Whilst watching the Dutch GP, I felt that the pit stops generally seemed slower than usual.
Was that actually the case or just viewer bias? Let's find out.
Let's assume that anything over five seconds indicates an issue.
First, we need to determine what constitutes a 'good' stop time.
Overall pit stop time distribution
Overall, we expect an average pit-stop time of 2.99 seconds and a median of 2.9 seconds. The fastest pit stop this year was Ferrari's 2.0-second stop on Hamilton's car in Japan.
When we filter for the top four teams, however, the average drops slightly to 2.79 seconds. This will become important as we break down pit stops by race.
Overall times by race
Overall, nothing looks particularly unusual. We see a median pit-stop time of 2.9 seconds, which is bang on the season-wide median.
But if we look at the top four teams separately from everyone else:
Maybe this plot explains things a bit more. A median pit-stop time of 3.05 seconds is around two-tenths slower than the season-wide median.
Given that the TV coverage focuses on the top four teams more than the rest, this gave me the impression that the pit stops were slow during the race.
Interestingly, only two pit stops by the top teams were faster than the season median to date.
Given that this pattern wasn't seen across the grid, I think this was a statistical anomaly more than anything else. However, there was a lot of close competition for position, and the added pressure might have caused a few small mistakes.
Cadillac
Whilst doing this analysis, I noticed that Cadillac have been particularly poor with their pit stops so far this season.
I know they aren't fighting for race wins and they're a new team, but they have managed only a few sub-three-second pit stops this season.
Pit stops are one part of the race weekend that the team can focus on getting right without worrying about the car's performance.
It is still early days for the team, but they will need to strengthen the operational side of their race weekend as time goes on. Once they start fighting for positions regularly, these slow pit stops will quickly hold them back.
The data
The data for this analysis consisted solely of the pit-stop times recorded by FastF1.