The highest-finishing of three Baptistas in Brazil's Stock Car Pro Series, Felipe finished sixth in the championship and tied 16th-place points finisher Gaetano di Mauro for the most wins this year in maybe the most competitive season in series history. The other two Baptistas (Felipe's older brother Vitor and the unrelated Bruno) both also won races, but Felipe was clearly the best of the three. Baptista was also one of only three drivers this year to win twice in races that were determined by qualifying instead of inverted grids along with di Mauro and the series champion Gabriel Casagrande. I only rated di Mauro in the bottom C- tier because he finished so low in points, but he actually had a higher rating in my teammate model by a small margin. Nonetheless, I do care somewhat more about the actual championship results rather than the results my model produces and I have chosen to give Baptista the last spot in the top 100 for his (relative) dominance in a season where few drivers were dominant at all and relatively high points finish even though he only ranked 13th in my teammate model, but it was a close decision and he's probably indistinguishable with most of the drivers I put in the C tier.
Brown earned his fourth NHRA Top Fuel title in 2024 and unlike many champions in other series, he has shown remarkably consistent performance across his championship season, as he has won 6 races in 3 of his 4 title seasons and 7 in the other while winning neither of NHRA's marquee events (the U.S. Nationals or Winternationals) in any of his title seasons. While he has won the U.S. Nationals three times overall, he weirdly still hasn't won the Winternationals yet, which might be the only capper he needs to complete his career. But even if he doesn't get that, he's already a legend with 63 career wins (Wikipedia says 64 so I'll have to check and see who's right). This year he overtook Larry Dixon's 62 wins to make him the second-winningest Top Fuel driver of all time and he definitely has a chance to overtake Tony Schumacher's record of 88 wins at some point (I say 89) since he is over six years younger. I don't really know how to evaluate drag racers properly and I think I might be underrating him since I definitely want to include him on my 1,000 greatest drivers list but if I only give him C+s for all his championship seasons, he might not score enough cumulative points, so don't be surprised if I start rating some of his seasons higher in retrospect.
The veteran Porsche factory driver earned his fifth 24 Hours of Le Mans class win this year and he has only one repeat teammate in any of his wins, yet despite all that, I've been rather hesitant to add him as a lock for my 1,000 greatest drivers list. I think it might be because he still has a below-average rating in my touring car model at -.096, while most of his fellow Porsche-Supercup-alumni-turned-Porsche-factory-endurance-sports-car-drivers are well above average, like for instance the next guy. I do admittedly have Lietz in the near lock category and I think he is very likely to make my list, and this year helped his case. Although he did not win the LMGT3 class title in the World Endurance Championship as the Joel Sturm/Klaus Bachler/Alex Malykhin car for Manthey Racing beat their team car co-driven by Lietz, Morris Schuring, and Yasser Shahin, Lietz was the fastest of those six drivers with a speed percentile of 74.26, he tied Sturm for the best lead change record at 2-0, he had the 2nd most lead shares at 0.83 and was one of only two drivers on the team to earn a TNL at Le Mans where he passed Sean Gelael for the win, and he was one of only two drivers on the team to set a fastest race along with Schuring. It's debatable whether Lietz or Schuring played a bigger role in their Le Mans victory because Schuring had the fastest race while Lietz made the pass for the win, but I ultimately decided to rate both Schuring and Sturm higher since they were rookies and even though their numbers might have been slightly worse than Lietz's overall, I think rookies deserve to be graded on a curve to an extent and both Sturm and Schuring came closer to Lietz than they were probably expected to.
Speaking of Porsche factory endurance drivers, a case can be made that Tandy was the best Porsche Penske driver in the Hypercar class. Tandy's season there was eerily similar to Lietz's WEC season in pretty much every way. Like Lietz, Tandy finished 2nd to his team car in the championship (although Tandy and his teammate Mathieu Jaminet came a little closer to the champions Dane Cameron and Felipe Nasr than Lietz did). Like Lietz, Tandy was the fastest Penske Porsche driver despite not winning the title, posting a speed percentile of 69.07 to Jaminet's 68.15, Nasr's 52.46, and Cameron's 41.91. It was pretty shocking that both drivers on the car that did not win the championship were so much faster than both drivers who did. Tandy also led the quadrumvirate in lead shares with 0.69 and CRL with 0.84 as the numbers seem to indicate he was the best driver on the team overall. I also suppose I have a bias towards Tandy over Lietz because Tandy is one of the all-time highest-rated drivers in my touring car model while Lietz was below average, so I have this implicit assumption in my head that Tandy has been more responsible for his teams' success than Lietz has, but that might not be true. However, I still rated Nasr higher because not only did Nasr lead the team with 4 natural races led and 5 on-track passes for the lead in addition to giving the team its only TNL and significantly outperforming Cameron in every way on their championship-winning entry, both of Nasr and Cameron's wins came in marquee events that counted towards the Michelin Endurance Cup (the 24 Hours of Daytona and 6 Hours of Watkins Glen), which meant not only did they go on to win both championships, they also scored marquee race wins while Tandy and Jaminet did not, and winning the 24 Hours of Daytona is probably more important than winning the championship anyway. So I guess I'd say Nasr had the better season even though Tandy is the better driver.
You might have noticed I originally had him in the C tier. That was because I forgot that I had him ranked in the top 100 and knew he was an essential inclusion so I cut Franco Girolami, who I originally had in that spot. After realizing I had initially ranked Pursley in the 96 spot (which I had entirely forgotten), I have placed him back here and edited my previous entry to include Girolami. This year's big breakout star in USAC won the Midget championship at age 19-20 with seven wins. He also won the USAC Indiana Midget Week championship, which was a subset of the regular Midget tour in addition to winning two Sprint wins and one Silver Crown wins. Not too many drivers have delivered a 10-win season at the age of 20, which suggests that Pursley is on a trajectory that will lead to future greatness. While I don't think he is as good as any of the big three USAC stars (Logan Seavey, Justin Grant, and Kody Swanson) at this moment, he's definitely close and I could potentially see him overtaking any of them if he stays in USAC long enough. However, don't be surprised if NASCAR comes calling especially since he is already a Toyota development driver.
Rossi competed in three South American touring car series simultaneously while earning top five points finishes in each. Although he failed to win any titles, he placed 2nd in the top-tier TC2000 championship behind Leonel Pernía with 2 wins, 2nd in the second-tier Top Race championship behind Luis José di Palma with 4 wins, and 4th in the TCR South America Series with 3 wins. His 9 wins marked his most since the 2020 season when he won the TC2000 and Top Race championships simultaneously as well as the first time he won races in three different major league or semi-major league series since 2019. The Argentinean driver remains the highest-rated active regular from this scene at .318 and his performance this year was commensurate for that as he doesn't seem to be slowing down even at age 40. He did not have enough teammate comparisons to be eligible for this year's touring car ranking, but his season was definitely excellent regardless.
For the second straight year, Tsunoda consistently outperformed a rotating series of teammates at VCARB, arguably the stupidest-named team in Formula One history. Although he was actually slower than his teammate Daniel Ricciardo in 2023, he was marginally faster this year with a speed percentile of 29.38 to Ricciardo's 29.08, while Ricciardo's replacement Liam Lawson's speed percentile of 26.33 was slightly slower. As a result of beating Ricciardo 8-6 and Lawson 3-1 in their teammate head-to-heads, he ranked 11th in my open wheel model just behind Sho Tsuboi and Colton Herta and just ahead of Will Power and Pascal Wehrlein, but I definitely don't think his season was as good as any of theirs. All four of those drivers had established teammates who are theoretically in their prime and capable of winning, while Ricciardo has been washed up for years, Lawson has less than a year of F1 experience, and the rotating series of drivers ensured that the other VCARB car would be unable to develop a rhythm or chemistry to maximize performance, so I definitely think Tsunoda's season is being inflated by a lot of people. I understand that a lot of people are upset that Red Bull promoted Lawson instead of Tsunoda to the top Red Bull team as Max Verstappen's teammate and I do get it. Tsunoda was definitely better than Lawson this year, although last year I rated Lawson marginally higher because I decided what he did in Super Formula plus what he did in F1 was worth more. However, this year Lawson was only competing in F1 so he wasn't close. He did pick up speed on Tsunoda this year however as last year his speed percentile of 20.45 was much further behind Tsunoda's 32.20 so he does seem to be rapidly improving with experience. What Lawson's hiring reminds me of is when Jack Roush chose to promote Kurt Busch over Greg Biffle from the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series even though Biffle had beaten him for the championship. That move turned out to be correct as Busch was clearly progressing much faster (he won four races in his truck rookie season while Biffle went winless at a much younger age). I was indifferent as to whether Red Bull promoted Tsunoda or Lawson; I'd have been okay with either as long as Sergio Pérez was gone. But it seems like Red Bull is betting on Lawson being better in future seasons than Tsunoda even though Tsunoda was definitely better in this one, and I have to say I don't disagree. Lawson is younger, he has a history of having won his debut race in many series (including the Toyota Racing Series, the Euroformula Open, Formula 2, DTM, and Super Formula, suggesting he is a much faster learner), and he has actually beaten Tsunoda in championships before. I actually think they made the right decision (even though I agree with everyone that Tsunoda was better this year), but I hope they didn't make it for the wrong reason. The Red Bull bosses do stick their foot in their mouths a lot and have said racist things sometimes and I hope anti-Asian racism wasn't the main impetus for the Lawson hiring, although if it had been, would they have even hired Tsunoda in the first place? It could be that Honda pressured Red Bull to hire Tsunoda in the first place because they wanted a Japanese driver in the series (and the Japanese manufacturers are known to frequently do that where they compete) and now that the team is switching to Ford in 2026, they feel they don't need to keep him. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that he wasn't promoted because Tsunoda should easily outperform Isack Hadjar and he won't lose any cred while Lawson is not going to be any threat to Verstappen and might therefore lose cred. It feels like although I think they were correct to promote Lawson instead that it is time for Tsunoda to leave and see what else is available for 2026. Since there are so many rookies debuting in 2025, it wouldn't be surprising if one of them flopped, which might provide Tsunoda a better opportunity for growth somewhere else.
You can count on Al-Attiyah winning a championship pretty much every season as the perennially underrated rally racer won the FIA World Rally-Raid championship for the third consecutive year, but he definitely fell off compared to his usual performance this time. While he won the "Dakar Rally" in each of his previous championship seasons, he failed to win it this year. Additionally, for the driver who won 18 of 19 Middle Eastern Rally Championships from 2005-2023, this marked the first time since 2010 he failed to win that championship. Admittedly, he was the only driver to win two rallies in that championship and only lost the MERC title because he retired from the season-opening rally in his homeland in Qatar while Abdulaziz Al-Kuwari (who won no rallies) beat him with a 4th, 2nd, and 3rd place finish. Normally the MERC has more than only three rallies, so he probably lost more because there wasn't enough rallies for his dominance to overcome his bad luck than because he actually fell off, but I do still think I need to rate him lower regardless. Maybe I should have left him off the top 100 for that.
Now here's a driver I did leave off the top 100 before I eventually changed my mind. The defending DTM champion had a bit of a championship hangover as he fell to fifth in the championship with a speed percentile of 53.49 that was only barely above average. He did still win once at Lausitzring. After winning the pole, he led the first three laps before being overtaken by Ricardo Feller, but he made a comeback after the mid-race pit stops when he passed Kelvin van der Linde for the virtual lead. By the time the pit stop cycle finished, he had won. In a year that only had seven lead changes - still an improvement over last year's three, it's kind of a big deal that he did have a natural win despite having a slower car than any other driver who made a pass for the win. Preining still utterly dominated his teammate Ayhancan Güven 11-3, and Güven only finished 16th in points. Since DTM drivers tend to be the absolute highest-rated drivers in my touring car model, this meant he ranked 4th among DTM drivers in my model and 5th overall, but I've rated him significantly lower than that because not only did he have a championship hangover and only barely above average speed for the team he won the championship with last year, I also think DTM drivers are generally overrated in the model because the series has no field inversions, which allows the top drivers to dominate their teammates by more than the many other touring car series that do have inversions (like the TCR World Tour, British Touring Car Championship, and Stock Car Pro). I think Preining's still a really good driver but his drop in speed was so stark even though the performance is still there that I felt I needed to drop him considerably this time.
More like Josef OLDgarden, am I right? Sorry, that was my little homage to Mark Prindle, a comedic rock critic I used to like, who alternated between some of the funniest stuff I've ever read on the Internet, lame dad jokes like that, and truly offensive shit that wouldn't fly today in relatively equal proportions. But there was nonetheless truth in what I wrote because this is the first time Newgarden felt old as he had what was definitely his worst season since 2014, Indy 500 win or not. While I considered all of Newgarden's seasons from 2015-2023 to be elite and saw him as one of the perennial bedrocks of consistency over the last decade, he really fell off this year in a way I was not expecting. But I can't say I'm all that surprised. I had already mentioned in previous years that Newgarden has lost his edge and a lot of his speed on road courses but he seemed to compensate for that for a while by leveling up on ovals. He might have been shockingly slower than rookie Marcus Armstrong on road courses last year, but he also became the first driver since A.J. Foyt in the '60s to win five oval races in a row. I guess it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that he fell to 8th in points after eight straight top five points finishes because the level of oval dominance he had in 2023 was not sustainable so now he has to be more reliant on his road course performances, which have not improved. When Newgarden appeared to dominate the season opener at St. Pete from the pole, I was utterly gobsmacked because he hadn't shown that kind of speed on a road/street course in years. Let me just say it did not come as much of a shock to find out that he was caught cheatin'. But the real issue that hindered Newgarden's season was a litany of rookie errors that such a seasoned driver should not make. He spun at Laguna Seca while running second, went off at Barber and Mid-Ohio, spun at Gateway but got extremely lucky to win after David Malukas and Will Power's crashes (one of which he arguably caused by brake-checking the field on a restart, even though IndyCar said he didn't). Despite his collapse in racecraft, his speed percentile of 81.41 was actually the best of his career so it's clear he had a lot of speed that he was wasting. Although his Indy 500 win was genuinely impressive and made him the first driver since Hélio Castroneves to win back-to-back years (and his back-to-back wins were obviously a lot more impressive than Castroneves's), it felt like he underachieved over the entire rest of the year. Even in his 24 Hours of Daytona win, he was the third slowest driver in the IMSA GTP class and he didn't really contribute. Not only did Newgarden have his worst points finish since 2014, this also marked the first season since then where he didn't lead multiple statistical categories which I track (although he did lead IndyCar with four fastest laps). He had his second-worst lead share total since 2014 and his worst CRL total as this was the first time he had less than one CRL since 2014. For a guy who was almost exactly on Scott Dixon's pace in terms of wins per age and years of experience, this was pretty embarrassing. It remains to be seen whether this is an aberration or a long-term trend. Newgarden's decline in road course speed does seem to be a trend but it's been a long time since he's been this sloppy. After 2023, I never expected Will Power to outrun Newgarden again, nor did I expect Álex Palou to win a third title first, and this marked the first season since Newgarden started at Penske where he wasn't the best driver. Still, he won two marquee races this year and his two IndyCar wins placed him in a tie for 10th on the all-time win list with Dario Franchitti, Paul Tracy, and Castroneves, so I felt leaving him out of my top 100 would be a little *too* contrarian. But not long ago I thought Newgarden would rival Scott Dixon in titles and now it's starting to feel like he'll never win one again.
Even though I've been harshly critical of him this year, I do have to defend Newgarden on one point. This "villain of IndyCar" narrative the media have been trying to concoct out of thin air after the cheating was revealed seems a little far-fetched. While I pretty much stopped liking him when he stuffed Romain Grosjean into the tire barrier at Toronto in 2022 then attempted to justify it by saying "Welcome to IndyCar", I still wouldn't say he's my least favorite driver and trying to paint him as IndyCar's biggest villain is flatly ridiculous. It seems obvious to me that he is neither the driver who the other drivers hate most nor the driver who the fans hate most. From what I can tell, the other drivers seem to hate Grosjean (especially the drivers like Newgarden who are better than Grosjean and never raced in F1) most because they are envious of the fact that he became substantially more famous despite not being as good a driver as IndyCar's best just because he raced in F1. If I had to anoint anyone as the "villain of IndyCar", it would be the driver the fans hate the most, who I have rated slightly higher. Newgarden might be the driver the media hates the most right now for whatever reason (maybe they never bought his apology interview after the cheating), but the villain narrative surrounding him seems entirely astroturfed to me.
The luckiest driver in NASCAR history added another undeserved Cup Series championship to his ledger causing even many formerly staunch NASCAR playoff defenders to criticize them this time. As Ryan McCafferty put it, "the playoffs finally gave us a championship weaker than 2003 Matt Kenseth", and I agree. In fact, I would say this was the worst championship since Benny Parsons in 1973, a year where he only had one lead lap finish in his win at Bristol, a race where he needed a relief driver. But at least Parsons did that for an L.G. DeWitt team that never won without him, as opposed to Logano, who seems to keep winning championships solely because Team Penske is the only team that seems to have adopted the correct strategy of not even attempting to be consistent over the entire schedule anymore in exchange for going all in on Phoenix to maximize the team's championship chances. You can't argue with success as Penske has now won three straight titles there, but it's admittedly annoying that NASCAR's current incentives make that the best strategy. What I will say is that this is an exceedingly high-risk strategy and one that nearly backfires on them repeatedly. Ryan Blaney almost missed the 2022 playoffs because he failed to win in the regular season. Logano got knocked out last year after crashing at Bristol. If you're going to intentionally give up speed elsewhere to focus on Phoenix, you're going to lose a lot of stage points and will probably need to win races to advance, and as Chris Buescher will tell you, that's not always possible even when you're running well. Logano did not look like he had even winning speed for most of the season as Blaney seemed faster for the entire year just as he had in 2023. His Nashville win was a complete joke along the lines of Mario Domínguez's 2002 Surfers Paradise CART win as Logano was running 14th 18 seconds out of the lead at Nashville when his teammate Austin Cindric brought out the caution at the end of regulation (thanks, Austin!) before winning 31 laps past the scheduled distance after all the faster cars ran out of fuel. Logano was probably barely a top 16 driver on performance entering the playoffs, but I'll admit he picked it up afterward. His Atlanta win was more impressive even though he only led nine laps. Then after backing into the Round of 8 after Alex Bowman was disqualified from the Charlotte roval race, he earned another fuel mileage win at Las Vegas as the dominant driver Christopher Bell probably needed another two laps to pass him despite coming tantalizingly close. Becoming the first driver to lock himself into the Championship 4 gave him more Phoenix prep time than the other teams so I guess it's not surprising he delivered his one knockout win in the race he needed to. Logano was likely the best driver in the championship race even though Bell led more laps and he definitely deserved the race win, but did he deserve the championship?
I would say he did not as this season for Logano reminds me more of Bowman's 2021 than any other championship season. I would take this year over that one since Penske this year was not as fast as Hendrick that year, Logano was a little more dominant, and he did win the title and that has to carry a little weight. If a team is geared to focus all its energies on winning a single championship race and pulls it off, it should be rewarded a little bit. While he was nowhere near the best Cup Series driver, I think some people are underrating his year. I realize he only had the 12th most top tens, the 9th most laps led, and the 13th best average finish, but I have to evaluate his performance as a little better than that implies, unlike the people who act like that the mediocre Latford points system was decreed by God and think he was only the 11th best driver are wrong. I did admittedly only rank him above three drivers who scored more Latford points (Buescher, Bowman - who I didn't even list at all, and Brad Keselowski) but one of the drivers who finished behind him in Latford points I actually listed higher. Some people on social media have been talking about him like he had a 15th-place season and that definitely isn't true, but I still only rated it 9th among Cup drivers mainly because Blaney trounced him in speed with a speed percentile of 75.30 to Logano's 60.62 (Logano was only barely closer to Blaney in speed than he was to Cindric), but he was admittedly just as strong in his best races as his 2.03 lead shares and 1.70 CRL were pretty analogous to Blaney's 1.91 lead shares and 1.95 CRL and he had more lead changes this year with 31 to Blaney's 27 as well because he seemed to be better at drafting races this year, as evidenced by his win at Atlanta. Still, Blaney definitely had a lot more good races even if Logano had about as many great races as Blaney. Overall, the fact that he has three titles at this point when his career performance much more closely resembles drivers like Keselowski, Kurt Busch, and Matt Kenseth who only won one (and you can easily argue that none of them were the best driver in a season at any point either) is definitely an injustice, but since I've rarely taken any points system (even the Latford system) seriously to begin with I can't really feel the same kind of visceral outrage that a lot of other people do. Logano deserves acknowledgment as a clutch performer, which is the one thing he did have over Blaney this year, but his third title is going to do little if anything to change how I think about his career. Imagine if Kenseth hadn't wrecked him at Martinsville and he'd won that title too. Yikes.
From 2006 - GM Racing Development Program
— Aaron Creed (@aaron_creed) December 27, 2024
A few of these guys amounted to something. pic.twitter.com/tru341vbs7
A couple days ago Aaron Creed posted the above historical article about the GM Racing Development Program in 2006, and I replied that Swanson might be the best driver on that list even over Joey Logano (which was misspelled "Lagano") or Ryan Hunter-Reay. I of course got some pushback for calling RHR overrated, but I don't think I'm wrong. The goat of USAC Silver Crown racing won his eighth championship in the last ten years and won five races, matching his previous career high from his 2014, 2018, and 2019 title seasons. His 45 career wins are now nearly double that of the second-winningest driver Jack Hewitt, who won 23 races and two titles. I might still say Hewitt was the better driver overall since he won numerous races in other sprint car series while Swanson has tended to focus on mastering one and only one discipline. That's the main reason I tend to not rate him highly as the drivers like Logan Seavey and Justin Grant who win in all three of the top-tier USAC divisions simultaneously, but I do still rate him very highly and since Silver Crown is the top tier of the three main national divisions, a strong case can be made that Swanson is the best sprint car driver of the last decade.
Speaking of goats, Guerrieri isn't one but he was the team leader for the hilariously-teamed GOAT Racing in the TCR World Tour, but the drivers certainly weren't good enough to justify that team name if it means what I think it means. Guerrieri finished 4th in points while his teammates Marco Butti and Dušan Borković ranked only 9th and 10th, which was enough for Guerrieri to also rank 4th (and 34th) overall in the TCR World Tour with a touring car rating of .244. While Borković won the most prestigious race of the series, the Macau Guia Race, he only won the reverse-grid race while Guerrieri's win at Interlagos was based on speed. In that race, he passed Santiago Urrutia, another South American who finished second in Indy Lights points twice, on the opening lap for the win. While that was the only race he led all season, Butti and Borković only led reverse grid races so he obviously had a significant advantage over his teammates, but the team name may create expectations that he'll never manage to live up to.
I couldn't decide whether to place Bourdais or his Cadillac Racing teammate Renger van der Zande higher, but they were obviously very close so I'm going to save space by writing about them together here. The Bourdais/van der Zande duo won two races in IMSA's top-tier Hypercar class, which tied them with the two Porsche Penske entries of Felipe Nasr/Dane Cameron and Nick Tandy/Mathieu Jaminet for the most wins this season. They were relatively evenly matched in every way with both drivers having 3 natural races led, van der Zande having a narrow edge in lead change record (3-2 vs. 5-5) and fastest races (2) and a larger edge in lead shares (0.58-0.18), but Bourdais had the edge in CRL (0.72-0.69), poles (2-0), fastest laps (2-0), and especially speed percentile (72.41-60.61). Each driver outperformed the other in about the same number of categories, so that made this hard. Ultimately I went with the narrative. Van Der Zande had one of the knockout wins of the year as he passed Tandy to win the marquee Petit Le Mans in the final fifteen minutes of the ten-hour race and he did so after his left headlight failed. After taking the lead, his right headlight occasionally flickered on and off as well. If had permanently shut off, he would have had to pit and lose the lead and the race, but it did not. Van Der Zande didn't see losing his lights as that big a deal because the track was still well-lit, but he was very concerned about losing the lead. This was probably the defining drive of VDZ's career and if I include him on my 1,000 greatest drivers list I would probably count that as his best race. It was a race so impressive that it led me to rate him higher, but they were very close.
Callum did a lott better than I expected upon his debut season in the World Endurance Championship. While I don't think he was quite the best rookie in the series as I would say Morris Schuring (barely) and Joel Sturm both outperformed him, Ilott and his teammate Will Stevens did give their Jota team its first win in the Hypercar class and Ilott was clearly the main impetus behind that win as he led the last 41 laps of the race while Stevens didn't lead at all, but that's not why I listed him this highly. What impresses me most is how badly Ilott performed all his other teammates in terms of speed percentiles. Ilott was not merely the fastest and most dominant Jota driver this season, but it wasn't even close His speed percentile of 73.66 was incredible when considering the speed percentiles of his five teammates: Oliver Rasmussen's 52.87, Stevens's 49.90, Norman Nato's 44.51, F1 World Champion Jenson Button' 44.10, and Phil Hanson's 29.86. For him to be over 20 percentage points faster than all five of his teammates including a World Champion is freakin' incredible and I don't think enough people are raving about his season. I might have gone even higher but I talked myself out of it mainly because his IndyCar starts this year did not impress me. It was truly an injustice that he got fired from the Juncos IndyCar team after he had swept Agustín Canapino, but in retrospect I suspect that was more because Canapino was bad than because Ilott was especially good. After he was a last-minute substitute for David Malukas at McLaren when Malukas was unable to start the season after being injured in a motorcycle crash, I had no expectations that Ilott would be any threat to Pato O'Ward, but I did think he'd outperform Alexander Rossi there and I was kind of surprised that he didn't since I haven't really rated Rossi for years. Nonetheless, even though I definitely think Ilott is a better driver overall than Rossi now, I suppose in retrospect that's to be expected since part-time drivers rarely outperform full-time drivers and it's not like Ilott is so much better than Rossi that he'd be able to overcome that. Obviously his focus this year was on sports cars and he was excellent there and perhaps he was too distracted to do better in IndyCar. His open wheel rating of -.228 ranked only 71st among open wheel drivers and was by far the lowest of any driver I listed, but obviously I'm listing him for the sports car stuff while his IndyCar performances were a bit more lackluster than I expected. Maybe I shouldn't be that surprised because Ilott is still rated as a below-rated driver in my open wheel model overall (albeit barely at -.011). Despite the fact that I expected more from him at McLaren than two 11th place finishes and being outrun by all his teammates (even though he ended up beating Kyle Larson in the Indy 500 after Larson sped), this two-race sample does nothing to deter me from feeling Ilott is a driver on the rise and one who still deserves a full-time IndyCar ride. Since his teammate is another rookie in Robert Shwartzman, I expect him to dunk on Shwartzman and immediately restore his cred but Ilott seems to be more consistent than dominant so I don't know whether he'll win. Plenty of other drivers have lost their IndyCar rides and made sports car detours before coming back much faster. We saw this with both Ryan Briscoe and Simon Pagenaud. Could Ilott be on par with those two? My guess is probably not, but he's worth a shot. While I still only think that as an IndyCar driver he was 4th best in that insane 2022 rookie class as I think Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Lundgaard, and Malukas are all better than him, he deserves to continue in IndyCar and I'm glad he's getting that chance.
In my opinion the best drag racer of the year, Prock, the son of John Force's crew chief Jimmy Prock, had a breakout season in winning this year's Funny Car title. The driver who only had four wins entering this season won eight times this year including his first-ever win in the U.S. Nationals. The title gave Prock's owner John Force something to celebrate after Force suffered a traumatic brain injury in a crash in June, which led to his retirement at the end of the season. At the NHRA Finals, Prock set a series-record speed of 341.68 mph in the first elimination round and he also broke Force's record for the most times leading qualifying in a single season with 15 out of 20 starts. Prock and Antron Brown were the only NHRA drivers in the top three classes this year to also win three races in NHRA's Countdown Playoff format. (Although Gaige Herrera in Pro Stock Motorcycle also did that, I don't include motorcycle riders on my lists.)
Told ya. One of the two drivers in the top 100 who I ranked in the exact same position this time (and you already know who the other one is), I declared Schuring the most underrated driver last year after he became the youngest-ever winner in both Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany, Schuring had a spectacular rookie season in the World Endurance Championship where he and his teammates Richard Lietz and Yasser Shahin won twice and finished second in the LMGT3 class championship to their Manthey Racing teammates Klaus Bachler, Joel Sturm, and Alex Malykhin. Schuring was particularly spectacular at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where he not only won as a rookie but also set the fastest average speed in the class. He also had a pass for the lead at Spa against Nicolas Costa. While Lietz still outperformed him as he had 2 lead changes to Schuring's 1, 0.83 lead shares to Schuring's 0.33, and a team-high speed percentile of 74.26 to Schuring's 72.74, I'm grading Schuring on a curve here to some extent because he is a rookie while Lietz has been winning in sports cars for almost 20 years. For such a fresh driver to almost instantly match a long-standing veteran, I feel I have to rank him higher. But as far as breakout rookies for the Manthey team in LMGT3, the other one was better.
Sweet mostly defected from the World of Outlaws (where he was the five-time defending champion) to race in his own upstart High Limit series, but that did nothing to stop his dominance as he remains the best winged sprint car driver in the world as his High Limit title gave him six championships in a row. Although WoO is historically more prestigious than High Limit, I have to rate Sweet's season higher than the WoO champion David Gravel because Sweet regularly beat Gravel for championships when they competed in WoO together and it feels like Gravel only won that title because Sweet left. Okay, Sweet didn't totally leave as he did make 14 starts and won the season-opener at Barberville, FL but clearly his focus was elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether WoO or High Limit will reunite or whether one of the series will fold, but as long as Sweet is choosing to race in his own series and as long as he keeps winning titles, I'm going to continue to regard the High Limit series more highly.
On the eighth day, God created Connor Zilisch.
I admit I missed the boat on this one as Zilisch was definitely along with Joel Sturm one of the two best drivers I'd never heard of entering this year. Zilisch was not even on my radar or on this list at the start of the season. While I agree he's definitely the best and highest-profile NASCAR prospect right now, I admit I've been more skeptical of him than most fans have been. I have rarely seen a driver so young develop such a pop star-caliber stan army. To express even the slightest doubt that Zilisch is a future all-time great will get you dogpiled online in much the same way as if you write the slightest defense of Corey LaJoie. Zilisch is obviously better than LaJoie, but I don't think he is (yet) as good as the way he is hyped. I don't think anyone could be. There are people out there who talk about him like he's already better than Max Verstappen. Quite frankly no, no he isn't. I have already mentioned in the past that I have a master driver list that I've been working on for over two years (currently sitting at just over 4 megabytes) consisting of 24,835 drivers and all their accomplishments year-by-year. I think it might have had about 18,000 drivers on it at the start of the year, but I think I am probably about 85% complete and I hope to finish this before the 2025 season begins in earnest. The main thing for me is that I found it impossible to take the Mazda MX-5 Cup seriously since it is the fourth-tier IMSA series, and to listen to a lot of the people who watched him there act like he was some kind of all-time great based on his performance in an obscure C-tier sports car series where half the champions don't even have Wikipedia pages really caught me off-guard. I was also reading lots of stuff how supposedly it was the best racing in the world when I had hardly heard of the series entering this season. I mean I get it: few road course series have ever had so many photo finishes. But a lot of this reminds me of how people used to talk about the classic-era IRL when it may have had a shitload of classic finishes in the first few years of the 2000s but the talent wasn't on the same level as CART. But at least the IRL was ostensibly still a major league unlike Mazda MX-5 Cup, which seems to be nowhere near the top level of IMSA. And he wasn't even winning the titles there, yet I saw nobody hyping Jared Thomas and Gresham Wagner as elite drivers on a global scale. So for all these reasons I've been very, very skeptical of him and remain more unconvinced than most people seem to be.
That being said, there was no chance I was going to overlook him for this list. He definitely had a great season. I am primarily rating him this highly for his IMSA performances. Although I'll admit that the LMP2 class is probably IMSA's weakest in terms of overall competition right now, Zilisch was certainly an exceptional performer in that class from day one. He won his first two starts at the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring, becoming the first driver to do that since Pipo Derani in 2016 (or you could argue Rik Breukers in 2018-2019, who won the Daytona twice before winning Sebring in his only three IMSA starts). Not only that but his speed percentile of 95.98 was not only the best in the LMP2 class among drivers who ran most of the races, but it was even the best speed percentile in any of the series I tracked this year. The LMP2 class definitely does not have a very deep field, but Zilisch was still deeply impressive to be immediately faster than the few good veterans the class has, like Stock Car Brasil champion Felipe Fraga, Mikkel Jensen, and his teammate Ryan Dalziel. As an IMSA driver, Zilisch was better at being fast than he was at passing, as his 2-2 lead change record was decent but not great (and there were actually amateurs who had better lead change records in that class), but he was still the TNL at the 24 Hours of Daytona on his debut after passing Malthe Jakobsen for the win, which is impressive enough. Zilisch was also the fastest driver in his class at the Petit Le Mans so even though his team failed to sweep all three marquee races, he himself impressed in all of them.
His other stuff doesn't impress me as much, but it still impresses me. Although in his ARCA starts, he and William Sawalich looked fairly interchangeable to me, Zilisch proved to be a lot better in the NASCAR national series, becoming the first driver to win on his Xfinity Series debut since Ty Gibbs in 2021 and he won the pole for both his Craftsman Truck Series debut at Circuit of the Americas and his first oval pole two starts later at Bristol. In his NASCAR road course runs, he had to drive through the field several times and he certainly handled this with aplomb and the maturity of a veteran, but I'm still not necessarily convinced he's an all-time great. Zilisch's debut win at Watkins Glen is very similar to Gibbs's debut win at the Daytona road course, and Gibbs still has not won in the Cup Series yet. Colin Braun co-drove the championship-winning Krohn Racing entry as a 17-year-old in Grand-Am in 2006 with Jörg Bergmeister (although he wasn't able to share in the championship since he was suspended from one race and unable to start another due to the Master Settlement Agreement). He did not even seem head and shoulders above Sawalich to me in his NASCAR oval races, although I acknowledge he'd have won the ARCA Menards Series East title if he hadn't been wrecked by Logan Misucara, but admittedly Sawalich wouldn't have been in that position to need to overcome misfortune if Zilisch hadn't wrecked him at Dover. Derani also won his first two IMSA starts and has also looked hit-or-miss lately. Braun, Gibbs, and Derani are all good drivers but are they all-time greats? Zilisch will win in the Cup Series on road courses, but I'm not yet convinced he'll be better than even those three drivers who are all similar in various ways and none of them are legends (yet). I realize he and Sawalich were winning almost all the ARCA oval races even against the regular-season drivers who generally went winless, but the competition on ovals in the top three NASCAR divisions is a lot deeper, and Zilisch could very easily be little more than a career road course ringer like Marcos Ambrose, but granted, he has a lot more road courses to play with than Ambrose did. But I've been underestimating him all along so I won't be surprised if I'm wrong. I think I'm more bothered by the online reception of him as an inevitable all-time great (where if you disagree you don't "know wheel") than I am by his actual season. His actual season was great but I still feel like he doesn't deserve quite the hype he has received.
Now we move from a driver who was apparently on everyone else's radar but mine to a driver who was on my radar but nobody else's. While I totally missed the boat on Connor Zilisch, I seem to seldom miss when it comes to forecasting the future of Porsche Supercup drivers. I know most people dismiss/ignore Porsche Supercup in the same way I dismiss/ignore Mazda MX-5 Cup, but the difference is Porsche Supercup consistently has a much deeper field even considering Zilisch's success. Last year, Ghiretti was the absolute last driver I added to my top 200 once I saw that he had overtaken Morris Schuring to be the highest-rated Porsche Supercup driver in my touring car model. Much like my placing Chris Buescher in this tier in 2021 before he blew up, my placement for Ghiretti was clearly prescient 'cause this year he was even better! In 2024, Ghiretti won his first Porsche Supercup race in the season finale at Monza after passing his perennial champion teammate Larry ten Voorde for the win. Admittedly, Ghiretti was outperformed by both of his teammates as he only finished fifth in points while ten Voorde won the title and Marvin Klein finished third and his teammate rating of -.007 ranked only 11th in the series as a result. However, I decided to list him in the top 100 anyway because the rest of his record was freakin' spectacular. Ghiretti was the winningest driver in the entire Porsche system with 18 wins. He simultaneously won the Porsche Carrera Cup France championship with 9/12 wins and the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia championship with 8/16 despite having to miss two races due to a conflict when Porsche Supercup was racing in Silverstone while Porsche Carrera Cup Asia was racing in Bangsaen on the same weekend. These titles were not uncontested either as his fellow Frenchman Mathys Jaubert competed and won races in both series and was the 3rd-highest rated Porsche Supercup driver in my model behind only the top two points finishers Harry King and ten Voorde. Not only that, Ghiretti actually beat Porsche Supercup champion Dylan Pereira to win the Asia title, winning 8 races to Pereira's 5. Pereira and Jaubert were the only drivers to win against Ghiretti in either series, but I chose Ghiretti over Jaubert since I felt Jaubert wasn't quite close enough to Ghiretti in any series to list him. Ghiretti ended up rated so low in my model because none of his teammates in PCC Asia or France were eligible for it but if they had been, I'm sure he would have been listed quite high. But even though ten Voorde "only" won 14 races to Ghiretti's 18, he was still better as Porsche Supercup is the major league and he dominated him there and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany is the second most important series and he won that title too.
Do I have to? Yes, unfortunately I do have to. I don't like writing about him because it forces me to take sides in an annoying, stupid culture war. I suppose I need to write as preamble that I do not support any of his bigoted actions past or present and it wasn't cool when he called Colton Herta and Kirk Kylewood "boyfriend teammates" at Detroit. Having said that, almost everything I read about him across the ideological spectrum makes me want to pull my hair out. I've grown very tired of both the kind of liberals who would tend to argue that cancel culture doesn't exist who gleefully want to cancel him as well as the conservatives who think he's a breath of fresh air because he "tells it like it is". There are a lot of people who seem incapable of separating the artist from the art as it were who argue that he is a bad driver because he is a bad person. Although I acknowledge his European formula results weren't very good, he's always been good in IndyCar. He had two TNL as a rookie in 2019, beat Álex Palou in points in 2020 before Palou won three of four titles, had a better average finish than all but four full-time drivers as a part-timer in 2021, and has now posted top ten finishes in all six of his Indy 500 starts despite never really having an above-average car until maybe this year. Some people call him bad because he hasn't won a race since 2015 while failing to acknowledge that not many people would have won in the cars that he had and he's outperformed a lot of people in them, but it is admittedly his fault that he hasn't landed a better ride because his bigotry and politics were alienating to sponsors in this era when corporations were pretending to be woke in a way they probably wouldn't have been twenty years earlier. I suppose that could change after Trump's reelection but I'm definitely not looking forward to it.
Perhaps he did have an above-average car this year for the first time as I realize that the A.J. Foyt team got a major influx of support as a Team Penske satellite this year, which explains why Ferrucci gave Foyt its first pole since Takuma Sato in 2014, its first above-average speed percentile since Sato in 2013, and first top ten points finish since Airton Daré of all people in 2002. I know when the Andretti teammates struck back at him they commented on how he was supposedly underachieving since he had a Penske car. I'm still not convinced. While the Penske support obviously improved the team, I'm not convinced Foyt has the same caliber of engineers, pit crew, dampers, and resources in general as the actual Penske cars yet Ferrucci was only a race or two in points behind Josef Newgarden for most of the season. I was undecided about whether to rank Ferrucci or Newgarden higher. In addition to finishing ninth in points, Ferrucci was eighth among IndyCar drivers in my teammate model and he beat Newgarden, but on the other hand Newgarden did win two races including the Indy 500 as well as the 24 Hours of Daytona while Ferrucci still has not yet won a major league race. I decided to go with Ferrucci because Newgarden really didn't impress me much outside of his Indy 500 win and made stupid rookie mistake after stupid rookie mistake all season while Ferrucci seemed to drive cleanly all year. Oh, many fans still give him shit for his supposed obnoxious driving like dangerous swerves in practice or whatever, but he consistently pulls them off and generally doesn't wreck anyone. I actually think he's a pretty clean driver currently and he'd be viewed as such if people weren't trying to seize on every bad thing he does as a justification to hate on him for his politics and general bigotry. And if you think he's the only bigot in IndyCar, I believe you've got another think coming, judging by the general history of drivers' politics as well as the recent revelation of Formula E champions' transphobia. He's just the only IndyCar driver stupid enough to not conceal his bigotry to make himself more palatable to sponsors, and he has paid for that repeatedly because I suspect without those controversies, he'd have gotten a top-tier ride a long time ago.
But I need to make it clear that he's my least favorite driver too and while I've become a reluctant defender because I find a lot of the stuff his haters say to be annoying and inaccurate, I definitely don't think he's a "breath of fresh air" like a lot of his fans do. I see people on Twitter like Champweb who I usually like comparing him to Paul Tracy and it baffles me. While they are both unlikable, I don't see much in common. Tracy was a truly great, legendary driver who people hated at the time for his on-track behavior and recklessness. While it turned out they had similar politics, nobody cared about Tracy's politics until long after he retired and he was in the broadcast booth. Ferrucci is a slightly above-average driver who has proven himself to be good but not great, basically like what Marcus Ericsson would be in second-rate cars (although he was admittedly a lot better than Ericsson this year). He's probably a top ten driver to never win a race at this point and he'd be a winner for Penske or Ganassi for sure and I'd give him 50/50 odds as an Indy 500 winner, but he'd never really be a championship threat and I expect most of his wins for a top team would be rather fortuitous just like Ericsson's have been. Also, Ferrucci is ultimately hated for his politics, not his on-track behavior (which I don't think most people would object to if they didn't know about his politics). For a guy who is a slightly above-average driver, he gets way too disproportionate a share of the attention from both fans and haters. I was so hoping that Townsend Bell would be out of the new Fox IndyCar booth because he's been Ferrucci's head cheerleader and maybe we can get someone in there who will mostly ignore him, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I still definitely want him in the series, but really what I want is a moratorium on Ferrucci Discourse and for people to shut up about him on both sides.
↑ not helping
↑ part of the problem
Rowland finished 4th in this year's Formula E championship while his teammate Sacha Fenestraz ranked 17th. This was tied for the largest positional difference between two teammates in the series with Maximilian Günther and Jehan Daruvala, who finished 8th and 21st in points. In a series with wild competition thanks to its peloton-style formations, Rowland was the fastest driver this year with a speed percentile of 71.10. It's extremely rare for the fastest driver to have a speed percentile that low, which says great things about the depth of competition. However, I ended up choosing not to rate him in the top 50 unlike Autosport while choosing Jean-Éric Vergne instead since he was substantially more dominant with a substantially slower car, and he indeed had a higher rating than any of the Formula E title contenders in my open wheel model. Rowland himself was strong in my model ranking 23rd overall with a rating of .222, ranking 7th in the series, and he would have been substantially higher had he not finished one position behind his new teammate Norman Nato in the 2024-25 season opener, which one could argue I maybe shouldn't have counted towards this year. However, the fact that he was the fastest driver this year yet did not lead any other statistical categories suggests that to some extent he was underachieving his speed. He was still very good, don't get me wrong, as he had 2 wins, poles, TNL, races with the most laps led, and poles. Indeed he and the two Jaguar drivers Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy were the only drivers to have no statistical goose-eggs this season, but he only ranked 9th in lead shares and 5th in CRL, which suggests he should have done more with the speed he did have, but admittedly one can argue his performance against Fenestraz suggests otherwise. This position is therefore effectively a compromise between those arguments.
The driver who won three straight Stock Car Brasil titles from 2017-2019 finished 8th in points in the rechristened Stock Car Pro, giving him his worst points finish since he finished 9th in 2010. So why did I move him up? Because this was probably his best year in sports cars, that's why. Although Brazilian stock cars are the main discipline for the son of Chico, he seems to be increasingly shifting his focus to sports cars to a greater degree of late. In IMSA, Serra contested the Michelin Endurance Cup subset of marquee endurance races with his teammate Davide Rigon for the Risi Competizione Ferrari team and he also made a couple starts for former IndyCar team Conquest Racing using the same model of Ferrari. After previously earning two 24 Hours of Le Mans class wins and two Petit Le Mans class wins during his Stock Car Brasil title seasons, he earned his first marquee sports car win since then in the 24 Hours of Daytona with a stacked lineup that also included James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi. Although Calado was the leader of the team with a 3-0 lead change record, Serra was not far behind with a 2-1 record in that race, passing both Ben Barnicoat and Daniel Juncadella while also being passed by Sheldon van der Linde. Serra also finished the race for the team, making him an "effective cleanup hitter". He also won once for Conquest alongside Giacomo Altoè, who is decent but not a top tier star by any means. Serra's speed percentile of 91.26 was the fastest in the IMSA GTD Pro class despite him driving for two separate teams and his advantage over Rigon's 51.04 speed percentile is massive and truly impressive, especially when considering Rigon himself ran similarly to Alessio Rovera in the WEC, who I have rated very highly. Serra also finished second in points in a full European Le Mans Series LMGT3 class season with his teammates Takeshi Kimura and Esteban Masson in a Ferrari for Kessel Racing, but they lost the title controversially after leader Michelle Gatting in the Iron Dames entry was ordered to pull over so Andrea Caldarelli in their teammate Iron Lynx car would win the title. She did as she was told and that cost Serra the title even though his team won two races at Spa and Mugello while that was the Andrea Caldarelli/Hiroshi Hamaguchi/Axcil Jefferies team's only win. It was even Caldarelli's only lap led of the season and he was the team leader! (And you thought Joey Logano was undeserving, geez...) Although Serra was not quite the fastest driver in the LMGT3 class (Julien Andlauer was), he did pass Lorcan Hanafin for the win at Mugello with three laps remaining in that series. In his main gig, he didn't do as well as usual but his 8th place points finish did beat his teammate Ricardo Maurício and Serra won two Stock Car Pro races while Maurício shockingly went winless in a year with 16 winners despite having only one winless season from 2013-2023 prior to that. Clearly their team Eurofarma RC's cars were a lot slower this year than in previous years. Serra only ranked 81st in my touring car model this year at .089 and 16th among Stock Car Pro drivers, but I'm clearly listing him primarily for his sports car accomplishments this year, not his touring car accomplishments.
Although a lot of people were skeptical when Hülkenberg returned to F1 for Haas in 2023 in his late career after not being a full-time F1 driver for three years, Hülkenberg has definitely proved he still belonged in the series as he had one of his better seasons this year, placing 16th in my open wheel model with a rating of .267 thanks to utterly dominating his teammate Kevin Magnussen 15-4. Like Hülkenberg, Magnussen was another driver who made an unexpected return to F1 after a year absence until the backlash from Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to Haas abruptly firing Nikita Mazepin and bringing Magnussen back. While Magnussen was a solid contributor for Haas years in the past and he did inexplicably win a pole, that hire (unlike Hülkenberg's) was clearly a mistake, which explains why Hülkenberg will still be racing in F1 in 2025 while Magnussen now looks like he's gone for good. Although Hülkenberg narrowly missed out on a top ten points finish after Pierre Gasly overtook him in the last two races, I think Hülkenberg had the much better season as he outperformed Magnussen substantially worse than Gasly outperformed Ocon and I think Hülkenberg's season has been a little underrated while I think Gasly has been vastly overrated due to that stupid Destructors' Championship. While Hülkenberg is probably never going to get a car fast enough to win or likely even get a podium for the rest of his career, people make too much of his record of having the most starts without a podium when his teams have usually not been capable of podiums. He performed very similarly to Sergio Pérez when they were teammates and Pérez used to be a good driver, but unlike Hülkenberg, Pérez fell off while Hülkenberg still hasn't. To me, this statistic is similar to Cole Whitt never having a top ten in the NASCAR Cup Series, which has more to do with luck than skill. In both cases the performances were there and Hülkenberg continues to deliver. He did utterly thrash Magnussen in speed percentile (40.34-29.69), but that was admittedly a slightly narrower gap in speed than the gap between Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, which is why I rated Alonso a little higher. I think one of the reasons people perpetually underrate Hülkenberg is that he's a pretty boring driver and he just isn't interesting or exciting enough to talk about. He delivers solid performance after solid performance and is extremely consistent with few whiffs but also very few knockout performances. Normally I care more about knockout performances myself, but his level of consistency is at such a high level that I think he deserved a top 100 placement.
The driver who might be the all-time goat of touring car racing only finished 4th in the DTM points standings this year, but he ranked second in my touring car model and led all DTM drivers for a third time. This marked the fifth time in the last seven years that Rast ranked in the top four in my touring car model and his eighth listing in the top four overall. However, even though he only narrowly ranked behind Thiago Vivacqua with a touring car rating of .628 to Vivacqua's .629 as the highest-rated major league driver, I do think all the DTM drivers were overrated as I said in the Thomas Preining entry because the series lacks field inversions (I'm not sure why Supercars drivers aren't similarly overrated though because that series doesn't have field inversions either...) The weird thing about Rast's Schubert Motorsport team is that he and his championship-winning teammates Sheldon van der Linde and Marco Wittmann all won races but none of them led any races naturally. Rast indeed was the team leader as van der Linde finished 6th in points and Wittmann was 12th, but all of them were pretty close in terms of speed percentile with Rast's 61.29 leading van der Linde's 59.46 and Wittmann's 55.36. Rast was the only driver on the team to win twice and despite not making a pass for the lead, his win at the Norisring was very impressive as he stayed out on slick tires in the rain to win before he later beat out eventual champion Mirko Bortolotti to win the second race at the Red Bull Ring. But his season was also noted for erratic behavior, like when he spun out Maro Engel (who otherwise could have won the second Nürburgring race, then punted Jordan Pepper into his teammate Wittmann at the Sachsenring. I ended up rating van der Linde higher both because he was cleaner and also because in their second role as BMW Hypercar drivers in the World Endurance Championship, Rast was the slowest of the six BMW drivers with a speed percentile of 30.45 as compared to Dries Vanthoor's 74.78, van der Linde's 59.24, Robin Frijns's 45.37, Raffaele Marciello's 38.95, and Wittmann's 33.81. Van Der Linde's advantage in speed over Rast in the WEC was much greater than Rast's advantage in speed over van der Linde in DTM, so I rated Sheldon higher.
Elliott had something of a return to form in 2024 after a lackluster 2023 season when he went winless and missed the playoffs for the first time (even though he somehow laughably led all Cup drivers in my teammate model), but to a certain extent his season still felt hollow. He's gotten his consistency back for sure as he led the Cup Series in average finish and ranked second in Latford-era points, but his season was nowhere near as good as either of those facts imply. A solid case can be made that this was actually the second-worst year of his career as aside from 2023, it was arguably Elliott's least dominant season as his 1.33 CRL are the second-worst of his career and his 1.45 lead shares are third-worst (ahead of only 2023 and 2018, but obviously the Hendrick cars were way faster in 2024 than in 2018). Additionally, Elliott had an 18-21 lead change record this year, which is the first time in his entire career he has had a losing record in a season. It feels as if he was trying to play it too safe after missing last year's playoffs and wanted to make sure he just managed to point himself in, but that can easily backfire (just ask Chris Buescher). Unlike Buescher, Elliott managed to get his win at Texas, but he didn't contend for nearly as many wins as expected and he remained very far behind team leader Kyle Larson, who again overtook in my teammate model, this time probably for good. Even Elliott's consistency was wildly overrated. While consistency is usually to some extent a measure of avoiding wrecks, Elliott was actually pretty crash-prone as according to Toby Christie's incident counter, Elliott had 15 incidents, which was tied with Larson and even supposed-worst-driver-ever Corey LaJoie. Admittedly, Christie's statistical table was not updated through the end of the season, so that could have changed, but the fact that Elliott and Larson were tied in incidents indicates that his advantage in consistency was not even close to overcoming Larson's advantage in dominance. It seems Elliott was primarily lucky that his incidents didn't take him out of races while Larson's were more likely to. Elliott had 32 lead lap finishes while nobody else had more than 30 and to some extent that's kind of dumb luck, especially since he didn't have an extremely low crash frequency like Buescher or Alex Bowman did. Elliott's season was still very good. He ranked 6th in Ryan McCafferty's model, but he was much lower in mine (13th). As with Buescher, this marked the first time that Elliott failed to make the top ten in my model in many years as this marked the first time he failed to make the top ten since his 2016 rookie season and his teammate rating of .099 was the worst of his career. I don't think his season was that bad but I do feel it was overrated by results fundamentalists who care too much about consistency, especially when his consistency seemed to be more dumb luck than skill since he wasn't even particularly less crash-prone than the more dominant and ostensibly less consistent drivers. I couldn't decide which order to rank him, William Byron, and Ross Chastain as they were all about the same to me, but I ended up taking Elliott last of those three since I have much higher expectations for Elliott and he kind of failed to meet them.
Nasr won this year's IMSA GTP class championship alongside co-driver Dane Cameron by 113 points over his Penske Porsche teammates Mathieu Jaminet and Nick Tandy. Although Nasr was significantly slower than both Tandy and Jaminet as I mentioned in Tandy's entry, he substantially outperformed Cameron by all metrics, who was clearly the worst driver on the team. Nasr was clearly the linchpin of his team to a greater extent that Tandy was because Jaminet was not far behind Tandy yet Cameron was far behind Nasr, as Nasr posted a 5-3 lead change record to Cameron's 0-4, had 0.56 lead shares to Cameron's 0, 0.61 CRL to Cameron's 0.34, and a speed percentile of 52.46 to Cameron's 41.91. I think I primarily rated Nasr over Tandy (who had slightly better stats in most categories) not primarily due to the fact that he won the title or the Michelin Endurance Cup or even won marquee races at the 24 Hours of Daytona and 6 Hours of Watkins Glen while Tandy's team didn't, but more due to the fact that Nasr was almost 100% responsible for his team's success while Tandy and Jaminet's success was split. Having said that, the fact that Nasr was so much slower than both drivers on all the other car means I couldn't really justify placing him that far ahead of Tandy and I feel both drivers should be in the same tier. Really, I think the IMSA Hypercar class was rather lacking in stellar performances this year as it feels almost every driver in the class has had a better season at some point, with one exception who I will get to in the top 50.
Maybe this year's most underrated driver, the driver who won a staggering six TCR championships from 2018-2021 (winning the TCR Asia title twice, the TCR Malaysia title twice along with TCR Middle East and TCR Germany championships) had probably the best year of his career to date in 2024. Despite only finishing 14th in the DTM standings, he ranked 9th globally in my touring car model this year with a rating of .459, but admittedly only fifth in DTM as I do have to adjust for the fact that I think my model is overrating all the DTM drivers at the expense of drivers in all other touring car series as I mentioned in the Thomas Preining and René Rast entries. But even though they both blew him out in points, I'm taking Engstler over Rast and Preining for a reason. Engstler tied Rast for 3rd in the series with 2 wins but in my opinion, despite Rast's rich racing legacy, Engstler was actually more impressive. Not only did Engstler beat the DTM champion Mirko Bortolotti out of the pits to win at Oschersleben, he passed him for the win at the Hockenheim season finale despite a below-average speed percentile of 45.38 which ranked only 12th in the series, and he did so in a year Bortolotti only won once. Engstler did not even have a consistent teammate this season but he was far faster than all three of his rotating teammates Christian Engelhart, Franck Perera, and Jordan Pepper (who had speed percentiles of 25.10, 26.85, and 31.25 respectively). Furthermore, he also won a championship in the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup's Gold Cup alongside his teammate Max Hofer. Admittedly, the competition in that class was not good but he still had to compete against four-time World Touring Car Cup winner Gilles Magnus there, who's pretty solid. Engstler was one of this year's most improved drivers and on the basis of this year, he jumped from .067 to .136 in my touring car model. If he ever lands a top-tier DTM ride, he'll probably be a title contender.
A lot of people expected Chastain to be a leading championship contender after he made the Championship 4 in 2022 then became the first driver outside of the Championship 4 to win the season finale at Phoenix last year, but he ended up not making the playoffs. Although most people seem to think Chris Buescher was the biggest playoff snub, I think Chastain was a lot better. I'm not even convinced his performance declined after his two previous seasons as his advantage over Daniel Suárez seemed to actually increase. In 2022, he had a speed percentile of 75.27 to Suárez's 58.93; 2023 was 64.57-54.97, and now this year he beat him 65.88-39.82, a far greater advantage in speed than the previous two years. Additionally, his 21-9 record against Suárez this year was only barely worse than his 21-7 record in 2022 so his intrateam performance is still there and you could argue this was his best season from a team leadership perspective. So how did he miss the playoffs while Suárez made it? Sheer dumb luck for the most part. Suárez got extremely lucky to come out on top in that three-wide photo finish at Atlanta, while Chastain had near-miss after near-miss after near-miss before finally getting his win (like Buescher) at Kansas after the start of the playoffs. Chastain's main issue is that Trackhouse Racing did not have a great deal of speed this year so he had a lot of races where he finished extremely consistently in the top half of the field with cars that few people probably would have scored top tens with, and although he had a consistent finishing record, it wasn't enough for him to point into the playoffs when there were so many other fluky winners. The one thing I do have to hold against Chastain is that he was pretty bad in terms of clutch performance as he had a 1-5 record on the final lead change of the race. If he had been better at holding onto the lead, he likely would have won before the playoffs and it would have been a moot point. Still, his performance was strong as he ranked 6th in my teammate model with a career-highest rating of .165, 8th in lead shares, and 7th in CRL despite only ranking 10th in speed, which does suggest he was outperforming his cars. Chastain outperformed Buescher (supposedly the biggest snub) in all these aforementioned statistics, and Ryan McCafferty had him higher too, ranking him 8th to Buescher's 13th. While he did have Elliott ranked higher, I decided to rank Chastain over Elliott because while both drivers definitely failed to meet expectations, I prefer to rate a driver who overachieved in a slower car above a driver who underachieved in a faster car (which is the same reason I ranked Santino Ferrucci above Josef Newgarden too). Chastain's season is virtually identical to Luca Engstler's in DTM as both drivers had lackluster points finishes but still got wins, thrashed their teammates, and placed highly in advanced statistical categories. I rated Chastain higher than Engstler just because I personally find NASCAR more prestigious than DTM, no matter what Maro Engel will tell you.
Much like how Scott Dixon seems to have been permanently eclipsed by Álex Palou in IndyCar in recent years, Turkington (who is still tied for the most British Touring Car Championship titles with four) has been permanently eclipsed by his West Surrey Racing teammate Jake Hill in much the same way, but Dixon is still very good and so is Turkington even though I kind of doubt either of them will ever have an elite season again. Turkington finished 4th in the championship to earn his 12th consecutive top five points finish and multi-win season, but although his numbers were still strong, Hill still kind of kicked his ass. Turkington did rank 3rd in most statistical categories with 5 wins, TNL, lead shares, races with the most lead shares, races with the most laps led, fastest laps, and fastest races. The only statistical categories he had more or less than 5 in were CRL (5.54) and poles (4, which was actually tied for the most with the champion Tom Ingram). In all other categories, Hill and Ingram both outperformed him except for the fact that Turkington actually seemed to arguably have more speed than Hill with 4 poles to Hill's 1, 5 fastest laps to Hill's 1, and 5 fastest races to Hill's 1. Hill nonetheless was the faster driver but only barely with a speed percentile of 75.86 to Turkington's 75.60. If they were so close in speed, why have I ranked Turkington so far behind Hill? Because Hill was far better as a clutch performer this year with a series-best lead change record of 7-4 while Turkington's lead change record of 1-4 was pretty awful. While the duo might have been close in speed, Hill demolished Turkington in passing. I can't say I'm surprised. Hill's three-wide pass for the win in the grass in the 2023 season finale is one of the best things I've ever seen, and it seemed to presage his future dominance in exactly the same way Alex Zanardi's pass of Bryan Herta at Laguna Seca did for him. Turkington still has speed but seems to be getting a little complacent as he can't seem to keep up with Hill's fiery bravado. I think his season was a little overrated by the strength of his equipment as he only ranked 6th among BTCC drivers in my touring car model this year and 56th overall, which is why I'm ranking one BTCC driver over him who you might not expect.
While I did rate him as the second-best Vanthoor brother this year as befitting the meme, I remain unconvinced that Laurens's brother Dries is necessarily better overall even though he's been better lately. Laurens's WEC Hypercar title with Kévin Estre and André Lotterer is his sixth major league sports car title of his career, and these title came in five different series and six different classes, while Dries has tended to specialize in one series (the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Championship) where he was won all three of his titles and I'm not convinced he's quite as versatile, even if he's been a little better in recent years. Dries seems to be progressing at a faster pace since he is seven years younger and it wouldn't surprise me if Dries eventually overtakes Laurens in titles, but I still view them as pretty evenly matched and I expect both of them to outperform the other in various seasons. Although Laurens only ranked 4th in speed among the Porsche Penske WEC drivers and his speed percentile of 64.69 was far off Estre's 82.42, he was the only Penske driver to have a pass for the win this year in the season opener at Qatar, which also meant he led all Penske drivers with 0.5 lead shares and ranked 2nd to Estre in CRL at 0.49. I think he was clearly the second-best of the Penske WEC drivers in the class, although I did end up rating Matt Campbell higher for what he did in other series, particularly his wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona and Bathurst 12 Hour. Although Vanthoor did co-drive the winning entry at Bathurst, it was Campbell's furious charge in the rain after receiving a penalty that really led to the win, which is why I rated him higher even though Vanthoor had more wins.
Surprisingly, Jones was the highest-rated Porsche Supercup/Porsche Carrera Cup driver in my model at .448, making him the 10th-highest rated touring car driver out of 227 in my model. He won his second Porsche Carrera Cup Australia title this season after also winning it in 2022, but he was a lot more dominant this time with 12 wins as opposed to 4 in 2022. Although his title doesn't come as a major surprise because he'd won it before, he entered the season with a subpar touring car rating of -.223 after finishing 9th in Porsche Supercup last year while his teammates Bastian Buus and Harry King finished first and third and his rating now has skyrocketed to .122, making him one of the most improved drivers of the year. The reason for his sudden surge was primarily due to the fact that he outperformed his teammate Fabian Coulthard, a 13-time Supercars winner, by the staggering margin of 19-4. Coulthard only finished 7th in points in a year when Jones won the title and twelve races, and he used to be really good (but maybe he isn't anymore). Jones actually beat Coulthard worse in his head-to-head than Scott McLaughlin did in any of the years they were Supercars teammates, which includes all three of McLaughlin's title seasons, and one of those seasons I'm going to be ranking McLaughlin in first globally. Admittedly, Jones did have experience in the series before while Coulthard did not and I think Coulthard has lost a lot of speed since his prime period as drivers tend to do after they drop back to part-time competition. Furthermore, Porsche Carrera Cup Australia is not exactly a major league series on the level of Supercars, so I want to make sure I don't overrate this season. Nonetheless, this is one of the best seasons in the series in quite some time as no driver has won 12 races in a season there since Matt Campbell won 13 races in his 2016 title season, and we definitely know how good he is. (Coming up.)
The nephew of French touring car legend Yvan Muller had his worst points finish in either the TCR World Tour or its predecessor the World Touring Car Cup, where he finished 5th in points in a year his teammate Thed Björk arguably dominated. Although all the Cyan Racing drivers lost the TCR World Tour title to Norbert Michelisz (who had a slower car), Ehrlacher was arguably the second-most dominant driver of the season as he and Björk tied for the most wins while Ehrlacher ranked second in lead shares with 2.33 to Björk's 4.33 and he slightly nosed out Björk to be the most dominant driver of the year with 2.37 CRL to Björk's 2.31. Additionally, Ehrlacher was one of the four drivers to lead the most laps in two different races and he led all TCR World Tour drivers in poles with 2 and fastest laps with 3. I was unable to find lap times for most races this season so I was unable to determine fastest races and speed percentile for this season, but the speed and dominance seems to be there even if the consistency surprisingly wasn't. I think Ehrlacher was too far off Björk in terms of dominance and passing to rank him in the top 50 as he had four passes for the lead in a season no other driver (including Ehrlahcer) had more than one, but he remained a strong touring car performer when considering the global scene, as he ranked 33rd globally and 3rd in the series with a touring car rating of .250, only barely behind Björk's .255 for second place. Two of Ehrlacher's wins came at Marrakech and El Pinar in flag-to-flag wins from pole, but the other was highly controversial as Björk was ordered to pull over for Ehrlacher in a reverse grid race at Mid-Ohio, which arguably cost Björk the title but I'll discuss that further when I get to his entry.
Like I said in the Chase Elliott entry, I think Byron, Elliott, and Ross Chastain were essentially indistinguishable this year but I do think Byron should be narrowly rated ahead of Chastain and Chastain narrowly rated ahead of Elliott for a few reasons: Byron won 3 races while the other drivers only won once, he had the best lead change record in the Cup Series at 18-14 while Chastain and Elliott both had losing records, he ranked fourth in my teammate model at .26 while Chastain was sixth at .165 and Elliott was 13th at .099, he had 2.18 lead shares to Chastain's 1.71 and Elliott's 1.45, he made the Championship 4 while the other two did not, and I guess winning the Daytona 500 isn't totally meaningless. While I think that's enough evidence for me to take him highest of the three, I still think all three had similar seasons and all three definitely underachieved expectations. Byron and Elliott have all been far closer to Kyle Larson in previous years than they were this year and Byron seemed to factor in fewer races than he did the last few. For all the strengths of Byron's season, his 11 natural races led are his worst since 2020 and his 1.61 CRL likewise. He did have more lead shares and a higher speed percentile (barely) than he did in 2022, but many people will erroneously tell you that season is bad because he wasn't consistent enough. The main problem with Byron's season is that he started out on a high note with three wins in eight races: a Daytona 500 he sort of backed into after Corey LaJoie turned Austin Cindric into Chastain (who otherwise likely would have won the race in my opinion), a COTA race where he did genuinely dominate, and a Martinsville race where he did pass Elliott twice. (This may indeed explain a lot of the difference between the three in terms of their lead change records.) I just realized as I was writing this that Elliott and Byron also swapped the lead twice on the overtime restart, and I do typically count lead changes where the second-place driver beats the leader to the line before being passed again so I'll have to fix that eventually. However, Byron had an extremely mediocre summer where he hardly led at all and even though he did make the Championship 4, he had a lot of help as Christopher Bell would have clearly overtaken him if either Adam Stevens hadn't botched the strategy in the fall Martinsville race (which in my opinion is the main reason Bell failed to advance) or if the other Chevies of Austin Dillon and Chastain hadn't been incessantly blocking for him in a display of egregious manufacturer orders that NASCAR had less of a problem with than Bell's almost accidental wall ride. While I feel he was better than Elliott and Chastain, it was only marginal and I do think a lot of people were overrating his season, especially Racing Insights, which used a variety of statistical categories to argue that he was the best driver in the Championship 4 and the most likely to win the title. For as much respect as I do have for Racing Insights, I'm sorry. Ryan Blaney and Tyler Reddick were both clearly better than Byron this year and Joey Logano was probably always most likely to win the title given Penske's preeminent focus on Phoenix relative to the other teams and the fact that Logano won his way into the Championship 4 before Blaney did, which gave his team more time to prepare Phoenix setups. While I don't feel he underachieved expectations by as much as Elliott and Chastain did, I also don't think he had a top four season and he probably wouldn't have been in the hunt for the championship in the final race if there had been a fairer championship format.
While I don't think Dixon will ever have an elite season again nor do I think he will ever again win a title or outperform his teammate Álex Palou in a season, he remains very good and it should come as no surprise that the second-winningest driver in IndyCar history has had a slower decline than most other IndyCar drivers ever. I must admit I didn't expect that Dixon's record streak of consecutive winning seasons would outlast Kyle Busch's (which also started in 2005) but I guess that shouldn't come as that much of a surprise because Chip Ganassi Racing is expected to be perennial championship contenders in IndyCar while Richard Childress Racing has consistently been shaky since Dale Earnhardt's death, although I thought the fact that Busch is younger and the fact that older drivers usually perform better in NASCAR than in IndyCar would be enough to overcome that. I think a lot of people are overrating Dixon's current performance based on his past success, like Fred Smith at Road and Track, who argue that he is still the best driver based on his career record, even though a number of other drivers are better now (which is one of the most common fallacies I've seen). He really has fallen off and he isn't even close to Palou anymore (a driver I also think is overrated). That doesn't mean he was bad, but that does explain why I placed him just above a few NASCAR Cup Series drivers who underachieved expectations and just below an F1 driver whose current form is being overrated for similar reasons. I must admit I entirely forgot until writing this that Dixon led the points for a couple races this year, as he took the points lead after both of his street course wins at Long Beach and Detroit, but he eventually faded to 6th in the championship in a year Palou won the title, matching his worst championship finish since 2005. To an extent, I think one of the issues is that the Penske cars seemed to be faster than the Ganassi cars, especially if Will Power could bounce back after a winless season to win thrice while Josef Newgarden posted the best speed percentile of his career in a year he frequently embarrassed himself. Dixon's 0.77 lead shares (8th in IndyCar) and 0.97 CRL (6th) were both solid and basically interchangeable with Pato O'Ward's, but obviously I have rated O'Ward higher because I think the McLaren cars were slower than the Ganassi cars. To Dixon's credit, he was only barely slower than Palou in terms of speed percentile, with a deficit of 69.06-66.84 that is substantially narrower than it was in Palou's two previous title seasons (but then again, that's part of why I think this was Palou's worst title season). But I wasn't really knocked out by him. He passed Power to win at Long Beach but Power is another driver who I think has significantly fallen off from his peak (although he was better than Dixon this year) and then he won a typical strategy race at Detroit because he pitted before Kyle Kirkwood did and was then typically able to stretch his fuel mileage. He hasn't seemed utterly able to dominate a race for a while now like he was in the past, but the performances are still good. He also won the IMSA season-ending Petit Le Mans. While he wasn't the main contributor to that team and didn't even lead any laps, he was faster than Newgarden in the 24 Hours of Daytona. To be honest, I feel like I might be kind of overrating him as he only ranked 38th and 9th in IndyCar at .105, just behind Santino Ferrucci but ahead of Christian Lundgaard but while I didn't think it was too contrarian to rank Ferrucci over Newgarden, I do think it's too contrarian to rank him over Dixon. I've erroneously predicted many times before that Dixon would finally have a winless season and failed so I won't be predicting that again here, but let me say that he could stop winning at any point and I would not be surprised. It probably won't be next year.
Much like Scott Dixon, I think people overrate Alonso based on things he did 10-20 years ago and pretend that he hasn't declined from that point when he clearly has, but also just like Dixon, he is still a very good driver even if I think his greatness is now firmly in the past. Alonso was actually really high in my open wheel model in 8th place at .361, but that is because my model erroneously believes Lance Stroll is good while I do not. It is true that Alonso has outperformed Stroll by a significantly larger margin than Sebastian Vettel did (which I suppose is why Alonso's seasons against Stroll have looked better than they are), but the difference is Vettel was already washed up when he was Stroll's teammate while Alonso definitely isn't washed up (even though I don't think he's an elite driver anymore). I think Alonso's advantage over Stroll this year was nowhere near what it was, as he dropped from beating him 206 points to 74 in 2023 to a 70-24 edge this year. Admittedly, those points ratios were about the same and this year's points ratio of 2.92 is actually steeper than last year's 2.78, but last year Alonso was scrapping with some of the faster teams and actually beat Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris in points when he wasn't even close this year. Obviously the Aston Martin was slower but I also think his performance was worse on top of that. In 2023, Alonso beat Stroll in speed percentile by a staggering margin of 70.49-47.52. This year he only beat him about half as badly in speed (48.06-36.56) even though I'm not convinced Stroll has improved, so that is the main reason I have rated Alonso lower. Basically how you rate Alonso depends on how good you think Stroll is. My model thinks he's genuinely very good (which is why Alonso appeared in my top ten in my open wheel model) but I don't (which is why I left Alonso out of my top 50).
The 2022 DTM champion finished 6th in points this year for Schubert Motorsport, which featured three past series champions (René Rast, himself, and Marco Wittmann) but I honestly think all those drivers were a little overrated this year as I think to some extent they all underachieved their own expectations, but since all of them are among the highest drivers in my touring car model, they'll always look good regardless of how they perform against each other. However, although all three drivers won races, none of them had an on-track pass for the lead and van der Linde was actually the least dominant of the bunch with 0.61 CRL to Wittmann's 1.08 and Rast's 0.93. However, he was a lot closer to Rast in both the points standings (4th) and performance than he was to Wittmann, as he ranked 12th globally and 6th among DTM drivers in my model while Rast was 2nd overall and Wittmann was only 42nd this year. I think I ultimately decided in favor of VDL over the other two because he also won two races in the Intercontinental GT Series at Spa and Indianapolis with Dries Vanthoor and Charles Weerts, where he tied for 2nd in points to Weerts (but I'm sure Dries Vanthoor was the main impetus behind those wins, even though I haven't calculated any lap times from them). Rast and Wittmann meanwhile had no other wins in other series. The other reason I rated Sheldon higher was because of their respective speed percentiles. Although BMW wasn't remotely fast enough to win in the WEC Hypercar class, Sheldon was the second-fastest driver for the team behind only Vanthoor with a speed percentile of 59.24 while his DTM teammates Wittmann and Rast were substantially slower (33.81 and 30.45 respectively). In DTM, they were closer with Rast's speed percentile of 61.29 only narrowly above van der Linde's 59.46 and Wittmann's 55.36, but van der Linde's advantage in WEC was so much greater than Rast's advantage in DTM that I had to rate him higher. But I left all of them out of the top fifty for not having any passes for the lead in DTM.
My pick for IMSA's most impressive rookie this year (and no, I am not forgetting Connor Zilisch) became the first driver to win the GTD Pro class championship or its predecessor classes in either IMSA or its predecessor the American Le Mans Series with no previous experience since Olivier Beretta in 1999. Although he only won the title by four points over the veteran Ross Gunn and failed to win any of the marquee races this season, he was almost singlehandedly responsible for his team's success as he ranked 2nd with 1.13 lead shares and led the class with 2 natural races led and 1.35 CRL while his principal teammate Sebastian Priaulx didn't lead at all. Although there were plenty of part-timers in the class who had a higher speed percentile (especially Daniel Serra, who led the class with a speed percentile of 91.26), Heinrich's speed percentile of 71.37 was the highest amongst regulars in the class and substantially stronger than Priaulx's 54.61. Midway through the season, Priaulx was replaced by two other drivers Julien Andlauer and Michael Christensen. While Heinrich won his first two races at Laguna Seca and Detroit with Priaulx, Christensen was his winning teammate at the 8 Hours of Indianapolis. Neither Andlauer and Christensen contributed much to Heinrich's winning AO racing team as their speed percentiles (Andlauer's 38.26 and Christensen's 34.21) were even slower and neither of them led either, suggesting that Heinrich deserves essentially 100% credit for his team's success and I might be underrating this as a result. I knew Heinrich was great as soon as I noticed that he ranks 20th all-time in my touring car model with an extremely high rating of .414, meaning that he is another driver whose future success was predicted by my model. I guess I left him out of the top 50 because he only barely won the title, because he didn't win any of the marquee races (which people in sports car circles usually consider to be more important than the championships anyway), and because several part-timers were faster, suggesting maybe the IMSA GTD Pro class wasn't very deep this year. It's definitely possible I will elevate him to the E- tier in retrospect if he keeps up his current performance or something is revealed to me in future research.
The Pato O'Ward of the BTCC may never land the championship-caliber ride he deserves but he continued to cook and led all BTCC drivers in my touring car model this year for the second time despite finishing 6th in the championship. He ranked 14th overall at .386 in my touring car model, just nosing out this year's champion Jake Hill who was 16th at .372. However, I would not attempt to argue that Cook was actually better than Hill this year. I do believe that number is inflated because Cook got a major boost from the fact that World Touring Car Champion Rob Huff (one of the best touring car drivers from the last twenty years) made his full-time return to the BTCC for the first time since 2004 as Cook's teammate at the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota squad. Cook obviously had a major advantage over Huff as Huff has to re-learn the BTCC cars and tracks which Cook has mastered for years, so I don't think Cook's performance against Huff should be worth as much as it would have been in Huff's better seasons, but he did beat him quite soundly by a margin of 327 points-195, 20-6 in their teammate head-to-head, and 67.62-52.13 in speed percentile. Cook's steamrolling of Huff is the main reason he beat Hill in my model. However, what kept me from rating Cook in the top fifty was the fact that Huff was actually a lot more dominant than he was with 3 natural races led to Cook's 1, 1.7 lead shares to Cook's 0.50, and 2.03 TNL to Cook's 0.53. Huff's advantage in dominance undercuts Cook's advantage in consistency to a certain extent so I don't think he actually outperformed Huff by as much as his teammate head-to-head or therefore my model imply. Huff's lead change record of 3-4 was a lot better than Cook's 1-2 as well and Huff's drive from 14th to win at Snetterton may have been the best of his career, but admittedly Cook's only pass for the win came against Huff in the second Croft race. Cook was also awarded another win at Oulton Park after Tom Ingram was penalized two positions for an incident with Dan Cammish, but he never led that race otherwise. Overall, I don't think Cook was dominant enough to place him higher but he remains one of the most underrated drivers out there.
We follow Josh Cook with a driver who basically had the exact same season in Brazil's Stock Car Pro series. Like Cook, Campos was the highest-rated Stock Car Pro driver in my model but he admittedly ranked a lot higher overall as his rating of .501 ranked 6th overall as opposed to Cook's rating of .386 placing him in 14th. Like Cook, he was far out of the championship battle due to a not great car which meant he only finished fifth in points and won one race (placing one position in higher in points with one less win than Cook). Campos did beat his teammate Átila Abreu even worse than Cook beat his teammates, but I also think beating Rob Huff is a bigger accomplishment than beating Abreu is because Huff was at least at one point one of the best touring car drivers in the world while Abreu wasn't. Stock Car Pro was such a mess with 16 different winners this year making it extremely hard to rank the drivers in order, particularly considering the series also has a lot of reverse-grid races that aren't determined by qualifying. I struggle with this series more than most others because I have been unable to find lap time data for it, so here I mostly evaluate drivers by wins, teammate head-to-heads, and my model, but I do suspect my model is inflating Campos to a certain extent like it is with Cook. I find their two seasons pretty much indistinguishable.
If you asked me early in the 2024 season after Campbell started out the year with a win at the 24 Hours of Daytona for Penske with Felipe Nasr, Dane Cameron, and Josef Newgarden, then immediately followed that up with a win in the Bathurst 12 Hour along with an entirely different set of teammates (Laurens Vanthoor and Ayhancan Güven) I would have rated him as the #1 driver of the year, especially because he was the main factor in the team's success at Daytona with a 2-0 lead change record to Nasr's 1-1, Cameron's 0-1, and Newgarden's 0-1. Although Nasr led more, Campbell's passes for the lead did more to maintain control of the race. On the basis of his hot start this year, I promoted him to lock status on my 1,000 greatest drivers list but admittedly, his WEC season was so mediocre that I had to push him down. In Campbell's main gig as a WEC Hypercar driver for Penske, he and teammates Michael Christensen and Frédéric Makowiecki only finished fifth in points and went winless while the lead car of Kévin Estre/André Lotterer/Vanthoor won the title. Of the six full-time Penske WEC drivers, Campbell was the least dominant with only 0.04 CRL, but he did rank third in speed behind only Estre and Christensen at 66.73. Deciding whether to rate Campbell or Vanthoor higher was tough, but I ultimately went for Campbell even though Vanthoor had three major wins and a title to Campbell's two wins without winning the title. Really, I think Estre gets the vast majority of the credit for the championship as the difference in speed between Estre's 82.42, Vanthoor's 64.69, and Lotterer's 60.35 was massive and Campbell was actually faster than Vanthoor despite being on the weaker team. I think ultimately I went with Campbell because he was the linchpin of both the Daytona and Bathurst wins, which I rate higher than Vanthoor's pass for the win in the Qatar WEC season opener, which is nowhere near as important a race.
Once more into the breach of pretending I know how to write about rally racing. While the eight-time World Rally Champion stopped competing full-time after 2021, Ogier had arguably his best season since his full-time retirement as his 4th-place points finish is his best ever in a part-time season and he finished 19 points behind Toyota's full-time driver Elfyn Evans despite missing three rallies. The fact that Ogier and his fellow Toyota teammate Kalle Rovanperä who collectively dominated the last decade both ran part-time yet remained dominant made this a very bizarre season as Rovanperä won 4 of his 7 starts, Ogier won 3 of his 10 starts, and Evans won 1 out of 13. This indicates to me that even though they finished in the exact opposite points order solely due to the number of rallies each driver started, Rovanperä was clearly substantially better than Ogier, who in turn was clearly substantially better than Evans, thereby explaining why I placed all three of these drivers in different tiers. But I'll never feel I'll know what I'm talking about unless I ever complete my rally model, but that might be too ambitious for me to ever finish.
Although he definitely had a great sports car season in 2024, most people's Nielsen ratings seemed way out of whack. (Sorry for the stupid pun; okay, not sorry.) Nielsen was admittedly very impressive as he was the only driver to earn class wins in the WEC, IMSA, and the European Le Mans Series this season and he was definitely instrumental in helping lead his AF Corse Ferrari team to victory at Le Mans as he made the first two on-track passes for the lead in that race against Laurens Vanthoor and Robert Kubica, but what I fail to understand is why everyone seems to be ranking him higher than his teammate Antonio Fuoco, who in my opinion was the best driver in the WEC. Autosport ranked him 12th and didn't even list Fuoco, even claiming that he "emerged from the shadows of... Fuoco" but I'm not sure why they said that. Sportscar365 listed him but didn't list Fuoco too, but at least they justified it since he saved a tremendous amount of fuel to claim victory at Le Mans. However, despite all that, Fuoco was still clearly the leader of the WEC Hypercar class in terms of both lead shares (1.40) and speed percentile (74.06), while Nielsen was only the sixth-fastest Ferrari driver with a speed percentile at 57.69. Not only was Nielsen substantially slower than Fuoco and Alessandro Pier Guidi (71.51), he was slower than three other drivers I didn't even list (Robert Shwartzman: 71.02, Antonio Giovinazzi: 65.17, and Yifei Ye: 58.44). While Nielsen's Le Mans drive was certainly spectacular, it's worth noting that Fuoco was actually the TNL after taking the lead from Frédéric Makowiecki at Le Mans and as a result, even in Nielsen's best race Fuoco earned more lead shares than he did. I think Nielsen was pretty great, but people have been far too quick to dismiss Fuoco when he was better. In addition to his WEC wins, Nielsen did earn an LMP2 class win at the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen IMSA race, where he was clearly the leader of his team with a speed percentile of 85.40 to Lilou Wadoux's 54.39 and Luis Pérez Companc's 24.75, but even there he wasn't as fast as (for instance) Connor Zilisch, but I still elected to rank him higher. Finally, he won the ELMS LMGT3 class season-opener alongside his teammates, father-son duo Johnny and Conrad Laursen. Nielsen was the fastest driver on that team as well with a speed percentile of 83.41 to Conrad's 66.36 and Johnny's 22.42. While I like the eclectic performances, as far as drivers like this are concerned, I feel like Alessio Rovera did the same thing better.
Although I did mention in the Nielsen entry that Kubica passed him at Le Mans and Kubica was actually the slowest of the nine Ferrari WEC Hypercar drivers with a speed percentile of 37.65, I still think Kubica was better than Nielsen overall. For one thing, Kubica ranked second to Fuoco with 1.30 lead shares, earning an entire lead share for passing Antonio Giovinazzi early at Circuit of the Americas for what eventually became the win; he was the only other Ferrari Hypercar driver besides Fuoco who had a TNL and a pass for the win this season, although admittedly Fuoco's came at Le Mans, which matters significantly more than Kubica's pass at Austin, especially since Kubica and this teammates Robert Shwartzman and Yifei Ye were the lowest-ranked of the Ferrari entries in the points standings. However, Kubica did a lot more than just that. In addition to his WEC success, he also won the overall European Le Mans LMP2 class championship for the second time, giving him three major league sports car titles in the last four years (this year however was the first time he had wins in both WEC and ELMS, so this is the season which impresses me most). In the ELMS, Kubica was the unambiguous team leader at AO by TF, a team whose name is almost as stupid as Pure Rxcing. His speed percentile of 81.90 was the second best in the class behind Charles Milesi's 86.12 and he was significantly faster than his teammates Louis Delétraz (68.69, even though most people rate him higher as a sports car driver), and Jonny Edgar (52.28). Furthermore, he was the most dominant driver of the trio in terms of both lead shares and CRL as he earned 1 full lead share in their win at Spa after passing Filip Ugran for the win. This gave him the second-most lead shares in that class as well behind only Luca Ghiotto of all people, but I couldn't really justify listing him. The relative dominance he showed in two different sports car classes would normally be enough to justify a top 50 placement, but I left him out because he was admittedly the slowest of the nine Ferrari drivers and that does matter.
Hamlin and his driver Tyler Reddick were both right on the border between C+ and E- in my mind practically all season as their seasons were very similar in practically every way. Hamlin's numbers were slightly better as although he and Reddick tied in numerous statistical categories, Hamlin tended to beat Reddick in all the categories where they weren't tied. While both drivers had 3 wins, 4 TNL, 5 races with the most laps led, and 3 poles, Hamlin beat Reddick in most other categories with 13 natural races led to Reddick's 10, 2.94 lead shares to Reddick's 2.44, 5 races with the most lead shares to Reddick's 3, 2.85 CRL to Reddick's 2.44, 3 fastest laps to Reddick's 1, 4 fastest races to Reddick's 3, and a speed percentile of 75.34 to Reddick's 72.72. So why did I place Reddick just inside my top fifty and Hamlin just outside? Two words: clutch performance. While I do think Hamlin had better performance when you consider all races equally, it's obvious now that teams are incentivized to focus on certain races than others and Reddick's team delivered in the clutch while most of Hamlin's best performances came in the first half of the season in races that are designed to be less important in the current championship format. Hamlin along with all the other Joe Gibbs Racing drivers except for Christopher Bell seemed to fall off after the Olympic break and he ambled his way through a very sloppy playoffs where he didn't even run very well. Granted, one can argue the same thing for Reddick and for the same reason: 23XI Racing's lawsuit against NASCAR likely distracted both. I have to give it to Reddick based on the clutch drives (particularly winning the regular season championship while sick and his epic final lap at Homestead where he won a duel against Hamlin and Ryan Blaney to advance to the Championship 4 at Hamlin's expense), but I realize that Hamlin probably had the better season if NASCAR had a championship format that didn't create such perverse incentives. I also think I have to dock Hamlin to some extent because so much of his dominance this year came in the Bristol spring race, where he and the team were penalized 75 points months after the fact because an engine seal was removed. While Toyota Racing Development was claimed that his engine would have passed suspension, it wouldn't surprise me if it was illegal since he was so dominant in the second half of that race after a first half with 36 lead changes. Hamlin potentially faces the biggest challenge of his career in 2025 as his crew chief Chris Gabehart who helped revive his career in 2019 is being replaced by the similarly-named but greatly inferior Chris Gayle. It remains to be seen whether Hamlin will lift Gayle up or Gayle will let Hamlin down. I'm guessing the latter, but I could be wrong.
The son of Rubens overtook his celebrated father to become the team leader for the four-car Full Time Sports ensemble in the Stock Car Pro series, where Rubens won the title twice previously after his open wheel career fizzled out. Eduardo was the team leader by a large margin, as he finished third in series points while his teammates finished 14th (Rubens), 18th (Arthur Leist), and 24th (Gianluca Petecof). This made him the 17th-highest rated driver in my touring car model this year and 3rd highest in Stock Car Pro behind only Júlio Campos and Felipe Fraga. While I definitely think he was better than both of them, I don't think he was quite as strong as my model implies (my model has him just behind Jake Hill, the best BTCC driver of the year, and just ahead of Chaz Mostert, the best Supercars driver of the year, and that feels contrarian to me). I think he mainly benefited from the fact that Rubens is now 52 years old and probably washing up as he is entering his prime and it helped that his other teammates were also no more experienced than he is with Petecof only in his second full-time season for Full Time (just like Eduardo) while Leist was a rookie. He was obviously the team leader and it's impressive that he was one of the few drivers to win twice when his three teammates only combined for one win, but admittedly both of Eduardo's wins came in reverse-grid races which weren't determined by qualifying. I think it was ultimately that which caused me to leave him out of the top 50.
The other driver besides Connor Zilisch on my top 100 list who I had not heard of until this year, Sturm was admittedly on my master driver list at the start of this year unlike Zilisch but I had definitely taken no notice of him until his achievements this year. For all the hype Zilisch and Laurin Heinrich have gotten (much of it deserved), I nonetheless think Sturm was the best sports car rookie this year as he simultaneously won two championships in WEC's brand-new LMGT3 class (where he was a rookie) and the Asian Le Mans Series's GT class (where he was not) as opposed to Heinrich who won one title and Zilisch who won marquee races but no titles. He and his teammates Klaus Bachler and Alex Malykhin won both titles for their Pure Rxcing team (brought to you by the same marketing geniuses who gave you pop star Jvke), a satellite of the highly successful Manthey Racing team, which has won many championships. The Asian Le Mans title was technically for the 2023-24 season and one of the trio's wins came in 2023 while the other came in 2024. In the WEC, they and their semi-teammates Richard Lietz/Morris Schuring/Yasser Shahin at Manthey EMA all won two races, but the Bachler/Malykhin/Sturm car won the championship over the Lietz/Schuring/Shahin car by 34 points. While all these drivers impressed me (except for the Bronze drivers Alex Malyhkin and Yasser Shahin; I've tended to doggedly refuse to rate amateur sports car drivers on my lists), I think Sturm was definitely the best on the team at least in his WEC starts (I didn't calculate data for the Asian Le Mans Series because I didn't think that would be worth my effort). Sturm was the most dominant driver in the class, delivering a big can of Sturm und Drang upon his rivals with 1.09 CRL. He was also the only driver in his class to lead the most laps in a race twice. Additionally, his 2-0 lead change record was tied with Lietz and Rahel Frey for the best in the class, but unlike Lietz, Sturm had on-track passes for the lead in two races and unlike Frey, he also won the title. Although Lietz's numbers arguably look slightly better than Sturm's as he had 0.83 lead shares to Sturm's 0.50 and a speed percentile of 74.26 to Sturm's 72.84, Sturm was only barely slower despite being a rookie and winning two championships while Lietz was a veteran who won no championships. Although I thought going into this that Bachler was the team leader since he was the veteran, Sturm beat him in every statistical category I track. He was clearly the best of the six Manthey drivers yet it doesn't seem like he's getting as much hype as he deserves.
Tänak wasn't far off his World Rally Championship-winning Hyundai Shell Mobis WRT teammate Thierry Neuville, but I couldn't justify a top fifty placement especially when considering I think Neuville's season was overrated too. Tänak tied Neuville with two wins (more than any other full-timer), but he did so in a year when clearly better drivers like Sébastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanperä won more rallies as part-timers. I still decided in terms of volume that Tänak's season was marginally better than Ogier's as I feel Rovanperä outperformed Ogier significantly worse than Neuville outperformed Tänak, but obviously Rovanperä is also a lot better than Neuville, regardless of who won the title. The main thing that decided this title besides Rovanperä deciding not to contest it was Neuville's surefire consistency as he finished worse than 8th once all season while Tänak failed to score points four times including two retirements, but I think their head-to-head performance was a little closer than that implies as Neuville only beat him 6-5 in shared finishes. I tend not to dock people as much as others for lack of consistency, but I think it was enough to leave him out of the top fifty.
I was going to give him the last spot in the top fifty, but I cut him in favor of another driver who impressed me more at the last minute. Yamashita did impress me in a big way, don't get me wrong. He and Sho Tsuboi combined to win the Super GT title by 33 points, the largest in series history. I definitely give Tsuboi more credit for that considering he has also won the GT500 overall class championship in Super GT two other times with different drivers although Yamashita won a Super GT title without Tsuboi also. Obviously and more importantly, the fact that Tsuboi won the Super Formula title and swept the major league Japanese championships while Yamashita went winless in Super Formula means I'm going to rank Tsuboi substantially higher, but Yamashita's Super Formula performance was also really good. Even though he only finished 7th in points, Yamashita swept his teammate Kazuto Kotaka in terms of shared finishes just as Tsuboi did against his teammate Ukyo Sasahara. This made them two out of only three drivers to sweep their teammate in a major league open wheel series this year, and obviously the other one is Max Verstappen. However, Tsuboi's accomplishment was far more significant as he won the title with 117.5 points while Sasahara finished 20th in points with 0 points, as opposed to Yamashita, whose advantage was narrower as he finished 7th in points with 48.5 points to Kotaka finishing 14th in points with 4.5 points, not to mention that Sasahara has a history of definitely being better than Kotaka. A strong case can be made that Yamashita was a top 50 driver particularly if you give him more credit for the Super GT title. I have been unable to find lap times for this series so I have no idea who was contributing what, but ultimately Tsuboi's vastly greater performance in Super Formula is why I ranked him much higher. But Yamashita was still very good and his open wheel rating of .149 ranks 31st overall, which is quite solid but probably more deserving of this tier than the elite tier.
