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Following another car costs lap time: the wake disrupts downforce and overheats the tyres. The dirty air cost leaderboard quantifies that loss in seconds for each driver in a race, accumulating the per-lap penalty from an airflow model calibrated per circuit. It turns “stuck in traffic” into a number you can rank.

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What it shows

Each driver carries three dirty-air figures:
  • Total cost (cumulative_dirty_air_tax_race_s): the race-end cumulative penalty from the OLS airflow model. Drivers who spent more laps closely following another car accumulate a larger penalty.
  • Average per lap (dirty_air_tax_s): the mean penalty per classified lap, capturing intensity rather than duration a high average with a low total means a short stint in heavy traffic.
  • Taxed laps: the count of laps where any dirty-air tax was applied (dirty_air_tax_s > 0).
The model estimates dirty air from the gap to the car ahead, scaled by a per-circuit OLS coefficient.
Zero-gap laps the race leader, safety-car restarts, and laps where DRS opens carry no tax, because there is no car ahead to disturb the air.

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How to use it

  1. Select a race from the filter bar; the leaderboard loads.
  2. Sort by total cost to see who lost the most to traffic over the full race.
  3. Compare average per lap to separate intensity from duration who was in the worst air versus who was in traffic longest.
  4. Read taxed laps to size how much of the race each driver spent following.

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Reading the signal correctly

Dirty-air cost is largely a function of track position and car pace, not driver error a quick car stuck behind a slower one accrues a large penalty through no fault of the driver. Read it as “how much traffic shaped this race”, and pair it with the lap air map to see exactly when the driver was in disturbed air.
The penalty is a per-circuit OLS estimate from gap-to-car-ahead, not a direct aero measurement. Circuits where following is aerodynamically cheap (or telemetry gaps are sparse) will show smaller, noisier costs.

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Data source

The chart queries int_dirty_air_tax_component via DuckDB-Wasm in the browser, for a single race. This is a single-race view across 2018–2024 data. For the full model definition, see the int_dirty_air_tax_component reference.