The sprint car ace never quite had a statistical record that matched his reputation until recently as after his back-to-back Chili Bowl wins in 2015 and 2016, Abreu rarely if ever competed in any of the top-tier sprint car tours full time until the emergence of Kyle Larson and Brad Sweet's High Limit series. I rated Abreu very highly last year when he only narrowly lost the High Limit title to Larson and actually won more races, but although he doubled his win count from 4 to 8 in a High Limit schedule that wildly expanded from 11 races to 49, his winning percentage declined and he dropped from second to third in the championship. This time, he did not lose the title to Larson but win more races than him. He instead finished behind Brad Sweet and Tyler Courtney who are great drivers, sure, but it doesn't feel the same. Admittedly, he only lost to Courtney by a single point, which explains why I have listed both of them in the same tier. Sweet has admittedly been a perpetual juggernaut with five straight World of Outlaws titles prior to his High Limit title, but he is also nowhere near as dominant as Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell, and Donny Schatz were in the past and feels like a career C+ driver who will probably make my top 1,000 list as a career compiler without having anything resembling an elite season. Losing a title to Sweet suggests that placing Abreu in the C tier is the correct decision. Having said that, Abreu won almost as many winged sprint races this year as in 2023 as he also won 2 World of Outlaws races, giving him 10 winged sprint wins this year as opposed to 12 last year, so it wasn't a huge falloff.
I probably overrated Albon last year because I didn't realize just how bad Logan Sargeant was. While sweeping one's teammate is always impressive, the fact that Albon also swept him in Sargeant's second year at Williams suggests that Sargeant was pretty out of his depth all along and beating him that badly isn't as significant as I thought it was (I feel the same way about Callum Ilott and Agustín Canapino at Juncos, too). Albon still posted really high in my teammate model both years in part because he beat Sargeant in F1 substantially worse than Oscar Piastri beat him when they were Formula 3 teammates and Piastri is great now. This year Albon ranked 14th in my open wheel model and 5th among F1 drivers behind only Max Verstappen, George Russell, Fernado Alonso, and Yuki Tsunoda, but I definitely wouldn't say he was better than all the people he beat in my model. It seems like his rating is drastically inflated because my model underrates how bad Sargeant is. It is clear that Albon's dominance over Sargeant was more because Sargeant was bad than because Albon was very good. When Franco Colapinto replaced Sargeant at Williams, he was immediately faster than Sargeant and a lot closer to Albon. In fact, Colapinto's speed percentile of 35.98 was actually better than Albon's 27.41, but admittedly Williams improved in speed throughout the season and if you count only the races Colapinto started, Albon was still slightly faster in those races at 36.94. Nonetheless, if a mid-season Williams replacement like Colapinto who was only 6th in F2 points at the time he advanced could nearly match Albon in speed, that suggests that Albon is not as strong as I thought and Sargeant is substantially worse than I thought, and I didn't rate him highly to begin with. It didn't help that Albon was also highly crash-prone. While I am suspicious of the validity of the so-called "Destructors' Championship", which seems to be an entirely made-up thing, the fact that Albon is listed as the driver who supposedly caused the second-most crash damage does not make a strong case for him. Nonetheless, his 10-0 record against Sargeant and 2-1 record against Colapinto is still highly impressive and easily compensates for the crashing as far as I see it, but I fully expect Carlos Sainz, Jr. to overtake him at Williams next year.
Albuquerque was the fastest of the four Wayne Taylor Racing drivers in 2024, but this year his teammate Ricky Taylor was definitely the leader of the team even though Albuquerque was slightly faster and slightly more dominant. Taylor's main advantage is that his 1.85 lead shares led the IMSA GTP class while the other three WTR drivers only combined for 0.88 lead shares, suggesting that Ricky was arguably responsible over half responsible for the team's success. That advantage in on-track passing was easily enough in my view to overcome Albuquerque's slight advantage in dominance (0.82 CRL to Ricky's 0.57) and speed (59.25 to 55.10). Although the Louis Delétraz/Jordan Taylor car admittedly finished one position higher in points and got a marquee win at the 12 Hours of Sebring while Albuquerque and Ricky won the less important race at Detroit, the Albuquerque/Ricky car easily outperformed the Delétraz/Jordan car by all metrics as Albuquerque beat Delétraz in nearly all my statistical categories between the two European co-drivers and Ricky beat Jordan in every single category except wins and the points standings between the brothers. I suppose this shouldn't have come as a big surprise since Delétraz was making his first full-time IMSA season while Jordan returned to prototype cars for the first time in five years after racing in the GT class. The fact that Albuquerque and Ricky were established at the team is probably why they had such a performance advantage, although I suspect that will likely diminish in future seasons. Ultimately, after three straight seasons where Albuquerque and Ricky finished second in points, this felt like a regression, especially because Albuquerque usually has wins in either WEC or the European Le Mans Series also but he almost solely competed stateside this time and still struggled compare to his usual performance.
For the second consecutive year, Azcona had a pretty good year but was drastically outperformed by his TCR World Tour teammate Norbert Michelisz, who won his second consecutive championship. Azcona definitely came a little closer to matching Michelisz this year than the year before as he improved from 5th to 3rd in the championship, lost in terms of lead shares by a margin of 0.67-1.67 instead of 0.67-3.67, and in terms of CRL by a margin of 1.16-1.87 instead of 0.14-3.73. He also improved in terms of my teammate model from .146 to .202 despite actually posting a worse teammate head-to-head against Michelisz this year (4-10) than the year before (6-11). The main reason Azcona improved was because this year his BRC Hyundai team added a third car for Néstor Girolami who Azcona outperformed as he finished sixth in points. While this year was better than his last year, I still left him in the same tier upon noticing that Girolami actually outperformed Azcona in terms of lead shares and CRL. Indeed, in terms of CRL Girolami was actually the most dominant driver on the team. However, I still listed Azcona and left Girolami off because Azcona did more through his own efforts than Girolami did as both of the races Azcona led were based on qualifying while the races Girolami led were reverse-grid races where he backed into his starting positions. As for Azcona, he won the pole for the first Mid-Ohio race before Thed Björk eventually passed him with three laps left and then he managed to pass three of the four Cyan Racing drivers in the rain (Björk, Yann Ehrlacher, and Santiago Urrutia; who tended to have faster cars than BRC) to win the first race at Zhuzhou International Circuit in Hinan, China. It was a better year than last year, but still I think not quite good enough to rate him in the top 100.
Bachler and his teammates Alex Malykhin and Joel Sturm won the inaugural WEC championship in the new LMGT3 class by a staggering 139-105 margin over their Manthey Racing teammates Richard Lietz, Morris Schuring, and Yasser Shahin. The team owned by former Porsche Carrera Cup Germany champion Olaf Manthey had a banner year with its teams each winning two races and sweeping the top two positions in points, but ranking the Manthey drivers is a little tricky. Before I did my research on the WEC season, I would have assumed Bachler had a top 100 season because each team included one established, very successful veteran (Bachler/Lietz), one wildly overachieving rookie (Sturm/Schuring), and one amateur driver (Malykhin/Shahin). The Bachler/Malykhin/Sturm trio also won the overall GT class championship in the Asian Le Mans Series as well. You might think that would make him a lock for the top 100, but I ultimately decided to list the other three instead. I don't want to include amateur sports car drivers on my list and indeed Malykhin's speed percentile of 41.56 and Shahin's 28.12 were far off the four pros who all had speed percentiles greater than 70. As for the others, I was surprised to find that Bachler had the slowest speed percentile of 70.96, although he was admittedly barely behind Lietz's 74.26, Sturm's 72.84, and Schuring's 72.74. He was also the only one of those four drivers to fail to have a pass for the lead in the WEC as Lietz, Sturm, and Schuring combined for a 5-0 lead change record while Bachler's was 0-1. He was of course still an important veteran presence and an important factor in the team's championship, but it kind of bothers me that Sturm outperformed him in almost every statistical category when considering that Bachler has been a strong veteran for years while Sturm was a 22-year-old WEC rookie who I hadn't even heard of prior to this year. The fact that Bachler was outperformed by two rookie teammates (Schuring also outperformed Bachler to a lesser extent in my opinion) is why I left a seemingly obvious driver out of my top 100.
Bortoleto has made an impressive ascent up the FIA open wheel ladder in Europe, winning the Formula 2 title as a rookie the year after he did the same in Formula 3, but despite all that, I don't really expect him to be any kind of dominant force in F1 at Sauber as he has never seemed to be that dominant driver. In both seasons, he only won two races and ultimately won the titles because he was more consistent than his peers even though other drivers won more races. When comparing him to the other three drivers who won either GP3 or F3 titles and F2 titles in back-to-back years as rookies in the last decade, Charles Leclerc won seven F2 races in 2017 as did George Russell in 2018, while Oscar Piastri won six F2 races in 2021. I don't expect Bortoleto to be on par with any of those three and I suspect his main advantage is that he had faster cars than some of the drivers like Andrea Kimi Antonelli who seem to be more naturally talented. The back-to-back rookie championships certainly indicate he deserves a shot (particularly when you consider what Leclerc, Russell, and Piastri have already done) but I suspect of the many F2 graduates entering F1 next year, he won't be the best. Bortoleto did not even take the points lead for the first time this season until race 24 of 28 at Baku, where he overtook Isack Hadjar, who had previously overtaken Paul Aron, who had previously overtaken Zane Maloney and they finished as the top four in points in exactly that order. However, Bortoleto has to be given credit for clutch performance as he earned seven top five finishes to end the season. What this reminds me of is Gil de Ferran's two CART titles. Although de Ferran was never the outright dominant driver and seldom the winningest, his plodding consistency in an era with numerous winners where no one else was consistent at all carried him to a championship, but the electrifying spark seems to be somewhat missing. That did carry de Ferran to CART championships, but that level of performance probably won't be enough for Bortoleto to become an F1 title contender. Having said that, he was still a strong performer and after F2 champions like Felipe Drugovich and Théo Pourchaire still haven't had a great chance to make a name for themselves in any professional series yet, it's refreshing to finally see another F2 driver advance after a year when the F1 grid felt very, very sterile.
Buemi nearly always gets a boost when considering he has been consistently competing full-time in Formula E and the WEC for most of the last decade and he's never gone a season without winning in either series. Having said that, the driver who is still tied for the most Formula E wins in history with Lucas di Grassi and Mitch Evans at 13 has definitely slumped as an open wheel driver in recent years as he hasn't won a race since the 2018-2019 season and Evans will be taking the lead on the overall win list very soon. At this point, I have to primarily judge Buemi by his WEC performances because his Formula E results haven't been so hot lately. He wasn't bad in FE by any means as he did have the best lead change percentage in the series at 4-2, he significantly beat his teammate Robin Frijns in speed percentile (60.52-38.64) and my teammate model (.140-.120) and tied him in head-to-head record (5-5), although Frijns was arguably more dominant with 1.34 lead shares to Buemi's 0.39 even though Buemi led more (0.63 CRL to Frijns's 0.40) and Frijns finished 9th in points to Buemi's 11th. Both Buemi and Frijns missed the two FE races at Berlin due to a WEC conflict with the 6 Hours of Spa. I still think Buemi should be rated over Frijns mainly because Buemi drove for a factory Toyota team that still won twice in the Hypercar class at Interlagos and Bahrain (as much as any other team) while Frijns was driving for an extremely uncompetitive BMW team and was by no means the team leader. However, Buemi wasn't the Toyota team leader either as Kamui Kobayashi remains overall the best driver there and in a year when Toyota fell off, I can't justify putting him in the top 100. Buemi was the third-fastest Toyota driver at 61.14, far off Kobayahi's 75.83 and he was also slightly slower than his own Japanese co-driver Ryō Hirakawa, who had a speed percentile of 64.29. While all three drivers on Buemi's car (Buemi, Hirakawa, and Hartley) had a single pass for the lead that also served as the TNL, Hirakawa and Hartley both did so in races with fewer lead changes, so they ended up leading all Toyota drivers with 0.67 lead shares while Buemi ranked third at 0.40. Buemi was however the most dominant driver on the team with 0.53 CRL, narrowly pipping Kobayashi's 0.52. Ultimately, he was too indistinguishable from his teammates Hirakawa and Hartley for me (and Frijns in Formula E as well) to justify a top 100 placement for any of them, but he's still very good.
I have always liked and rated Buescher (even when it wasn't cool) but I must admit I thought it was very funny when he was whining about not getting a sticker affixed to his car after Tyler Reddick wrecked him at Darlington. I admit until that moment I never knew that winning drivers got such a sticker, but the particular emphasis on stickers reminded me of elementary-schoolers getting smiley-face stickers for earning a perfect score on a math quiz. It was as if he was trying to prove cultural critics right in regard to how all us millennials are obsessed with our participation trophies (news flash: we aren't). That being said, I'll be the first to admit that Buescher was extremely unlucky not to win a race and lock himself into the playoffs. It seemed like he had outrun his boss-teammate Brad Keselowski before the Darlington incident, he lost to Kyle Larson in a photo finish by .001 second at Kansas after Larson had slightly roughed him up (in a race where Buescher also made a five-wide pass for second place in what might've been the move of the year), and he led most of the second half at Sonoma before a strategy miscue by pitting too early prevented him from going all out, which allowed him to be overtaken by Larson again. If you think the playoff drivers should be the 16 best drivers in a season, it goes without saying that Buescher was one of them even if I don't think he was quite the biggest playoff snub. But obviously there ended up being so many fluky winners who were not expected to win (including Austin Cindric, Daniel Suárez, Chase Briscoe, Harrison Burton, Austin Dillon - who thankfully was ruled ineligible, and to be quite honest Alex Bowman) that he got knocked out. If you ran a simulation of the 2024 season repeatedly, I suspect Buescher would have won in the regular season at least half the time and made the playoffs at least 90% of the time as there probably would've been fewer fluky winners in most other seasons but he didn't. It's really unusual for a driver who missed the playoffs like Buescher to be more consistent than the actual champion Joey Logano, but Buescher ranked 7th in Winston Cup-era points while Logano was only 11th and Buescher had the 7th-best average finish as well. It was an injustice for sure.
However... that doesn't let Buescher off the hook for his deficiencies and there definitely were some and I think people as usual are overrating his season for his consistency to some extent. First off, like his No. 17 car predecessor Matt Kenseth, he is not a great qualifier and he tends to finish better than he starts. There's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, but it made it a lot harder for him to collect stage points than almost all the other playoff contenders who qualified better. Furthermore, to some extent Buescher is a little too complacent when he doesn't have cars capable of winning. Buescher has proven that when he has cars that can fight for the win he'll go hard (as he did when he bumped past Shane van Gisbergen to win at Watkins Glen) but when he has mediocre cars, it seems like he is primarily preoccupied with not crashing rather than maximizing his performance and he often tends to have bland, mediocre runs as opposed to other playoff snubs like Kyle Busch or Ross Chastain who seemed to propel mediocre cars to better finishes at their best. Buescher is great at not crashing, don't get me wrong. His seven incidents were tied with Alex Bowman for the fewest amongst playoff contenders, but it feels like when he doesn't have cars capable of winning he is too conservative rather than going for stage points like he needs to. While he definitely belonged in the playoffs, he'd have easily made up the 7 points he needed to beat Martin Truex, Jr. for the last playoff spot if he'd gone even just a little harder for stage points. I think that is on him and that's why he's not in the top 100. I do think his performance dipped a little in other ways as well. While Buescher is one of my stock car model's favorite drivers as he ranked in the top 10 all five years from 2019-2023 including hilariously leading my model in 2021 after beating a washed-up Ryan Newman, this marked the first year since 2018 when Buescher did not rank in the top ten in my model as he dropped to 14th and Keselowski ended up beating him by one spot. I also feel Buescher's advantage over Keselowski was narrower this year than in 2022 and 2023 if there was even an advantage overall. Ryan McCafferty ranked Keselowski 9th to Buescher's 13th because Keselowski had much better passing numbers. Personally, I think Buescher was better as he beat Keselowski in natural races led (8-5), lead shares (1.40-0.85), CRL (1.13-1.04), and speed percentile (65.06-58.92). He appeared better in Ryan's model because I guess Brad maximizes his performance better in races where he doesn't have competitive cars, but I do think performances when drivers have cars capable of winning matter more (especially in a win-and-in playoff format) and Buescher clearly shines more in those races.
Regardless of whichever driver you favor, it's clear that Buescher wasn't so much better than Keselowski that they should be in different tiers and I don't think this is one of the worst playoff snubs in history, or even the worst this year. Was Buescher a top sixteen driver and should he have made the playoffs? Yes, absolutely. Was he a top ten driver? No, not really (regardless of where he would have finished in a points system that hasn't been used for 20 years), and honestly him missing the playoffs in a year he deserved it pretty much cancels out the astonishing good luck he had in 2023. His big flaw is that he doesn't take enough risks, but he did seem to become more aggressive as the season progressed, right-hooking Todd Gilliland at Darlington (which I do not approve of) followed by the Watkins Glen win. It seems his rage at Larson and Reddick for both of them mildly roughing him up in races he could have won did eventually lead to him elevating himself much like Logano's rage at Denny Hamlin in 2013 did the same for him. This year was still important for Buescher's legacy. People now expect him to win and make the playoffs every year, which I doubt many people would have entering 2023. Like Dale Jarrett and Martin Truex, Jr., he seems like he could end up this generation's late-blooming superstar. I suspect he's not on a Hall of Fame track as he feels more like the millennial equivalent of the similarly-initialed Clint Bowyer, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if he career-compiles his way into the HoF either like Ricky Rudd did. I don't think I'd put him on my 1,000 greatest drivers list yet, but since that probably won't be finished until 2027, he has a chance.
Am I the only person who thinks Busch's performance was not any worse than Chris Buescher's? I realize Buescher won and Busch didn't and he was also a lot more consistent, but I think the main reason people think Buescher was much better is because Busch underachieved relative to his previous expectations while this was admittedly Buescher's second-best season. Busch's season will forever be overshadowed by the fact that he went winless for the first time in his career in 2024, snapping his record streak of nineteen consecutive seasons, but I don't think his performance declined that much, especially when you consider that he had the slowest cars of his entire career this year. How slow? Busch's speed percentile of 2024 of 58.22 was the slowest of his career, far below his previous worst of 65.48 in 2022. However, he still managed to have 1.33 lead shares this year, exactly in line with his previous marks of 1.36 in 2020, 1.47 in 2022, and 1.39 in 2023 even though his cars were significantly slower. He also had 13 natural races led this year, ranking tied for 4th in the NASCAR Cup Series behind only Kyle Larson, Ryan Blaney, and Christopher Bell. Busch still had very good performance there despite the speed decline, which I think I'd put more on Richard Childress Racing's decline than his own. Despite the fact that Austin Dillon "won" and Busch didn't, Busch actually beat Dillon in speed by a larger margin in 2024 than in 2023, actually increasing his speed percentile advantage over Dillon from 22.59 to 23.63. Granted, he did worse against Dillon in their teammate head-to-head and his rating of .124 was his lowest since 2007, where he ran much better but was absolutely pummeled by both Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon in his last year at Hendrick Motorsports. You can make a case that this was Busch's worst season, as in addition to being his only winless one he also had his fewest lead shares since 2014 and had fewer than 1 CRL for the first time in his career, but it's not clearly his worst season beyond a shadow of a doubt like a lot of people think it is. When considering the decline in speed, the fact that his lead shares were still comparable to most of his other post-2019 seasons suggests that I shouldn't move him down a tier. The problem as usual is that Busch perpetually beats himself when he doesn't have cars capable of winning, and that happened again this year. I kind of suspected he'd go winless after the all-star race when he got into that scrape with Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. and informed him "I suck just as bad as you!", although I still thought he'd make the playoffs until the series of fluke winners. While he didn't suck nearly as bad as Stenhouse, he couldn't get out of his own head so this year ended up combining his mental immaturity from 2011 with his 2020s-era decline in speed, but I think the performance was still there. He ranked 9th in my model and 11th in Ryan McCafferty's and we both had him over Buescher and Martin Truex, Jr. Busch had a lot of near-misses this year, coming up short in the three-wide photo finish at Atlanta, earning back-to-back second place finishes in the last two races of the regular season, and spinning from the lead at Kansas. I have to give him credit for not wrecking Chase Briscoe and Harrison Burton at Darlington and Atlanta when I expect many other drivers including his teammate would have in that position. While Busch will never win a title again, I'm not convinced he'll never win or make the playoffs again like a lot of other people think. He ran well enough that I still expect him to bounce back, but I do think it might be time for a crew chief change at the No. 8 team. I know Childress does seem to favor Dillon because he's a grandson, but I think it is time for RCR to pair its best driver (Busch) with its best crew chief (Justin Alexander, who I think is the most underrated crew chief in the Cup Series) and see what they can do together. I think if that ever happens, he might return to becoming an outside championship contender. It feels like it's time for a shakeup here, but I don't think Busch is done by any means.
The relationship between Cammish and his Motorbase Performance teammate Ashley Sutton in the British Touring Car Championship was pretty comparable to that of Pato O'Ward and Alexander Rossi in IndyCar. While Cammish as usual was worse than Sutton just like Rossi as usual was worse than O'Ward, Cammish and Rossi both came a little closer to their team leaders than they did in previous seasons. Although it's become pretty obvious that Cammish will never win a BTCC title like I thought he would after he lost the 2019 title in his second season by only two points after losing the points lead due to a mechanical failure in the season finale at Brands Hatch, Cammish's points finish of 5th was still his best since 2020 even though Sutton had his worst points finish in 2019. His touring car rating of .221 this year was also his best since his rating of .467 in 2020. He ranked 43rd overall in my touring car model but 5th among BTCC drivers. Cammish also came a little closer to Sutton in speed than in the last two years, as he trailed Sutton in speed percentile by only 9.42 this year as opposed to 15.01 in 2023 and 10.29 in 2022. His improved performance against Sutton is why I have placed him in a higher tier this year, but he still wasn't that great. Cammish's only win and even natural race led came in a reverse grid race where he started on the pole and he didn't have a single pass for the lead all season even though Sutton had a 3-0 lead change record, but admittedly the Motorbase cars seemed significantly slower than the West Surrey Racing cars of Jake Hill and Colin Turkington. Nonetheless, I think his consistency was sufficient to make this tier even though I was not impressed by his lack of dominance.
The Brazilian touring car driver had a breakthrough season in 2024, winning the TCR South America championship as well as the TCR Brazil championship, which consisted of most of the same races although there were some races that counted for TCR South America but did not count for TCR Brazil and vice versa. Cardoso did beat some big names en route to this championship, including Argentinean megastars Leonel Pernía (who won his third straight TC2000 championship) and Matías Rossi (who finished second in points in TC2000 and Top Race simultaneously). Since Pernía and Rossi are definitely two of the best touring car drivers in the world, Cardoso deserves to be rated although admittedly I think the other two drivers were better. While all of them won thrice, Cardoso scored only one overall win in the series while all of Pernía and Rossi's wins were overall wins. Cardoso's other two wins came at the TCR World Tour event at El Pinar, Uruguay, where he won the TCR South America class but lost to TCR World Tour regulars. Nonetheless, he proved he could definitely compete with the TCR World Tour stars as he did finish 2nd overall against the full field in the El Pinar reverse grid race and he led the first 13 laps before Thed Björk passed him for the win. His second-place finish in the Uruguay round was the best for any regional TCR driver this series against the TCR World Tour regulars. Cardoso ranked 53rd overall and 12th among TCR drivers in my touring car model with a rating of .174, placing directly behind Supercars champion Will Brown. While he did place behind five of the TCR World Tour regulars in my model (Norbert Michelisz, Björk, Yann Ehrlacher, Esteban Guerrieri, and Mikel Azcona) he did beat the other regulars in that series in my model, suggesting that he would be a median TCR World Tour regular in performance, although I did place most of the drivers who beat him in my model in the top 100. Cardoso was the 3rd-highest TCR South America driver in my model behind Thiago Vivacqua (who actually led my model for sweeping the semi-washed-up South American legend Norberto Fontana) and Pernía. While most of the aforementioned drivers were better, Cardoso still had an impressive season, especially for a driver who was previously unknown.
Courtney finished second in the High Limit winged sprint car championship with six wins. Even though he did not win as many races overall as Carson Macedo, who finished second in World of Outlaws with a career-best 12 wins, I think High Limit had stronger competition than WoO to such an extent that I think Courtney's season was still better. Courtney had 6 wins to High Limit champion Brad Sweet's 10, which is comparable to Macedo last year, who had 7 wins to Sweet's 11 in the World of Outlaws. Admittedly, Macedo had an injury that likely cost him wins last year, but on the other hand, Courtney won both in WoO and High Limit this season showing arguably greater versatility than Macedo, who has not yet won in High Limit (although admittedly he has barely competed there). I'm probably primarily rating Courtney higher than Macedo because he had to compete against the juggernaut champion Sweet while Macedo did not. I expect if Sweet was still competing in WoO, he would have beaten Macedo worse than he beat Courtney in High Limit, but you can't necessarily say that for sure. Nonetheless, I chose to rate both Courtney and Abreu (who had 8 wins to Courtney's 6 but lost to Courtney by a single point) over Macedo because they won in both series while Macedo did not (to Macedo's credit, he did also win a USAC Midget race so you could argue for him here as well). I definitely think Sweet and to a lesser extent David Gravel were better than all these drivers though.
I understand why Delétraz has a reputation as being one of the best sports car drivers right now but I am admittedly less convinced. I do have to give him props for being one of the few drivers to win in all four of the international sports car series not sanctioned by the SRO (the WEC, IMSA, the European Le Mans Series, and the Asian Le Mans Series) and he also won a sports car championship for the fourth consecutive year. However, three of those titles including this year's came in the European Le Mans Series's LMP2 class, which does not have nearly the same caliber of competition that either WEC or IMSA do. However, he was nowhere near as dominant in the ELMS this year as in his 2021 and 2022 title seasons as he only won once this year after earning three wins in 2021 and four wins in 2022, which is why I rated him in my top 100 in 2022 but did not do so the last two years. Nonetheless, this year might be his most versatile ever as he did win one race each in the ELMS, IMSA, and the Asian Le Mans Series, and his win at the 12 Hours of Sebring with his co-driver Jordan Taylor is probably the biggest of his career. One of the things that led me to leave him off my top 100 list is that Robert Kubica (his ELMS co-driver at AO by TF) outperformed him i nearly all categories with 1 lead share to Delétraz's 0, 0.54 CRL to Delétraz's 0.42, and a speed percentile of 81.90 to Delétraz's 68.69. I definitely think Kubica deserves more of the credit for the team's success than Delétraz does, and I think Kubica's WEC performances were clearly better than Delétraz's IMSA performances as well. Delétraz was better than Taylor obviously as he had a speed percentile of 55.53 to Taylor's 48.03 and he had a TNL while Taylor did not, but Filipe Albuquerque was both faster and more dominant and I didn't even think he belonged in a higher tier and Ricky Taylor was clearly the team leader as he had more lead shares than the other three drivers combined. Delétraz was clearly the #3 driver at Wayne Taylor Racing in a year neither team significantly contended. The Sebring win is certainly worth a lot, especially since he did pass Sébastien Bourdais with five minutes left in the race to win it, but despite his vast versatility, he didn't have either enough speed or dominance to justify a top 100 position in my opinion.
I originally had Dennis as the last driver in the C+ tier in 100th but I eventually dropped him. Although the 2023 Formula E champion remains one of the series's perennial stars having easily outperformed every single teammate with wins and top ten points finishes every season, I think this year was probably his worst. In his four full-time seasons, this year's 7th place is his worst championship result, which definitely indicates he had a bit of a championship hangover even if he did win the second race of the season at Diriyah. While I had been touting Dennis as Andretti Global's best driver for the past couple years, Colton Herta clearly reasserted himself this year to reclaim that role. I have not lost any faith in his talent, but in a year when the peloton-style Formula E offered up more passing than possibly any open wheel road course series in history, Dennis made only one of this year's 81 passes for the lead and his 0.05 lead shares only ranked 14th. Dennis did lead almost the entire race at Diriyah as he utilized his attack mode more strategically than his opponent Jean-Éric Vergne, but I definitely don't consider any of the gimmicked up attack mode passes for the lead to be "real" passes, since drivers are voluntarily given up the lead to receive an increase in boost that may or may not allow them to re-pass the driver who they fell behind. In that race, passing seemed more difficult than the rest of the season and Dennis didn't really have to fight for the lead as much as most other drivers did this season, so even though the 0.99 CRL he obtained largely from that race ranked 6th for the season, I think his performance was probably worse than that. He did still as usual outperform his teammate (Norman Nato this year), allowing him to rank 28th in my open wheel model (which is admittedly comparable to Scott McLaughlin and Lando Norris, so that's still pretty strong) and 9th among Formula E drivers. The consistency and teammate rating suggested he might still be worthy of a top 100 placement and I do in general still think of him as one of the best drivers in the series, but I ultimately felt I needed to dock him for his lack of dominance.
Even though Derani and his co-driver Jack Aitken failed to win for Action Express Racing, traditionally one of the powerhouse IMSA teams, they were definitely two of the most dominant drivers in the GTP class as Aitken ranked 2nd in lead shares and led the class in CRL and speed percentile while Derani ranked 3rd in lead shares and 4th in CRL. However, I think Derani was significantly worse than Aitken for three main reasons. First: Aitken also won three DTM races in 2024 while Derani competed in IMSA only, Aitken's speed percentile of 76.16 was far greater than Derani's 59.30, and Derani was substantially more mistake-prone. Although Derani himself led the class with two fastest races and three poles in the first three races of the season at Daytona, Sebring, and Long Beach and he also led a race-high 170 laps in the 24 Hours of Daytona, Derani's first fastest race came at the 12 Hours of Sebring, where he was pretty embarrassing, getting passed by both Sébastien Bourdais and Felipe Nasr before crashing, flipping, and coming to rest upside down atop a tire barrier after he cut off the Ferrari of Miguel Molina while trying to lap him. While he was uninjured, the crash more or less eliminated the team from the IMSA GTP title battle before it even began. Admittedly, Derani's 24 Hours of Daytona was much more impressive as he had a 3-1 lead change record after passing three major heavy hitters in Josef Newgarden, Sébastien Bourdais, and Kévin Estre for the lead. He also had the fastest race at Long Beach, but was beaten out of the pits by the eventual winner Renger van der Zande. If he had been either a little closer to Derani in speed, hadn't had that crash, or won a race somewhere I probably would have put him in my top 100, but all those things happened so I elected not to.
Much like Laurin Heinrich, Dillmann impressed by winning the championship in his debut IMSA season, but unlike Heinrich, Dillmann's LMP2 class was nowhere near as deep as Heinrich's GTD Pro class, and Heinrich unambiguously dominated his class while Dillmann's title felt significantly hollower. He only won one race at Mosport, which you could argue was the least significant on the LMP2 schedule. In the five Michelin Endurance Cup races, he was overshadowed by Connor Zilisch at the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring, Nicklas Nielsen at the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen, and Mikkel Jensen at the 8 Hours of Indianapolis and Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta. I honestly think all three of those drivers were probably better, although I listed Jensen in the same tier. Besides them, the depth of talent was largely nonexistent with the only other drivers I would consider major in the class were Felipe Fraga (who weirdly underachieved in a year I feel he should have dominated) and Ryan Dalziel (whose best performances were over a decade ago in a year when he was carried by Zilisch). He primarily benefited by the fact that most of the teams where the better drivers raced either did not compete full-time (most of them skipped the Mosport race he won) and Fraga was the only other major driver in his prime who competed full-time; granted, beating Fraga is still a big deal. Considering he beat Fraga, won the title as a rookie, had the highest CRL in his class, and obliterated his teammate Nick Boulle in speed percentile (84.14-41.66), I think he deserves this placement while still acknowledging he was not the best driver in his class.
Although I've thought Ellis was the best IMSA GTD driver for a while, this marked his best season on paper as he won his first title in the class with wins in four of the first five races including the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring, which also carried him to a Michelin Endurance Cup championship with his full-time teammate Russell Ward and Indy Dontje, his teammate for the endurance races only. I said "on paper" because I actually think I am more impressed with his 2022 season, when I did rate him in the top 100. Although he had the title and the marquee race wins this year to prove his talent to the general public this year, I actually like his numbers in 2022 a lot better. He had a 4-0 lead change record in 2022 to 1-0 this year; 3 TNL to 0 this year; 2.40 lead shares to 0.11 this year; 0.72 CRL to 0.51 this year; and he beat Ward substantially worse in speed percentile (84.74-51.63) than he did this year (76.76-52.15). To some extent, it seems like the main difference this year is that he was luckier. I also think Dontje arguably a bigger role than Ellis in their 24 Hours of Daytona win since he had three passes for the lead in that race to Ellis's one and he led the most laps at Sebring too. To be fair, you could make the case that Ellis had two passes for the win this year at both Sebring and Laguna Seca. At Sebring, he passed a washed-up Andy Lally with an hour left but Lally dropped immediately to eighth so I suspect he went off-track but they never showed it on the broadcast. At Laguna Seca, he overtook Robby Foley for the win in the last five minutes after Foley slid through the dirt to hand Ellis the win. If you counted those as passes, his numbers would look a lot closer to 2022. But if you don't count either of those, Ellis has no TNL, no races with the most laps led, no poles, no fastest laps, and no fastest races. It was weirdly a bit of a goose-egg of a season despite appearing so dominant on the surface. If you count those two passes, then he ties Foley for natural races led and has the best lead change percentage and the most lead shares, but aside from that, he led no categories except for wins and winning the championship itself, which is still worth a lot. The most dominant driver this year was Kenton Koch with 0.95 CRL, who I didn't even list! This year does kind of make up for the 2022 title when it seems like Ellis should've won the title but didn't, but I'm less knocked out by this than it seems like I should be on the surface.
Evans was the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT championship contender in the World Rally Championship pretty much by default as his two greatly superior teammates and perennial champions Sébastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanperä both ran part-time allowing Evans to sort of back into the team leader role even though he was only the third-best of the four drivers on the team. While the team won eight rallies, Rovanperä won four of them and Ogier won three, with the full-timer Evans only winning the season finale in Japan. Although he kept himself technically alive in the championship entering the final race, he was far behind the eventual champion Thierry Neuville, who was pretty much guaranteed the title if he didn't shit the bed, which he didn't. Considering Neuville in my opinion is not up to the standards of a usual WRC champion and likewise pretty much only backed into it because Ogier and Rovanperä were both part time, I feel like Evans should have won this. He actually came closer to matching Rovanperä in his 2023 season (when he lost to him 4-7) than he did this year (2-4), and he was closer to Ogier too (tying him 4-4 last year and losing 2-6 to him this year). You'd think that one driver remaining full-time while the other drivers were part-time would help the full-time driver since most teams are more likely to have team orders supporting the full-time driver, but he still lost to Neuville by a similar margin to Rovanperä, and Neuville is nowhere near as good as Rovanpera. I feel this should have been Evans's title and he did not deliver, as Ogier came closer in points to him despite missing two races than Evans came to Neuville, but I suppose I might be underrating this since I might be underestimating Neuville. We'll see after I complete my rally model. If I ever complete my rally model.
The closest thing Philip Ellis had to a rival this year, Foley and his teammate Patrick Gallagher admittedly finished a distant second to Ellis and Russell Ward in IMSA GTD by 230 points, but I think Foley was the stronger performer this season. He led the class with a 3-0 record this season and none of those passes were debatable while a couple of Ellis's apparent passes (including one against Foley) were. Foley ranked second in lead shares with 1.22, fourth in CRL with 0.60, and third in speed percentile amongst series regulars at 85.08 ahead of all other drivers who won a race. In all these categories, he outperformed Ellis despite Ellis winning the title, more wins, and higher-profile wins. I get that most people would argue the titles, the wins, and the marquee race wins are everything but there are so many factors outside of the lead drivers in determining who wins (especially in something like multi-class sports car racing, where luck seems to matter substantially more than even most single-driver series). Although I don't have the nerve to put Foley in the top 100 while leaving Ellis out, the real reason I found him better is because on top of all that, he also won the GT World Challenge America Pro-Am championship, where he and Justin Rothberg beat (among others) Ellis and Jeff Burton (no, not that Jeff Burton). In GT America, Foley and Rothberg won three races while Ellis and Burton won only twice (but one of theirs was an overall win). It's admittedly kind of a wash, but I like Foley's numbers overall better than Ellis's unlike 2022 where I liked Ellis's numbers better than Foley's even though Foley beat him in the championship. What I will say here is that we seem to have a nice little rivalry brewing. And Ellis did beat Foley when Foley went off-track when they went head-to-head at Laguna Seca, but it's clear they're very evenly matched.
By far the most overrated F1 driver of the year, Gasly is being wildly overpraised by F1 Twitter for the semi-viral statistic going around that he suffered $0 in crash damage this year, thereby making him the supposed leader in the so-called "Destructors' Championship". By all accounts, this is something some redditor made up as a rough estimate with incomplete data that the F1 press ran with. According to the Reddit post I linked, it isn't true that Gasly had no crash damage, as he and his teammate Esteban Ocon did crash at Suzuka and Gasly was even interviewed about it! The fact that everyone is taking this as gospel truth on the basis of dubious evidence means they are vastly overrating Gasly and underrating Ocon as a result. It doesn't help in general that fans in most series seem to judge who the best drivers are based on crash avoidance rather than performance in their best races, which in my opinion matters more. From that perspective, Gasly and Ocon have consistently run about the same in races and performed the same in qualifying. This year, believe it or not Ocon actually won their teammate head-to-head 9-8 although admittedly both of Gasly's retirements were mechanical and both of Ocon's retirements were crashes (so if I do count driver DNFs like other models do, then Gasly would have won this 10-9. Ocon also beat Gasly in qualifying 12-11, so they were clearly pretty evenly matched but so many talk about Gasly like he's secretly great and Ocon's a hack just because of their crashing or lack thereof when on pace the gap is far narrower. I do still think Gasly was definitely better. He did nearly double Ocon in points as well as laps in the top ten even though Ocon beat him at Interlagos in the race where both of them made the podium and he did utterly dominate him in speed percentile (35.68-22.58). But aside from the speed percentile and the crashing (which did cause me to place Gasly one tier higher, mind you), I really don't see a damn difference. They're both essentially the most average drivers in the field. Stop believing in people's made up statistics (except mine lol).
Much like Louis Delétraz, Girolami has gone on a run of championships, but much like Delétraz, they tend to be mostly second-tier championships, which is why I am reluctant to rate either of them higher. In 2024, Girolami won his second TCR Europe championship after also winning that title in 2022 in addition to a TCR Italy title in 2023, but none of those are major league series and he weirdly has not made a TCR World Tour start yet even though his brother Néstor is one of the leading veterans of international touring car racing, and Franco's races in that series's predecessor the World Touring Car Cup weren't very good. Nonetheless, I decided Franco was the better Girolami brother this year although it was kind of a close call. I think I'm more impressed by Franco winning the TCR Europe title with four wins in addition to winning a race in the TCR European Endurance Series more than I am by Néstor finishing 6th of 11 regulars in the TCR World Tour while his teammates Norbert Michelisz and Mikel Azcona finished 1st and 3rd. While Néstor did win a race on the TCR World Tour and led the entirety of another until being passed on the last lap by Ma Qing Hua, both of those came in reverse grid races and Néstor's touring car rating of .027 was barely better than Franco's -.001. I think given my druthers, I'd rather list minor league greatness over major league mediocrity, much like how I listed Christian Eckes and Corey Heim over Alex Bowman and Bubba Wallace. But as I write this, I'm starting to think I should have put him a tier lower...
In one of the upsets of the season, Golding finished seventh in Supercars points for the relative upstart team PremiAir Racing, giving the team its best points finish in the three seasons since they purchased Tekno Autosport. Even if you count the Tekno years, this is the team's best points finish to Will Davison finished 5th in the 2016 season. Although the team still hasn't won since Davison left and Golding earned only one podium in the marquee Sandown 500 and he hardly led any laps, he earned his first pole at Darwin and he bizarrely had his first fastest race at the first Melbourne race despite finishing 23rd. He really slayed his teammate, two-time Supercars winner Tim Slade. Although Golding only narrowly beat Slade last year finishing 16th in points to Slade's 19th, he dominated him this year as Slade actually dropped to 20th in points in the same year Golding improved from 16th to 7th. His 15-8 record against Slade placed him 54th in my teammate model and 6th among Supercars drivers, and he is only barely behind two other Supercars drivers (Heimgartner and this year's champion Will Brown). He also beat Slade by a strong margin in 55.68-39.91 in speed percentile. His performance probably flew under the radar since PremiAir cars still aren't capable of winning, but he seems to be bringing the team back to prominence after a long stint of mediocrity. It remains to be seen if he can deliver PremiAir its first win under its new name though.
It's unclear right now who the best driver in USAC is, but there are three obvious standouts. Kody Swanson has set records for the most Silver Crown titles (8) and wins (45), but he almost never competes in the Sprint and Midget divisions. Logan Seavey just completed the Triple Crown this year with his first USAC Sprint title, where he tied Tom Bigelow's record for the most wins in a season in series history. Finally, Grant has not yet completed the Triple Crown as he has not yet won the USAC Midget title, but he wins prolifically across all three divisions and has now become the first driver in USAC history to win at least 10 races combined in four consecutive seasons. Deciding which of these drivers is greatest overall is a real debate at this point, but deciding which order to rank them this year really wasn't. Grant lost the Sprint title to Seavey and the Silver Crown title to Swanson, so it seems like I should definitely rate him lowest of the three. You could argue that 12 wins overall (2 in Silver Crown, 9 in Sprint, and 1 in Midget) should lead me to rank him higher than Swanson who only competed in Silver Crown but did win the title with five wins, but I also don't feel I should dock Swanson for only competing in Silver Crown when that is the most prestigious division. While this isn't a great comparison, ranking Grant over Swanson would feel to me like ranking Kyle Busch over Jimmie Johnson in one of those years Johnson dominated in Cup but hardly competed in Nationwide while Busch won far more races across Cup, Nationwide, and trucks than Johnson did, although I acknowledge that the Sprint and Midget divisions are definitely closer to Silver Crown in prestige than Xfinationbusch is to Cup. I do kind of think USAC is a minor league to a certain extent to begin with since many of the drivers making legendary ascents are ultimately gunning for minor league rides, so I'm usually reluctant to put USAC drivers in my top 100 unless they win the title. Since Grant won titles in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and didn't this year I did feel I had to dock him accordingly, but the 9 sprint car wins in particular are very impressive, albeit not as impressive as Seavey's 14.
After a bunch of near-misses including three straight second-place points finishes in the World of Outlaws and four previous seasons in the series with over 10 wins, Gravel finally got his WoO title, but it was somewhat hollow as Brad Sweet defected to compete in his own High Limit series, which ended up having stronger competition as a result since Sweet remains clearly the best winged sprint driver with the possible exception of Kyle Larson, so it's not like Gravel had a lot of competition this time except from Carson Macedo, who he nearly always beats in the championship anyway. Ultimately I'm more impressed by Gravel winning 12 races last year against Sweet than 15 races without him, especially because he won more races than Sweet in the same series last year. It obviously wasn't a drop in performance as much as a drop in competition, but I felt the drop in competition was enough to justify placing him just outside the top 100 this year after placing him just inside the top 100 the year before. This sort of thing has happened before as Dave Blaney's only WoO title came in 1995 (the year when Steve Kinser and Sammy Swindell made their failed NASCAR moves) and Bobby Davis, Jr. had a dominant 21-win championship season in 1989 despite never doing anything half so remarkable in the rest of his career because all the major WoO stars switched to the United Sprint Association that year. That's what this reminds me of. If WoO and High Limit end up merging again (as is rumored) I would still expect Sweet to once again beat Gravel.
Like Jake Dennis, Günther had a decent but somewhat uninspiring Formula E season where he thrashed his Maserati teammate (rookie Jehan Daruvala, a frequent minor league teammate of Lando Norris) but wasn't nearly dominant to justify a top 100 placement. Günther and Dennis's seasons were very similar with each driver only having a single pass for the lead in a year where many FE races looked like restrictor plate races with Dennis beating Günther by one position in points (7th-8th) while Günther narrowly beat Dennis in my teammate model (.169-.151). I think I'm more impressed with Dennis since his teammate Norman Nato was a veteran while Daruvala was a rookie, but they were about the same. Günther's advantage over Dennis in lead shares (1.00-0.05) was comparable to Dennis's in CRL (0.99-0.34) but Dennis was a little faster. I know I shouldn't be comparing those two because they weren't teammates, but they did seem like two of the most comparable drivers in this year's FE season and if there was a racing equivalent of similarity scores in baseball, these might come out as two of the most similar seasons overall. To Günther's credit, his win at Tokyo was natural as he passed Oliver Rowland for the lead while Dennis's at Diriyah was not because he won via coming out on top in terms of attack mode timing. Honestly, I think I was more impressed with Günther last year when he outscored his teammate Edoardo Mortara (one of the best drivers in the series) 101-39 but his actual performance felt more or less the same this year and his teammate rating was actually higher because Mortara actually beat Günther in their head-to-head in 2023 but finished behind him in points primarily because he had a lot more retirements. Günther's an above average driver but not really a star and I don't ever foresee him becoming one.
I originally had the son of 14-time European Rallycross Champion Kenneth Hansen and younger brother of 2019 World Rally Champion Timmy Hansen (who serves as Kevin's teammate in the team owned by Kenneth) in the C- tier, but I decided to push him up to this one at nearly the last minute. For the second straight year, Kevin finished second in points and won a single World Rallycross event while the perennial champion Johan Kristoffersson won five races, but I was a little more impressed by Kevin last year than this year. Last year, he won 1/7 races while Timmy went winless. This year, Kevin won 1/10 races and Timmy also won a race. Last year, Kevin beat Timmy 5-2 in finishes but this year they were tied 5-5. Additionally, most of the World Rallycross drivers also compete in the Extreme E series for electric off-road cars and Kevin is no exception. After finishing 3rd in Extreme E points last year, Kevin was leading the points after four races when... the series was canceled. It's unclear whether Kevin and his teammate Molly Taylor (who did win both races at Scotland's Hydro X-Prix) won the championship or not and almost nobody reports on this series at all even though McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Jenson Button, Michael Andretti, and Jimmie Johnson were all entered as car owners and Johnson was set to drive in a future race that never happened. Even though it looked like Kevin was going to win the championship before the series shut down for the year (although it is expected to be replaced by "Extreme H" in 2025), his win count decreased from 3 to 2 and it's hard to know how much credit to give to wins that seemed more important at the time than they turned out to be in retrospect. If an electric tree falls in the off-road forest, does it make a sound?
Last year, I wrote that Loek Hartog and Morris Schuring were the most underrated drivers and that aged rather nicely as Schuring earned a class win at Le Mans as a rookie and Hartog won the Porsche Carrera Cup North America title this year. However, I wasn't really sure what to do with Hartog this year because he voluntarily left the premier Porsche Supercup series to race in PCCNA, which had next to no competition this year. The only other drivers in the series who had ever done anything really were Mazda MX-5 Cup/two-time World Challenge champion Michael Cooper and short-lived Champ Car driver "Speedy" Dan Clarke. It's hard to argue with Hartog's results as he did win 7 of his 16 starts and finish 2nd in 6 others, which allowed him to clinch the title two races early. He also annihilated his teammate Jake Pedersen, who finished 14th in the championship and barely scored 10% as many points as Hartog. Having said that, while I don't think his talent has declined in any way it's a minor league and there were quite frankly a number of Porsche Carrera Cup drivers, particularly Harri Jones and Alessandro Ghiretti, who both won more races in arguably more competitive divisions. Hartog's season is further complicated by the fact that he did actually win a second title in the Porsche Endurance Challenge series, where he earned two class wins in the Cayman division, but again the competition was not good. He did do well in his one Porsche Supercup start this year, finishing ninth in a one-off at the Hungaroring, where he beat his teammate Jaap van Lagen who only finished 12th, which means if I counted his one teammate comparison this year, he would rank 2nd in my touring car model. While a case could easily be made that he was still a top 100 driver, I felt like I needed to dock him for intentionally racing in a less competitive series rather than seeing if he could either challenge for a Porsche Supercup title or win in major league sports car events like his countryman Schuring has done.
Like James Golding, Heimgartner was another Supercars driver who overachieved in weak equipment, but unlike Golding, Heimgartner has been doing this for years and he got a win while Golding didn't. Heimgartner has been truly wasted at Brad Jones Racing, where he has significantly outperformed all his teammates for three straight years, but he also has never really had a high-quality teammate so it's hard to evaluate him. Even though he had his best points finish last year (7th) and beat his BJR teammates worst the year before (2022, when he ranked 8th in speed percentile while Brad Jones was 24th, Bryce Fullwood was 25th, and Jack Smith was 29th), this might be Heimgartner's best season. Of his three BJR seasons, this is his highest-rated one as his touring car rating of .177 just nosed out this year's champion Will Brown for fourth place and he also got his first win for the team at Taupō, but admittedly that only happened because he beat Brown out of the pits and he had no passes for the lead this season unlike the past two seasons when he had one each. The team seems to be getting slower and slower with each passing year though as Heimgartner's speed percentile has decreased from 61.91 in 2022 to 58.87 in 2023 and 51.21 this year. The fact that Heimgartner still held off everyone to get a win this year of all years is pretty impressive, and it's not like Supercars has field inversions unlike a lot of other series to allow slower drivers or drivers with slower cars to back into wins. This year, he finished 10th in points while his teammates Fullwood, Macauley Jones, and Jaxon Evans ranked 18th, 22nd, and 33rd respectively. The eight-position gap between him and his next closest teammate is the largest since he debuted at BJR. In terms of speed percentile, he beat Fullwood (36.29), Evans (28.86), and Jones (22.60) significantly although admittedly he has beaten Fullwood and Jones worse in previous years. A case could be made that he was actually pretty great and could be a championship contender at Triple Eight Race Engineering, but he will never end up at a team like that so we'll probably never know.
Hirakawa was probably the second-strongest driver on Toyota's factory WEC team this year as he ranked second among Toyota drivers in speed percentile at 64.29 although he was still far behind the team leader Kamui Kobayashi's 75.83. Additionally, he made a pass for the win at Interlagos against Ferdinand Habsburg, giving him 2/3 of a lead share, tying him with Brendon Hartley for most among the Toyota drivers although both Kobayashi and Sébastien Buemi led more as his CRL of 0.38 trailed Kobayashi's 0.52 and Buemi's 0.53. If the Toyota teams were still dominant and the leading title contenders as they had been in most previous seasons, I might be more inclined to rank Hirakawa's season higher but since the Toyota team seemed to have been overtaken by the Porsche and Ferrari squads, I don't think his being the second-best Toyota driver justifies a top 100 placement.
Well, you can't spell overachieve without anagramming the first seven letters of his name. I knew entering the season that Hocevar would be the best rookie, whether or not he actually won Rookie of the Year. He entered the season ranked ninth overall among active drivers in my stock car model, and he was already ahead of drivers like Brad Keselowski, William Byron, and Christopher Bell after a stellar truck career where he pretty much ran on par with perennial Cup playoff contender Ross Chastain. However, I was unsure whether Hocevar's advantage as a driver would be enough to overcome Josh Berry's car advantage since obviously Hocevar was driving for Spire Motorsports, which had a reputation of backmarkers while Berry was replacing Kevin Harvick in a car that won a championship. As it turned out he did and clinched the Rookie of the Year before the season was over and even overachieved my expectations. While I expected him to be relatively evenly matched with Corey LaJoie as a rookie before clearly overtaking him in subsequent years, his rise was more meteoric than even I expected as he was pretty much immediately faster than LaJoie from day one and convinced the world that LaJoie was bad and always had been. You're not gonna convince me LaJoie was always bad, but he definitely was this year and the fact that Hocevar so utterly dominated a driver who I did previously rate (I've even had LaJoie on top 200 lists before) pretty much guaranteed I'd put him in this tier even if his actual numbers would place him closer to the C- tier. After dominating LaJoie 18-6, his fellow rookie Zane Smith 20-9, and Justin Haley 5-2, Hocevar ranked 5th in my stock car model with a rating of .182 and even went up from his already championship-caliber rating entering the season while Berry by contrast had a lackluster rating of -.118. Hocevar finished 21st in points while Smith, Haley, and LaJoie all ranked 30th or worse. The No. 4 car was still definitely faster than the No. 77 as Berry's speed percentile of 49.65 was faster than Hocevar's 47.08, but Hocevar's superior talent was easily enough to compensate for that. It helped that surprisingly one of the most aggressive drivers in the sport really didn't crash much. According to Toby Christie's incident tracker, Hocevarson only had 12 incidents to Berry's series-high 21 and quite a few big names (Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Christopher Bell, Martin Truex, Jr.) had more incidents than him. To be sure, Hocevar right-hooking Harrison Burton under caution at Nashville was reprehensible and he got a deserved 25-point penalty for it, but I remain surprised that he did seem to have the car control of a veteran even as a rookie given his history of overdriving. This suggests great things in his future and something tells me Alex Bowman needs to watch his back at Hendrick Motorsports because it seems likely Hocevar will replace him sooner than later.
After a twenty-year absence, Huff left the international touring car series variously known as the World Touring Car Championship, World Touring Car Cup, and TCR World Tour to return to the British Touring Car Championship where he had originally made his mark in 2004. Just like in 2004, he won twice but was outperformed by a high-caliber teammate. In 2004, it was Jason Plato but this time it was Josh Cook. Cook ended up beating Huff 20-6 which was enough to make him the highest-rated BTCC driver in my model of the year when considering Huff's vast record of international touring car success. Although Huff only finished three positions behind Cook in the standings in ninth, they were separated by a massive points margin with Cook beating Huff 327-195 in the championship as Huff arguably came closer to his other Speedworks Motorsports teammates, Aiden Moffat and Andrew Watson, than he did to Cook. Nonetheless, Huff still had a very good season and tied Cook with two wins even if Cook tended to outrun him everywhere else. Although Cook did crush Huff in speed percentile 67.62-52.13, Huff had a better record passing for the lead (3-4) than Cook did (1-2). However, both of Huff's wins came in reverse grid races while Cook's wins came in races based on speed so he was obviously better. To Huff's credit, his win in the Snetterton reverse grid race was one of the best of his career as he started 14th and took the lead after 9 laps and he did re-pass championship contender Tom Ingram after Ingram beat him to the start-finish line on lap 5 in the reverse grid race at Knockhill. Huff was probably at a deficit as he needed to learn the BTCC cars and re-learn the tracks he hasn't raced on in many years, and given that he still performed quite well. However, his 2025 status is unknown at this point. If he returns to the TCR World Tour instead of remaining in the BTCC, I really don't see what the point of all this was.
Although Mathieu Jaminet and his teammate Nick Tandy narrowly lost the IMSA GTP title to their Penske Porsche teammates Felipe Nasr and Dane Cameron, you can make the case that Tandy and Jaminet were better this year. They were substantially faster than their teammates as Tandy's speed percentile and 69.07 and Jaminet's 68.15 were substantially better than Nasr's 52.46, which in turn was substantially better than Cameron's 41.91. It's unusual for the teammates who lost the title to be so much faster than the teammates who won it, which suggests that Nasr and Cameron were not necessarily the biggest contributors to their success. Nasr at least did have 5 on-track passes for the lead to Tandy's 3 and Jaminet's 2, so I did rank Nasr higher than Jaminet, especially because Tandy seemed to be better than Jaminet across the board with 0.69 lead shares to 0.2 for Jaminet, 0.84 for CRL to 0.59, a pole, a race wth the most laps led, and a fastest race (while Jaminet had none of these) and a faster speed percentile. Tandy was clearly better than Jaminet to such an extent to justify them being in different tiers. Nasr and Jaminet were closer, but I do think the fact that Nasr won the IMSA title matters and at least he was making a lot of on-track passes for the lead himself and was also more dominant than Jaminet, even though Jaminet was consistently faster than Nasr. Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that all three of these drivers were close while Cameron was far off all of them, so it isn't surprising that Cameron was replaced.
Jensen was one of the few drivers this year who attempted to race a full schedule in IMSA (in the LMP2 class) and the World Endurance Championship (in the Hypercar class) simultaneously. He was unable to achieve this as the IMSA Mosport race conflicted with WEC's Interlagos race and obviously his factory Peugeot drive took priority over his LMP2 ride for the more independent TDS Racing team. Jensen was the fastest of the six Peugeot regulars for a team that wasn't very competitive with a speed percentile of 47.04, faster than all five of his teammates who made either F1 or Formula E starts at some point (Nico Müller's 44.36, Paul di Resta's 35.62, Jean-Éric Vergne's 35.42, Loïc Duval's 28.76, and Stoffel Vandoorne's 27.21) However, the big surprise came in his stateside operation. Jensen was still the team leader on the IMSA side as he had 2 TNL to McElrea's 1, 0.98 lead shares to McElrea's 0.62, and 0.70 CRL to McElrea's 0.44, but McElrea had the edge on speed (85.09-83.16) and had a better lead change record (3-0 vs. 4-1). I also feel Jensen should have been one of the leading championship contenders in IMSA since he was one of the few drivers in the LMP2 class who I considered even good. While he didn't underachieve like Felipe Fraga by any means, he and his teammate Steven Thomas had three DNFs, which meant the team's back-to-back wins at the Indianapolis 8 Hour and Petit Le Mans to end the season weren't enough for them to seriously enter championship contention in a schedule that had only seven races. If he hadn't raced in IMSA, I might be more inclined to rate this higher considering he was faster than a lot of drivers on his WEC team who won championships elsewhere, including di Resta (DTM), Vergne and Vandoorne (Formula E), and Duval (Super Formula), but the fact that he underachieved in IMSA and even there was difficult to distinguish from recent Indy NXT driver Hunter McElrea (who is decent but not great or anything) is the reason I decided to leave him out of the top 100.
Keselowski probably had the best season of his owner-driver stint in 2024 even if it looks like he'll never recapture the old form of his Penske era. Even though his teammate Chris Buescher outran him at Darlington and probably would have won if he and Tyler Reddick had not made contact, Keselowski was long overdue for a win at that point after Buescher had outwon him 4-0 even though he barely ran better if he ran better at all. I do think Buescher has been slightly better than Keselowski all three years, but in my opinion that is almost entirely due to the fact that Buescher has proven to be one of the top road racers of the Next Gen era while Keselowski has quite frankly sucked. If NASCAR returned to having only two road course races a year like in most of their history, I suspect Keselowski would still be clearly better year after year, but Buescher is probably better-suited to the current schedule. As I discussed in the Buescher entry, I do think Buescher was better than Keselowski as he beat Keselowski in natural races led, lead shares, CRL, and speed percentile even though Keselowski made the playoffs and Buescher didn't. However, Keselowski definitely was better than Buescher in certain metrics, especially overall passing. According to Ryan McCafferty's table, Keselowski had the second-best pass differential in the Cup Series to Kyle Larson at 348, which was a lot better than Buescher's 138, and his overall passing percentage of 52.70% was the second highest to Larson as well. Buescher did end up gaining more positions across the season as the difference between the sum of his finishing and starting positions was 202, but Buescher was a lot luckier in races than Keselowski as he gained 64 positions under caution while Keselowski lost 224, probably because Buescher's crew chief Scott Graves is better than Keselowski's now-former crew chief Matt McCall. I will say the fact that Buescher missed the playoffs in a year he deserved to make them cancels out a lot of his luck in races (Ryan has him as the luckiest driver of the season, but I think missing the playoffs cancels a lot of that luck out). Ultimately, I do not rate Brad's season as highly as Ryan does because I care more about passing and fighting for the lead than passing and fighting in mid-pack as I believe the top positions are worth more and Buescher was much better at that this year, which is why I do still think Buescher had the better season, but out of respect for the other argument, I have to acknowledge they were basically equivalent. Keselowski definitely had some spectacular races, especially the fall Martinsville race where he led 170 laps in a race where Buescher bizarrely finished three laps down. They were almost exactly tied in my stock car model with Keselowski's rating of .100 just above Buescher's rating of .099. His performance was definitely there even if his season seemed both a lot less exciting and less interesting to talk about than Buescher's.
Even though Kirkwood won two races in 2023 and failed to win in 2024, you could argue that this year was better. He had his best points finish of 7th and his first two on-track passes for the lead and he earned his biggest sports car win to date by winning the 12 Hours of Sebring in the GTD Pro class with teammates Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat. However, he had a bit of an imperceptible decline this year regardless. Last year I rated Kirkwood over his Andretti teammate Colton Herta mainly because he had given Andretti its only wins. Admittedly, by most other metrics other than wins (including even the points standings) Herta did outperform Kirkwood as he was probably unluckier, but I decided to reward Kirkwood over Herta mainly due to performance against expectations. This year, Herta reasserted himself and utterly dominated his teammates, which is why I downgraded Kirkwood. I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise since Herta is younger than Kirkwood (even though that feels like that shouldn't be true) and therefore has more room for growth. While Herta and Kirkwood were more or less comparable in 2023 (Kirkwood's 2 wins to Herta's 0, Herta's 1 TNL to Kirkwood's 0, Herta's 1.38 lead shares to Kirkwood's 0, Kirkwood's 1.06 to Herta's 1.01, Herta's speed percentile of 58.26 to Kirkwood's 57.10), this year it wasn't even close. Despite losing the title, Herta led all drivers with 3.33 lead shares to Kirkwood's 1.33, and he pummeled Kirkwood with 2 wins to Kirkwood's 0, 3 TNL to Kirkwood's 1, 2.33 CRL to Kirkwood's 0.89, and a speed percentile of 74.55 to Kirkwood's 56.06. Even though Kirkwood did win at Sebring, Herta had the upper hand even there as Herta's overall win at Sebring is obviously more significant than Kirkwood's class win. Kirkwood's rating in my teammate model plummeted from .163 to .029, and he only ranked 46th in my model overall, far closer to the extremely mediocre Marcus Ericsson than Herta. Ericsson was even faster than Kirkwood shockingly as he had a speed percentile of 60.19 despite doing almost nothing all season. The one exception came at Detroit, where all three Andretti drivers were fast. Kirkwood had his first on-track pass for the lead in that race against Christian Lundgaard, but ended up losing out to Scott Dixon after he pitted on the caution before Kirkwood did and stretched his fuel mileage. In that race, Ericsson (who was on Kirkwood's strategy) managed to blast through the field up to 2nd while Kirkwood was unable to, indicating he wasn't much of a clutch performer this season. He did improve on ovals somewhat although less than Herta did. He won the pole and led 67 laps at the season finale at Nashville, but his victory chances were thwarted when he got caught a lap down after pitting from the lead (I suspect Herta would have won anyway). Kirkwood is still in general a driver on the rise even if this season was definitely worse than his last.
The French Porsche driver finished third in Porsche Supercup, giving him his best points finish to date. He also won his first race at Spa for the Schumacher CLRT team, where his teammates were champion and possible series goat Larry ten Voorde and Alessandro Ghiretti, who actually won more races in the Porsche system than any other driver. While I think Klein was the least impressive of the three overall, he did beat Ghiretti in points as well as my teammate model, where he ranked 26th overall and 4th among Porsche Supercup drivers. In addition to his Porsche Supercup win, he also won three races in Porsche Carrera Cup Italy (where he also finished third in points) and one in Porsche Carrera Cup Germany (where he finished tenth). In PCC Italy, he actually tied ten Voorde for 2nd in points with 176 points but only had 3 wins to ten Voorde's 4 and lost the tiebreaker (admittedly, ten Voorde missed two races at Italy, which is arguably what cost him the title). Although Klein definitely had a strong record, there were several drivers in the Porsche system who had a lot more than five wins and I think he was definitely second-tier compared to any of those drivers.
Huh? That's all I have to say. Huh? In one of the most baffling and dadgummedest silly season transactions I ever did see, Kostecki shockingly failed to start this year's Supercars season after winning last year's title. Even after reading lots of articles about this, it's hard for me to figure out precisely what happened here but it appears Kostecki was trying to leave his Erebus Motorsport team with whom he won the championship while still under contract. After announcing his departure and being replaced by Todd Hazelwood to start the season, he unexpectedly returned to the team at the third round of the season at Taupō. Apparently, Erebus had threatened to sue Kostecki over the loss of several high-profile sponsors who left the team when it was revealed he would not be racing (including Coca-Cola), but then when Kostecki returned to Erebus, he alienated Peter Adderton, owner of Boost Mobile who ws one of his most loyal backers. Adderton had apparently sided with Kostecki over Erebus and was upset when Kostecki returned, withdrawing his sponsorship at that point. We may never know what all that was about, but Kostecki did elect to finish his contract with Erebus probably to avoid a lawsuit, claiming that he had taken a break off for "mental health reasons" (which has to be a lie). The late start and missed races relegated him to a 17th-place points finish, but his season was redeemed by a win in the series's marquee race, the Bathurst 1000, where he and Hazelwood combined to lead 160 of 161 laps. He added another win at Surfer's Paradise before leaving the team to replace Anton de Pasquale at Dick Johnson Racing. By all accounts, Erebus was a toxic working environment and Kostecki's 2023 teammate Will Brown had already left the team after that season with Hazelwood also choosing to remain loyal to Kostecki over Erebus, where he too joined Kostecki at DJR as his endurance racing co-driver, which makes sense since Kostecki did get Hazelwood his first-ever win in the biggest race. Despite his late start, Kostecki was still the 5th most dominant driver in both lead shares with 2 and CRL with 1.67. He did not have any passes for the lead this year, but he did hold the lead without giving it up in both races where he won the pole, and since he won the pole, led the most laps, and won at Bathurst, I give him about 95% of the credit for that while saying Hazelwood was along for the ride, while he still did what he needed to do to maintain the lead. Weirdly, Hazelwood did actually have a better speed percentile (62.40) than Kostecki (58.32), who in turn was only barely better than the team's full-time driver Jack Le Brocq (54.91) and Le Brocq (a mediocre driver) ended up actually tying Kostecki 6-6 in their teammate head-to-head, but he hardly ever led and Kostecki clearly blew him out. With his departure, Erebus is pretty much up shit creek after launching the career of two of the more mediocre Supercars champion, but I'm probably both underestimating Kostecki and Brown as I admit if the team dynamics were as toxic as they appeared, it likely prevented them both from getting better results. Kostecki did move above average in my touring car model for the first time so he and Brown are continuing to improve but I still think Chaz Mostert is better. I was not sure what to do with this season since it was one of the weirdest seasons in history, but I think I made the right choice.
Although there was a stupid meme going around criticizing the Penske Porsche driver lineup of Kévin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor, and André Lotterer (past-prime Estre, 80-year-old Lotterer, second best Vanthoor), the trio went on to win the FIA World Endurance Championship title in he premier Hypercar class anyway. After several years of mediocrity in Formula E, I too kind of believed Lotterer was washed up, but that was the only part of the meme I really agreed with. I never thought Estre was past his prime and I'm unsure which Vanthoor brother is better. While I did rate Dries higher this year, at the moment Laurens has six major league sports car titles while Dries only has three so I would say Laurens had had the stronger career to date even though Dries has looked stronger recently. But after Lotterer finished 18th in points when his teammate Jake Dennis won the Formula E championship in 2023, I wasn't expect much and Lotterer definitely proved me wrong. Although I did not intend to rate Lotterer this year in my 1,000 greatest drivers entry on him, I ended up changing my mind. Although Lotterer was only the 5th fastest of the 6 Penske Porsche drivers with a speed percentile of 60.35, the Estre/Vanthoor/Lotterer team did win the title and two races while their team car co-driven by Matt Campbell, Michael Christensen, and Frédéric Makowiecki finished 5th in points and went winless. Furthermore, Vanthoor and Lotterer were the only two Penske Porsche drivers who had an on-track pass for the lead in the WEC this year (shockingly Estre did not even though he was the fastest and most dominant driver otherwise). Lotterer ended up being a lot closer to Vanthoor in performance than Vanthoor was to Estre, so if I'm going to list Vanthoor (which I m) Lotterer does deserve it also. Lotterer's pass of Nicklas Nielsen was effectively the move that gave the team the win at Fuji, which allowed them to nearly clinch the title entering the final round at Bahrain (but he wasn't the TNL since Brendon Hartley also made a pass on Nielsen on that same pit cycle before all of them pitted and Lotterer beat everyone out of the pits to take the win). While he'll never be as good as he was in the 2010s again and he was still the weakest driver on the championship team, he remains a major contributor to his team and he's a lot more than just a washed-up 80-year-old at age 43.
Probably the most underrated IndyCar driver of late, Lundgaard failed to win this year after winning in 2023 and dropped from 8th to 11th in points, so I figured I had to drop him down a tier but you could make a solid case his performance didn't even decline when adjusting for equipment. The Rahal team has been circling the drain for a while and Lundgaard's speed percentile dropped from 57.34 to 49.32 while Graham Rahal came closer to matching him in speed this year than he did before as his speed percentile increased from 36.29 to 38.59. On the other hand, Rahal had periodic bursts of speed in 2023 including winning 2 poles and setting 2 TNL that year while he was completely uncompetitive this year so I would argue Lundgaard outperformed Rahal by an even greater margin (Rahal even beat Lundgaard in lead shares last year). This year by contrast, Lundgaard was the team's only leading light with a 3-2 lead change record and 1.03 lead shares (6th in IndyCar) and 0.56 CRL (9th in IndyCar) despite only ranking 15th amongst full-timers in speed. At his best track (the Indy road course) he passed eventual champion Álex Palou before Palou beat him out of the pits, which relegated Lundgaard to a 3rd-place finish. My hesitation on placing Lundgaard in the top 100 is solely due to my assumption that Lundgaard's intra-team dominance was primarily because Rahal and especially Pietro Fittipaldi were bad to a greater extent than he was good, but that could be wrong. He ranked 40th in my open wheel model overall and 10th in IndyCar at .092, directly behind Scott Dixon's .105 and ahead of Rinus VeeKay's .091, while all three of those drivers are ahead of Josef Newgarden and Kyle Kirkwood among others. Admittedly, I feel like I still have to take Dixon and Newgarden over Lundgaard for their wins while VeeKay ended up being a late cut, so I guess I'd say he should be rated somewhere in between. What I will say is that I think McLaren replacing Alexander Rossi with Lundgaard is an improvement. Not only will Lundgaard likely expect less money because he isn't a past Indy 500 winner, but I am sure he has more wins in his future than Rossi does even if Rossi was better historically. What I don't really get is why McLaren chose to keep Nolan Siegel over Rossi when it doesn't feel to me like Siegel should have ever been hired there in the first place. I don't think Lundgaard will seriously challenge O'Ward at McLaren, but he will probably win more often there.
Maloney started off this year's Formula 2 season by sweeping the first two races at Sakhir. Sweeping a round is a relatively rare occurrence in F2 since it requires winning both a race based on qualifying and another race based on a reverse grid, but he achieved this winning the first race from eighth and the second from third. In a year where there were 18 different winners, he never won again but he was consistent enough to maintain the points lead for a while, only losing it to Paul Aron at the second Monaco race before Aron was eventually overtaken by Isack Hadjar in the championship, who was in turn eventually overtaken by Gabriel Bortoleto. Even though Maloney only finished fourth in the championship and did not win after the opening round, I have rated him this highly for a reason. His teammate was Ritomo Miyata, who doubled up as the Super Formula and Super GT champion last year and who I perhaps dubiously ranked 3rd overall last year. Even though Maloney skipped the last two races of the year to compete in the Formula E season opener at Interlagos instead, he finished 4th in points while Miyata (who missed no races) finished 19th. Maloney's electrifying 18-4 defeat of Miyata was enough to give him a debut rating of .240 placing him just behind George Russell, Jenson Button, and Brian Redman, and just ahead of the likes of Álex Palou, Scott Dixon, and Josef Newgarden. In a year when Formula 2 had insane competitive depth, this makes him actually only the fourth-highest rated F2 driver this year as Taylor Barnard, Antonio Kimi Antonelli, and Oliver Bearman are currently all ahead of him. Obviously none of them will sustain this, but that definitely says something for the depth of talent if you couldn't tell that from the 18 winners in 28 races to begin with. F1 teams' refusal to look at F2 talent year after year after year created a bubble that exploded as many F2 drivers finally got a shot for 2025. Although Maloney ended up in FE instead of F2, he did finish 12th on his debut in a race where his championship-winning teammate Lucas di Grassi failed to finish. I'm gonna guess that just like Taylor Barnard looks like he's already faster than Sam Bird, the same will likely hold true for Maloney and Lucas di Grassi since di Grassi seems to have been washed up for years, indicating it is time for the next generation to get its shot (get it?)
The former Formula One runner-up earned another second-place points finish this year, albeit this time in Stock Car Pro, the series formerly known as Stock Car Brasil. That series was hypercompetitive this year with 16 winners. Massa was one of them, winning the opening reverse-grid race at Mogi Guaçu, but despite Massa's points finish, I wouldn't say he was anywhere near the second-best driver in the series. The fact that he won a reverse-grid race but did not win any of the races based on speed or qualifying is one issue. The fact that his teammate Rafael Suzuki seemed to be faster at times is another, as Suzuki won two poles while Massa won none. Although Suzuki finished 7th in points, the pair were fairly evenly matched as Massa only beat Suzuki 11-9 over the season and 6-4 in "regular" (non-reverse grid races) and while Suzuki does have three wins in the series, he isn't one of the series's biggest stars. As a result, Massa finished with an above-average touring car rating of .085, which only ranked 84th out of 227 touring car drivers this year and only 16th amongst Stock Car Pro regulars. The lack of wins and rather low teammate rating suggest his season was not as good as it looked, and the fact that he only barely outperformed Suzuki when Suzuki was distracted by also trying to run a full schedule of TCR South America while Massa was not attempting double duty makes this look even worse.
Although his level of talent may not yet live up to his name, Masters earned his career highlight where in a shocking upset, he won the Porsche Carrera Cup Italy title by 30 points over Larry ten Voorde (the best driver in the Porsche system, who won this year's Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany titles simultaneously). Masters is the only driver to beat ten Voorde in a championship he contested this season. He was admittedly greatly aided by the fact that ten Voorde failed to start the second Imola round, but that isn't necessarily why he lost the title. After winning four of the season's first six races, ten Voorde was actually still leading the points after that round and only lost the points lead to Masters later after he finished the season with 5th, 6th, 2nd, and 3rd place finishes, while ten Voorde had finishes of 26th, 10th, a retirement, and a 6th. Even if you throw out the two races that ten Voorde missed where Masters finished 2nd and 3rd, Masters still would have only lost the title by 7 points which suggests he had a very impressive season considering what ten Voorde did elsewhere. My touring car model agrees as Masters ranks 32nd among all drivers and 5th among Porsche Supercup drivers with a teammate rating of .253, which was in fact comparable to some of the world's greatest touring car drivers like Thed Björk or Ashley Sutton, the two drivers directly ahead of him. Although Masters has not yet won in Porsche Supercup, he did finish fourth in points and he skyrocketed in my model this year as his overall rating rose from -.111 to .125. While he only won once in Porsche Carrera Cup Italy and won no other races in the Porsche system while many of the top drivers win in multiple series simultaneously, I still thought he was worthy of placement since he beat ten Voorde, especially when you see how highly I have chosen to rate him.
Nojiri continues to be one of Japan's best drivers as he is the only driver to win in both of Japan's major league series Super Formula and Super GT in every season since 2019. In those six years, he has finished no worse than fifth in the Super Formula championship and he has also won multiple races in every Super Formula season since 2021. However, even though he improved from 3rd to 2nd in the championship, I think this year was definitely worse. In 2023, Nojiri finished third in points and tied his teammate Liam Lawson for the most wins with 3, but he only lost the title by 8.5 points to Ritomo Miyata despite missing race and he actually outscored both Miyata and Lawson in the races he started. This year, three of the top five points finishers left the series with Miyata switching to Formula 2, Lawson switching to F1, and Ryō Hirakawa shifting his entire focus to the World Endurance Championship, so it felt like Sho Tsuboi was the only driver who even had a chance of posing a challenge to Nojiri. Last year, Tsuboi finished 4th in points and Nojiri beat him 106-59 points. This year, Nojiri lost to Tsuboi 87-117.5 by 30.5 points. This time, Nojiri did beat his teammate (another incoming Formula 2 graduate in Ayumu Iwasa) but it definitely seemed that while he was still performing well, he was performing worse against the same group of drivers than he did last year against a much stronger field despite missing a race. There really was no difference between his Super GT performances in 2023 and 2024 as he won one race both years but slightly dropped from 8th to 9th in points despite scoring more points. Nojiri's rank of 43rd and rating of .065 in my model puts him rather borderline as almost everybody rated higher than him in my open wheel model I judged to be deserving while almost everybody rated lower I decided was not (with a few exceptions in both cases), but I decided to put him in the C tier instead of the C- tier because of his versatility. At least he still won in both series, like Sho Tsuboi and unlike Tadasuke Makino, but considering I don't think Makino's very good, Nojiri probably should have beaten him by more than one point.
Arguably this year's breakout star in Supercars, Payne improved from 14th to 6th in his second season and thoroughly dominated his overrated veteran teammate Richie Stanaway, who limped to a 19th-place points finish. Payne was the fifth-fastest driver of the year for Grove Racing and completely took control of the team after the departure of David Reynolds (who beat him in points in 2023). He had blinding speed at times including a win at Townsville and poles in the third Melbourne race and second Taupō race, but he did suffer pain in a disastrous Melbourne round where he wrecked Cam Waters and himself out of the race in a lap 3 crash as they battled for the lead after his pole, then took the lead from Chaz Mostert at the start of the next race before Mostert knocked him into the grass and Bryce Fullwood spun him out on the next race. Payne was very impressive but was to some extent limited by his overexuberance and aggression and Thomas Randle ended up beating him in points even though he was slower. His mistake-prone nature and the fact that he had a below-average touring car rating of -.007 were the things that kept him out of the top 100 this year, but he is still a driver on the rise and I suspect he will be a perpetual top 100 driver very soon.
Pepper had an eclectic sports car season with four major wins in three different series for three different teams. His primary role was driving for the Grasser Racing Team in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup. Although he did not enter the first race at Paul Ricard, his co-drivers Marco Mapelli and Franck Perera did not score any points in that race so he still got to share in their mutual second-place finish in the championship. In the more minor league International GT Open, he and teammate Alessio Deledda won two races for the Oregon Team out of Italy, although Pepper was forced to miss the Hungaroring round while preparing for the 24 Hours of Spa so Deledda ended up finishing 2nd in points while Pepper was 4th. Pepper was obviously doing the vast majority of the work since Deledda arguably the worst driver in DTM last year. Finally, in IMSA, Pepper, Perera, and this year's DTM champion Mirko Bortolotti entered the Michelin Endurance Cup races in IMSA, where they won the GTD Pro class at the season-ending Petit Le Mans for the Iron Lynx team. Pepper was the linchpin of this team as well as he led the most laps in that race and earned an entire lead share for passing Roman De Angelis for the win in what was the only pass for the lead that race. Pepper was also faster than both of his teammates as his speed percentile of 71.07 was better than Perera's 64.06 and much better than Bortolotti's 47.17, which is really impressive since Bortolotti won the DTM title this year. I'm starting to think maybe I should have bumped Pepper up into the top 100, but I am exhausted and drained and now want to focus on my writing rather than re-ranking when I'm still not even half done yet and definitely want to finish by the end of the year.
Pier Guidi has long been a better sports car driver than most of his peers as he earned his sixth major league championship in the last eight seasons in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, but he and his teammate Alessio Rovera for the AF Corse Ferrari team did this more due to raw consistency than any sort of dominance as they failed to win any of the five races but they and their usual teammate Davide Rigon did score a lot of points especially at Spa where they finished second and were the only team to place in the top five in all three stages. However, I don't think this was overall one of his best seasons. In addition to failing to win in GT World Challenge Europe unlike his two previous title years in 2020 and 2021, he also failed to win for his WEC Hypercar team while his teammate Antonio Fuoco's was arguably the class's best driver. Admittedly, Pier Guidi was the second-fastest of all the Ferrari drivers with a speed percentile of 71.51 (only barely worse than Fuoco's 74.06) so Pier Guidi was certainly contributing, but the fact that Fuoco's car finished second in points while Pier Guidi's car finished eighth in points suggests there should indeed be a large gap between them on this list. Pier Guidi only had one major win, but it was a big one as he earned an IMSA GTD Pro class win in the 24 Hours of Daytona where he led a race-high 91 laps but his teammate James Calado was the clear leader of that operation as he made three on-track passes for the lead while Calado made none. Pier Guidi did make a pass for the lead in the WEC finale in Bahrain against Nyck de Vries, but the team only ultimately finished 14th there, so I'm not rating that all too highly. Pier Guidi had enough speed and accomplishments in general to be worthy of placement on this list (especially the SRO title) but I think four of his teammates were better than him this season.
I actually forgot him when I was finishing up the list but I definitely meant to include him and that was an oversight, so I dropped Franco Girolami, the TCR Europe champion, who I originally had in this tier to make room for him. I suppose this means I might need to drop one of my drivers from the last post to make room for Girolami, who probably still deserves it as much as the TCR China champion Martin Cao or the TCR Denmark champion Kasper Jensen, but I think Pursley is definitely a more important inclusion. 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.
The man who once looked like he would be Josef Newgarden's biggest rival now appears in retrospect to be just another Ryan Briscoe or Graham Rahal: a driver who combined a great season or two with a handful of other good wins and a brief spurt of winning that did not survive the steadily increasing competitive depth in IndyCar. After McLaren released Rossi this year, I was seeing tons of people on social media who argued that McLaren had just released its "best driver". In what universe??? Pato O'Ward now is only one win behind Rossi despite not starting his career as a full-timer until Rossi had already settled down into his present mediocrity. O'Ward won three times this year while Rossi went winless. Despite going winless last year, O'Ward nearly swept Rossi and I wasn't convinced last year that Rossi was even better than Felix Rosenqvist. This year, Rossi ended up finishing behind Santino Ferrucci in points... in an A.J. Foyt car. Yes, it was an injustice that Rossi was fired instead of Nolan Siegel (who never should have been hired in the first place) but my guess is that Rossi was probably one of the most wildly overpaid drivers in the series because he was a past Indy 500 winner and at one point (a long time ago) a championship contender and was being paid accordingly while his current level of performance doesn't live up to that (much like why Roush Racing in NASCAR released Jamie McMurray instead of David Ragan). It seems people were praising Rossi primarily for crash avoidance and because he was momentarily ahead of O'Ward in points for a few weeks after O'Ward got in a couple stupid crashes, but they weren't even close yet it seemed like the conventional wisdom was that McLaren had fired "its best driver". To Rossi's credit, he did have a strong Indy 500 this year and he finally had a pass for the lead in that race for the first time since... 2020. While keeping Siegel over Rossi does not make much sense (considering Siegel is clearly the worst of the four drivers who drove the No. 6 car this year without a doubt), replacing him with Lundgaard definitely does since Lundgaard has wins in his future and I'm not convinced Rossi does. I honestly think Ed Carpenter Racing replacing Rinus VeeKay with Rossi is a downgrade, but I will admit Rossi was better this year. Rossi did slightly outrank O'Ward in my model in 19th (just between Álex Palou and O'Ward) because O'Ward did not beat him by as much as he was supposed to, but that is not nearly enough for me to actually say he had a better season like a lot of people did. That narrative continues to baffle me. Rossi's speed percentile of 63.19 was still far off O'Ward's 75.89, but he was admittedly closer than he was in 2023 (82.86-66.35). I'll give him props for coming a little closer to O'Ward than he did last year, but it seems people are mostly giving him props for not crashing much like Pierre Gasly, even though he doesn't really do anything. It feels like if he hadn't lucked into that Indy 500 win as a rookie, he might already be gone and I'm increasingly unsure what he even brings to the series anymore. This season was fine but I kind of think it will be his last good one and he's going to perform even worse than VeeKay at ECR.
I'm grouping these drivers together rather than talking about them in separate entries. The Argentinean touring car veteran Santero won his first major title in Turismo Carretera, but by all accounts the perpetual Turismo Carretera champion Werner (who won three of the previous four titles) continued to be the best driver until a freak incident when Chevrolet fans threw papers at Ford driver Werner, which destroyed his carburetor and took him out of the championship. The incident didn't do anything to help the bowtie cause however as Santero is also a Ford driver. Despite losing the title, Werner did win the most races this season with 3 while Santero only did twice, although as with NASCAR, Turismo Carretera has a playoff which likewise threatens to muck everything up. Santero probably still would have won the title regardless as he scored the most points in the regular season and in the playoffs, but there's no way of knowing. The good thing is that the Chevy fans didn't get what they wanted. (Insert Bob Jenkins "race idiot" quote right here.) But it was another sorry display for many of the more obnoxious Argentinean fans, and I have not forgotten how Agustín Canapino's diehards pressured Ricardo Juncos to fire Callum Ilott (the better driver) after he complained about receiving death threats. Ilott I suppose got the last laugh as he is now returning full-time to IndyCar while Canapino got fired before the 2024 season ended because it looked like he wasn't going to qualify for next year's Leader Circle Progam and they needed Conor Daly of all people to bail them out. Although I have a Uruguayan who advises me on a lot of the South American stuff and I know I need to take it seriously (especially because a lot of the Argentinean drivers do very well in my touring car model), I struggle to respect many of the fans down there even though I do respect the drivers.
Truex definitely retired at the right time. While he was still a strong performer in 2024 and had an extremely unlucky season, you could kind of tell he had understandably lost his passion to race after Sherry Pollex's death. He still was delivering strong performances especially early in the season and he should have won at Richmond, where he won the race in regulation before his teammate Denny Hamlin beat him out of the pits under caution before jumping the start on the ensuing restart, which understandably argued Truex. That seemed to take the wind out of his sails for the rest of the season as his performance began to decline in the middle of the season when Hamlin and Christopher Bell frequently dominated, but admittedly he was repeatedly let down both by bad luck, stupid mechanical breakdowns, and a subpar crew chief in James Small. While he's had bad luck before (2016) and Small has been his crew chief for several years (which were mostly better than this), Truex no longer had either quite the speed or the passion to overcome his team's snafus as he had in previous years. Having failed to win a race in the regular season, he was actually in danger of missing the playoffs after an embarrassing crash on lap 3 at the regular-season finale in the Southern 500, but he narrowly held off Chris Buescher by 7 points. Joe Gibbs Racing seemed to be trying to give him a final win after back-to-back poles at Martinsville and Phoenix to end the season, but it felt like he no longer had the speed to win. Although I acknowledge Truex had an extremely unlucky season (which Ryan McCafferty ranked as the second-unluckiest to Kyle Larson, but since Larson still had a lot of success besides that I'd say Truex was definitely unluckier) he's had bad luck before and his -.022 rating in my stock car model is shocking as it's his first negative rating since 2010 and his worst since -.071 in 2009 when he was drastically outperformed by Juan Pablo Montoya. I suspect Truex could have had more longevity if Small had been replaced by a crew chief comparable to Chris Gabehart or Adam Stevens (who may be the only reason Hamlin and Bell still looked better), but it also didn't seem like he wanted to race full-time anymore so I think he made the correct decision. Despite his relatively short elite period, he's definitely a Hall of Famer and it looks like he's still poised to make a few more starts in the Cup Series. Although I can't really see him winning again, it would be cool to see him win a Daytona 500 since that is one of the main things he lacks (although obviously a Daytona 500 win is not necessary to have a complete Cup Series career anymore).
