'm assuming they mean the number of drivers from each nation. Would make sense as there are typically quite a few Brits and Germans on the grid.
It certainly can't be anything to do with teams/engine suppliers otherwise the British element would be the largest by far and I doubt Brazil would feature at all.
It certainly can't be anything to do with teams/engine suppliers otherwise the British element would be the largest by far and I doubt Brazil would feature at all.
lauda said:
I'm assuming they mean the number of drivers from each nation. Would make sense as there are typically quite a few Brits and Germans on the grid.
It certainly can't be anything to do with teams/engine suppliers otherwise the British element would be the largest by far and I doubt Brazil would feature at all.
Definitely just to do with drivers. But it's a question of what the figures actually represent - in other words, what did they calculate, in order to come up with those figures? As I mentioned in the OP, the 'obvious' possibilities don't work because the listed figures total more than 100%.It certainly can't be anything to do with teams/engine suppliers otherwise the British element would be the largest by far and I doubt Brazil would feature at all.
They are pointless numbers. The word 'average' is too vague to be informative. The common use definition refers to the arithmetic mean, but there are several other types of mean that could be used and the median and mode. Either the person who calculated them didn't know what he was doing, or the person writing the article didn't know how to interpret the data correctly and has written what he thinks it means.
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