Comments on: Upgrade Criteria

By: Brooke Hoyer

Brooke Hoyer — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:57:02 +0000

They are only the lap times from the places 1, 5, and 10. For example, I got 8 lap times from each A+ rider. That means I had 24 lap times for that category. The plots show the max, min, mean, and standard deviation of those 24 lap time.

Sure, it’s only for the top of the fields, but it does show that there is some separation between the fields.

For another race (can’t recall offhand which it was), I saw some data that included the 20th placed rider. Even then, the 1st placed rider in the lower category wasn’t overlapping with him. I think it was Cs and Bs at Ranier.

I’d say it’s reasonable that the top couple of riders would slot into the middle of the pack in the next cat up. And that’s generally what happens except for a few dudes who are obviously in the wrong category at the start of the season.

After all my analysis — I wish I had more lap times to do a more comprehensive study — I think that much of the talk to fix sandbagging is a solution in search of a problem.

Each year there are some guys that obviously need to cat up and they do. Then there are the guys that worked hard and win some races and they earn the upgrades. And then there are the problem guys who sneak around the rules by soft pedaling to poorer results to avoid the upgrade. There seems to be one or two a season. Still, not a problem.

I’ve raced in C, B, B+, and A+. I’ve never had a real problem with the distribution of the talent in any of those fields.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:38 +0000

Yeah, that makes more sense. I was under the impression that the times you got from Candi were 1st, 5th, and 10th place only which left 60-odd slower riders out there. I didn’t think you had more samples from the whole field.
The Std Dev chart does tidy up the differences between the categories. Still, there’s 15-20% on each end of those ranges. I’m thinking that those outside of that range can be bumped up or down.

By: Brooke Hoyer

Brooke Hoyer — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:46:06 +0000

Okay, about that chart. I took all the lap times for each category and grouped them. The chart then displays the range of the lap times and average lap time for each category. The top of the bar is the max lap time and the bottom of the bar is the min lap time with the diamond the average lap time.

In the post I also included a histogram of the A lap times. If you notice, there is a single lap time of 8:20 way out on the edge — perhaps a flat or crash – with the next slowest around 7:40.

The best chart to look at is the one that plots one standard deviation above and below the mean. That will give you a better idea of how the fields stack up. About 65-70 percent of the lap times for each field fall within that range. That removes any outliers like the 8:20 lap in the As.