With Albuquerque, we begin the E- tier consisting of drivers who had great seasons that were in some way lacking (either due to a lack of dominance, passing, consistency, or competition.) As I mentioned in the last column, I was going to rank Albuquerque a close third behind Mathieu Jaminet and Pipo Derani until I did a last-second switch when I realized Jaminet's pass of Connor de Phillippi in the Watkins Glen race where he was stripped of the win shouldn't count and when I realized that Derani knocked Albuquerque off the track to ultimately win the IMSA GTP championship in the season-ending Petit Le Mans at Road America. Although Albuquerque and his co-driver Ricky Taylor failed to win a race in the class, they did finish second in the championship in spite of having four DNFs to Derani and Alexander Sims's zero. Their season essentially came down to the crashes at Road Atlanta and also the 12 Hours of Sebring where Albuquerque led the most laps before he made contact with Jaminet taking both of them out of the race and giving Derani his only win of the season. Had Albuquerque not crashed in either of those events (one of which was his fault and one of which wasn't) he probably would have won the title. I apparently gave the implication in yesterday's column that I thought Albuquerque took out Jaminet on purpose. I do not think that and acknowledge it was a racing incident. Regardless, despite not winning Albuquerque was the only driver besides Derani in the class who had an on-track pass for the lead, a race with the most lead shares, a race with the most laps led, a fastest lap, and a fastest race. Albuquerque actually was the only driver to have two fastest races in the GTP class and they came in the two biggest events, the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring. He ranked second in lead shares with 1.1, only barely behind Derani's 1.33, and third in speed but at 69.45, he was very clost to Derani's 69.85 and Sébastien Bourdais's 69.51. By all metrics he blew out Taylor as he had complete goose-eggs in almost every category and a speed percentile of only 55.85. Albuquerque also competed in five of the WEC races in the LMP2 class for United Autosports splitting the #22 car with Ben Hanley. With teammates Philip Hanson and Frederick Lubin, Albuquerque scored the team's only win and he was the third-fastest driver in the class with a speed percentile of 85.40 only behind Hanley and Louis Delétraz. However, I'm actually more impressed by what Albuquerque did in IMSA as their WEC win was decided in the pits and he didn't have any passes for the lead there. He also made one start in the European Le Mans Series in the LMP2 Pro/Am class at Motorland Aragón, where he finished 3rd and his speed percentile in that race of 89.65 was the second-highest in the class for the year behind Malthe Jakobsen's 91.18. It was a pretty great year for Albuquerque but while I do rate him as the best of the IMSA GTP drivers, there are a couple IMSA drivers in other classes who I rate higher.
Casagrande won his second championship in the Brazilian Stock Car Pro series in the last three seasons, thereby probaby enabling him to buy a bigger house. In a series that had incredible parity last year, there were 11 different winners in 24 races. Casagrande did tie Ricardo Zonta and Matías Rossi for the most wins with three, the most races all three drivers have ever won in a season. However, Stock Car Pro is one series that has inverted grids; the first race of a round is determined by qualifying and the starting grid for the second race inverts the positions top ten finishers in the first race. Casagrande was the only driver to win three races in the series that only won races determined by qualifying, and those races to me should always carry more weight. Casagrande's rating in my model was wildly inaccurate last year as it seemed like most drivers were way off, perhaps due to the inverted grids. He only ranked 99th among all touring car drivers and 21st among Stock Car Pro drivers with a rating of .057, because he beat his very mediocre teammate by only a margin of 13-8; however, if you count only the races determined by qualifying, he beat him 8-3 so it indeed seems like the inverse grids hurt him substantially last year. If I threw out the inverse-grid races, Casagrande would rise to .165, 57th overall and 10th in Stock Car Pro, still worse than you'd think, which is one of the reasons why I ranked him too low. He still did crush his teammate regardless as Foresti finished 19th in the championship with half as many points as Casagrande. I was too burnt out to go through the Stock Car Pro YouTube videos last year and determine all the passing statistics although it seems he led two flag-to-flag races from the pole at Interlagos and Velopark, where he also set the fastest laps and in his third win in Buenos Aires, it appears he passed Felipe Fraga for the win. Casagrande had a very impressive year, but there is one other Stock Car Pro driver I will be ranking higher.
A lot of you will immediately say this is too low for Hamlin and I can see where you're coming from but I will explain. On paper, he had a more impressive season than that as he ranked fourth or better in most of the categories I track and yet I am ranking him as only the fifth-best NASCAR Cup driver of 2023. Hamlin was the outright leader in natural races led with 16, ranked second in lead shares with 3.14, was one of five drivers to tie for the most races with the most lead shares with 4, ranked 4th in CRL with 3.16, tied for second with four poles, and ranked a close third behind William Byron and Kyle Larson in speed with a speed percentile 78.54. However, what really draws my attention here is that in almost all statistical categories he was pretty indistinguishable from his teammate Martin Truex, Jr. even though Truex had an extremely mediocre playoffs and Hamlin had a lot more speed in the playoffs including leading over 100 laps in three different playoff races after not having done so the entire regular season. Truex and Hamlin were extremely evenly matched: although Hamlin did have a solid difference in speed (78.54-73.07) and natural races led (16-11), one thing that sticks out to me is that Truex had the fastest race six times (more than any other driver in the Cup Series) while Hamlin only had the fastest race once. In all other categories, they were close: wins (3-3), TNL (2-2), lead shares (3.14-2.97 Hamlin), CRL (3.37-3.16 Truex), races led most laps (3-2 Truex), poles (4-3 Hamlin), and fastest laps (3-1 Truex.) Their seasons look almost identical to me in terms of top-level performance but Truex was easily by far better than Hamlin in the regular season even though he did almost nothing in the playoffs. Both drivers made 27 on-track passes for the lead, but Truex had a winning record (27-24) while Hamlin had a losing one (27-29), and of the three JGR drivers, Hamlin's 2-4 record was the worst on the final lead change of the race so he was also the least clutch driver. (He would have beaten Truex if I counted his spinout of Kyle Larson at Kansas as a pass, though.) It essentially took Truex 26 races to do what Hamlin did in 36 races. Normally I do give a little weight to NASCAR playoff performances, but I feel like that would be unfair to do in this specific case. It is clear to me that Truex's season collapsed because his wife Sherry Pollex died early in the playoffs. I saw so many people on antisocial media trashing Truex for his collapse when it seems to me like it would be almost impossible to race through the grief. It seems like a lot of extremely online folks honestly don't have many close real life human relationships so they seek refuge in online platforms that serve as simulacra of socialization and they struggle to empathize with human tragedy (witness how many people celebrate the deaths of people who disagree with them politically, which would have been basically universally unacceptable when I was a kid.) Truex was clearly outperforming Hamlin by a pretty large margin before Sherry's death so I cut him a break and ranked him higher. Additionally, despite the fact that Hamlin arguably ran better throughout the playoffs than he did in the regular season, he still failed to make the championship round at Phoenix. That admittedly wasn't his fault as he had a steering failure at Las Vegas that pretty much knocked him out, but he also had a string of stupid unforced errors in other races, most notably crashing out and finishing last at both Sonoma and the Charlotte roval race. I just wasn't knocked out by him last year even if he looked very strong by a lot of statistical metrics because he seemed nowhere near the best driver either in the regular season or in the playoffs and only ended up having a statistically better season than Truex because he has a substantially better crew chief and because of Sherry's death. I acknowledge this is a contrarian position, especially when Ryan McCafferty ranked him second. My own model only ranked him seventh though at .159, only barely ahead of Christopher Bell (but both of them were well clear of Truex.) I hope you now understand where it's coming from though.
Waters had an impressive Supercars season when considering that his cars seemed to be nowhere near as fast as the Erebus Motorsport and Triple Eight Race Engineering, or the Chevies in general. In a year when Chevrolets won 22 races to Ford's 6, Waters single-handedly managed to win 3 of those and as usual utterly dominated his teammates, beating 2010 champion James Courtney 18-4, Thomas Randle 18-7, and Declan Fraser 19-4. That's a slight decline from 2022 as he beat his teammates even worse the year before, which is part of the reason why I rated him lower. Still, even though his teammate rating was actually worse than it was every year from 2020-2022, he was still a standout within Supercars itself as he ranked 2nd in my teammate model among Supercars drivers but only 40th overall at .214. That is a distant second behind his ex-teammate Chaz Mostert, but Waters did beat every single Chevy driver including all four of the main championship contenders by that metric. Waters started the year off with a bang as he inherited the win at the season-opening race at Newcastle after Shane van Gisbergen was disqualified. He added a win at Surfers Paradise where he dominated and a win at Adelaide where he passed David Reynolds for the win midway. Despite the equipment deficit, he ranked 4th in speed and was the fastest Ford driver at 75.44 (he was only barely slower than Broc Feeney and he was actually considerably faster than Will Brown), tied for 3rd in natural races led, tied for the best lead change record at 2-1 (the same percentage as van Gisbergen's 6-3), 5th in wins (3), tied for 4th in TNL (3), 3rd in lead shares behind only the Erebus drivers (3.33), 5th in CRL (2.15), tied for 3rd in poles (3), tied for the most fastest laps (3), and tied for 3rd in fastest races (3). Given almost all those metrics, he certainly performed better than his 6th place finish in the championship even though he was actually a considerable distance behind the 2nd-5th place points finishers. I think the only reason for that is that he got poor finishes at both the Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000 endurance races, which count for significantly more point. You could certainly make the case he was the best Ford driver of the season, but I ended up going with Mostert instead. You could even make a case that adjusting for equipment he was better than both Brodie Kostecki and van Gisbergen who were both lower-rated in my teammate model, but that seems like too much of a stretch. At some point, you do have to go by the raw data and I couldn't really justify to myself ranking him over those two, but I wouldn't laugh if someone tried. If the Fords are ever as fast as the Chevies again, he can win a championship and since he is still not yet 30, I would lean toward him doing that unless he too makes a NASCAR move.
Easily the best American driver named Logan S., he will never get the opportunity to drive to survive but he was still easily better than that other Logan last year as I'm sorry - being the best sprint car regular in the world is a bigger accomplishment than being the worst F1 regular. After back-to-back 2nd place finishes in the USAC Silver Crown championship where he narrowly lost to the perennial champion Kody Swanson, he nosed him out by a mere 13 points in 2023, the closest championship result since 2016. For the second year in a row, Seavey and Swanson tied for the most wins with three but this time Seavey came on top. Considering Swanson is probably the Silver Crown goat at this point as he won seven championships in nine seasons from 2014-2022 and has won the most races or at least tied for winning the most races every year since 2014 except in 2020 when Kyle Larson went trophy-hunting after his suspension, this was no mean feat for Seavey to defeat him. But if that was all Seavey did, I would have him nowhere near this high. On top of that, Seavey also won the USAC Midget title with a career-best eight wins in that division, claimed two more wins in the USAC Sprint Series, and won his first Chili Bowl as well. Because Swanson hardly ever enters the USAC Sprint and Midget events, this actually makes Seavey the first driver to win both the Silver Crown and Midget championships in the same year since J.J. Yeley in 2003, but it doesn't seem likely that NASCAR teams will come calling for Seavey as they did for Yeley even though Seavey is a year younger than Yeley was when he won his single-season Triple Crown. I do kind of wonder why NASCAR teams haven't been more interested in him; maybe it's simply because he didn't develop quite as quickly as Christopher Bell did (he was definitely better than Bell last year though.) Admittedly, I still do consider sprint car racing to be a minor league to a considerable extent so even though this is probably the best full-time sprint car year since I started this website (with the likely exception of a couple of Donny Schatz's World of Outlaws championship seasons) I can't rate him higher, and admittedly his Chili Bowl win was a little hollow because many of the big names like Larson and Bell sat out the race. Regardless, Seavey had a remarkable season and one that should not be overlooked. I hereby dub thee Logan Lieutenant.
Evans finished second in last year's World Rally Championship and tied his two Toyota Gazoo Racing teammates, defending and current champion Kalle Rovanperä and eight-time champion Sébastien Ogier with three rally wins apiece. I clearly have to rate Evans below those two because Rovanperä was the youngest driver ever to win the WRC title in 2022 and is still only 23 while Evans had a substantially slower ascent and because Ogier is now a part-timer yet he still tied Evans in wins. I suppose you can make the case that I should have rated Thierry Neuville higher since he was the leader of his Hyundai team while Evans was clearly not the leader at Toyota, but I ended up rating Evans higher than Neuville probably because of performance vs. expectations. In 2022, Evans finished fifth in the championship and Rovanperä won 5 races to his 0 and beat him by almost a 2-1 margin in the championship, so for Evans to come back the next year and tie him in wins (even if he still wasn't really much of a championship threat) should be rewarded here, while Neuville only ended up tying the much weaker Esapekka Lappi in their head-to-head and also finished behind Evans in points after beating Evans the year before.
Werner is a driver I have never given enough respect since I only really started learning about the domestic Argentinean motorsports scene in 2022. Now I know a lot more ever since I introduced my touring car model, but I only included drivers in my model if they made starts in any of the international major league series and Werner is one of the few big names in recent Argentinean touring car racing who has not, so as a result I don't know as much about him as some of the other drivers but from what I do know, he seems to be not far off the bigger names like Agustín Canapino, Matías Rossi, and José María López (although I do think those three were all clearly better.) Nonetheless, Werner won his third championship in Argentina's most storied championship Turismo Carretera in four years, winning three races in that division. Additionally, he also won another more obscure championship, TC Pick Up, which is quickly picking up steam amongst South American touring car fans as well. He won both championships by a massive margin, beating 2nd place finishers Julián Santero 676.5-448 in Turismo Carretera and Diego Ciantini 652.5-458 in TC Pick Up. I also noticed that on DriverDB's Elo-based top 100 driver ranking that Werner ranks 36th, while the only other Argentinean drivers on the list Canapino and López both ranked behind him. Clearly even though I'm still learning about the Argentinean racing scene, this is a gap I needed to fill and a season that needed to be acknowledged.
I pretty much covered all of this in the Hamlin entry, but while normally I would dock a driver for a playoff collapse (as I did for Kyle Busch) I can't dock Truex for his playoff collapse because I think it was almost entirely due to Sherry's death, which is understandable. Before that point, Truex was almost inarguably the dominant driver of the season. I am certainly going to dock him a little for the playoffs (he would have been in the full Elite tier straight up if the race had ended after 26 races), but it seemed like people pretty quickly forgot how much he was outrunning Hamlin earlier in the season. After Truex's winless 2022, I had pretty much written him off and never expected him to have another season like this again, although it's worth noting that Truex did actually have the best lead change percentage in the Cup Series in 2022 even though he missed the playoffs so he was definitely really underrated and unlucky that year. Based on his performances in recent seasons, I was starting to feel like any win might be Truex's last, but he showed bursts of dominance in the regular season that he hadn't shown since 2019. He had the most fastest races for the third time in his career with six. Although that doesn't come close to the 12 he had in 2017 or the 8 he had in 2019, it was his best performance in that category since 2019, and he had his most CRL and poles since then as well. It's debatable whether his 2021 or 2023 was better. I rated this slightly higher (I had Truex 46th in 2021) but either way, it's close and people seemed to ignore everything he did because of the playoff collapse but I'm pretty certain the playoff collapse wouldn't have happened if Sherry had lived, so again, I'm cutting him a break. Truex has had arguably one of the unluckiest Cup careers in history actually as he has 51 fastest races, 43 TNL, 41 races with the most lead shares, and 42 races with the most laps led with only 34 wins, and last year was no exception although I wouldn't say this was one of his unluckier seasons. Almost all his metrics last year averaged out to about his win total of 3 except for fastest races, so it could be argued that his cars were better than he was. In fact, I think I would say that for all four Gibbs drivers last year (the three drivers who actually belonged in the Championship 4 had vastly superior seasons to both Truex and Hamlin in my opinion.) Truex was something of a juggernaut in the middle of the season as his six fastest races all happened within a short eleven-race timespan from the spring Darlington race to the Michigan race. Two of those were his wins at Sonoma (where he got an entire lead share by making all three passes for the lead) and Loudon, but two of the other races were Darlington (where he did kind of embarrass himself with an unforced crash, much like Hamlin kept doing on the road courses) and Michigan, where Chris Buescher straight up outdueled him in what was likely a slower car so I'm not sure if I'd say most of those other races where he was the fastest and didn't win were unlucky per se. However, in addition to Sherry's death, I'm also cutting Truex a bit of a break because his crew chief James Small continues to make notoriously incompetent pit calls much of the time and far more than your average elite team crew chief should. He has seemed to be producing faster cars for Truex recently (which does make sense since he originally came from the Supercars series and the current Gen 7 chassis are based on earlier Supercars designs), but his strategy has never really improved and when he has to go head-to-head against Chris Gabehart, who rivals Rudy Fugle as the best strategic crew chief in the business, it has made Truex look a little worse than he actually is, although I would say that was a bigger factor in both 2020 and 2022 than last year. Regardless, it was an impressive year for Truex when I never expected him to ever pull off another year like that again. I was beginning to write him off but now I definitely wouldn't. If he is able to refocus again and if his head is in the game like it was before Sherry's death I see no reason why he won't remain successful next year, but it would be perfectly understandable if he never gets that fire back.
I think I'm going to surprise many of you with where I will be placing all the F1 drivers last year. While Autosport ranked five drivers in the top ten, even Alex Albon (really?) and either 11 or 12 in the top 50 (depending on whether you think Liam Lawson counts or not), I will not be doing that. In a year when Max Verstappen blew out all the records and at least doubled every other driver in points, I think Verstappen's gap to the rest of the field should be reflected on this list, so I ranked a lot of the other big names in F1 substantially lower than I think most other people will be doing. In a year when Max won 19 races out of 22, it's really hard to make the case for "greatness" or elite performance elsewhere, so for 2023, I tended to opt for rating great drivers in other series higher than anyone other than Max even though I know there's a contingent that unironically believes all 20 F1 drivers are actually top 100 drivers in the world (they're not.) To compensate for that a little, I did include a few more F1 drivers in my top 100 than I normally would because I do think all the other teams besides Red Bull were closer than they usually are. So even though Sainz was the only driver to win a race for a team other than Red Bull last year, I actually dropped him a little this time. While the Ferraris were notably slower in 2023 than 2022, it's telling that Sainz was further off Charles Leclerc last year in speed than he actually was the year before (in 2022, Leclerc only barely beat 87.15-85.96 despite drastically outperforming him, while in 2023, Leclerc beat Sainz 78.91-73.60 despite barely outperforming him.) You'd think since Leclerc was actually a title contender for a while in 2022 that he would have had a larger margin over Sainz that year, but that was not the case. Leclerc actually performed better than Sainz in their teammate head-to-head in 2023 also beating Sainz 9-5 after tying 7-7 the year before. I'm just going to ignore that though. Leclerc was still the last driver to pose a championship challenge to Verstappen, which Sainz has never done and will never do so I definitely think Leclerc declined by a larger margin than Sainz last year while also outperforming Sainz. Because Sainz controlled the entire Singapore race, that gave him an entire lead share and CRL, which ranked him 3rd in both categories and higher than all other non-Red Bull drivers despite only ranking 5th in speed (Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were both faster.) Then again, something does feel hollow when you consider Sainz only finished 7th in the championship with the 5th fastest car. I realize 4th through 7th were all extremely close and only separated by six points in the championship, but given the speed of their respective teams, Fernando Alonso and Lando Norris should not have beaten Sainz in the championship and they did even in spite of Sainz's win (yes, they're coming up.) Sainz only ranked 10th among F1 drivers and 29th overall in my teammate model in 2023 (he even finished behind George Russell and barely ahead of second-year IndyCar driver Kyle Kirkwood, but I do have to give him big bonus points for the win.) I suspect I likely overreacted and underrated all the non-Verstappen F1 stars last year, but I also think that was the correct decision in a year when one driver pretty much captured all the greatness by himself.
After McLaughlin's 2022, I really expected he was going to be one of the leading championship threats and he was indeed my favorite entering 2023, but I do think I understand what happened. Team Penske had a wildly unexpected plummet in road course speed in 2023 and they rarely seemed to have anything resembling winning speed on road and street courses all seasons; this was mostly reflected in Josef Newgarden's performance but it also was probably one of the main factors that led to Will Power having his first winless season since 2006. McLaughlin is still pretty new in IndyCars and he hasn't completely mastered ovals yet, which often takes longer for international drivers, so while McLaughlin may already be the best road racer in IndyCar, he simply didn't have the cars to show that in a year when the Ganassi cars were overwhelmingly dominant on those tracks and honestly even the Rahal cars seemed faster at times. Still, McLaughlin is clearly in the prime of his career and can carry inferior cars to victory in a way it seems like Power no longer can. While McLaughlin was overshadowed by Newgarden for the entire season as Newgarden kept winning one oval race after another, McLaughlin was a lot more consistent and his advantage in consistency on road courses was enough for him to overtake Pato O'Ward and Newgarden in the final race to finish a distant third in the championship, best in class behind the dominant Ganassi cars. It was actually the highest he had been in the points standings all season. Even though he seemed to be kind of overlooked last year, he still delivered in numerous statistical categories: he ranked tied for 4th in natural races led with 3, tied for 2nd with the champion Álex Palou in TNL with 3, 3rd in lead shares with 2.67 (actually only barely losing to Palou in that category), tied for 2nd in races with the most lead shares with 3, tied for the most poles with 2, second in fastest races with 3, and 3rd in speed with a speed percentile of 74.74 (he actually beat both Scott Dixon and Marcus Ericsson in speed even though he had a way slower car.) He also won his class at the 12 Hours of Sebring alongside teammates John Farano and (gag me with a spoon) soon-to-be IndyCar Ganassi debutant Kyffin Simpson. So considering all that, why do I have him so low? Part of it is the ovals. Even if McLaughlin is the best road racer in IndyCar (which he might be presently) there was a mismatch between his strengths and the team's strengths so he ended up performing better at the races Penske was worse and performing worse at the races where Penske was better (the ovals; I realize McLaughlin still isn't very experienced on them but McLaughlin and Power are both talented enough that they should have at least battled Newgarden some when the Penske cars were that dominant on them and they just didn't.) Part of it is that his .216 in my teammate model wasn't amazing, ranking 25th among drivers overall and 7th among IndyCar drivers. Part of it is that he only made one pass for the lead all season and to pick an extremely comical example, his 1-1 lead change record in 2023 was the same as Devlin DeFrancesco and Graham Rahal's. McLaughlin was good at maintaining his position on road courses and often jumping people on pit cycles, but I'd still expect more passes from him than that: granted, that's as many road course passes for the lead as both his teammates had on road/street courses combined. Furthermore, his season went off to a bad start when he wrecked Romain Grosjean to start the season in a battle for the lead at St. Pete: while it certainly derailed Grosjean's year, I think it might have affected McLaughlin too as that race forced him to come from behind and he was never able to do so when the Summer of Palou began. Furthermore, McLaughlin's only passes for and against came against Grosjean at Barber, who is hardly the most clutch driver in the world and throws away races constantly. Should I be as impressed by this as Christian Lundgaard passing Palou and putting 12 seconds on him at Toronto? (No, but McLaughlin still had the better season.) Even in IMSA, Simpson actually (and shockingly) had a faster speed percentile than McLaughlin did last year (64.86-63.99) although McLaughlin was admittedly faster in their Sebring win. And even at Sebring, McLaughlin only led 22 laps (4th most) and took the lead on a pit cycle, not on track. Like Denny Hamlin, McLaughlin's season looks like one that was worse than the statistics imply. Don't get me wrong: they were both pretty great but their performance was not as great as the numbers they put up. However, Penske will not be this slow forever and I have a sneaking suspicion that they intentionally focused all their development for 2023 on ovals to get Newgarden an Indy win and it came at the expense of their road course performance. I see no reason why Penske won't bounce back on road courses in 2024, and I see no reason why McLaughlin won't be one of the leading championship challengers.
