Has anyone ever checked how many times karters jump in their PR's?

I became nostalgic tonight and watched some PR videos. Comparing my DP1 Non-NBT 5-lap with Kartseven's F-lap, I was surprised to see how little she jumped, especially in the first half of the track. I remember in the past watching other karters' PR's and being alarmed at how little they jumped, thinking how lucky they got not to hit grass here or there, where I would personally never take the risk and just instinctively jump.

So I decided to actually watch DP1 Non-NBT videos from five top players and count how many jumps were in each. I wanted to watch Jamie's and Matthias' but couldn't find them on youtube. DP1 is a great track to compare because many players are at the top at a comparable level.

These are the numbers I came up with. Respectively, we have (# of jumps) / (average # of jumps per lap)

Kartseven (Alicia L'Hoëst) (14"58 F-lap & 14"77 opener):    13 & 12 / 12,5
Chraizy (Christian Wild) (14"62 F-lap):                                     21 / 21
Martin Morissette (1'13"60 5-lap):                                            73 / 14,6
Chris Balch (14"59 F-lap):                                                       10 / 10
Chris Balch (1'13"63 5-lap):                                                58 / 11,6
Simon Laflamme (1'13"58 5-lap):                                            92 / 18,4

Chraizy's jump count is boosted because of 2 crash-avoidance jumps at the end that wouldn't be there in a successful 5-lap PR, but even so that's still 19 "legit" jumps ( )

So, my intuition that Kartseven jumps less is correct, but Chris Balch's jump count is even lower! In fact, the jumpiest players here jump about twice as much as the least jumpy. By the way, I'm assuming that no one jumps for aesthetical reasons. Players jump because that feels right to them.

Does this stat compilation interest anyone? I'd be curious to know which tracks are most prone or least prone to jumping (I'd guess VL2 and GV1, respectively). Ultimately, we could compare tracks by number of jumps per second. In the case of DP1, we have players who jump less than once per second and others who jump more than once per second. We could also compare PAL and NTSC and WR's with one another.

Is anyone inclined to suggest causal relationships between observed jumping behaviour and players' physical shape, personality, repressed oedipian disorder, etc? I used to think the new generation of players who grew up in a NBT environment (read: from 2004 onwards) would jump less than older generation players, but here Chris, who definitely started playing Non-NBT, jumps the least and Chris, who's known both, jumps the most. I mean... Chris Balch and Christopher Wild.

Also I can't help but wonder if my jumpy behaviour isn't the reason why I've always felt carnal love for MC3. As Gerard (I think it was him) once wrote about the MC1 3rd corner pipe, "I was made for jumping you, baby."

Edit: Found Chris Balch's 1'13"63 5-lap, so added it in the stats

I'd like to see these stats for VL2 5-laps...

This is very nice information Simon, thanks!  

The choreography of high level VL2 really is a thing of beauty.  

I have always been very interested in those statistics for VL2 since I had the feeling that race was more a question of rhythm just like a DDR-like effort. I had already counted how much jumps I was performing in one race (and so, per second) and I found it was really crazy to press that button more than twice in one second during a ~ 47 second-long run. This makes me wanna watch Sami's run again to see why he jumps 3 times less than I do per lap in a race which is only 0"08 "slower" — it's very interesting. Same for the gap between us on the PAL side... looks I jump much more than he does.

Many thanks for those detailed investigations, Simon!

Would you be surprised if I asked for Rainbow Road statistics?

The BC1 PAL flap statistics (less jumps equals faster times) reflects what I experienced when I last played the course. Jumping after the corner was always natural for me for straighting out. But it slows you down here. Of course the WR video is the best example for that. But this is probably old news  

Sebastian, what do you mean jumping slows you down in BC1? As far as I know jumping doesn't affect speed. Of course getting the angle right from the start of the approach is probably going to give better results than being out of synch and having to do extra jumps to countersteer, if that's what you meant?

That being said, Alicia's very 17"60 F-lap had a correction countersteer on the first 90° corner, but she did the countersteer without jumping. In fact she only jumped twice on the first corner and once on the second for that WR.

Okay, here's the count for RR. I found even fewer NTSC video than with BC1, and none of the top 3 times. I believe many of the sub-1'25 PR's are quite old already. I marked with an asterisk times that correspond to the player's current PR.

PAL:
1'26"74* (Guillaume): 101 / 20,1 / 19-21
1'26"92* (Sami):        117 / 23,4 / 22-25
1'26"96* (Alicia):       112 / 22,4 / 20-25
1'27"06* (Kalle):         91 / 18,1 / 16-21
1'27"26* (Sebastian): 122 / 24,4 / 21-28

NTSC:
1'24"84 (Karel): 118 / 23,6 / 21-26

Individual F-laps - PAL:
17"23* (Guillaume, F-lap):    20
17"25 (Sami, F-lap):           21
17"27 (Karel, F-lap):           21
17"27* (Alicia, F-lap):           23
17"49 (Guillaume, opener): 21

Individual F-laps - NTSC:
16"80* (Guillaume, F-lap):    19
16"85 (Karel, F-lap):           21
16"88* (Jamie, F-lap):          19
16"96 (Guillaume, opener):  20

Seems like Guillaume can't be the champion of the R button in every track. However he does stand out as being the most regular player, always jumping between 19 and 21 times in all nine NTSC and PAL laps represented in the list. Many players feel insecure about the "0" fork before the last turn, jumping to make sure not to fall there. The first three and the very last 90° corners are usually best tamed with 2 or 3 jumps, though for the first and last, players often do 1 or 2 additional recovery jumps to straighten out.

By the way, does anyone remember Nicolas Clementy's website from 2001? It had a section with a detailed strat page for every track and I clearly remember he suggested 3 jumps to cut the most out of every corner on RR. He had even named the 3-jump strategy after a popular triple jump olympic athlete. I swear I'm not making this up. Nicolas was #2 overall to Sami back then, and I would guess his RR 5-lap was around the low-mid 1'28" mark when he wrote that.

Aron, I've only focused on Non-NBT PR's so far. So no flatboost in the videos I watched.