2024 season by math's

And there you have your best riders on the current grid - Acosta, Quartararo, Martin and Binder. Marc isn't doing bad either.

Considering that DiGi missed 3 races and 3 sprints, Bezz really should have beat him comfortably rather than being behind.
I know that the Hondas weren't often in the points but Mir crashing out of 9 GPs and I don't know how many sprints should have seen Marini finish ahead of him comfortably.
Oliveira missing 25% of the races shows that R Fernadez did a pretty bad job and is probably a tad lucky to have a ride next season.

Sennas_Caress said:

And there you have your best riders on the current grid - Acosta, Quartararo, Martin and Binder. Marc isn't doing bad either.

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It's very interesting to see the table, but I don't think we can go from there to whom are the best riders as a list. It depends on the second rider in the team. The Ducati Factory team had both riders in the championship fight for quite some time, while that doesn't apply to any other team. Hence, Bagnaia being down the list could say that Bagnaia isn't as good as other riders, or that Bastianini is better than other 'second' riders, or a combination of the two.

The thing I find a bit concerning about the above graph in terms of what it means for Yamaha and Honda, is that there has been some progress but there is still a long way to go. It's always the case that a new, or recovering, manufacturer finds it easiest to catch up to a dominant manufacturer when the new (and recovering) manufacturer is a long way behind. As the gap gets smaller, it gets harder to catch up. Yamaha and Honda may, given their concessions, budgets, and hopefully motivation, be able to catch up a lot and perhaps equal KTM and Aprilia. But, then crossing that smaller gap to catch Ducati becomes much harder.

I wonder if Ducati's dominance will only be ended by Ducati making a significant wrong turn or something going wrong with the team. As in Formula One with Mercedes, then Red Bull, and others before them.

The graphs are nice to have. The stopwatch though is the one that will show you the progress more clearly.
The difference between quali and race trim is the litmus test.

Ducati had already an unsurmountable lead in development when the new rules came into place.
Restricting their testing will not show until earliest 26, and with the new format introduced in 27, we can't see it on track for a long while.

You can also add to the equation the number of world champions on the Ducati, and you'll be looking at an even longer domination for those Bologna bullets

To see what motorbike is the best, or how the bikes are developing, on a purely objective basis is difficult.

Where they finish during the sprint and Grand Prixs are one way of trying to get some sense of the development prosess.
However, weather, crashes, tires and the individual riders performance will also play a key part.
The best riders tend to be on the best bikes. They are winners, and few want to have the best possibility to do so.
Crashes also skew the results, except for Mir of course.

The time gap in quali and the difference in the time gap between quali and race trim should be somewhat better than purely where in the classifications the bikes end up.
Although the rider's skills also amplify these numbers. You only have one Quartararo, one Acosta and one Binder.
Marini was never a screen biter, Rins have been perma-innjured since he hobbled on the Yamaha, Oliveira same.

The tires could also impact the development, without the bikes themselves being worse, purely objectively.
KTM as I can recall, have been struggling massively with the tires, while the bike itself, its speed, breaking, etc. being pretty good, as could be seen in the qualies.

At the end of the days though, it's your podiums that get you points, and your distance to the podiums that gives you that opportunity to to get there.
However you'll need to compete with the strength of the best bikes in order to do so.
So Ducati were always fast, yet they had to be able to be sufficent in their cornering and to keep improving their ability to get the power into the tires, for them to be dominant.
Yamaha and Aprilia can be much better in the cornering phase, yet they'll lose out every time in the Grand Prix-s, in they can't match the power-to-tire ratio that Ducati has.
KTM seem to have an issue with getting their fast bike into the tires, and some more.

What I'm trying to argue here is that they all have their mini projects, and its difficult to see the complete picture from just numbers, we'll have to dig a layer deeper.
Ducati was close for quite few years, then they just clicked, and that was several factors combining well for just them.

mikesbytes said:

In this case the number of world champions remained the same during the year, what I was looking for was to see if Honda and Yamaha had made better progress than the other manufacturers during the year and while the graph is hard to read it looks like the progress is small. I didn't anticipate seeing a decline from Aprilia and KTM. However it should be noted that there aren't enough data samples to get real meaning from it.

Any suggestions on other data analysis?

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I would suggest plotting cumulative constructors' points for the whole year, including calculating that for the GP23 and GP24 separately as if they are different constructors.

mikesbytes said:

Based on the data in the previous graph you get this, which is similar to your suggestion
View attachment 15226

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If any teams were improving, then the lines wouldn't be straight but would curve upwards. But, they look more or less straight. Maybe Aprilia curves down a bit. No real upwards curve for Honda and Yamaha that I can see.

AnnoyingTwit said:

If any teams were improving, then the lines wouldn't be straight but would curve upwards. But, they look more or less straight. Maybe Aprilia curves down a bit. No real upwards curve for Honda and Yamaha that I can see.

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Upward curve would indicate that the bike is continually improving relative to the field at each round. If they bike/team made a leap forward, the slope of the line would increase.

Round 11 looks like an inflection point for several teams. Yamaha, Honda and GP23 appear to have improved at Round 11. Aprilia went the other direction. This is an interesting inflection point because it is the first round of the 2nd half of the season. Did the manufacturers homologate new aero/parts? Did the tires change? Or did the GP23, Honda and Yamaha jump after Round 11 simply because Aprilia took a wrong turn?

KTM and Ducati seemed to be largely unaffected during the season. They were the top 2 finishers in the constructors championship last year. Significant?

mylexicon said:

Upward curve would indicate that the bike is continually improving relative to the field at each round. If they bike/team made a leap forward, the slope of the line would increase.

Round 11 looks like an inflection point for several teams. Yamaha, Honda and GP23 appear to have improved at Round 11. Aprilia went the other direction. This is an interesting inflection point because it is the first round of the 2nd half of the season. Did the manufacturers homologate new aero/parts? Did the tires change? Or did the GP23, Honda and Yamaha jump after Round 11 simply because Aprilia took a wrong turn?

KTM and Ducati seemed to be largely unaffected during the season. They were the top 2 finishers in the constructors championship last year. Significant?

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I don't know if the GP23 was improving as much as MM started winning. I'm not going to do the maths, but his 3 wins were in the second half of the season, 6/10 of his GP podiums were in the second half of the season, and half of his sprint podiums are in the second half of the season. On the otherhand though, Bezz and Alex's only podiums were in the first half of the season.
Aprilia's curve has a sort of downward slope around the time Aleix was out injured, stabilises a tad but is then harmed by Oliveira missing 5/6 last races. Salvadori, their replacement rider for Oliveira was unable to score any points which hurts them on the graph.
KTM again, started out great but while Binder was consistent, Fernadez was terrible, Miller was inconsistent at best but I think what hurts their graph the most was Acosta crashing a lot after the first 4 rounds.

Given the small number of samples, I'd want to see changes in slope that are much more significant than we see. I don't see anything there that is a clear change in performance. If we don't consider that, then we risk reading meaning into something which is just random variation.