INFORMATION DESIGN ‧ DATA VISUALIZATION
Road Trip
This project, submitted for OCAD’s Data Visualization class, shows the migration of the Formula One race calendar over time according to the average location of each season’s races.
Since its inception in 1950, the race calendar has moved more than twenty degrees of latitude to the south, and sixty degrees of longitude to the east. The 2020 season, affected by COVID-19, took place almost exclusively in Europe.
This closeup highlights the movement of the average location of each season’s F1 races over time.
The pale orange line shows each year’s average, an erratic measure that’s hard to interpret. Taking a 15-year moving average, we can see from the thick orange line that there was a very consistent southward movement of races in the 1970s and 80s, followed by a fast, drastic movement toward the east in the 1990s and 2000s.
In this chart, each grey dot represents a F1 race. Each row of dots is a full season of races, and the orange dot on that row is the average longitude (‘east- or west-ness’) of that season. From the early 1960s to the early 2010s, the average longitude of a Formula One season moved nearly 7,500km to the east, the equivalent of travelling from Iceland to Armenia.
The right half of the chart shows you just how many circuits were launched beginning in the 1980s in the Eastern Hemisphere. Only recently, thanks to a combination of circuit closures and the modified COVID-19 season in 2020, has the momentum begun to swing back toward the west.
Observing race latitudes, the effect is less pronounced: the majority of F1 races have always been in the band of latitude that encompasses much of North America, Europe, and North East Asia.
There is, however, an undeniable tendency towards the south, with successful mainstays like Brazil and Australia slowly pulling the average southward over time.
