Formula One Drivers, Nationality, Globalization

stat 385 — Professor Kinson

Emily Tomes

2026-08-06

Motivation

  • Formula One has grown from a mostly European series into a global racing scene
  • New race locations (e.g., races in the U.S.) are drawing broader, more global audiences
  • Research question: has competitive diversity kept pace with geographic expansion?
  • Supporting questions: top nationalities by podiums, diversity by decade, calendar growth, home-race advantage, constructor–nationality links

Data Source & Size

  • Kaggle dataset (Rohan Rao), compiled from the Ergast Motor Racing Data API
  • 5 files: races, results, drivers, constructors, circuits
  • Joined via driverId, raceId, circuitId, constructorId in R
  • Covers 1950–2024

Variables & Limitations

  • Key variables: driver_nationality, race_country, decade, home_country, podium
  • Limitation: nationality ≠ birthplace or training location
  • Limitation: host-country count ≠ intensity of participation
  • Limitation: race count and season structure changed over time
  • Limitation: country-label matching creates possible home-race misclassification

Data Prep & Feature Engineering

  • Filtered to podium finishes: positionOrder <= 3
  • Merged tables with left_join() into f1_dataset
  • Created decade variable, standardized country names, built home_country flag
  • Cleaning done in R with tidyverse

Descriptive Stats & Statistical Test

  • Podium totals: count(driver_nationality)
  • Diversity per decade: n_distinct()
  • Podium rate: mean(podium) * 100
  • Chi-square test of independence: home_country vs. podium
  • No regression or machine learning models — descriptive stats plus one inferential test

Nationality Diversity Over Time

  • Distinct podium nationalities ranged from 11 to 16 per decade
  • Diversity peaked in the 1970s and 2010s
  • Declined again in the 2020s

Podiums by Nationality

  • British drivers hold the most podiums overall (770+)
  • German and French drivers follow
  • Many nationalities have few or zero podiums — success is concentrated

Top Nationalities by Decade

  • Dominance shifted over time, not static
  • British drivers: consistently strong nearly every decade
  • German drivers: surged from the 1980s through the 2010s

Geographic Expansion

  • Host countries grew from 13 in the 1950s to 26 in the 2020s
  • Podium nationalities stayed flat, 11 to 16 the whole time
  • The calendar globalized much faster than podium diversity did

Home-Country Advantage

  • Podium rate at home races: 11.1%, non-home races: 12.8%
  • Goes against popular expectation — no home-track boost
  • Chi-square test: chi-squared(1) = 2.42, p = 0.120 — not statistically significant

Constructors & Nationality

  • Top constructors show strong nationality patterns
  • British drivers dominate podium share across multiple teams
  • Others cluster with specific teams

Conclusions

  • Geographic globalization and competitive diversity move at different rates
  • More host countries did not produce proportionally more diverse podiums
  • Success remains concentrated among established racing nations
  • No statistically significant home-country advantage was found

Recommendations & Future Work

  • Race-level analysis instead of grouping by decade
  • Compare nationality across all participants, not just podium finishers
  • Regional and continental analysis of race locations
  • Study constructor nationality vs. driver nationality interaction
  • Use birthplace instead of represented nationality for a truer home-advantage test

References

  • Rao, R. (2024). Formula 1 World Championship (1950–2024) [Data set]. Kaggle.
  • Jolpica. Ergast Developer API.
  • R Core Team (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing.