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| Photo: racerxonline (cudby) |
Dissecting a
race is common practice and the factory teams take it to a whole new
level. All I’ve done here is quantify
what we’re seeing then illustrating those results for anyone who cares to
follow. Commentary and opinion are very
entertaining and keep the sport alive but the numbers tell the story.
With my
charts I can illustrate not only how well a rider did among his peers but with
further analysis I can determine to what degree, among other things. Follow along throughout the season and you’ll
be able to gauge the momentum of a rider, or what I like to call relative
strength – a technical indicator used to chart strength or weakness. I assume the factory teams already do this
and only out of curiosity did I decide to develop my own method of evaluation.
Let’s take a
look at Moto 1 in the 250 class.
According to my calculations Jessy Nelson was my top performer followed
by Kyle Peters, Dean Wilson and so on.
If I sort by CLAW score you would find another unfamiliar name in Jacob
Baumert in the top 10 and Matt Bisceglia uncharacteristically in the bottom
10. The meat of the curve begins with
Christophe Pourcel and ends with Justin Starling. You may have noticed that my scores have very
little to do with the AMA Point Standings and that’s because I wanted a method
of evaluating a rider rather than tallying points.
So how did I
get to these results? Well, it took a
lot of hours of grinding out numbers until my results reflected what I
saw. I had to apply some advanced
analytics to compensate for some of the random variables in a race and the
result is what you have here. It’s tough
to watch every rider at all times during a race and this chart illustrates in
one frame the performances of all 40 riders.
Over time the spreadsheets I use to figure all this out can be manipulated
to evaluate multiple scenarios and should lead to some very interesting
statistics.
It’s all
greasy kid stuff but it’s interesting to know that there is so much more going
on behind the scenes and I hope that I can bring us all just a little closer to
that motocross team experience – enjoy!
The Roost'r
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