Tenths Apart

Qualifying only

Tenths Apart covers qualifying performance only — race results, championship points, and race pace are not considered. A driver who dominates qualifying but struggles on Sunday will look very strong here, and vice versa.

The Delta

Every figure is the driver's qualifying time minus their teammate's, measured in seconds. A negative number means the driver was quicker; a positive number means the teammate was quicker.

Only teammates at the same constructor in the same event are ever compared — there's no cross-team element. A pairing must have at least 3 qualifying events together before it appears in any comparison or season summary.

The s / % toggle switches every figure between seconds and a percentage of the pair's average lap time. Seconds is the default — it's how qualifying gaps are usually talked about. Percent exists because a given gap in seconds means something very different on a modern ~80-second lap than on a 1950s 8-minute lap; switching to percent makes gaps comparable across eras, which matters most in Degrees of Separation chains that can span decades.

Choosing the Session

Modern knockout qualifying has three sessions (Q1 → Q2 → Q3). We use the highest session in which both drivers set a representative time — specifically within 7% of the fastest car in that session. Starting from Q3 and working down, the first session where both pass that test is used.

This means if Driver A only reached Q2 while Driver B made Q3, the Q2 times are compared. If one driver's time was more than 7% off the pace in every session — due to a problem, a deliberate slow lap, or a red flag — that round is recorded as N/A.

For older qualifying formats (pre-1996), each driver's best valid lap across all available sessions is used instead.

Include & Exclude

Once all rounds for a pair are collected, each one is checked against the spread of the pair's full shared history. A round is excluded if its gap is statistically anomalous — more than two standard deviations from the pair's average gap, in either direction. This catches both a driver's freak bad day and rounds where the usually-slower teammate was unexpectedly ahead, which almost always signals a problem for the other car.

Incl — counted in the season averages Excl — outlier, not counted

This handles events where one driver had a mechanical problem, a crash, or another non-representative result that would otherwise distort the picture.

Wet & Dry Qualifying

Whether wet-weather pace should count towards a driver's qualifying record is a matter of opinion — some see it as one of the purest tests of skill, others as noise that says little about outright speed. Rather than pick a side, the All / Dry toggle lets you decide. All is the default and counts every session.

Conditions are recorded per session, not per weekend, which matters more than it sounds. A rained-off Saturday can leave a grid that was actually set in a dry Friday session, and a dry-looking weekend can hide a downpour that arrived partway through qualifying. The weather icon on each round describes the session that particular comparison came from, so it won't always match the weekend as a whole.

Wet — session run in the wet Mixed — one driver dry, the other wet

Mixed is the worst case for a fair comparison: in the older formats each driver's best lap could come from a different session, so occasionally one set their time in the dry and their teammate set theirs in the wet. Those two laps aren't really comparable at all, so Dry-only excludes them along with the wet ones.

Switching to Dry doesn't simply hide the wet rounds — it recalculates. The outlier test described above is re-run across the dry rounds alone, so a round's status can genuinely change: dropping a couple of wild wet gaps narrows the pair's normal spread, which can push a merely-scruffy dry round outside it. Hiding rows without redoing that would leave the averages resting on a spread that still counted the rounds you'd just removed.

Two consequences worth expecting. Some pairings disappear entirely in Dry-only, because the three-event minimum now has to be met by dry rounds alone. And because dropping rounds changes the average only slightly, a season can show the same figure in both modes while the event count falls — the percentage view often shows the difference more clearly, since it also accounts for how long each lap was.

Avg Δ & Med Δ

Both figures are calculated only from included rounds. The median is often the more reliable number — it's less sensitive to any outliers that still made it through the filter. The average can be pulled by one or two unusually large gaps.