F1 Championship Metric Comparison: Vettel vs Verstappen by Maruffuzzman TanvirF1 Championship Metric Comparison: Vettel vs Verstappen by Maruffuzzman Tanvir

F1 Championship Metric Comparison: Vettel vs Verstappen

Maruffuzzman Tanvir

Completed work

Data Analyst

Data Visualizer

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft SQL Server

Analytics

Four-Time Champions: Vettel vs Verstappen

A SQL + Power BI deep dive comparing Sebastian Vettel's (2010-2013) and Max Verstappen's (2021-2024) four-title peaks at Red Bull Racing, race by race, season by season, metric by metric.

Thesis

Two drivers, two eras, the same team, both won four straight titles with Red Bull Racing, but they won them in very different ways. This project uses 14 SQL questions across 5 categories to find out exactly where their peaks matched, and where they didn't: who was more dominant, who was more efficient, who handled pressure better, and who had the bigger edge over their own teammate.

The Analysis

Section 1: Scale of Dominance

How large was each driver's championship advantage in points converted, margins won by, and how early the title was sealed?

Q1. Points Efficiency Across Four Championship Seasons

What I did:

Combined race and sprint points (UNION ALL) for Verstappen's sprint-era seasons

Calculated each season's maximum possible points using a flat per-race rate (25 / 29 / 34 by era)

Measured % of available points actually converted, per season and career average

Major finding:

Vettel converted a higher share of available points on average 69.05% vs Verstappen's 63.28%, despite winning fewer races overall

Q2. Championship Winning Margin Per Season

What I did:

Pulled final-round standings for the top 2 finishers each season

Calculated the points gap and that gap as a % of the champion's total points

Major finding:

Verstappen's tightest title (2021, 2%) and widest (2023, 50.4%) bookend the entire dataset, the single largest swing of any driver

Q3. How Early Did They Clinch Each Title?

What I did:

Built a round-by-round CTE comparing the champion's cumulative points against the 2nd-place driver's maximum catchable points (flat rate)

Flagged the first round where the title became mathematically unreachable for anyone else

Major finding:

Verstappen's earliest clinch (2023) came with 5 races still to run, the most cushion either driver had in any title year

Section 2: How They Won

Beyond just winning, how did each driver actually get there? Pole conversion, grid recovery, and reliability all shape the picture.

Q4. Win Rate, Pole Rate, and Podium Rate

What I did:

Combined results and qualifying data to compute win, podium, and pole ratios per season

Averaged each ratio across each driver's four-year peak

Major finding:

Verstappen's average win rate (59.4%) clears Vettel's (44.4%) by the largest single margin in the whole project

Q5. Grid vs Finish Position, and Win Distribution by Starting Grid

What I did:

Compared average grid vs average finish position per season (Part A)

Bucketed every win by starting grid position- pole, 2-5, or 5+ to see how often wins came from outside the front row (Part B)

Major finding:

Verstappen won from outside the top 5 on the grid in 3 of his 4 seasons something Vettel never did in his four titles

Q6. DNF Rate and Causes

What I did:

Cross-referenced actual status text values (not assumed categories) to split DNFs into mechanical vs incident causes

Calculated DNF/completion ratios and estimated points lost per season

Major finding:

Verstappen's 2023 was flawless zero DNFs, a 100% completion rate, the cleanest season either driver had

Section 3: Consistency & Pressure

Titles aren't just won on best days - they're won by minimizing bad ones. This section looks at scoring consistency and how each driver performed when the title was actually on the line.

Q7. Race-by-Race Points Consistency

What I did:

Calculated standard deviation, minimum, and maximum points scored per race within each championship season

Used this to measure how predictable each driver's scoring was

Major finding:

Verstappen's 2023 was the most consistent season of either driver, a standard deviation of just 3.78 points, never scoring fewer than 10

Q8. Cumulative Points Progression (Champion vs Rival)

What I did:

Locked the "champion" identity using their final-round standing, avoiding mid-season identity flips

Tracked their round-by-round points gap against whichever non-champion driver was the strongest rival at that specific round

Major finding:

Vettel trailed the championship rival for 18 of 19 races in 2010, only taking the lead in the final race in Abu Dhabi one of the closest come-from-behind titles in F1 history

Q9. Performance in Must-Win Pressure Races

What I did:

Defined a "pressure race" as one of the final 5 rounds with a points gap of ≤50 entering that round, calculated via LAG()

Compared each driver's performance in those races against their full-season average

Major finding:

Every pressure season for both drivers shows a positive delta both drivers scored above their season average when the title was actually on the line

Section 4: Teammate Benchmark

The most controlled comparison possible: same car, same team, same season. How much of an edge did each driver have over the person sitting in the identical machinery?

Q10. Qualifying Head-to-Head vs Teammate

What I did:

Parsed and converted raw qualifying time strings into milliseconds via string-splitting and CROSS APPLY

Compared champion vs teammate lap times race by race

Major finding:

Verstappen's best single-lap qualifying gap over a teammate was −3700 ms (2022) the largest outright edge either driver posted

Q11. Race Head-to-Head vs Teammate

What I did:

Compared finish positions between champion and teammate across races where both were officially classified as "Finished"

Tracked ahead/behind ratio and average positional gap

Major finding:

Verstappen finished ahead of his teammate in 100% of classified races in two separate seasons (2021, 2024)

Q12. Points Gap Over Teammate at Season End

What I did:

Pulled season-end cumulative points for champion vs teammate

Calculated the raw points gap, gap ratio, and running career totals for both drivers using a window function

Major finding:

Verstappen's 2023 produced the largest teammate points gap of either driver by a wide margin - 290 points

Section 5: The Peak Compared

This section doesn't introduce new metrics, it restructures everything from Sections 1-4 into two final comparison formats.

Q13. Season-by-Season Comparison via Positional Year in Streak

What I did:

Re-aligned both drivers' seasons by year in streak (Year 1 vs Year 1, Year 2 vs Year 2...) instead of calendar year

Joined all 9 prior views into one row per season for a fair side-by-side

Q14. The Complete Scorecard

What I did:

Aggregated all 9 views into a single career-level scorecard one row per metric, Vettel and Verstappen side by side

Built as this project's single "screenshot moment"

Full Findings

The summary above only covers the headline finding for each question. For the complete, detailed breakdown of every question, including secondary numbers and notable patterns not shown here, see insight.md.

SQL Queries

All 14 questions are written as standalone .sql files, one per section, built on CTEs and 9 reusable views. Full logic, inline methodology notes, and known caveats are documented directly in the files.

📁 sql_queries/

Power BI Dashboard

A 5-page interactive report built in Red Bull Racing livery colors (navy/red/amber), with custom page navigation.

📊 powerBi_dashboard/

Data

Built on the Ergast F1 Database (via Kaggle). Raw table import required a cleaning fix before it would load correctly, see datanote.md for what happened and how it was handled.

📁 data/