#misleading graphs

[harukowitch]

Do you ever read someone’s argument where they are using a graph and you think “They’re reading that wrong, it’s not supporting their viewpoint as much as they think”?

[dr-otter]

In case you don't think your figures are professional enough looking this is Carl Linnaeus' figure from his thesis depicting plant pollination.

[stealthetrees]

I don’t think Fox believes in fall damage. He 100% believes he can survive any fall, to the great frustration of his medics. He’s got in enough arguments about it that he makes a graph of the height of the fall vs the amount of time spent in the med bay afterwards. While technically correct, the results are misleading because Fox refuses to stay in the med bay longer than 26 hours (that’s their record, he was sedated most of the time but he’s become immune to them).

[assumptionprime]

Hey. Hey buddy. You maybe... wanna... run the numbers into those pie charts again?

Especially the Undertale one?

I don't see a way that 15.8k is 25% of a graph while 5.2k is 23%.

Hey guys remind me how many properties there are on ao3 where m/m outnumbers f/f for no good reason

[charles-leclerc-official]

https://x.com/ferra_ria/status/1817615372104740934?s=46

what is that ass top speed omg how is it so low compared to everyone? were we not running a low downforce setup i am confused

This is the graph shown in the tweet. And this is a very good example of how data can be very misleading without context.

So the reason for this is simple. Charles was not in DRS as much as the others. He made passes quickly, while many of these others had longer runs in DRS. The speed difference here is made by DRS, not the car. All this shows is who was in DRS and for the longest. It doesn't show anything substantive about the cars.

And it's pretty clear because while the Ferrari is not the fastest car are you trying to tell me it's slower than the Sauber? Really.

This kph difference is basically the exact difference that comes from DRS. All this shows was that Charles didn't have any long runs in DRS compared to the others. He also made any passes quickly instead of being stuck. Running on the straights without DRS was around 314kph(give or take) for everyone.

Mid field cars often have the chance to hit higher speeds simply because they are more likely to be in DRS for longer.

And this is why data in context is important. Just presenting the raw data this way does not inform anything about the cars and the race and borders on misinformation.

[tomorrowusa]

Silicon Valley has its own variety of racism. And you'll never guess who is the leading figure in spreading this poisonous ideology. [CLUE: He left South Africa at age 18 when the country had just begun the process of eliminating apartheid and moving to majority black rule.]

Racist pseudo-science is making a comeback thanks to Elon Musk. Recently, the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X (formally known as Twitter), spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers—a dynamic my colleague Garrison Hayes analyzes in his latest video for Mother Jones. X, and before it Twitter, has a long-held reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy. [ ... ] Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.) “People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”

Racist pseudo-science simply sprays cologne on the smelly bullshit of plain old irrational bigotry. Warped theology, which was used to justify slavery, passed the baton of officially sanctioned race prejudice to pseudo-science in the late 19th and early 20th century.

DNA and other real science not only undermine the pseudo-science of racism but has revealed that "race" is not even a valid scientific concept among humans. What is widely regarded as race is defined by rather generalized phenotypes.

There has always been petty bigotry. But racial pseudo-science has been used to justify exploitation, colonialism, and territorial expansion by the powerful and ignorant. Elon Musk certainly qualifies as both powerful and ignorant.

In 2022, just one week after Musk purchased Twitter, the Center for Countering Digital Hate —an online civil rights group— found that racial slurs against Black people had increased three times the year’s average, with homophobic and transphobic epithets also seeing a significant uptick, according to the Associated Press. More than a year later, Musk made headlines once again for tweeting racist dog whistles in a potential attempt to “woo” a recently fired Tucker Carlson. But, his new shift into sharing tech-bro-friendly bigotry carries its own unique set of consequences.

If you are still on Twitter/X then you are indirectly supporting the propagation of pseudo-scientific racism – as well as just plain hate. Like quitting alcohol and tobacco, ditching Twitter/X can be difficult. But after doing so, you'll eventually notice how much better you feel.

[prototypesteve]

You’re not supposed to be like me. You deserve to be like you.

Never think, “I’m probably not really aromantic, because I’m not as completely aromantic as that person.”

Never think, “I’m probably not really asexual, because I’m not as completely asexual as that person.”

People like me are over-represented on the aromantic and asexual spectra, because we have the time and social appetite to be more visible. It can give the misleading impression that we represent what aromanticism, asexuality, or aromantic asexuality look like.

I was in the middle of writing a 1,500 word essay complete with scatter graphs and shit, but this was important, so for now I’ll just say it, and prove it later, because I think you know this is true, or at least probable:

There are a lot of people who feel like they experience a little less romantic or sexual attraction than other people do, but who still have found a way to make a relationship work. Many of them will never even hear about aromanticism or asexuality, and if they do they’ll think it must apply to someone other than them, because they’re with someone. Their “invisibility” (by way of not self-identifying as aspec) means their ends of the asexual and aromantic spectra are underrepresented or even erased.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

On this scale, 5 and 6 are safely in the middle of the purple numbers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

On this scale, where 1-4 have excluded themselves, 5 and 6 are on the edge of the purple numbers.

The under representation or erasure of non-self-identifying aromantic and asexuals means you might feel like more of an edge-case or an outlier than you are, because it’s the real edge-cases and outliers—the very asexual or very aromantic—who generate most of the written discourse about aromanticism or asexuality, because we have more time to, and we have a stronger motivation to connect with others like us.

But you belong here. You’re probably the invisible majority of us, and have a lot to teach us about your far-more-complicated end of our spectra.

[aropride]

misleading graph of the day, from the wikipedia page for the military budget of the US page

it was changed from a way better format in 2021

????? what is the reason except to obfuscate information on purpose

[txttletale]

https://twitter.com/ZakugaMignon/status/1739703106466627976?t=6BRheBvMK4MlCt5gXaj4ig&s=19

this is a comically misleading graph lol (copy-pasted it below)

like you look at this and obviously think 'wow training an AI model is so much more carbon-intensive than planes or cars' -- but if you look at the actual units being chosen, they're fucking stupid. like, why is the air travel one the only one measured per passenger? the AI model will presumably be used by more than one person. fuck, even the average car will often be transporting more than one person! why is the car the only one that has its lifetime use and manufacturing cost combined when the AI model only has its manufacturing cost and the plane only has the cost of a single flight divided per passenger?

these are absolutely fucking nonsensical things to compare, and obviously chosen in ways that make AI look disproportionately bad (and air travel look disproportionately good, for some reason?). i'm not even touching the profoundly Fucked political implications of measuring the CEO emissions of 'a human life'

but let's, just for funsies, assume that these are reasonable points of comparison -- in 2021, 9 million cars were made in the USA. for the environmental impact of training AI to be even equal to the effects that those cars will have over their lifetimes (which this graph obviously seeks to imply), there would have to be over a million AI models trained in that time. which--hey, hang on a minute, that reminds me, what the fuck is 'training an AI model'! AI models come in all kinds of sizes -- i don't think the machine learning model that the spiderverse animators used to put the outlines on miles' face cost as much to train as, say, DALL-E 3! there is no indicator that this is an 'average' AI model, or whether this is on the low or high end of the scale.

so having just had that above question, i went to look at the original study and lol, lmao even:

the 626,000 lbs figure is actually just the cost of that one specific model, and of course the most expensive in the study. there's no convincing evidence that this is a reasonable benchmark for most AI training -- for all this study's extremely limited set of examples tells us, this could be an enormous outlier in either direction!

so yeah, this is officially Bad Data Visualization, & if you originally saw this and thought "oh, it looks like AI art really has a huge environmental impact!" then, like, you're not stupid -- the person making this chart obviously wanted you to think that -- but i recommend taking some time when you look at a chart like this to ask questions like 'how was this data obtained?' and 'are these things it makes sense to compare on the same scale?', because there's a lot of misleading charts out there, both purposefully and through sheer incompetence.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preseved in our archive (Daily updates!)

By Benjamin Mateus

Stanford University held a conference last month with the misleading title, “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past.” Given the utter bankruptcy of the US and global policy in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, one would conclude that a discussion on how the world can address the current and future pandemics is of immense importance and has significant relevance to international public health policies.

However, the one-day conference held at the prestigious university was funded through Collateral Global and supported by Brownstone Institute, promoters of pandemic misinformation and COVID-19 contrarians. It was the opposite of a serious discussion on pandemic preparedness.

To place these organizations into a proper perspective, it bears noting that Robert Dingwall, a British sociologist who has been heavily promoted by Collateral Global, wrote on his blog in March 2020 that the elderly would be better off to die from COVID-19 than to be protected and later die from a degenerative disease like dementia. This was a thinly disguised version of fascistic eugenics—weeding out the “unfit” from society.

The Stanford symposium showcased a panel of discredited scientists and supposed policy health experts associated with the reactionary Great Barrington Declaration, better characterized as a manifesto of death, set on promoting the notion that no broad-based public health initiatives should have ever been undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic or when the next pandemic strikes.

At the core of the debunked “declaration” is the claim that there can be “focused protection” against the pandemic for those at high risk, which would allow those at minimal risk of death to lead normal lives while building up immunity to the virus through natural immunity.

Well-respected global health advocate Peter Hotez said of the conference, “This is awful, a full-on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize COVID.”

These include discredited figures like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford public policy professor; Dr. Scott Atlas, former Trump administration adviser on the Coronavirus Task Force; and Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s former state epidemiologist, who advocated for a policy of mass infection to achieve “herd immunity” that had horrendous consequences on the population, in particular, the elderly and most frail. Tegnell’s most consequential remark during the conference gave the flavor of the event: “We have focused so much on mortality as a measure of outcome, but there are more important things.”

Included on the panel were Marty Makary, prominent Johns Hopkins University surgeon, who had repeatedly predicted that the population was on the verge of achieving natural immunity and the pandemic would thus come to an end. Also there was Oxford Professor of Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, one of the original signers of the declaration with Bhattacharya, and Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kuldorff.

Graph compares COVID deaths in the US, Sweden and Norway (which adopted a far more rigorous pandemic mitigation program). [Photo: Our World in Data] Gupta has called for mass infection of the young and declared during the conference that her idea of focused protection had evolved into what she termed “individual risk reduction,” where each person would decide for him or herself the level of protection and mitigation they wanted to assume during a deadly outbreak. This is the literal opposite of public health, treating infection with a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease as a purely individual matter.

That institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Stanford are at the forefront of promoting such anti-science and anti-public health initiatives speaks to the deep political and moral decline in academic circles. Similarly, these “elite” institutions have embraced censorship and attacks on democratic rights of students protesting the US backing of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza.

Closing remarks at the Stanford conference were given by John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology and one of the principal investigators of the fallacious, non-peer-reviewed Santa Clara County study, released in April 2020, which suggested that COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu and that the pandemic measures to protect populations needed to be lifted forthwith.

At the time of that study, the COVID-19 pandemic was inundating the healthcare system of New York City. The CDC had noted that close to 20,000 people had died in the three-month window (March through May) with an overall crude fatality rate of 9.2 percent. Also, 30 percent of hospitalized patients with laboratory confirmed COVID-19 were known to have died.

Bhattacharya, who had locked arms with AFT President Randi Weingarten in forcing students and teachers back into schools in 2021 and served as a pandemic adviser to Florida’s fascistic Governor Ron DeSantis, attempted to sell the conference as a forum for people with opposing views coming together to air out their differences.

“What can we do in the future? The pandemic was by any measure a disaster,” he declared. Although he cited the correct number of deaths and economic turmoil caused by the pandemic affecting the poorest in the world, he blamed these losses, not on the failure to carry out systematic public health measures but on the measures themselves. It was a translation into academic jargon of the notorious declaration by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

Bhattacharya had the audacity to assert, “this conference was four years too late, but this is not too late, this is not the last pandemic the world will face.” The purpose of his efforts to codify the perspectives put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration is to ensure no real effort is taken by any government to address any threat, including the current bird flu outbreak that threatens to ignite another pandemic.

His ideas have nothing to do with the field of epidemiology or any scientific comprehension of the nature of pandemics. If he has a bone to pick with the Biden administration and its response to the pandemic is that Biden and Harris did not adopt the mass infection policy officially from the beginning, but only implemented it piecemeal.

Additionally, Bhattacharya has positioned himself as a fellow traveler with the anti-vaxxers promoting the false notion that the current mRNA vaccines are unsafe and the process through which they were brought forward violated safety measures which is patently false.

He wrote for the Brownstone Institute a report published on November 16, 2022, stating, “The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population ‘safe’.”

Scott Atlas blurted out the real purpose of the conference. Reading a prepared statement, he said that the lockdowns failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread. He blamed the economic lockdowns for the excess deaths rather than the virus. He blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for implementing the lockdowns and not enforcing “targeted protection.”

Atlas later also called for complete US divestment from the World Health Organization and called for the termination of all middle-level scientists at the CDC, for which he received applause from his colleagues on the panel.

The Stanford conference was entirely divorced from the actual history of the pandemic, particularly its early weeks. The initial outbreak of COVID in Wuhan showed it was propagated by airborne transmission and was both highly contagious and lethal.

When, on January 30, 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, Europe, the US, and other countries chose not to act. They could have rapidly eliminated and eradicated the virus but did nothing until the virus had spread globally and began its deadly rampage.

It was in early March, six weeks later, with the horrific scenes emerging out of Italy that prompted the working class to demand a shutdown. Auto workers took the lead in many countries, including the United States and Canada, and it was only out of fear of a mass rebellion among workers internationally that the ruling elites were forced to respond with limited lockdowns to stem the tide of infections.

The Great Barrington Declaration, the right-wing campaigns against mask and vaccine mandates and last month’s conference at Stanford were essentially rooted in fear of the independent initiative of workers insisting on serious in public health measures. The populist demagogy about allowing people the “freedom” to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic cannot disguise what is a fundamentally anti-working class perspective.

The maliciously false point being driven home by the organizers of the conference was that social interventions—masking, closure of schools and businesses, lockdowns, and maintaining social distancing—were worse than the disease, despite studies that have shown when such policies were actually implemented, they saved many, many lives.

As one 2023 study published in The Lancet found, in the period from January 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022, Hawaii, with stricter anti-COVID measures, saw 147 deaths per 100,000 compared to 581 per 100,000 in Arizona and 526 per 100,000 in Washington D.C. The national rate was 372 deaths per 100,000.

Similar conclusions were reached in a more recent comprehensive study that evaluated state by state in the US comparing restrictions in place and impact on excess deaths. As the authors of that study noted, “COVID-19 restrictions were associated with substantial reductions in excess pandemic deaths in the US. If all states had weak restrictions, as defined in the Methods section, estimated excess deaths from July 2020 to June 2022 would have been 25 percent to 48 percent higher than if all had imposed strong restrictions. Behavioral responses provided a potentially important mechanism for this, being associated with 49 percent 78 percent of the overall difference.” This last part of the statement underscores the importance of open channels of communications and an all-in approach to such matters. Public health is first and foremost a social concern.

And still another study published in January 2022 found that the impact of the limited measures employed saved between 870,000 to 1.7 million Americans.

The most insidious issue that the COVID-19 contrarians fail to mention is that herd immunity is not achievable with a virus like SARS-CoV-2, which mutates so rapidly, and the issues raised by Long COVID and reinfections with the concomitant long-term health impacts that will debilitate the population are not even considered. Current estimates place the number of those suffering from Long COVID across the globe at over 410 million as of the end of 2023.

The response to pandemics requires a social investment in public health on an international scale. The global nature of the economy poses that a national approach as was seen in China and its Zero COVID policy cannot withstand an anti-public health policy that is imposed on the global population. This raises the need for a socialist perspective not only to the global economy but to the global health of the working class.

[mithliya]

it’s so telling how old-skkkool-butch has yet to actually acknowledge any of my points. but then made sure to insult my intelligence. maam im not the one who provided misleading population graphs & a youtube video as my only sources.

[gumjrop]

The Weather

The CDC has finally released their own wastewater dashboard with state-level and regional trends. After public pressure to expand wastewater surveillance in September, including from all of us, it’s great to see some progress. The CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) landing page now includes dashboards to check national wastewater viral activity for COVID and Mpox. Additional dashboards for National and Regional trends, State and Territory trends, a wastewater viral activity map, and variants in wastewater are available.

As of 11/25/23, the Current Wastewater Viral Activity Map shows viral activity by state. Many states are reporting high to moderate COVID levels with very few reporting low levels. Approximately 350 sites delayed testing since September 15, 2023. After these sites have resumed testing for six weeks, their data will be added to the dataset. However, we’d suggest the CDC reconsider its color choices, as the calming blue shades they’ve chosen for “high” COVID transmission are misleading at best. They can refer to our red-shaded transmission map for reference.

Also updated 11/25/23, the national wastewater viral activity level is high and seems to be trending upward. The West is in decline while the Midwest, South, Northeast and National levels are at an incline. As with Biobot data, the most recent two weeks (indicated by gray shading on the graph) are subject to change due to reporting delays. Trends mentioned in this text are based on the areas before the shaded area shown in the graph. As we enter the cold and flu season, many in-person gatherings are held. We encourage you to continue monitoring local reports for a more accurate measure of levels. Also, please continue to, and support others in using, layers of protection. And as we continue to report on advocacy successes, remember that our actions and voices can enact change!

Hospitalizations

Weekly hospitalizations are trending upward in the last three weeks according to the CDC’s COVID data tracker, with over 19,000 weekly admissions reported 11/25/23. Since we last reported deaths on 10/28/23, there have been an additional 3731 deaths reported, for an average of almost 750 deaths per week. Remember that these numbers are an undercount related to reporting delays in place since the Biden Administration ended the Public Health Emergency. Remember also that COVID deaths follow hospitalization numbers, so we expect these numbers to increase in the weeks to come.

COVID remains the third leading cause of death according to the CDC in the US. We mourn all those who have died due to COVID, and in that mourning, call you to take measures to prevent death and disablement for yourself, your loved ones, and your communities. 

Wins

Early this month, school districts across the United States will be able to order free Covid-19 rapid tests from the national stockpile to be distributed to schools with the HHS encouragement to share them with, “students, staff, family members and others in the community.” While this school project of the Biden Administration feels long overdue, we hope new access to free tests aids in preventing the spread of Covid-19, if used correctly.  If your household has not placed a new order for more rapid tests from the federal government through covidtests.gov, you can still place an order for 4 free rapid covid tests here. The Horward Zinn Book Fair this weekend is requiring masks indoors, and outdoors, within 15 feet outdoors of the venue.  Increasingly progressive groups in this country are connecting the dots between our governments’ attempts to erase the ongoing pandemic in an effort to restore business as usual and the necessity of centering public health and disability justice in our social movements. Send them a note of thanks here. 

Take Action

We urge you to take a moment to read and sign on to this letter, authored by public health and medical professionals, demanding CDC Director Mandy Cohen reject HICPAC’s (Healthcare Infection Control Practice Advisory Committee) Guideline for Isolation Precautions: Preventing Transmission of Infectious Agents in Healthcare Settings. Current draft guidelines are incredibly insufficient, inappropriate, and fail to protect both patients and healthcare workers.  Letter can be found HERE. You also still have time to sign on to the National Nurses United letter urging the CDC “to reject HICPAC’s weak draft and create a new one that protects health care workers and their patients!” Sign-on deadline for both letters is this Friday, December 8, 2023.

[cottoncandylesbo]

here, this is a better article.

apparently usage of "delve" is appearing in greater numbers in written text but it's unclear whether this is directly linked to AI or simply a language trend.

apparently ai writing includes some words that human writing doesn't include at much higher frequencies, such as the word "delve". supposedly ai writing is using this word with such higher frequency it's misleading data collection, as datasets focused on word usage over time are showing major skews since 2021

[gay-otlc]

So, I came across this image contrasting the genocide in Gaza to the Holocaust, and it's extremely misleading and I wanted to talk about it.

While I think the sentiment is something that very much needs to be addressed- the genocide in Gaza and the Holocaust are not equivalent in magnitude, and I'm sick and tired of antizionists pretending they are, because that's Holocaust minimization- these graphs minimize and dismiss the deaths in Gaza, which is also an awful thing to do.

The person who created these graphs very intentionally ignored that time is a pretty significant factor here. Israel began attacking Gaza a little over five months ago. World War II lasted six years.

Prior to October 7th, the Gaza population was around 2,230,000. As of writing this post, it has been 165 days since October 7th, and 31,923 people in Gaza have been killed. That's roughly 193 deaths per day. Assuming deaths continued at that rate and lasted the same number of days as WWII (2,194), that would bring the total to about 424,479 deaths, 19.03% of the population.

Prior to WWII, the Jewish population in Europe was around 9,500,000. Approximately 6,000,000 Jews were killed. With WWII lasting 2,194 days, that's roughly 2,735 deaths per day, which is 63.16% of the Jewish population in Europe.

So, these graphs might be a bit more accurate:

Again- these genocides do not exist on the same magnitude, and claiming that they do is wrong, insensitive, and hurtful. But it is just as wrong, insensitive, and hurtful to minimize the casualties in Gaza.

[f1-ferraero]

Hi! People said the upgrades didn't work but an article pointed out there was an improvement in aerodynamic load. I am curious though, Charles mentioned that the car couldn't take on as much kerb as the RB, is this something we can see an improvement on from the upgrades later on? Also, why won't upgrades take on full effect from the get go?

Hello! Very good questions :)

I will start by just saying that the upgrades definitely work, but people and media have hyped them up to the point that people expected total domination.

I will ALSO say that it's impossible to accurately judge an upgrade package after only one race, even more so after less than that. Not even the teams themselves can do that. People have a tendency to jump to conclusions way too quickly.

That is also the reason why the upgrades don't take on full effect immediately: because the team needs a couple of races to fully understand how they work in order to optimise car setup. Some people also refer to Imola not being a very good track for Ferrari, so we might not see the car at its full potential.

RedBull, McLaren and Ferrari are incredibly close at the moment, but they have different strengths and weaknesses so performance between them will likely be very circuit dependent.

It is true that Ferrari definitely has gained an improvement in aerodynamic load. As this graph demonstrates, RedBull has a lot of lateral grip (they are good in the high-speed corners), but are very weak in longitudinal grip (braking). McLaren is the opposite, with good braking but bad cornering. Ferrari has found a nice compromise where they are very good in all areas.

The improvement in aerodynamic load allowed Leclerc to reportedly (I have not seen the data myself) have the highest percentage of full throttle around the lap and the lowest percentage of breaking, as well as the lowest deviation in speed around the lap.

Additionally, we've only seen qualifying and the free practices (which looked very promising), at a track that isn't suited to Ferrari. The qualifying performance of the f1-75 and the sf-23 has also, I think, affected the perception of this car. Compared to them, the sf-24 has much better race pace than qualifying pace. Starting first is great, but starting 3rd and 4th is also good if your race pace is equal to, or better than the cars in p1 and p2.

But looking at the pace difference in qualifying it was very very marginal. Again, Imola is more suited to McLaren than Ferrari and the sf-24 is more of a race car than quali car. The Ferraris didn't manage to get their tyres into the window properly for their last runs, and Verstappen received a slipstream from Hülkenberg that gave him around 0.15 tenths, but this is the closest we've been to pole this season. A great improvement.

The race simulations in practice also showed very good pace. This data (below) was from fp2 (no comparable running in fp3). RedBull was 4th but they probably had their engine turned down a bit more than the others. The consistency can also be a sign of targeted lap times.

This is also slightly misleading, as @/fdataanalysis has chosen to combine Leclerc's and Sainz's times. He should probably have separated them like the McLarens, because Leclerc was on average 1:20.6/7 and Sainz 1:20.8/9. This, and a few very fast laps from Charles, is the reason for the inconsistency in the bar for Ferrari. Piastri was on the hards, so that's not comparable, but both Norris and Leclerc was on mediums at the same time. If the times are representative then on race pace Leclerc was on average -0.1/2 seconds faster. But again, only practice and it's very marginal.

Regarding the sf-24's ability to take kerbs: this is more circuit specific as Imola has some very high kerbs that you need to take in order to maximise the lap. The kerbs haven't been a big issue on other tracks, so I don't see it being a big problem. However, I would need to read up on it a bit and look at more data to say anything with certainty. If it turns out to be an issue I will make a post about it :)

[charles-leclerc-official]

You were joking, but this entire analysis is actually just me waxing poetic about the fact CHARLES HAD NEGATIVE TYRE DEG AT SUZUKA.

Okay, please, for those of us who are quite new and incognizant (me). Negative tire degradation is a joke on praising purpose. Or is it a thing? And if it's second, what does it mean. Tires necromancy from Charles?

So it is actually a thing (kind of, the name might be a little misleading)

Basically tyre degredation is a very simple idea that tyres lose time with every lap. Newer tyres = faster

So with negative tyre deg we see older tyres setting faster laps, which is exactly what Charles did.

It's not like he's repairing the tyres or anything, but he is driving to such a standard that the literal rule of standard tyre deg is not applying, in the sense that he is getting more pace out of older tyres which in most cars and with most drivers is not possible.

General rule Newer tyres = faster

Charles Older tyres = faster (fuck you and your physics)

I am including a lot of helpful charts and graphs that will show you exactly what this looks like in the data(I should have my race analysis done sometime tomorrow)

But yes it is a thing, and it's not just made up for praising purposes. We saw Max have negative tyre deg during pre-season testing as well.