World TT Championships - Fun with Charts!

The World's TT is unusual in that it's usually done in laps, and thus has a lot of intermediate splits.  This, naturally, inspires me to play around with spreadsheets.

So here are two charts I created

via img838.imageshack.us

This is (hopefully) fairly straightforward.  It's the average speed of each of the two laps of the riders who finished in the top 10. 

You can see that everyone except Wiggins went faster in the first lap than the second.  Cancellara started fast and slowed in the second lap, as did Bobridge

via img90.imageshack.us

This is maybe a little less clear, but allows us to tell something of a story of the race for the top 5 finishers. 

This chart is showing the speed compared to Tony Martin, who wasn't going at a constant speed himself - as we saw in the previous chart he slowed in the second lap.

The six coloured bars show the riders average speed compared to Martin in the sections of the course, the next two bars show the speed compared to Martin for the two laps, and the final shows the average speed for the whole Time Trial

The first thing to note is that Martin didn't just lead for the whole race, he was the fastest in every section.

Looking at Bradley Wiggins, we can see he started out considerably slower, but by the final section was almost going as fast as Martin.

Fabian Cancellara started extremely strongly, and raised his game for the second section, perhaps trying to match the incredible pace of Martin.  But in the second lap he pays for this effort and falls behind the strong finishing Wiggins.

Bert Grabsch seems to have paced himself remarkably similarly to his victorious compatriot and HTC team mate.  Unfortunately he was going more than a km/h slower.

Jack Bobridge started extremely strongly, going at medal winning pace for the first section.  He pays for this, going more than 2km/h slower in the second lap, but the youngster still manages an impressive 5th.