车手55号

Carlos Sainz. The answer is Carlos.

Every Carlos fan know Carlos talks a ton when driving. We also know Gaetan enables him and this year has been a full yap-fest beteen the 2. But I wanted to see just how much Carlos talks compared to other drivers. So I used the Inside The Cockpit youtube channel and took their video runtime for each driver for the 24 Grand Prixs this year. Then I just graphed the total time the driver & engineer talked to each other for the whole season.

Qualifying was not included because that would be too affected by car quality. I have sprint data but decided not to include it because it didn't really add to the story. Also as a huge caveat, the method I used means this graph is also affected by DNS, DNFs, broken radios, etc. That wouldn't affect our frontrunner because the gap is so big, but certainly could affect some of the tighter races. (also I am sorry Jack and Franco people. I really couldn't be bothered to separate. That's my bad).

Anyway the takeaway proves my hypothesis as seen by how Carlos far and away has the most minutes logged even with a few DNFs under his belt. Pierre and Gabi are P2 and P3. Then the bottom three are Charles, Yuki, and Liam.

But really I would be wary of drawing TOO heavy conclusions about any non-Carlos drivers being frequent or infrequent talkers because they are all semi-packed together. Like the total time difference between Pierre and Liam is 156 minutes. While the difference between Carlos and Pierre is 186 minutes. That's right. The time between P1 and P2 is bigger than P2 and P20. Carlos was the most frequent speaker in TWENTY-ONE of the 24 races. The 3 he wasn't were all DNFs. (Lance, Gabi, and Pierre were the ones who filled his spot each leading one race a piece). If radio use was a wdc, we are seeing 2023 levels of domination here.

(Note: I seriously recommend non-Carlos fans go listen to one of his radios if you are wondering what he could possibly be yammering on about, it's a fun listen).

Anyway back to the other drivers I would want to see if these patterns repeat next year before I go around saying Charles is a radio-phobe for example. He probably is! The boy might just want quiet while he drives. I just want the patterns confirmed another year.

anyway in case you wanted to see this data on a per race basis, here is the median graphed:

and if for some reason you really love means instead of medians, i also graphed per race average with the top three and bottom three time lengths removed for each driver.

The story doesn't really change too much. A few drivers trade a place or two but the trend is generally the same. Anyway interesting stuff! Someone please ask Carlos if he knows he is putting the others to shame with how much he clicks that radio button. Thank god the radio breakdown in Vegas happened to known radio-hater Alex, because Carlos might have perished on the spot if he had no one to talk to.