In only his second year on the circuit, Feeney exploded to Supercars superstardom with a five-win season and Sandown 500 win en route to a third-place finish in the championship. By most metrics, he was not very far behind his departing teammate Shane van Gisbergen and he actually tied him in quite a few categories. Both Triple Eight Engineering teammates had 5 wins, 4 races where they led the most laps, 3 poles, and 3 fastest laps. They were also very close in natural races led (where van Gisbergen had 5 to Feeney's 4), lead shares (3.27 to 3.00), and CRL (3.97 to 3.00.) By some metrics, I could see why some people would call Feeney's season elite but I left him just outside of the elite tier mainly because of his weak passing and solid but not overwhelming speed. Despite winning five races in 2023, Feeney wasn't even involved in a single lead change: he had a 0-0 lead change record in a year where a number of drivers I didn't even list did have passes for the lead in weaker cars: Matthew Payne, Anton de Pasquale, David Reynolds, and Thomas Randle. Feeney's Sandown co-driver Jamie Whincup, was arguably more impactful in Feeney's marquee race win as in his two starts in the marquee race wins, he managed to earn a 3-0 lead change record and 1.1 lead shares (maybe I should have actually considered Whincup for the list even though in general I think part-time drivers don't belong.) van Gisbergen meanwhile led the series with a 6-3 lead change record and that's a huge difference. Feeney seems to be already coming close to matching van Gisbergen in talent as a driver and raw pace, which is extremely impressive for a driver who only recently turned 21. SVG himself did not even win in Supercars until his second season, so Feeney is well ahead of his pace both in terms of performance by age and experience level already. But he certainly is no match for van Gisbergen as a duelist in terms of battling other drivers on track, the difference between driving and racing. Feeney was considerably slower than van Gisbergen too with a speed percentile of 75.96 to SVG's 85.59. And of course Feeney didn't do the other thing Shane did last year and I don't think he could have. If van Gisbergen hadn't won the Cup race,I probably would have had both drivers a lot closer together, but there were a couple of Supercars drivers that finished behind Feeney in points who did impress me more. Feeney had a rating of .169 in my touring car model last year, which placed him 55th among all drivers and 6th among Supercars drivers. I think cars are still faster than he is and he has been carried by them to some degree but admittedly not to the degree of Will Brown who I listed earlier, and Feeney is having a much faster and much more impressive trajectory than Brown is. With Brown replacing SVG as Feeney's teammate, I predict that it won't even be close and Feeney will obliterate him as he sits poised to be Brodie Kostecki's biggest long-time challenger (even though I still think Chaz Mostert and Cameron Waters in slower cars are better than he is currently.)
Chastain is 5th in points, 4th in lead shares, and 4th in cumulative races led despite only ranking 9th in speed. He's definitely outperforming his car and I think he is having a borderline elite season even though he has had a lot of random off weeks lately.
— Sean Wrona (@racermetrics) July 29, 2023
For a lot of folks the shine fell off the Ross Chastain experience really quickly. Immediately after the Hail Melon, for a brief moment he seemed bigger than NASCAR himself as his Martinsville move was one of the first times NASCAR had gotten press coverage for something other than a crash or a political controversy in a long time. Chastain's newfound celebrity seemed to place a target on his back not seen since Ernie Irvan in 1992 when after a string of incidents he was consistently blamed for anything on track if he was even near it, but even though Chastain's style and talent hearkens back to the likes of Irvan, there are many differences between the two. For one thing, Irvan unambiguously caused three crashes that took out around 15 cars (Darlington 1990, Talladega 1991, Pocono 1991) in his reign of terror, the first two of which injured drivers with Neil Bonnett getting amnesia and being knocked out of commission for three years and Kyle Petty breaking his leg. Chastain has never in his career caused a wreck as bad as any of those and the only one that comes close in the 2020 Daytona 500 took out fewer cars and did not injure anyone, yet Chastain is racing in an era when the cars are bunched far closer together due to closer competition, more restarts, double-file restarts, and a win-and-in playoff format, all of which incentivize more aggression than in Irvan's era. However, despite not being anywhere near as much of a menace as Irvan was, he still seems to be receiving the same level of criticism both from both the other drivers and a lot of the racing media that Irvan did. It seems like after Martinsville, everyone was gunning to take him down a peg. At Richmond, Christopher Bell blamed him for causing the incident where he spun William Byron even though it was much more Bell's fault than Chastain's. That led to a wave of fan support as a cabal of viral memesters started mocking Bell by blaming Chastain for every crash in motorsports history along with a variety of natural disasters. By that point, it seemed most of the fan base had cooled down although Chastain did admittedly wreck Larson indirectly at Dover and directly for the win in the spring Darlington race, which earned him a rebuke from Rick Hendrick. Immediately after that, it seemed like Chastain suddenly got slower so I wonder whether Hendrick influenced Chevrolet to withdraw some funding from Trackhouse Racing or Chastain essentially suppressed his competitive drive for a while so people would stop paying as much attention to him and he could again embrace the underdog role that has proven so effective for him in the past. Both seem plausible. As far as Chastain being the most dangerous driver last year, he had 17 incidents, which ranked midpack and wasn't particularly noteworthy in either direction by that metric, so a lot of people crashed more, but he did admittedly seem to give up a lot of speed when he learned patience. After his long string of mediocre runs, he again began to receive criticism from many analysts like my future RotoBaller colleague Jordan McAbee who were mocking the idea of him being elite, which I attempted to argue against in the above post. A lot of people were rating Chris Buescher higher for elevating a supposedly weaker RFK Racing or Tyler Reddick higher for his greater clutch passing ability and I can see the arguments, but honestly I thought Chastain was better than both for almost the entire season. The main reason for that is that I think Chastain's performance exceeded the speed of his car more than any of the other contending NASCAR Cup drivers in 2023 except for Ryan Blaney. His numbers did drop somewhat from the post I made before, but Chastain ranked 5th in lead shares with 2.58 (even beating Kyle Larson) and 6th in CRL at 2.25 despite only having the 9th fastest car with a speed percentile of 64.57. His lead change record of 21-14 ended up ranking third in the Cup Series behind only Buescher's 11-7 and Blaney's 35-23 (all three of them were extremely close percentage-wise.) 2023 was actually Chastain's best year in both lead change percentage, TNL, and lead shares, and he had the most lead shares in 4 races in 2023 just as he did in 2022, but last year he actually tied for the lead in that category. Both of his wins were a lot more impressive than his wins in 2022, especially his win in the Phoenix finale after he had been eliminated from the playoffs where he managed to be the first driver to outduel the championship contenders and win since the Championship 4 was introduced, which a lot of people were beginning to doubt would ever happen. Pretty much all his leading data remained about the same or even improved despite the fact that his speed percentile dropped from 75.27 to 64.57. So why don't I have him in the elite tier? While I don't think consistency matters as much as other people do especially in a championship format where consistency in the regular season doesn't even matter at all as long as you win, I can't ignore the fact that both his median results and his median performance were significantly worse. Although I definitely think Chastain's good races were even better in 2023 than they were in 2022, he had many more mediocre ones and ultimately for me, the marginal improvement in his top performances was not enough to overcome the increase in his quantity of mediocre performances. It's worth noting that Chastain's teammate Daniel Suárez contended for a lot of wins in 2022 and was almost a complete non-factor in 2023; he dropped in performance way more than even Chastain did (and was also much more of a weapon than Chastain ever was, for as much criticism as he did get.) I still kind of think I'm underrating him even here because he was really good in my advanced metrics and better than his cars, but can I really justify ranking him over his mortal enemy Denny Hamlin or Martin Truex, Jr. when he was only 10th in Ryan McCafferty's model and 17th in mine? No, I can't.
The most veteran of all drivers in the TCR World Tour, Huff is the only driver who has run full-time almost continuously in the top tier of international touring car racing since the World Touring Car Championship was reintroduced in 2005 with the exception of 2020, when he switched to the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship for one year and won the title. 2023 was one of Huff's better seasons statistically as his third place finish points finish was the best since his WTCC championship in 2012. However, that was largely because the Comtoyou Racing team he drove for last year was faster than most of the cars he drove in the years since. In my touring car model, Huff ranked 28th overall and 3rd in the inaugural TCR World Tour with a rating of .263, but he actually ranked higher in my model the two years before as he had a 17-5 record against his teammate in 2021 and a 14-0 record in 2022, while last year his record of 42-15 was a little worse. Huff was still clearly the third-best driver on the circuit and he had a very real shot at winning the championship. Huff crushed his main teammate Frédéric Vervisch, who finished only one spot behind him in the points standings but he beat Vervisch by 67 points and by the fairly massive margin of 16-6. If you just count his performance against Vervisch alone, he would have been the highest-rated TCR World Tour driver of the year, but he performed worse against all the TCR Europe championship drivers he competed against as well as in his British Touring Car Championship starts for Team HARD. Huff did well in my leading data as well, tying for the most natural races led with 3, leading the series with a 3-1 lead change record, and ranking 4th in both TNL and lead shares while Vervisch only ranked tied for 6th in lead shares and 11th in CRL. Huff was in position to potentially win the TCR World Tour title as in the season-ending Guia Race of Macau, Vervisch ran down leader Santiago Urrutia and then blocked him long enough to allow Huff to catch up; if Huff had ever gotten around Urrutia, the team would have invoked a team order to allow Huff through to win the championship, which would have left Vervisch winless. He huffed and he puffed as he ran down Urrutia, but in one of the biggest freak accidents of the year, as he tapped Urrutia's back bumper his hood somehow detached and flew up directly in front of his windshield obstructing his view and taking him out of the race; his pit stop thereby ended his championship bid. It was as if the Comtoyou team suffered some instant form of karmic retribution by attempting to rig the race for Huff. So why don't I have him in the elite tier? Part of it is that the level of competition was not great as only nine drivers ran the entire TCR World Tour schedule even though most of them were very good. Part of it is that one of his two wins came in an inverted-grid race. Part of it is that I think much of his improved results came from having a faster car because he rated higher in my touring car model in both 2021 and 2022 (I probably rated him too low when I only placed him in the C tier last year.) But mostly I think it is that the team tried to set up a team-orders championship and fell flat on its face even though it isn't his fault.
Al-Attiyah started off his 2023 season with a bang by winning the Pseudo-Dakar Rally for the fifth time overall and the third time in five years. While actually racing from Yanbu to Dammam in Saudi Arabia, he took the lead from Carlos Sainz(, Sr.) in the fourth stage and led the rest of the way collecting three stage wins along the way. This was maybe the best season of his entire career as he won the World Rally-Raid championship with two other wins in addition to "Dakar" and he did at least have a little competition from Yazeed Al-Rajhi, Sébastien Loeb, and Mattias Ekström. On top of that, he also won the FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Bajas with four wins, but admittedly he faced almost no competition in that series except for Al-Rajhi. Despite being the only driver to win multiple FIA championships in this season, I just thought the competition he faced was shallower than that in almost every other division and admittedly, I still can't get over the inaccurately-named Dakar Rally even though it has been fifteen years since hat happened.
The defending DTM champion dropped to 4th in the standings in 2023, but he still had a very good season regardless. When I introduced my touring car model in October, van der Linde was the highest-rated driver overall and the highest DTM driver for the third straight season because at the time I calculated that, van der Linde was beating his three-time DTM champion teammate René Rast 5-2. However, in the tail end of the season Rast started to catch van der Linde and ended up winning a race, tying him 5-5 and only losing to him by eleven points in the championship (almost entirely because he skipped two races to meet his Formula E commitments.) Rast is still one of the best touring car drivers in the world and even matching him is quite the accomplishment. However, any thought of having him in my elite tier was pretty much extinguished at that point even though he was still the fourth-highest rated driver in my overall touring car model and third in DTM. I think I have to take that with a grain of salt because as I've said I think all the DTM drivers are overrated because that series does not have field inversions while many of the other main touring car series do, which means DTM has somewhat less artificial parity and fewer flukish results, which allows people to dominate more substantially. van der Linde ranked behind only the champion Thomas Preining and the third-place finisher Ricardo Feller in my model, but both of them were clearly better (especially when you consider Feller's simultaneous GT championship.) van der Linde did beat Mirko Bortolotti for third place in my model in the series, but Bortolotti clearly had a better season, while there was admittedly a lot of parity in DTM other than Preining and Bortolotti because while both of those drivers won three times, the other nine drivers in the series all only won once, which makes them hard to distinguish. van der Linde did rank 4th in speed just as he did in the championship (the top four in speed matched the top four in the championship exactly in 2023.) Despite the fact that van der Linde acquitted himself adequately against a historically elite teammate, I left him out of the elite tier because he was too similar to a lot of other drivers as he was one of eight drivers to tie for 3rd with exactly 1 lead share, and some of those like Franck Perera, Jack Aitken, and Sheldon's brother Kelvin van der Linde I didn't even list. He also failed to make a pass for the lead and tied for only 7th in CRL. For a defending champion, he was a bit disappointing (although not nearly to the extent of Will Power, Joey Logano, or Stoffel Vandoorne) and my model definitely inflated him this time. To his credit, he did also win a couple races in the Intercontinental GT Challenge for Team WRT, the Kyalami 9 Hours and the Indianapolis 8 Hours, although admittedly those are the two least prestigious races on that schedule, so I'm not sure how many people noticed. At age 24, he's still one of the hottest up-and-comers in motorsports and I'm glad he's clearly overtaken his brother Kelvin after Kelvin intentionally wrecked Liam Lawson and caused him to lose the championship in 2021. Now that I've completed my teammate model, I can definitely acknowledge that I likely should have had him in the top 25 (the full elite tier) last year and I underrated him then. Last year was not as impressive but he was still very good.
A major reason why it took me two days to write this column and one day to write most of the other ones is I did have to alter my list slightly and rearrange three of the IMSA GTP drivers because I did not do sufficient research in that category. I was initially planning to list Jaminet as the highest-ranked GTP driver last year with Pipo Derani second and Filipe Albuquerque third. They were all quite close to me and essentially dead even. However, after losing my job in 2022 I could not afford to maintain cable so I have not been watching much; I've been primarily only listening to NASCAR and IndyCar races on the radio live so I had to catch up with everything else after the fact by looking at the video footage to collect lead change data, most of which I did only in the past couple months. I was going to take Jaminet first initially because he led the IMSA GTP class in most of the categories I track, including natural races led (3), lead change record (3-0), TNL (3), lead shares (1.83), CRL (1.75), and races with the most laps led (3) despite seeming to have a speed deficit (his speed percentile of 48.56 and his co-driver Nick Tandy's 56.34 weren't particularly stellar but Jaminet nonetheless was in every other category.) However, what I did not notice because I hadn't kept up with the headlines throughout the season is that even though Jaminet passed de Phillippi for the lead to win the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen on track, his Porsche Penske team was dropped to 9th after a technical infraction. As a result since I don't count passes for drivers if their team got nabbed for cheating, that drops his natural races led to 2 behind Sébastien Bourdais, his lead change record to 2-0 (which is still best in the class), his TNL to 2 (ditto; all other drivers only had 0 or 1 TNL), his lead shares to 0.83 (behind Derani, Albuquerque, and Tom Blomqvist), and so on. When considering he didn't win the title and he didn't win any of the four big endurance races (DNFing in three of them), it was hard to justify placing him highest in the class but I was going to do it based on some of my other statistics. After realizing I shouldn't have counted his Watkins Glen, he does look a lot worse in my statistics now (although still really good) and I can acknowledge that Albuquerque and Derani were both definitely better.
The biggest star in Porsche Supercup failed to win a race in that series for the first time since 2018, but he still finished 2nd in the championship and had one of his best seasons in 2023. While he was nowhere near as good as he was in 2020 and 2021 when he won the Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany championships in back-to-back years, a feat no one else had done ever that led me to rank him 7th in 2021, this was definitely his best year since as he won his third Porsche Carrera Cup Germany championship in four years and won seven races in that series while he also crossed over and competed in the Porsche Carrera Cup Italy, where he also won the championship and won five times. The twelve combined wins in the Porsche system matches what he did in 2021, but winning half the races in the major league Porsche Supercup is a far cry from going winless in that series last year despite still being very competitive. ten Voorde ranked 30th in my touring car model at and 3rd amongst Porsche Supercup drivers at .258 behind Alessandro Ghiretti and Morris Schuring, but aside from Schuring, who was really only barely a championship contender, he beat all the other championhip contenders like Bastian Buus, Loek Hartog, and Harry King by a pretty good margin and I still think he's the best driver in the series. ten Voorde had a 67-8 record against his teammates in 2023 (not including Porsche Carrera Cup Italy, where I couldn't quite determine who drove for each team so I haven't included it in my model yet) while Schuring's record of 25-4 was admittedly not quite as good. If you discount Hartog, ten Voorde beat all his other teammates by the mindboggling margin of 54-1 but the problem is that some of ten Voorde's teammates like Soren Spreng were so lousy that you barely gain anything for sweeping them in my model so weaker performances against stronger drivers ended up being worth more, which I believe is the only reason Ghiretti and Schuring still outranked him (although it wouldn't surprise me at all if Schuring overtakes ten Voorde at some point in the not-too-distant future.) Finally, ten Voorde also scored a class win at the Dubai 24 Hour driving for Fach Auto Tech, the team owned by Schuring's Porsche Supercup car owner/teammate Alexander Fach. Schuring didn't enter but Fach himself did in the team's other car in the 992 Pro class and ten Voorde's car ended up beating Fach's car by three laps to win the class.
As I mentioned in the Mathieu Jaminet entry, I had to do some last-minute revisions to my list to properly rank the top three IMSA drivers in the Hypercar class. Initially I had Jaminet as best, Derani second, and Filipe Albuquerque third in an IMSA GTP season so messy it was almost deranged: parity, penalty, and punts galore! The punt (which was really more of a bodyslam, but otherwise it wouldn't have fit the alliteration) was delivered by Derani, who shoved Albuquerque off the track in what was probably the dirtiest move of the global motorsports season to win the GTP title. To be fair, Albuquerque isn't the cleanest driver himself as he had wrecked Jaminet out in the closing minutes of the 12 Hours of Sebring, which ended up handing Derani and his co-drivers Jack Aitken and Alexander Sims their only win of the season. With the best drivers all wrecking each other, Jaminet being stripped of a win, and Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun being penalized 200 points but being allowed to keep their win (for an infraction that seemed way more serious than Jaminet's) you can see why I ended up rating all these drivers so low when normally I would rate the top IMSA drivers a lot higher than this. I did put Albuquerque in the elite category barely, but for the most part there seemed to be not much elite driving in IMSA's top class in 2023, a year when cheatin' and wreckin' dominated most of the conversations. IMSA 2023 almost seemed like the Craftsman Truck Series, only with drivers who are good enough and experienced enough to know better. While the best drivers in IMSA are almost always the drivers who compete for the overall wins, I actually thought a couple of the lower-class drivers were better than any of them last year, but we'll get to that. Because as I mentioned in the Jaminet entry, I didn't actually follow IMSA last year for the most part until after the season had ended and I only looked at the parts of the videos from each race when lead changes happened so I saw neither Albuquerque's failed outside pass or Derani forcing him off the grass into the wall at the time. I'm glad I caught in time though because once I realized that, I knew I could not rank Derani over Albuquerque and I could not rank Derani in the elite tier either. Nonetheless, he remained one of the best drivers in the class as he had the fastest speed percentile among GTP regulars at 69.85 (which is admittedly a remarkably low percentile to actually lead that category) while Sims's speed percentile of 50.59 was not even close. Once I registered Jaminet's penalty at Watkins Glen, that gave Derani the lead in lead shares at 1.33 and he also ranked a distant second to Jaminet with 0.86 CRL. Derani tied Blomqvist and Matt Campbell for the most poles with two and his speed and lead share numbers are at least commensurate for his championship. It's not really a joke that he won the championship, even though you could argue that it's a joke how he won it. Between backing into the Sebring win (his only win of the season) after Albuquerque took Jaminet out and then backing into the title after he took Albuquerque out, I guess Jaminet's the guy I feel for most of the three, but all three drivers' strengths and weaknesses basically cancel out and they had essentially equally good, borderline elite seasons in my mind but Derani was too dirty and too lucky for me to consider him elite while Jaminet wasn't fast enough. I now agree with the general consensus that Albuquerque was the best of the three, but I also admit that it was pretty much a coin flip between all three of them both before and after I learned about all the chicanery in this deeply warped season.
DS Penske, the Formula E team owned by Roger Penske's son and magazine magnate, Jay Penske saw a meeting of champions as Jay cleaned house and replaced Sérgio Sette Camâra and Antonio Giovinazzi (two of the bottom three finishers in the points standings) with defending champion Stoffel Vandoorne and two-time past champion Jean-Éric Vergne. The idea of a backmarker team suddenly hiring two past champions was intriguing and I had no idea which one would end up coming up on top. The team instantly improved, but while the drivers likely contributed, I think most of the reason for the improvement was Penske switching from manufacturing in-house engines to using DS engines instead. As a result, Vergne gave the team its first win and its best points finish (5th) since the 2015-16 season when another former F1 driver in Jérôme d'Ambrosio did the same thing. Coincidentally, that was the last season before Penske manufactured its own engines. As a result, I don't think the main reason for the team's improvement had much to do with the drivers at all and much more to do with a superior engine package. Vergne himself was still very impressive, but Vandoorne wasn't really. Vergne nearly doubled Vandoorne in points by a margin of 107-56 and Vandoorne only finished 11th in the championship immediately after his title. Although I don't think Penske had the fastest cars in Formula E by any means, I think they were fast enough that Vandoorne should have done more and of all the really big-time champions of 2022, he's the only one I left entirely off the list. Vergne ranked 9th overall in my open wheel teammate model and 3rd in Formula E with a rating of .350 while Vandoorne's rating was only barely above average. He also beat Vandoorne in most categories, but they were maybe a little closer than the team head-to-head of 9-5 implies (wins: 1-0, TNL: 1-0, lead shares: 1.19-0.14, CRL: 0.83-0.37, fastest laps: 2-0, fastest races: 1-0, speed percentile: 52.72-46.42) with the only exceptions being natural races led (where they tied at 2), lead change record (tied at 2), races with the most laps led (tied at 1), and poles (Vandoorne got a pole and Vergne did not, but that wasn't enough to make this clear difference look any closer.) I definitely toyed with ranking Vergne towards the bottom of my elite tier for 2023, but the main reason I didn't was his crossover in the World Endurance Championship did not go well. Although the Peugeot Hypercar team he drove for was not very competitive as all six regular drivers had below-average speed, Vergne was slower than all five of his teammates, and I only included one of them on this list (he's coming up.)
The sprint car veteran was the best winged sprint car regular of the year. Even though he failed to win the main championship he contested, the High Limit championship co-owned by NASCAR champion Kyle Larson and World of Outlaws perennial champion Brad Sweet, Abreu came excruciatingly close to beating Larson for that title in 2023. Over the 11-race schedule, he only lost to Larson by a mere seven points and he actually won the most races, winning four times to Larson's three. Larson and Abreu weren't the only big names in that series by any means, as Tyler Courtney (who scored the most USAC wins four years in a row), the final All Star Circuit of Champions champion Zeb Wise, two-time USAC Midget champion Buddy Kofoid, and Anthony Macri (who made my list in 2022) also entered most of the races and most of them didn't do much of anything at all, which says a lot for Abreu. Beyond all that, Abreu claimed six wins in the World of Outlaws in 45 starts, giving him the 3rd best winning percentage in the series behind only the top two championship finishers Sweet and David Gravel. He also won two of his nine races in the All Star Circuit of Champions, where he basically matched both Wise and Courtney's winning percentage and they tied for the most wins in that series. As far as drivers who competed entirely in the sprint car world, he was obviously the best in winged sprints while Logan Seavey was obviously the best in the USAC series. It was a close decision between them, but I think I went with Seavey because he had more wins (barely), he won a couple of the USAC championships while Abreu won no titles, and he also won the Chili Bowl. But it was very close, don't get me wrong.
