I originally had Rovera 58th, but I bumped him up to this tier at the last minute. One of the most versatile sports car drivers of the year, Rovera was the only driver this season to post a speed percentile above 80 in all three of the major league series I collected lap times from: WEC, IMSA, and the European Le Mans Series. While I was unable to find lap times for the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, Rovera and his AF Corse Ferrari teammate Alessandro Pier Guidi won that title despite failing to win a race and that was Rovera's highest-profile accomplishment, but he was equally solid everywhere else. In the WEC (also for AF Corse) the car co-driven by Rovera, Simon Mann, and François Heriau finished 3rd in the championship while the other AF Corse car co-driven by Francesco Castellacci, Thomas Flohr, and Davide Rigon finished 7th. Both teams won once but Rovera and Rigon were clearly the team leaders as Rovera had the best speed percentile in the LMGT3 class at 88.00 to Rigon's 84.97. Rigon narrowly beat Rovera in both lead shares and CRL because Rigon's pass for the lead at Fuji was for the win while Rovera's pass at Bahrain wasn't, but Rovera had one of the most electrifying laps of the season as he drove from 4th to 1st in less than a minute before eventually being passed by Charlie Eastwood, then beating him out of the pits a couple laps later to win. Finally, in ELMS, he and teammates Matthieu Vaxivière and François Perrodo won the LMP2 Pro/Am championship, but here Vaxivière was actually the fastest driver in the class with a speed percentile of 87.68 to Rovera's 82.80 although Rovera was slightly more dominant with 0.72 CRL to Vaxivière's 0.58. Despite winning that championship and two races, none of the three drivers had a pass for the lead. Overall, I think Rovera narrowly belongs at the bottom of the elite tier because he had consistent speed across four different sports car disciplines not to mention winning two titles, but the fact that his speed was still in the same league with drivers like Rigon and Vaxivière who I placed in the C- tier suggest that I shouldn't place him much higher than this.
By many metrics, Power had one of his best IndyCar seasons in a long time, but I suspect that's mainly because the Penske cars had dominant speed than because of his own driving. After a shocking 2023 when Power went winless and had no races with an on-track pass for the lead for the first time since his rookie season of 2006, Power had a significant return to form as his 4 natural races led are his best since 2015, his 4-1 lead change record is the best of his career, and his 3 wins and teammate rating of .307 are his most since 2018. Outside of his wildly undeserved 2022 championship, his 4th-place points finish was also his best since 2018. What stands out most of all is that he definitively outperformed Josef Newgarden this year, which I wouldn't say he did in any of the previous years they were teammates, which thereby explains why he ranks 12th in my open wheel model overall and 3rd in IndyCar, even over Álex Palou. However, while I think this was one of Power's better years for racecraft, you can still tell he's aging as his speed seems to be continuing to decline, but to some extent that was masked by the fact that the Penske cars seemed so dominant this year. His teammate Scott McLaughlin posted the fastest speed percentile in IndyCar at 81.68 for his career-best and Newgarden ranked second with what was also his fastest career speed percentile at 81.41 despite posting his worst season in a decade. Power on the other hand was far off the other two in speed with a speed percentile of 71.27, actually marking a decline from last year's 72.75 when he went winless and the Penske cars were not as fast on road and street courses. Although Newgarden actually beat Power by a larger margin in speed percentile in 2021 and 2022, this was still Power's third-worst defeat and it came in a season where Newgarden ran far worse than he did in those years. It's particularly telling that the driver who has won the most poles in IndyCar history and won the most poles in 10 of 13 seasons from 2010-2022 had his first season without a pole failed to win a pole while McLaughlin won five and Newgarden won two. The fact that he qualified worse is probably why his lead change record was so good because he had to work his way through the pack and win, and to his credit he did that. But it's obviously significantly easier when the cars were as fast as McLaughlin and Newgarden's performance indicated they were. He also had no fastest laps for only the second time since 2009 and one fastest race (tied for his least ever since those data became available in 2013). I think Power did have a great season (mainly because he outperformed Newgarden), but it wasn't the kind of season that really convinced me he was back or he would be able to repeat it. He was just unusually consistent for once while his teammates weren't and lucky he wasn't hit with as stiff a St. Pete penalty too, but his speed decline when both of his teammates had their fastest years ever does not inspire confidence. When the Penske cars inevitably don't have the same kind of edge, I think Power will fall off. And I think it's especially telling that Power only had one pass for the win at Portland while the other two times he took the lead in the pits, and his other three natural races led came in races he didn't win, including Long Beach (where Scott Dixon eventually passed him), and Gateway (where he passed David Malukas for the TNL, but it looked like Malukas was going to pass him for what probably would have been the win before Power wrecked him). This feels hollower to me than it looks on the surface, but I can't argue with him outperforming Newgarden for the first time (which is something I never thought would happen going into the season).
I must have missed whenever he changed his name from Cameron to Cam. Anyway, Waters finished fourth in this year's Supercars championship and you can make a strong case he was actually better than that as he was definitely far closer to the top three points finishers Will Brown, Broc Feeney, and Chaz Mostert in performance than he was to anyone else. He actually ranked better than his 4th place points finish in most statistical categories as he had the 3rd most wins with 4 (ahead of Mostert), 2nd in natural races led with 5 (tied with Feeney and Brown), tied for 2nd in TNL with 5 (ahead of Feeney), 2nd in lead shares with 5 (ahead of Feeney and Brown), 3rd in CRL (ahead of Brown), 3rd in races with the most laps led (ahead of Brown), and 1st in poles with 7. The main thing he seemed to be lacking was speed as he had no fastest laps while the other three had at least 4, 2 fastest races when the other three had at least 3, and a speed percentile of 70.04 that was way off Feeney's 86.54, Brown's 80.44, and Mostert's 79.69. While I don't think he was better than Mostert (who I think was doing more with the second-tier car he had than Waters did), you can make a strong case he outperformed his equipment more than either Feeney or Brown did. My touring car model certainly does as Waters's .229 rating ranks 38th overall and 3rd among Supercars regulars behind Mostert's .342 and (surprisingly) David Reynolds of .237. So I should rank him ahead of Brown and Feeney, right? I don't know. Brown's rating of .177 was not as good but you also need to bear in mind that my touring car model has been vastly underrating Brodie Kostecki and Brown the whole time so therefore it also underrates anyone who was teammates with them, which means Brown's actual performance has to be higher than my rating has it. I ultimately think Brown should be higher not so much because he won the title as his overall versatility. Both Brown and Waters did a lot of extracurricular driving as well and Brown was a lot more successful in that regard, winning three races in the GT World Challenge Australia while Waters's NASCAR forays didn't go nearly as well. It would be easier to make a case for Waters over Feeney, but I elected to go with Feeney since in addition to Feeney earning the most wins and leading many other categories by a large margin, it simply seems like Feeney is progressing much more quickly than Waters is. To some extent, I do grade on a curve by rating drivers who overachieve in the earlier years of their career better than I would rate those seasons by an established veteran (that's why for instance I ranked Joel Sturm and Morris Schuring higher than Richard Lietz, or Carson Hocevar in the C tier when his stats are probably closer to C-, or listed Ty Gibbs and left Bubba Wallace and Alex Bowman off, etc...) Feeney has now won 12 races and almost caught up to Waters's 15 even though he only just turned 22 years old (younger than Waters was when he won his first race. Essentially, I think Feeney might be a generational talent while Waters isn't and although perhaps that shouldn't color my opinions with regard to single-season evaluations, but I don't think I can avoid it.
I am of two minds with regard to Reddick's 2024 season. On the surface, most people would say this is the best season of his career because he won the regular season championship for the first time, made the Championship 4 for the first time, and had by far his most consistent season in the Cup Series, but while he is definitely consistently performing better in his weaker races than he used to, I also think his good races aren't as good and he had fewer knockout races than he did in 2023 or (especially) 2022, when I rated him higher in a year he led the Cup Series in lead shares. Ryan McCafferty agreed as Reddick was not the highest-rated driver in his model in a race this season and his teammate Bubba Wallace seemed to outperform him on short tracks more often than not and I didn't even list him. Reddick seemed to give up some of his dominance and blinding speed in exchange for more consistency, which leaves me in a weird place since I tend to rate drivers more based on their stronger performances than their weaker. It's like Reddick was conditioning himself to compete using the old Latford points system's incentives where avoiding DNFs was more important than winning yet he still ended up not being the most consistent driver. His first drafting-track win at Talladega may have locked him into the playoffs, but it also felt rather hollow as he wasn't running that great until the Toyotas pitting first effectively handed him the lead when John Hunter Nemechek wrecking his teammate Erik Jones allowed Reddick to stay out of the pits and grab the lead. In a race where it was difficult for anyone to penetrate the front row, that greatly assisted his charge to victory. Over the summer, it felt like there were several races like Nashville and the Chicago street course where he should have blasted through the field to win but he screwed up and failed to do so but he did make up for this with a strong win at Michigan where he made three passes for the lead late to win despite only leading 15 laps and scoring no stage points. That race gave him his seventh straight finish of 6th or better, but his consistency plummeted as he only had a single top five in the last third of the season. Like most Toyota drivers except for Christopher Bell, Reddick had a very mediocre playoffs and only barely backed into the Round of 8 before a wildly erratic penultimate round where he flipped at Las Vegas before winning the next race at Homestead (becoming the first driver to flip in one race and win the next since Rusty Wallace in 1993). That landed him a spot in the Championship 4, but he was by far the slowest of the drivers to make it there as he wasn't even close to Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, or William Byron in speed despite eventually finishing in 6th. I didn't really know what to do with this because he definitely had more consistency than in previous years but it definitely fizzled out and he won just as much in previous years but his wins were nowhere near as dominant. I think the reason I still put him in the top 50 was his clutch performance. Although he did not deserve to win the regular season title in any way as Kyle Larson outperformed him drastically, it was a really gritty performance to come out on top there by a single point over Larson despite a stomach virus. And his last lap at Homestead was truly epic as he overcame flipping the previous week and passed both his boss Denny Hamlin and Ryan Blaney on the outside in an epic move to lock himself in the Championship 4. But then he had another of the worst runs of his career at Martinsville... See what I mean? He was a little more consistent but still not really consistent and a little less dominant but there were still real flashes of brilliance there. I think the clutch performances make me feel more comfortable placing him in the top 50 than not, but I was right on the fence with both him and Hamlin until I was finally ranking.
Although he and his teammate Filipe Albuquerque finished 6th in the IMSA GTP championship and Ricky was only the third-fastest driver at Wayne Taylor Racing with a speed percentile of 55.10 to Albuquerque's 59.25 and Louis Delétraz's 55.53, I have decided to include Ricky as the only WTR driver in the top 100 and also the second-highest rated driver in the class. The main reason for that is because he led all drivers in the class with 1.85 lead shares and 2 TNL while his three teammates combined for only 0.88 lead shares. Ricky was almost single-handedly responsible for the team's one win at Detroit, where he earned an entire lead share for passing Mathieu Jaminet for the win. He also made the final pass for the lead against Bent Viscaal at Road America but Jaminet turned the tables and ended up with the win after Ricky was forced to pit under a late caution. Ricky was also made a pass for the lead against Maxime Martin. As I write this, I'm starting to feel I should have rated Ricky lower and dropped him out of the top 50 instead of Kenta Yamashita, so I will likely make that change whenever I review him historically for my 1,000 greatest drivers list.
Although Hamilton returned to victory lane for the first time since 2021 with wins at Silverstone and Spa, I have to rate him a lot lower than I did in 2023 because he significantly dominated his Mercedes teammate George Russell this year while this year was the other way around. Although on the surface, Russell and Hamilton looked fairly similar with bot drivers winning two races and Russell beating Hamilton by 22 points (less than one race's worth of points), Russell beat him a lot worse than that implies as he finished ahead 13-7 in races and 19-5 in qualifying in the 2024 season. Both of Hamilton's wins came in races Russell failed to finish, while Hamilton finished both of Russell's wins. Admittedly, Hamilton had already passed Russell for the lead at Silverstone before Norris passed him, so I would say he probably outran Russell in that one before Russell retired due to a water leak and Hamilton beat Norris out of the pits to win. At Spa, on the other hand, Russell had the win on track after his one-stop strategy beat Hamilton's two-stop due to his car being underweight so you could more easily argue Hamilton backed into that one. Having said that, Hamilton did make the race's only pass because he passed the polesitter Charles Leclerc before Russell took the lead on pit strategy. Russell solidly defeated Hamilton in most categories this year, but perhaps not by as much as the head-to-head finishing and qualifying records imply. I suspect Hamilton might have run a little worse just because he had already announced he was leaving to go to Ferrari so Russell was favored, much like how Daniel Ricciardo seemed to be favored over Sebastian Vettel at Red Bull in 2014 before he went to Ferrari, so especially in that context, Hamilton was solid and I might be underrating him. Having said that, he did only rank 39th in my open wheel model between Scott Dixon and Christian Lundgaard, who I rated a lot lower. Maybe this is a proper compromise.
It was a tale of two seasons for Vergne, whose Formula E performance was very impressive even though I feel like his performances in the World Endurance Championship were relatively lackluster. Although Vergne finished 6th in Formula E points and failed to win a race, he was still very impressive as his 7 natural races led are tied with FE champion Pascal Wehrlein for second-most in the series and his 1.99 lead shares ranked 3rd in the series as he and Mitch Evans were the only FE drivers who had the most lead shares in 3 different races. Vergne was also tied with Wehrlein and Evans for the most poles with 3 despite a curious lack of race speed since his speed percentile was actually below average 49.85, thereby suggesting he was dramatically punching above his weight. My model also confirms this as Vergne ranked 6th globally and 3rd among Formula E drivers in my model at .411 thanks to his 12-4 defeat of fellow series champion Stoffel Vandoorne, who finished 10th in points. Vergne actually rated higher than all three championship contenders Wehrlein, Evans, and Nick Cassidy in my model as the sole two-time champion of the series still seems to be one of the top drivers even if his DS Penske engines were not as strong as he was. However, his WEC performance was not as impressive as he only was the 4th fastest of the six Peugeot drivers with a speed percentile of 35.42. He was slower than both of his co-drivers Mikkel Jensen (47.04) and Nico Müller (44.36) and since Müller also had a higher driver rating based on his Formula E starts, I have to take him higher. I don't think I can rate Vergne too highly in the top 50 when considering he didn't win a race and the fact that I think Müller was better, but his Formula E numbers are so impressive given how slow his cars were that I did want to place him in the top 50.
Pernía remains Argentina's greatest touring car driver this year as he earned his third consecutive championship in Argentina's TC2000 series, where he won five times although it does seem like part of his dominance comes down to the dominance of his Renault team the past few years when you consider that his 20-year-old son Tiago joined him as a teammate and won four of his first five starts as a rookie. That does make me question how much of Leonel's dominance is down to him and how much is down to the cars, but Leonel did have impressive accomplishments in other series this year as well. Although neither of them quite ran full-time schedules in the TCR South America championship due to their TC2000 commitments, Pernía and Matías Rossi (who finished second to Pernía in the TC2000 championship) tied for the most wins in TCR South America as well with three. Rossi finished higher in points there, finishing fourth to Pernía's sixth but I think Pernía's advantage over Rossi in TC2000 (he won the title by 62 points) was a lot bigger than Rossi's advantage over Pernía in TCR South America. Pernía was the highest-rated of all the Argentinean drivers in my touring car model this year, although Rossi did not appear on the list because he did not have enough teammate comparisons against drivers who were already integrated into the model.
Da Costa led all Formula E drivers with four wins this season (which all occurred over a five-race span) but only finished 6th in the championship while his teammate Pascal Wehrlein won the championship. You can't really argue da Costa outperformed Wehrlein since Wehrlein did better in nearly all categories other than wins as he had 7 natural races led to da Costa's 5, 2.75 lead shares to da Costa's 1.68, 2.5 CRL to da Costa's 1.9, 3 poles to da Costa's 0, and 3 fastest races to da Costa's 1. Although da Costa was slightly faster with a speed percentile of 67.14 to Wehrlein's 61.65, Wehrlein did a lot more with the speed he did have. Da Costa was fairly lucky as his first win at Berlin came after Mitch Evans activated his attack mode so it was not a competitive pass and he also inherited the win at the first Portland race after Evans (the winner on track) received a five-second penalty for contact with Jake Hughes, which dropped him to eighth and ultimately cost him the championship as it turned out. Da Costa only ranked 37th in my open wheel model this year and 12th among Formula E drivers but I nonetheless decided to include him towards the bottom of my elite tier because his other numbers were generally closer to the three main championship contenders (Wehrlein, Evans, and Nick Cassidy) than they were to any other driver. Cassidy led the points standings for most of the season but da Costa's 1.68 lead shares, 1.90 CRL, and speed percentile of 67.14 were only barely worse than Cassidy's 1.71 lead shares, 2.13 CRL, and speed percentile of 69.74. Furthermore, da Costa was actually faster than Evans in addition to being faster than Wehrlein and ranked 3rd in speed percentile for the season. Although da Costa ended up not quite becoming a championship contender because he had such a slow start, his strong second half is enough for me to take him over Rowland and even the winless Vergne but not enough for me to take him over another driver who drastically outperformed his equipment.
Although Toyota's WEC Hypercar operation has really fallen off now that they have competition and no longer win titles effectively by default, Kobayashi remains one of the best sports car drivers in the world and the obvious leader of the Toyota squad. He arguably had more top-level speed than any other WEC driver this year. Although Kobayashi's speed percentile of 75.83 ranked behind Estre's best-in-class 82.42, Kobayashi seemed to be faster in his fastest races as he was the only Hypercar driver with multiple fastest laps (2) and fastest races (3). Weirdly, neither Kobayashi nor Estre had a pass for the lead this season while a lot of their teammates did, which is probably one reason I rated both of them lower than I normally would with the kind of raw numbers they put up. Four of the other five Toyota drivers (Ryō Hirakawa, Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and Mike Conway) had passes for the lead but only Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries did not. Kobayashi was almost the most dominant driver though with 0.52 CRL to Buemi's 0.53. However, I probably value speed more than any other statistic in terms of endurance sports car racing both because passes are so rare and it is the best way to evaluate the performance of different drivers in the same car, and Kobayashi had a lot of speed as none of his teammates were close to him (Hirakawa: 64.29, Buemi: 61.14, Hartley: 57.22, de Vries: 55.59, Conway: 51.50) although his advantage was not nearly as pronounced as that of Dries Vanthoor. To be honest, I was going to have Kobayashi 35th and Vanthoor 41st, but I decided to flip 'em as I was writing both because Vanthoor had more wins this season and because he beat a similarly-strong stable of teammates by an even worse margin. Dries also gets a bonus because he was highly successful in his non-WEC starts in the SRO sports car series, while Kobayashi's Super Formula season was not good as his teammate Nirei Fukuzumi beat him nearly 3-1 in points and 6-2 in their teammate head-to-head, which resulted in Kobayashi ranking only 69th in my open wheel model at -.198, making him arguably more similar to Callum Ilott than to Dries Vanthoor. Nonetheless, I'm going to give Kobayashi a major edge because he was dominating stronger teammates (yes, I realize one of Ilott's teammates was Jenson Button this year, but I don't think he's particularly good anymore).
I basically chose Sainz over Lewis Hamilton because it seemed like Sainz came closer to Charles Leclerc than Hamilton did to George Russell. They were both in similar situations as lame-duck drivers with Hamilton ultimately announced as Sainz's replacement for 2025, but I think Sainz was better this year (even though I do think Hamilton was probably a better choice for next year). He ranked 24th in my open wheel model at .210, only barely worse than Leclerc's .232 and 8th overall in F1. Although he only had one pass for the lead this year, it was an epic one as he overtook Max Verstappen at Mexico City, asserting himself after Verstappen in one of his biggest dick moves shoved him off the track at the start. While it's a little rough that he got demoted to Williams (one of the worst teams on the grid) despite not really doing anything wrong and despite the fact that there are so many rookies entering in 2025 (which likely could have offered him better opportunities if he'd waited), it was nice to see him get what was in all likelihood his final win and it was nice to see him successfully stand up to Verstappen.
After the wildly-overrated Tom Blomqvist bombed out of IndyCar after crashing on the first lap of the Indy 500, that made O'Ward the highest-rated driver overall in my open wheel model, but admittedly his rating of .263 isn't that much higher than Álex Palou, Scott Dixon, and Josef Newgarden who are all rated between .235 and .236, suggesting that he would only beat those three drivers 52.7-52.8% of the time if they were in equal equipment and on a historical level, they're all effectively evenly-matched (although Dixon has not been up to his usual standard the past couple years and Newgarden for some reason wasn't this year). O'Ward was not as good this year as he was in 2022 or 2023 when he was the highest-rated IndyCar driver in my open wheel model. This time he only ranked 21st overall and 6th in IndyCar, although his rating of .241 wasn't much below his career average so it's not like he wildly underachieved or anything. He was actually tied with Scott McLaughlin and Will Power for the most wins this year with 3 and obviously the McLaren cars were not as fast as the Penske cars this season. I think O'Ward's equipment deficit was definitely enough to rank him over Power but McLaughlin beat him too badly in almost every other statistical category for me to consider ranking him much higher than this. What I missed from O'Ward was the sheer dominance he had shown in earlier seasons. While this was the first time he won three races in a season, he's had better seasons in every other statistical category and it seems like he was pretty lucky to win three times. Obviously, he inherited the win at St. Pete Chase Elliott-style in a race where he led no laps when Josef Newgarden and McLaughlin were both disqualified. He did win and dominate the first race at Milwaukee, but besides that the Indy 500 was the only other race he led naturally and although I would say O'Ward outperformed his teammate Alexander Rossi, they were really close, and O'Ward still got outdueled by Newgarden at the end of that race and Colton Herta at the end of the Gateway race, suggesting despite winning three times he wasn't as much of a clutch performer as he has been in previous years. His performance was still there, but the main reason I feel this year was worse was because Rossi came a lot closer to him in performance than in 2023 when O'Ward actually nearly swept him. Indeed, even though O'Ward still beat Rossi even in their teammate head-to-head, he did so by a smaller margin than expected and Rossi actually rated higher than him. I don't agree with that. I know there were a lot of people saying because of some of O'Ward's sloppy mistakes in the first half of the season that McLaren had fired "its best driver". O'Ward outran Rossi substantially in his entire stint there, let's not get that twisted. But Rossi definitely did come a lot closer to him in 2024 than in 2023. He improved from 16.51 points behind in speed percentile (82.86-66.35) to 12.70 (75.89-63.19), which is admittedly still far behind. Rossi also had 6 passes for the lead in the Indy 500 (his first since 2020) and he was not far off O'Ward's 8 passes for the lead this year, but O'Ward still consistently outran him. However, the fact that it was by a significantly smaller margin is the main reason why I ranked O'Ward lower this time.
O'Ward's entire season was arguably overshadowed by Mark Miles dissing him by saying that he isn't as famous as the previous Mexican star Adrián Fernández. For all the shit Miles got, I think this is probably true if for no other reason than because IndyCar's popularity plummeted due to the split (which happened before O'Ward was even born) and also because the late '90s/early 2000s still had a monoculture. The equivalently big versions of the same things will inevitably be smaller than their predecessors if only because the culture has fragmented as fewer and fewer people have their eyes on the same things, so I suspect Fernández actually was bigger in Mexico, but I do think relative to IndyCar's popularity at the time and the current era of celebrity when almost all celebrities are more niche than the equivalently-placed celebrities in previous eras, O'Ward is more popular. (Also a far better driver than Fernández who was far worse than his stats implied and is actually below average in my open wheel model.) O'Ward responded to the controversy by delivering his Milwaukee win in style, then bought a billboard with the text "Pato WHO?" which is admittedly very funny. He's certainly better at creating his own media than Fernández was because Fernández came at a time when CART knew how to market itself so he didn't have to learn the art of self-promotion to the same extent O'Ward did. It's particularly telling that O'Ward has more followers on Instagram than IndyCar itself does.
One of the most underrated drivers in the world right now, Müller was a major player in both his Formula E and World Endurance Championship appearances. A driver who I snubbed last year but maybe I shouldn't have, Müller had a season very similar season to the aforementioned Jean-Éric Vergne as he wildly overachieved in FE for a below-average team and steamrolled a past series champion. In Müller's case that was Lucas di Grassi, who he beat 52 points to 4 despite missing two races due to his WEC commitments (a much larger margin than even Vergne beat Stoffel Vandoorne, but I admittedly think di Grassi is more washed up than Vandoorne is). This made him the 5th-highest rated driver in my open wheel model overall at .462 and 2nd to Edoardo Mortara (who also stomped on another FE champion in Nyck de Vries) in the series. Müller wasn't as dominant as Vergne was as his cars seemed to be slower and his speed percentile of 44.41 was slightly less than Vergne's 49.85, but he still had three natural races led and ranked 11th in lead shares (.30) and 13th in CRL (.38) with the 14th fastest speed. Even though it would appear that Müller did not outperform his cars in Formula E by as great a margin as Vergne did, I have to take Müller over Vergne because not only did he outperform him in my teammate model but he was also the only one of the six Peugeot WEC drivers to have an on-track pass for the lead and he ranked second in speed for that team with a speed percentile 44.36, narrowly behind Mikkel Jensen's 47.04, but considerably ahead of Vergne's 35.42, and Vergne co-drove the same car. While both Müller and Vergne significantly overachieved in FE according to my teammate model, Müller's greater performance in the same car in WEC is why I placed him higher.
Although Feeney finished second in Supercars points to his Triple Eight Race Engineering teammate Will Brown, who replaced Shane van Gisbergen there after SVG defected to NASCAR, you can make a strong case that Feeney was actually better. Despite the fact that Feeney was only 21 years old for most of the season, he led all drivers with 6 wins, 6.01 CRL, 8 races with the most laps led, 6 fastest races, and a speed percentile of 86.54. He led five statistical categories while Brown only led two in what was definitely an overrated championship season for him. Having said that, while Brown doesn't seem to have the blinding speed of Feeney (who already has more career wins with 12 to Brown's 10), he seems to still have a lot better racecraft, which is certainly understandable for a driver who is four years older. Even though Feeney was faster and more dominant, Brown beat him 14-10 in finishes and was a substantially better duelist with a series-best 3-0 lead change record while Feeney had a losing record of 2-3. That also gave Brown more TNL (5-4) and lead shares (4.67-4.33) as a result, indicating that Brown was probably more responsible for his own dominance than Feeney was even if Feeney was arguably more dominant. You can pretty much ignore my teammate model for this one as Feeney's rating was putrid because my model incorrectly thinks Brown is a below average touring car driver, which makes Feeney look a lot worse than he was. Ultimately, the reasons why I rated Brown higher were that he had better racecraft, that he did win the title, that he earned a marquee race win at the Sandown 500 while Feeney didn't, and that he also had wins in GT World Challenge Australia while Feeney did nothing outside of Supercars. However, I also think Brown only won the title this year just because he was more experienced. This reminds me a lot of Bobby Labonte winning the 2000 NASCAR Cup Series title because he was more experienced and therefore consistent than Tony Stewart before Stewart outperformed him in every future season. I expect the same thing to happen here and I think from this point on, Feeney is going to overtake Brown to become the perennial championship favorite unless Chaz Mostert finally gets the championship-caliber ride he deserves.
Although King finishes second simultaneously in Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany (the series where most of the Porsche Supercup stars also run simultaneously) to Larry ten Voorde, he had a great season in his own right as he was the highest-rated Porsche Supercup driver in my touring car model, ranking 11th among touring car drivers globally with a rating of .415, although he was slightly behind his 2023 Porsche Supercup teammate Harri Jones in the Porsche system overall as Jones's season in Porsche Carrera Cup Australia came out as more impressive in my model. The reason why I still listed King instead is because Porsche Supercup and PCC Germany are simply both higher-tier major league series while I consider PCC Australia to be much more minor league. Although King won fewer races in Porsche Supercup in 2024 (1) than in 2023 (3), he finished higher in points as he was 3rd in 2023 and he was a much more prolific winner this year with four wins in PCC Germany, three in PCC Middle East, and a class win at the Bathurst 12 Hour where he and co-drivers Alessio Picariello and Yasser Shahin finished 9th overall in the Pro-Am class. Although it's hard to find reporting on who will be racing in Porsche Supercup in 2025 since next year's grid is not scheduled to be announced until March 15, if ten Voorde stops competing in the series full-time as expected and King remains there, it's hard to imagine him not being the championship favorite.
As much as I don't want to give credence to the stupidest racing meme of the year, I do think Dries Vanthoor was the better of the two Vanthoor brothers this year even though Laurens won the WEC Hypercar title for the Penske Porsche team while Dries only finished 14th for the BMW M Team WRT squad. Although he failed to win and barely even led, he and his co-drivers Raffaele Marciello and Marco Wittmann did substantially better than Robin Frijns, René Rast, and Sheldon van der Linde in the other car as those drivers only finished 27th in points with 10 points to the Vanthoor team's 39. Furthermore, Dries was actually the 3rd fastest full-timer in the entire Hypercar class with a speed percentile of 74.78, which trailed only Kamui Kobayashi's 75.83 and Kévin Estre's 82.42. Dries hung all his teammates out to dry this year as none of them were even close to him in speed, with van der Linde having a speed percentile of 59.24, Frijns 45.37, Marciello 38.95, Wittmann 33.81, Rast 30.45. He had a larger speed advantage over his set of teammates than arguably any other driver in the class. The only driver who even looks comparable in that regard is Callum Ilott, but Vanthoor was definitely a lot better than Ilott because he had much stronger teammates. Rast, van der Linde, and Wittmann all won DTM races this year while Frijns and Marciello was one of the best sports car drivers last year (which he definitely wasn't this year). For Vanthoor to blow out drivers like that is definitely one of the strongest performances of the year even though it didn't seem like any of the BMWs were competitive for wins. This still wasn't quite Dries's best season as he only finished 2nd in points with 3 wins in the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup (a championship he won three years in a row from 2020-2022), but he was still better than Laurens since Dries was the fastest BMW driver by a large margin while Laurens was far off of Porsche team leader Estre, and ended up being slower than Dries despite having a faster car.
Probably the best IMSA driver in a year I think most of the top IMSA drivers underachieved, Aitken didn't win a race in his first full-time IMSA GTP season after winning the 12 Hours of Sebring as a part-timer last year, but he was arguably the most dominant driver of the year as he led the way with 5 natural races led, a 5-1 lead change record, 0.86 CRL, and a speed percentile of 76.16. He also ranked a fairly close second in lead shares with 1.39 to Ricky Taylor's 1.85, but Aitken impresses me more than Taylor as his 5-1 record was far better than Taylor's 3-2 and he crushed Taylor in speed. He also crushed his teammate Pipo Derani in speed, as Derani's speed percentile of 59.30 was mediocre in comparison. Although Aitken and Derani were actually rather close in dominance, with Aitken beating Derani 1.39-1.21 in lead shares and 0.86-0.76 in CRL, Aitken was way better. Not only did he have such a massive speed advantage, he was a lot less mistake-prone (unlike Derani flipping himself at Sebring and costing Aitken a chance at back-to-back victories) and he also had accomplishments outside of IMSA. Aitken also competed in DTM in 2024 where he only finished eighth in points but led more statistical categories than any driver, including the DTM champion Mirko Bortolotti. In DTM, Aitken led in natural races led (4; tied with Bortolotti), wins (3; tied with Kelvin van der Linde), TNL (4; tied with Bortolotti), lead shares (4), races with the most lead shares (4; tied with Bortolotti); races with the most laps led (4; tied with Bortolotti), poles (4), and fastest races (3). The main issue Aitken faced in both series was a lack of consistency, and that was why I kept him out of the top 25 despite being the most dominant driver in two different major league series. Aitken's season reminds me very much of Felipe Fraga's 2022 when he led both IMSA LMP3 and DTM in lead shares but only finished 7th and 16th in points respectively and I placed Fraga in exactly the same position. I swear I didn't do that on purpose. Well, at least I'm consistent.
People continue to underrate Blaney too much. A lot of people still want to call him a Mickey Mouse champion because he only had 8 top fives, 18 top tens, and 562 laps led when his performance was a lot better than that. What people were overlooking and continue to overlook is how badly he has been outperforming Joey Logano in what should be Logano's peak years. A lot of people who liked the Latford points system do sometimes seem to be in denial about the fact that consistency no longer matters in a win-and-in format and the teams have clearly adjusted for that. Team Penske seems to have adapted the strategy of putting disproportionate weight on Phoenix at the expense of other races to maximize their championship chances, and the fact that Logano and Blaney have won three straight titles there indicates they've clearly been very effective for that. While I'm going to dock them somewhat for lacking consistency, when they consistently deliver in the playoffs I think I do have to give them a boost for that. Blaney's season in terms of baseline stats looks almost identical as his 2023 with 3 wins in both seasons, 12 top fives this year to 8 last year, 18 top tens in both years, and 567 laps led to 562 laps led. But in 2023, he won the title and in 2024 he lost it to Logano, so I do have to dock him for that to some extent. While I agree with Ryan McCafferty that Kyle Larson was the best driver in both seasons, Blaney was a lot closer to Larson in all statistical categories in 2023 than 2024, so I also have to dock him for that reason. Blaney was a lot faster this year than in 2023 with a speed percentile of 75.30 as compared to last year's 63.74. He was the fastest Ford driver in 2024 while he was slower than Chris Buescher in 2023, but despite greater speed, a lot of his other advanced statistics declined. His 35-23 lead change record in 2023 was a lot better than his 27-26 this year, and he was a lot more clutch in races with a 4-0 lead change record in 2023 as opposed to 2-3 this year. Blaney losing the lead to Tyler Reddick on the last lap after a move Blaney didn't even seem to defend against would have been really embarrassing if he hadn't made up for it by locking himself into the Championship 4 at Martinsville, but then he ended up losing the title to his teammate. I still think Blaney's 2024 was really good, but there was a definite dip from 2023 when he had 2 TNL to last year's 4, 1.91 lead shares to last year's 3.01, and so on. Although Blaney admittedly beat Logano by significantly worse in terms of speed percentile this season (75.30-60.62) than he did in 2023 (63.74-59.42), Logano came a lot closer to him in terms of performance this time as he was substantially more clutch with a 4-0 TNL record and he actually beat Blaney with 2.03 lead shares to Blaney's 1.91 and was nearly as dominant as Blaney as well (1.70 CRL-1.95). Although Blaney's 2024 season looked almost identical to his 2023 on the surface, the fact that Logano came closer to him in performance while Blaney was substantially further behind Larson this year caused me to rate him lower. I probably would have ranked him in the top 25 if he'd won the title, but he didn't. Nonetheless, I'm still really impressed as he continues to regularly outperform Logano title or not. And even in my model, which hates the Penske drivers, Blaney ranked 7th this season with a rating of .150. If I adjusted by how much all the Penske drivers are likely underrated in my model, he probably would have ranked third in my model behind only Larson and Christopher Bell, which is exactly how I ranked them here.
Although the four-time champion has been the dominant BTCC driver of the last decade, most notably in 2023 when he won 12 times (tied for the most in series history), Sutton had a bit of a championship hangover in 2024 finishing third in points with three wins but it seems like that was more because his cars got slower more than because he himself got worse. This did mark only the second time in the last six years that Sutton has not led BTCC drivers in my teammate model, though he still ranked third in the series and 31st overall with a rating of .253. Sutton also had the best lead change record of the season at 3-0 and he ranked 2nd highest in speed percentile (78.59) actually nosing out the season champion Jake Hill (75.86). The main reason he didn't lead my teammate model this time around was because his principal teammate Dan Cammish came a lot closer to him in performance than he has in previous years. Much like the relationship between Pato O'Ward and Alexander Rossi, Sutton significantly outperformed Cammish as usual but by a smaller margin than before, which is why I have dropped both of them out of the top 25. Sutton still had a better year than his fellow four-time champion Colin Turkington (Hill's teammate), who had better stats and was more dominant probably because he had a faster car than Sutton, but Sutton actually beat him in the championship despite having an inferior car.
Just finished watching the @Netflix Nascar series - cool insights into the sport and charachters really nice job!!
— Maro Engel (@MaroEngel) February 2, 2024
But my personal highlight is “Kyle Larsson is probably the best race car driver on the planet” 😅
F1, WRC, Sportscar Drivers.. Discuss? 😅
I've been thinking about this all year.
It was such a random cheap shot, and I think what bothered me most about it was the implication that any old F1, WRC, or sports car driver was better than Larson. Especially the implication that Engel himself was better than Larson, which is how I read that. Yes, Engel is a very good sports car driver and he admittedly backed up his trash talk with the best season of his career. But I do not think Engel is a living legend like Larson is. Larson is definitely a lock for my 1,000 greatest drivers list. I could totally see Engel making it as well, but if he did it would very much be a career-compiler sort of thing, as he has never come close to hitting the peak level of dominance we have seen from Larson repeatedly. Furthermore, Larson actually has a major league sports car win in the 24 Hours of Daytona, where he was an important contributor to his team in 2015 and nearly matched Scott Dixon in speed before he was even good in the NASCAR Cup Series, which proves that he was able to cross over and win in Engel's playground, something Engel will never do in reverse. This tweet is essentially the reverse of if Chris Buescher said to Kévin Estre, "Man, you suck!" Engel is very good, just like Buescher. But neither of them are great.
That being said, Engel for the first time in his career definitely approached greatness this year and I do have to give it up for him in that regard. In his primary role in the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup, he and his Winward Racing team Lucas Auer won the title and three races, narrowly nosing out Dries Vanthoor and Charles Weerts, who won three straight titles in that series in 2020-2022. I rated Engel substantially higher than Auer (who I didn't include on my top 200 list) because they were also teammates in DTM for Mercedes's factory team and Engel finished 3rd in the DTM championship while Auer was only 10th. This marks a dramatic improvement for Engel over all previous seasons when considering that he never finished better than 10th in DTM points in seven previous seasons, and his touring car rating of .402 was also easily the best of his career, ranking 13th globally amongst touring car drivers but admittedly only 7th in DTM (as I think almost all the DTM drivers except Jack Aitken were overrated in my model because the series doesn't have field inversions like I've said). But one great season does not a career make and even after this year, he still sits just below average at -.002 in my touring car model, although he did make a big jump from -.045 in my original model. Despite not winning in DTM, he was a strong performer with the second-best speed percentile in the series (66.63) while ranking 4th in lead shares with 1.33. He did win the pole for the second Nürburgring race and might've won it if René Rast hadn't spun him out. Engel also had two more wins in other series, winning the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup season finale at Jeddah with Auer and Daniel Morad and more significantly, he won the FIA GT World Cup at Macau, which ties Edoardo Mortara for the most wins (4) in that prestigious event. After this year, I'm taking him a lot more seriously as a top 1,000 driver candidate than I would have entering the season and I might be leaning "yes" at this point. But Kyle Larsson (sic) is still better than him. And it's not even close.
Rovanperä intentionally stopped competing in the World Rally Championship full-time, so I guess I have to take Thierry Neuville over him just because he won the title, but I still think Rovanperä is easily the better driver even though I reluctantly rated Neuville higher for having the better season. Despite only starting 7 of the 13 WRC events, Rovanperä led the way with 4 wins and finished 7th in points, so it seems pretty clear to me that if he didn't drop back to part-time competition, he would have easily won the title, which is why I left Neuville out of the top 25 when I saw people actually complaining that Autosport rated him 10th. Rovanperä looks like he's in the middle of a sports car transition as he started competing in the Porsche Carrera Cup Benelux series, where he won three times and finished fourth in the championship. Although he missed the Spa and Assen rounds of the PCC Benelux series due to WRC conflicts, he had the most wins in that series as well and he also had a higher average points per race than the champion Dirk Schouten. Granted, PCC Benelux is one of the shallowest of all the Carrera Cup series and it's not like Rovanperä had much in the way of significant competition except for Kobe Pauwels, who I rated highly in 2023 based on his TCR Europe performances before he kind of strangely sucked this year.
Now we go through a run of major league motorsports champions who have been wildly overrated by the general motorsports press and I have pointedly decided to leave all of them out of my top 25/elite tier because there were elements of mediocrity in all of their seasons that I don't think were frequently acknowledged. Even though I tend to rate touring car drivers much, much higher on my lists than most people do, I'm starting to think Supercars drivers are vastly overrated relative to drivers in more obscure touring car series who aren't any worse but receive markedly less attention from international racing fans. I certainly get it to some extent as Scott McLaughlin becoming a championship contender in IndyCar and Shane van Gisbergen winning races in NASCAR suggests these drivers are more adaptable to other major league disciplines than those in other touring car series. I for one remain unconvinced. While McLaughlin and SVG are unquestionably two of the best overall drivers of the last twenty years, not every Supercars champion is McLaughlin or SVG. I think Supercars is currently going through a bit of a fallow period in terms of talent right now after McLaughlin, Jamie Whincup, and SVG all either left the series or dropped to part-time after 2020. By all rights, this is a period when Chaz Mostert should be dominating but his cars just haven't been fast enough so that has resulted in a bit of a power vacuum where drivers like Brodie Kostecki and Brown who I think aren't up to the usual level of Supercars champions won titles against unusually shallow fields until whichever drivers dominate the next era emerge (Broc Feeney). I've declared both of them the most overrated drivers in the world in recent years as a result, but a lot of it is my frustration that it seems like Supercars drivers are the only touring car drivers anyone ever talks about (when I think a number of drivers in the BTCC, TCR World Tour, Stock Car Brasil/Pro, DTM, and Porsche Supercup are just as good/better but get 10% of the attention). I'm not saying Brown doesn't deserve a high placement, but this is why I don't think he had a top 25 season. Kostecki admittedly wore me down and I ranked him 19th last year, but that year was a lot better as he clearly outperformed Brown in nearly all metrics last year (and at least he won a title while SVG was still there), while Brown this time was largely indistinguishable from Feeney and benefited hugely from the fact that Kostecki failed to start the season. Indeed, Feeney beat Brown in wins (6-5), crushed him in CRL (6.01-2.60), races with the most laps led (8-2), fastest races (6-3), and beat him speed percentile (86.54-80.44) even though Feeney just turned 22 while Brown is 26 and the fact that Feeney already has more wins than Brown (12-10) suggests Brown is not likely going to remain better for long (in fact, I literally expect Feeney to begin dominating him in 2025). But as I revealed in the Feeney entry, I still rated Brown higher because he won the title, had better racecraft with a 3-0 lead change record to Feeney's 2-3 which also gave him the edge in TNL and lead shares, a marquee race win in the Sandown 500, beat him 14-10 in shared finishes, and also had three wins in the GT World Challenge Australia while Feeney did not. But I think it will become obvious in retrospect that Kostecki and Brown primarily benefited from the fact that so many recent champions left the series as they came of age before Feeney came of age. It's just disappointing to me that Mostert didn't get an opportunity to drive for Triple Eight when he's more talented than either of them right now and also that drivers in other touring car series get ignored. Kostecki, Brown, and Cam Waters already proved in their NASCAR starts that they aren't quite transcendent talents like SVG is, which any Supercars fan could tell you. I'd be a lot more interested to see what Ashley Sutton could do in NASCAR than any of these guys, but the BTCC just doesn't have a large enough profile to produce stars. It wasn't an undeserved title really. Brown still ranked 5th among Supercars drivers in my touring car model and if he wasn't so underrated in my model overall (which I do acknowledge), I'm sure his current seasons would be coming out higher. But it also feels like he kind of won by default because SVG left, Kostecki missed the start of the season, Mostert didn't have a fast enough car, and Feeney just wasn't experienced enough to capitalize and take over team leadership at Triple Eight. Feeney over the next half decade I suspect is going to make this whole Kostecki/Brown era look really silly in hindsight.
After a long string of top five points finishes but no titles, the driver who was effectively the World Rally Championship equivalent of what Hélio Castroneves was in IndyCar or Denny Hamlin was in NASCAR (never the best driver except maybe once, but a perpetual winner, outside championship contender, and marquee race winner) managed to break through and win an unexpected championship. However, to an extent it feels like he won the title by default because the two most dominant drivers of the last decade (Kalle Rovanperä and Sébastien Ogier) both competed part-time and it feels like they're both still more talented. Neuville won only 2/13 rallies while Ogier won 3/10 and Rovanperä won 4/7. It feels like this would have pretty obviously been Rovanperä's third straight title if he'd contested it and I'm not sure how much credit to give Neuville for largely backing into a title because the dominant drivers dropped back to part-time. I still ended up rating Neuville two slots higher than Rovanperä (while thinking Rovanperä is still clearly the better driver) essentially on volume. Neuville's 242 points over 13 rallies gave him a slightly better average than Rovanperä's 114 points in 7 rallies (18.61-16.29) but a lot of that was solely due to consistency as Neuville only had one finish outside the top eight while Rovanperä's finishes outside his wins were all 31st or worse. That led me to reluctantly take Neuville higher even though Rovanperä had a more diverse season without question. While he might not be the absolute worst champion in WRC history, I think he's definitely a below-average one as he never really took control of the series while the previous years' dominant drivers were still running full-time. Granted, the same thing could be said for Ogier and he was one of the best drivers in the world for a decade so maybe Neuville will have more longevity than I suspect, but I'm not convinced. He did still beat full-timers Elfyn Evans and Ott Tänak who have been perennial contenders for years but he also only beat Tänak 6-5 in their teammate head-to-head and it seems like he mostly won that because Tänak was less consistent than because Neuville was particularly dominant: they both won twice but Tänak had four poor finishes to Neuville's one. I did end up rating him with the highest-rated WRC season, but I definitely don't think in a vacuum that he was, is, or ever will be the best driver there. He does deserve props for winning his second Monte Carlo Rally though.
I saw a lot of people complaining that Palou was "only" ranked 4th on Autosport's Top 50 list since it seems like a lot of people felt he should be second since he won the IndyCar title and people are most likely to say that IndyCar is the second-most prestigious racing series in the world. By contrast, I think this is one of the lowkey worst title seasons in IndyCar this century. It's not quite as bad as Will Power's 2022 (which I ranked 32nd) but I think it's honestly quite close. Statistically, they're eerily similar: both drivers had 2 natural races led, Palou had a 1-2 lead change record to Power's 2-6, Palou had 2 wins to Power's 1, 2 TNL to Power's 1, 1.67 in lead shares to Power's 1.14, 2.27 CRL to Power's 2.03, 4 races with the most laps led to Power's 2, 3 poles to Power's 5, 1 fastest lap to Power's 2, 3 fastest races to Power's 1, and a speed percentile of 69.06 to Power's 68.35. Yes, Palou was better in almost all categories and I will acknowledge his cars probably weren't as fast. At least he was clearly the team leader at Chip Ganassi Racing this year which Power wasn't at Penske that year (and to be honest, I probably overrated that Power season). But what really stands out about Palou this year is that he became the first champion (including both sides of the split) to lead none of the statistical categories I track since Gil de Ferran in 2000. And even that season (which I gave an E) is still better because de Ferran brought Penske back from the dead after they went winless for three years (not to mention setting the fastest qualifying lap in motorsports history), as opposed to Palou who just had a significantly worse version of his previous championship season. Palou declined in literally every statistical category except poles (he had 3 instead of 2). I realize he also won that Thermal Club... fiasco and I think that meant a lot to the drivers and teams, but is that really going to be part of his legacy in the long run? A couple more things stand out. One of them is the one pass for the lead. Would you believe Sting Ray Robb actually had more passes for the lead this season than Palou did? It's actually true. Robb had two passes for the lead at the Indy 500 while Palou had one at Laguna Seca. Last year, he had 14. Finally, he entered the 2024 season as one of the three major IndyCar drivers who had never won on an oval. The other two (Scott McLaughlin and Colton Herta) cleared their goose-eggs leaving Palou as the sole IndyCar superstar who is winless on ovals. If you're going to argue IndyCar (which many people consider second-rate relative to F1) is the second-most prestigious series in the world, it has to be for the combination of ovals and road courses, so should a driver who does next to nothing on ovals except for the Indy 500 (he is the only IRL/IndyCar champion since 1999 to have not won it, by the way) really be rated as the second-best driver in the world like a lot of people want? Just winning the IndyCar championship does not automatically make you one of the best drivers in the world that year since all championships are not created equal. People realize it when it's Joey Logano, but they fail to realize it when the points system is actually good. But even good points systems get it wrong sometimes and I would say this is an example. McLaughlin was a lot more dominant than Palou and while his equipment was better, I think the gap between McLaughlin and Palou's performance exceeded the gap in their equipment. Herta overachieved in his equipment by a lot more than Palou did as well. Here's a comparison for you: Palou in 2023 beat Marcus Ericsson in speed percentile 83.46-74.33 (a margin of 9.13 percentage points). Herta in 2024 beat Ericsson 74.55-60.19 (14.36 percentage points). I realize Ericsson should probably be expected to do worse after changing teams, but Herta's relative performance was better even when compared to Palou's much stronger 2023. Herta was clearly better this year, title or not. So if you look at the data more closely and realize Palou was only the 3rd best IndyCar driver, my placement starts to make a lot more sense (especially when in my opinion, Formula E has a better field than IndyCar too, but nobody wants to hear that since the series is arguably an even bigger joke than NASCAR). I'm still ranking Palou highly. He did well compared to his equipment which did not seem as strong as it did in previous years (although I'll point out that Scott Dixon tied him in wins, which he didn't in Palou's other two title seasons and Dixon was also closer to Palou in speed than his other two title seasons, only losing to him in speed percentile 66.84-69.06 this year). Really, what this feels like to me is a championship hangover season where he somehow backed into the championship, mainly because of Josef Newgarden and McLaughlin's DQs at St. Pete, Will Power and Dixon's decline in speed, and Pato O'Ward and Herta not having fast enough cars. He basically won by default.
Ingram was a really close miss for me and somebody who feels like he belongs in the top 25, but then I looked at everyone I ranked above him and realized I couldn't do it. I think this year was a little top-heavier than the past few years as it seemed like the top drivers in most elite series (with some exceptions: F1, Cup) were all more or less evenly matched with each other so there was no obvious standout in each series. This was especially true when evaluating Formula E, IndyCar, sports car drivers, and the F1 drivers outside Max Verstappen. There were a lot more drivers who were top 25 contenders this year than I think there usually are, so a season like this which feels more like an 18th-20th place season in another year ends up just narrowly missing my E tier, but I don't think I'm wrong that everyone I rated higher was better. The reason this looks wrong to me is that I am ranking him twenty spots lower than Jake Hill, his British Touring Car Championship rival who only beat Ingram for the championship by seven points. However, I definitely think Hill was better. Ingram's numbers actually look slightly better on the surface as he had 10 natural races led to Hill's 9, 8.17 lead shares to Hill's 7.67, 7.35 CRL to Hill's 7.15, 4 poles to Hill's 1, 10 fastest laps to Hill's 1, 9 fastest races to Hill's 1, and a speed percentile of 84.12 to Hill's 75.86. However, Hill also led many statistical categories with a 7-4 lead change record to Ingram's 6-5, 8 wins, TNL, and races with the most lead shares to Ingram's 6, and 8 races with the most laps led to Ingram's 7. It seems like the vast majority of the categories Ingram led had more to do with speed than performance and his season only looks better because his car was faster. It reminds me a great deal of Kevin Harvick's 2018 vs. Kyle Busch's where Harvick put up bigger numbers than Busch but actually was the worse performer because Busch outperformed his car more. Same thing here, although Ingram's 2024 does not look as impressive to me as Harvick's 2018 both because I don't think BTCC is nearly as prestigious as Cup and also because Hill beat Ingram in a lot of statistical categories while Busch really didn't to the same extent. As a result, I rated Ingram just outside of the top 25 and placed Hill in the top ten. Maybe this was too much of a gap, but I don't think so, mainly because Ingram only ranked 4th in my touring car model among BTCC drivers and 40th overall at .224, which was indeed a substantial gap to Hill's .372, which ranked 16th. I do have to give Ingram some points for what was maybe the save of the year in the first Oulton Park race, where he slid through the grass after Ashley Sutton tapped him without losing the lead.
Van Der Linde finished 2nd in the DTM championship in 2024 and ranked 4th overall in my touring car model behind only TCR South America driver Thiago Vivacqua and two other DTM drivers René Rast and Mirko Bortolotti. While I think Bortolotti (the DTM champion) was definitely better, van der Linde definitely was not far behind as he was in the top three in nearly all statistical categories in the series along with Bortolotti and Jack Aitken, but I definitely felt I should take van der Linde over Aitken mainly because he was a lot more consistent. He and Aitken were the only drivers this season who had three wins in a season where Bortolotti only had one, and he was actually the most dominant driver of the season with 2.85 CRL, which narrowly nosed out Aitken's 2.82 and Bortolotti's 2.64. He also led the series in fastest laps with 3 while the other two had none. In most other categories he ranked 2nd or 3rd, with 3 natural races led, TNL, lead shares, races with the most lead shares, races with the most laps led and poles and 2 fastest races despite a surprisingly low speed percentile of 59.64 which only ranked 7th in the series. In his other role in the FIA World Endurance Championship, he was the fastest of the regular Akkodis ASP Team Lexus drivers in the LMGT3 class with a speed percentile of 60.90. Although most of his teammates there were lesser-knowns, he was substantially faster than former WEC champion José María López who co-drove the other Akkodis entry and only had a speed percentile of 44.56. He and Bortolotti were also the only DTM/WEC crossover drivers who led their team in speed and he outperformed his DTM Abt Sportsline teammate Ricardo Feller (who finished 11th in points) by nearly as much as Bortolotti did (Bortolotti's teammate Nicki Thiim finished 13th in points). Although his younger brother Sheldon has typically been better lately, Kelvin was his team leader in both series while Sheldon was not the team leader in either.
As with many young drivers, I am probably giving this season more of a boost than I should be simply because it is only his second full-time season. It's easy to make the case that his year was a lot worse than this and that the McLaren drivers should be rated even lower than where I put them because McLaren won the Constructors' Championship and didn't even really come close to the Drivers' Championship. Norris ranked only 29th overall in my open wheel model while Piastri was 54th with a negative rating of -.038, placing him just behind Sergio Pérez. Needless to say, I don't think he was actually worse than Pérez though. The most impressive aspect of Piastri's season is that he had the best lead change record in F1 at 3-0, which is particularly impressive when Norris also only had 3 passes for the lead but was also passed 8 times. Granted, the same held true for almost all the teammate pairs who could contend to wins as both Ferrari and McLaren had the same situation where both drivers had the same number of on-track lead changes but the superior qualifier ended up having a worse record since they were more likely to be passed for the lead. For example, Charles Leclerc had a 1-3 lead change record to Carlos Sainz, Jr.'s 1-0, George Russell's was 2-4 to Lewis Hamilton's was 2-1, and the same thing applies here. I don't think I can actually make any realistic case that Hamilton was better than Russell, Piastri was better than Norris, or Sainz was better than Leclerc based on this. However, of those three I think Piastri came the closest. He won at the Hungaroring and Baku after passing Norris and Leclerc for the win respectively, and he was also TNL at Monza after passing Norris again before Leclerc beat him out of the pits. The Baku win gave McLaren the lead in the Constructors' Championship so he was definitely instrumental in the team winning that championship. However, Norris was still a lot better than Piastri with a 16-8 lead in head-to-head finishes and 20-4 in qualifying, so I can see why one might think I am overrating this.
I think I've been perpetually underrating Mr. Big House, so when I evaluate the three-time Stock Car Brasil/Pro champion's past seasons to determine his placement on my 1,000 greatest drivers list, don't be surprised if I place some of his recent seasons in higher tiers in retrospect than I originally did at the time. I do think this was probably Casagrande's best season as in addition to winning his third title in the last four years (in the same exact seasons as Álex Palou's three titles, no less) he also won another championship in NASCAR Brasil, which is why I rated him over Palou. You might not have realized there was a NASCAR Brasil and I don't blame you as it was rather lacking in name drivers outside of Casagrande and Daniel Suárez winning in a one-off. However, Suárez did not win against Casagrande as they competed in different classes that weekend. In his main gig, Casagrande won the title for the A. Mattheis/Vogel team while his teammate Lucas Foresti finished 15th in the championship. He always dunks on his teammates in his championship seasons as Foresti finished 19th in 2023 and Gustavo Lima finished 25th in 2021, but weirdly he never seems to finish as highly in my touring car model as all of that implies, which is maybe why I haven't been rating him as highly as I should when he's probably one of the best drivers in the world right now. Casagrande may have only won twice, but he did so in a Stock Car Pro season where no one won more than three times and he was one of the only three drivers along with Felipe Baptista and Gaetano di Mauro to win two races on speed (excluding the reverse grid races) and he was a lot more consistent than those guys. In addition, he won four races in NASCAR Brasil but I don't know how seriously to take that since that series seems like it might even be shallower than NASCAR Europe, but nonetheless, the second title is what pushed him over the line and caused him to make the top 25 for the first time, but maybe I should consider doing so for his other championship seasons too.
The actually talented Logan added some important line items to his C.V. this year. Seavey had arguably the best season in his career in 2024 as he completed his USAC career by winning his first Sprint car title. This made him one of eight drivers along with Pancho Carter, Jerry Coons, Jr., Dave Darland, Tracy Hines, Tony Stewart, Chris Windom, and J.J. Yeley to win all three top-tier USAC titles. Not only that, Seavey's 14 wins tied the all-time single-season USAC Sprint win record set by Tom Bigelow way back in 1977. Although Bigelow made slightly fewer starts that year (42) than Seavey (44), Seavey's season was definitely better than Bigelow's. Not only did he actually win the USAC Sprint title while Bigelow lost his to Sheldon Kinser, he also won the Indiana Sprint Week title consisting of a subset of USAC Sprint races along with his second straight Chili Bowl (making him one of only four drivers including Kevin Swindell, Christopher Bell, and Kyle Larson to win it in consecutive years), third-place points finishes in the Silver Crown and Midget championships with three wins in those years as opposed to Bigelow who only had one other win in his year (although he admittedly did earn a top ten in IndyCar points that year). I do still consider dirt racing to be a minor league, although I also consider the top three sprint car divisions to be some of the top-tier minor league series. It's a rare season where I would give a driver a full elite grade for a sprint car season, but Seavey's accomplishments are rare enough that I think he deserves it. And you can add him to my lock list for my 1,000 greatest drivers list right about now.
By all rights, either of the two Jaguar Formula E drivers (Evans and Nick Cassidy) should have won this year's championship. Although he ended up losing the title by 6 points to Pascal Wehrlein, Evans led more advanced statistical categories than any FE driver this year, with a series-high 8 natural races led, 3 TNL (tied with Cassidy), 3.07 lead shares, 3 races with the most lead shares (tied with Jean-Éric Vergne), and 3 poles (tied with Wehrlein and Vergne). In a year that had such absurd parity, I'm kind of surprised any driver led in five different statistical categories. He also tied Wehrlein for the most passes for the lead this year with 14, but Evans's record of 14-13 was slightly better than Wehrlein's 14-15. Only two of his statistics seem rather weak: his speed percentile of 61.51 only ranked 6th in the series and his rating in my open wheel model of -.105 was very bad because Cassidy is probably the most underrated driver in my model while Evans has been the highest-rated FE driver in my model for its entire history. As a result, Cassidy ranked extremely highly after defeating Evans 8-5 but Evans ended up below average because Cassidy entered this season with a rating of -.030 (although he did finally crawl above average by season's end, that still vastly underestimates his actual ability and makes Evans look worse than he really was). I'm not going to dock him too much for my model placement since I knew Cassidy was wrong in my model all along (the man beat Álex Palou to win a Super Formula title and was the highest-rated driver in that series in two different seasons, so I know he's great). However, even though Evans finished 2nd in points while Cassidy was 3rd, I did choose to take Cassidy over Evans for two main reasons: Cassidy's head-to-head edge and the fact that Evans made more mistakes and had maybe the worst championship choke I've seen since Ryan Briscoe. Although Evans never actually led the points this year as Wehrlein and Cassidy traded the points lead back and forth, he would have won the title if he had not been penalized five seconds for contact with Jake Hughes after inheriting the lead when Cassidy spun with two laps left, which dropped him from the win to eighth. That wasn't his only missed opportunity as Sam Bird passed him on the last lap to win at São Paulo, although Evans admittedly made up for that by passing Wehrlein for the win on the last lap at Shanghai. Nonetheless, after the Portland round Evans held the tiebreaker for second in points over Wehrlein 12 points behind Cassidy and was in great shape to capitalize after Cassidy suffered bad luck. After Cassidy was wrecked (apparently accidentally) by Wehrlein's teammate António Félix da Costa in a race it looked like Cassidy would ultimately win en route to the championship, but Evans missed his entry into the corner to activate his final attack mode, which cost him the championship to Wehrlein. Although both Jaguar drivers kind of choked this, I think Evans's choke was bigger than Cassidy's even though Cassidy blew a bigger points lead and Cassidy's failure to win the finale and the title came down to bad luck (getting wrecked by the champion's teammate) as opposed to a "skill issue" (a phrase the kids like saying that I despise), which is why I rated Cassidy (slightly) higher. I do have to give Evans some major credit for his historic last-to-first win in this year's São Paulo race in December, which definitely seems to be his best career drive. That race put him tied with Sébastien Buemi and Lucas di Grassi for the most career wins with 13, but he's done it in fewer starts and he's been way better recently. My model had him as the best FE driver in 2021 when he only had two wins, so I'm really proud of this one.
It's close, but I'm gonna give the nod for second-best IndyCar driver to McLaughlin over Álex Palou. What is absolutely not close is their statistics. Aside from Palou winning the championship in an admittedly inferior car, McLaughlin beat Palou in every advanced statistical category. He led the series in natural races led (5), wins (3), TNL (3), races with the most lead shares (3), CRL (3.31), races with the most laps led (5), poles (5), fastest races (4), and speed percentile (81.68) and recall what I said about Palou leading no statistical categories: it's because McLaughlin led almost all of them. The exceptions were lead change record (where his 6-7 was still better than Palou's 1-2), lead shares (where he beat Palou 3.04-1.67) and fastest laps (2-1). On the surface, this shouldn't even be close. The reason that it is is because I acknowledge that Team Penske overwhelmingly had the fastest cars in IndyCar this year to such an extent that Josef Newgarden had the best speed percentile of his career in a year he half-sucked and Will Power had a series-best 4-1 lead change record after going winless and posting a 0-3 lead change record the year before. The Penske cars were obviously a lot faster than the Ganassi cars if all three Penske cars were faster than every Ganassi car. That said, even despite that, I think McLaughlin's performance advantage was greater than his equipment advantage to such an extent that he should be rated higher. The other reason I rated McLaughlin over Palou was because he was vastly superior on ovals, where he finally break through in a way Palou still hasn't yet. After winning a race at Barber which he pretty much controlled start-to-finish, most of his other highlights this season came on ovals. He won the pole led the most laps at the Indy 500 before fading to 6th at the end of the race. Both his races at the Iowa and Milwaukee double-headers were curious mirror images of each other. Although there was next to no passing on the Iowa weekend, McLaughlin took the lead in the pits in the first race after Colton Herta won the pole before losing the second race in the pits the next day. At Milwaukee, he won the pole for the first race before Pato O'Ward overtook him for the win before he passed Herta to win the second race. Although I thought his Iowa win was a fairly lackluster one, the Milwaukee win really impressed me as he came on top in a frenetic duel with Herta. I also have to consider the fact here that McLaughlin would have actually beaten Palou in points too if he had not been disqualified from St. Petersburg. Although Palou narrowly outscored McLaughlin in points in the subsequent races as McLaughlin scored 32 fewer points than Palou after being stripped of all his points at St. Pete and he lost the title by 39, before the disqualification McLaughlin was scored with a second place finish while Palou was sixth. I'm not saying the penalty was unjust, but his performance in that race does further support my argument that he was better, but trust me, I wouldn't be rating him higher if I didn't think his post-St. Pete season was better as well.
I probably chose to rate Bell exactly one spot above Scott McLaughlin because Bell's NASCAR Cup Series career and McLaughlin's IndyCar career have weirdly echoed each other as they have steadily improved at almost exactly the same rate since I debuted my models in 2021. McLaughlin's initial open wheel rating was .005 before rising to .090 in 2022, .096 in 2023, .131 at the start of 2024, before dropping to .128 in my last update. Bell started at exactly 0 to three decimal places in 2021 before rising to .064 in 2022, .075 in 2023, .099 at the start of 2024, and .130 at my last update, overtaking McLaughlin for the first time. Although I wouldn't say either of them have ever been the best driver in their respective series yet, McLaughlin was certainly the best Penske driver in IndyCar this year just as Bell was certainly the best Joe Gibbs Racing driver in Cup. Even though Bell did obviously a lot better in my model this year as his .242 rating ranked only barely behind Kyle Larson's .250 (and if Bell had been the highest-finishing JGR driver and Larson the lowest-finishing Hendrick driver in the season finale, he'd have overtaken Larson to be the highest-rated driver in my model this season) while McLaughlin ranked only 27th in my open wheel model at .164, you can make an argument that McLaughlin was the best IndyCar driver this year while you absolutely cannot for Bell, so ultimately, it almost exactly cancels out in my view. I think I'm going to give the edge to Bell mainly because he overachieved my expectations more. I realize Bell made the Championship 4 in both 2022 and 2023 and didn't this year, but this is the first year I really took him as seriously as I always should have. I will admit in retrospect that I underrated his 2022 and 2023 and if I include him on my 1,000 greatest drivers list (I'd say he's probably a near lock at this moment but not quite a lock; I'd say the same for William Byron and Tyler Reddick as well) it's possible I'll adjust those earlier years up. If I'm going to give Ryan Blaney more credit than most people would for his clutch playoff performances, I probably also should do so for Bell. But I did rate Bell's previous seasons 90th and 88th for a reason and that reason was that his passing numbers did not impress me. Back in 2022 when Bell's passing numbers did not exactly live up to a Championship 4 placement, I let Ryan McCafferty convince me that Erik Jones was secretly better and that Jones shouldn't have been replaced. That seems utterly laughable now in retrospect as Bell has truly become an elite driver while Jones just had the worst year of his career (although admittedly, Jones actually ranked 3rd in my model this year as well but he was inflated by competing against a washed-up Jimmie Johnson and a wildly underachieving John Hunter Nemechek). After this year, it's obvious that while JGR did do Jones a little dirty, Bell was clearly an improvement and it's hard for me to even imagine Jones ever being better than Bell in a year again. But even though Bell did well in my model in both 2022 and 2023, I didn't take those years seriously for a reason as you can make a legit argument that his 2024 season was better than the previous two years combined. His 14 natural races led this year nearly matches his 15 combined in 2022-23, his 27-21 record is better than his 21-20 record in those years, his 3.75 lead shares beat his 3.60 lead shares in the other two years, and his 4.18 CRL beat his 4.07 CRL in those years as well. By almost all leading statistics, this year was better than the previous two combined. He was also one of only three drivers to lead any statistical categories this year besides Kyle Larson as he had 7 races with the most laps led to Larson's 6 although Larson definitely beat him in everything else. Bell was also the full-season points leader in classic Latford-era points if that matters to you, which it really doesn't to me. At least that's a better outcome than Chase Elliott winning it because Bell was the 2nd best driver this season while Elliott wasn't even close. But I have to point out that he only beat Larson by 130 points in Latford points and if you exclude the Coca-Cola 600, which Bell won and Larson missed because of his Indy crossover, Larson outscored him even in full-season points despite being less consistent than Bell. Still, while I don't think you can argue Bell was very close to Larson, I think he was clearly 2nd as he ranked 2nd in lead shares, CRL, as well as my model. While Bell's advantage in consistency was nowhere near enough to overcome Larson's advantage in dominance, he was at least kind of close and it's disappointing that neither of the two best drivers made the Championship 4. I don't really blame Bell for it at all though. Despite being by far the most consistent playoff driver, Adam Stevens's botched pit call to have Bell long-pit at Martinsville was stupid and I said so at the time. That trapped him a lap down when the caution came out before he could get his lap back when I am certain that if he had short-pitted, he'd have been back on the lead lap before that caution came out and he'd have been able to score the points he needed to advance. Stupid calls to long-pit have screwed over many Stevens-chiefed drivers before and literally cost Kyle Busch the 2017 title, because Stevens never seems to deviate from this strategy even though it seems to backfire more than it doesn't. While Bell might not have been in that position to be trapped a lap down if he hadn't sped, I think Stevens's bad pit call is what really screwed him over and stuck him in the position where he felt like he had to do a wall ride to advance. As it turned out, he gained nothing from that and the chicanery between the Chevrolet drivers blocking for William Byron and Bubba Wallace pulling over to help his Toyota stablemate Bell was truly annoying. But I think Bell failing to make the Championship 4 was less his fault than Stevens's, and I think he's ready to win a title. He has the consistency. He has the dominance. He won the spring Phoenix race and led the most laps in the fall one (which I suspect he might have won if he'd needed to to win the championship). Although Larson's still better, I think Bell might be my playoff favorite for 2025.
For a while, Cassidy was trending top ten on my list. Considering how highly I've rated his Jaguar Formula E teammate Mitch Evans over the years (Evans is the only driver who's led his series throughout the entire history of my open wheel model to date), I was really knocked out by Cassidy starting the year by sweeping Evans 5-0. Although Evans definitely made a charge in the second half and closed the deficit to 8-5, I would still say Cassidy was the better driver despite finishing 3rd in the championship while Evans was 2nd. Not only did he win the head-to-head, he became Evans's first FE teammate to beat him in a head-to-head ever, which meant the most underrated driver in my open wheel model has finally crept above average (and it took far too long). Finally, while both Cassidy and Evans choked the title in different ways, Cassidy also had bad luck in the finale so his championship collapse wasn't on him to the sam extent as Evans, which is the main reason I placed Cassidy higher even though most of Evans's advanced statistics were better. Evans was a far more electrifying with 8 natural races led to Cassidy's 4 and 3.07 lead shares to Cassidy's 1.71. However, nearly all their other statistics were similar (both drivers had 2 wins, 3 TNL, 2 races with the most laps led, 1 fastest lap, 1 fastest race, while Evans led 3-2 in races with the most lead shares and 3-1 in poles, but Cassidy was faster with a speed percentile of 69.74-61.51). Effectively, I would say Cassidy's advantage in speed and head-to-head finishes largely cancels out Evans's advantage in dominance and passing. So it ultimately comes down to how the championship was lost. Evans's losses seemed to be more embarrassing as he got passed on the last lap at São Paulo, was stripped of the Portland win after a penalty for contact, and then failed to activate his final attack mode to lose the title. Sure, attack mode is a stupid idea to begin with (I almost think it's stupider than FanBoost), but it's part of the game. Cassidy had one major embarrassment as well as his spinout while leading at Portland with two laps to go is what led Evans to temporarily inherit the win in the first place, but he seemed to have worse luck. Despite the fact that Cassidy's Portland spin dropped him from a likely win to 19th, he still led Evans and Pascal Wehrlein by 12 points in the championship entering the season-ending doubleheader at London. However, he lost the points lead after an unexpectedly bad qualifying session in the first London race. Although he recovered from 17th to 7th, Wehrlein and Evans finished 1-2 to take the top two spots in the championship, although all three were separated by 7 points so any of them would have won the title with a win. Cassidy seemed exactly in position to do that as he won the pole for the second race at London and seemed to be controlling it. He took both of his attack modes before Wehrlein and Evans did, which meant if nothing bad happened he would likely inherit the win and the title after they took their attack modes. Unfortunately, something bad did happen as Cassidy was wrecked by Wehrlein's teammate António Félix da Costa, which ended up giving the Wehrlein the title. Despite what it looks like, by all accounts it wasn't some kind of Speedy Thompson-esque dirty team tactic but it did take Cassidy out of the championship. Yes, I'd have probably taken Cassidy over Wehrlein if he'd won the title but ultimately I think his own self-spin at Portland played an equal role in him losing the title as the London crash, so I did end up rating Wehrlein highest among Formula E drivers because he was the only one of the main championship contenders who didn't seem to make a mistake.
Although he only finished second in the TCR World Tour championship, Björk dominated the series in most statistical categories with 5 natural races led, a 4-1 lead change record, 3 wins, 4 TNL, 4.33 lead shares, 4 races with the most lead shares, and 2 races with the most laps led, all of which led or were tied for the lead within the series. In a series that had only 11 lead changes all season, Björk was the only driver who actually had more than one. Furthermore, he likely would have won the title if he had won the second race at Mid-Ohio before being stripped of the win for the stupidest of reasons. He was penalized 5 seconds for this extremely mild bump-and-run on Marco Butti. Having grown up primarily a NASCAR fan, somebody being penalized for something so minor is astonishing, particularly when I see what people get away with even in European-based series like F1 and the BTCC. Max Verstappen gets away with shoving people off the track all the time and Björk loses the title for an extremely minor bump-and-run? Make it make sense. Even that may not have cost him the win and title had he built up enough of a gap to cover it in subsequent laps and it seemed like he might have had the speed for it, but Cyan Racing officials also ordered him to let his teammate Yann Ehrlacher (who is usually the Cyan team leader) past. These two factors dropped him to eighth in a race he should have won by all rights. If he had won it, he would have had four wins while nobody else had more than two, and he likely would have taken Ehrlacher for most CRL as well since Ehrlacher beat him by an extremely narrow margin (2.37-2.31). So why did I not rank him as the best driver in the series if he was that dominant and I feel he should have won the title? Because honestly, I think the Cyan drivers had an absurd equipment advantage this year and I felt that Hyundai's leading driver Norbert Michelisz (who won the championship at Björk's expense) had greater performance when considering the level of his equipment even though Björk was more dominant. In my teammate model, Michelisz led all TCR World Tour drivers with a rating of .466 to Björk's .255. That difference was far too large for me to list Björk higher. Ultimately, I decided Michelisz's advantage in my model outstripped Björk's advantage in dominance, but if you disagree with me I can't really argue with you.
Mostert never seems to get his due, even from me. Even though he was the highest-rated Supercars driver in my touring car model this year for the third year in a row, this is the first time I've actually placed him in my top 25 after I placed him 27th back-to-back years in 2023, but I decided in hindsight to elevate both those seasons to Es. Nonetheless, I think this is Mostert's best year of his career to date. While his Walkinshaw Andretti United Fords seem to not be as fast as the Triple Eight Race Engineering Chevies, Mostert led Supercars with 6 natural races led, 6 TNL, 5.33 lead shares, and 6 races with the most lead shares. The four categories he led were more than the two categories the champion Will Brown led. Despite Mostert having a clearly slower car, he only barely had a slower speed percentile than Brown (79.69-80.44) and as usual he steamrolled his new teammate Ryan Wood while you can seriously debate whether Brown or his teammate Broc Feeney was better. Admittedly, Wood was a rookie so it's hard to draw any conclusions from that, but Mostert dominated his previous teammate Nick Percat just as badly in 2022 and 2023 as he did Wood this year, and Percat just won two races this year immediately afterward and it certainly doesn't look like Mostert has declined in performance since then in any way. In addition to Mostert sweeping the Sydney Motorsports Park round, he also won at Perth but was very unlucky with three other races where he was the TNL which he didn't win. Brown beat him out of the pits at the second race at Bathurst to win, then Mostert was stripped of the win in the second race at Perth (which he had dominated) after receiving a five-second penalty for an unsafe release (which he took the blame for, but might not have actually been his fault) before he lost the season finale at Adelaide after he was the last driver wrecked by Broc Feeney this season (sorry). In addition to his Supercars success, Mostert and his co-driver Liam Talbot won the premier Pro-Am class in the GT World Challenge Australia by 31 points over the car co-driven by Brown and Brad Schumacher, also justifying my opinion that Mostert was actually better than Brown. This marks Mostert's second major domestic championship in Australia after previously winning the TCR Australia title (a title Brown has also won). It will be interesting to see if either Brown or Mostert completes this trifecta (Brown only needs an Australian GT title and Mostert only needs a Supercars title to do it), a feat which would impress me almost as much as a NASCAR driver winning the Cup, Xfinity, and Craftsman Truck Series titles. But I'm starting to think Mostert won't get the Supercars title that it feels like he's so overdue for. While he's definitely been the best driver in this post-SVG era while Brodie Kostecki and Brown got all the plaudits, I suspect that if he ever gets a championship-caliber ride, by that point we will be in the midst of Feeney's power run of consecutive titles and he will have been overtaken. It feels like he missed his shot in much the same way that Mark Martin never won a NASCAR title because there was no gap between the Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon dynasties. What's frustrating here is that in this era of Supercars, there was a gap but he didn't have a fast enough car to capitalize.
I think Norris is getting a little too much shit. Yes, he failed to win the F1 title with the fastest car and that is why I have only placed him 15th overall and 4th among F1 drivers this year, but c'mon. From a global perspective, he was still great. When you consider that Max Verstappen led every statistical category I track by a huge margin in 2023, and he led every category in 2022 except for poles as well, nobody was really expecting anyone would win the title other than Verstappen to begin with, and for Norris to look legitimately faster in the second half is definitely worthy of praise. Granted, I think it's less anything he did and more due to the fact that Red Bull's legendary engineer Adrian Newey left in the middle of the season, but he still capitalized and performed even if he had a bit of a history of choking after winning the pole and even if Verstappen still outscored Norris in points even in the subset of races where the McLaren was faster (but this was his best season ever, so that's understandable). Although Verstappen still as usual led the vast majority of statistical categories this year, Norris tied him for the most poles with 8 and fastest races with 7 and beat him in fastest laps 6-3 and (narrowly) in speed percentile 88.58-87.96 with him finally overtaking Verstappen in the last race of the season. Granted, it's not a good thing that he lost the title and wasn't even in the title chase despite being faster, but I still think he has championship-caliber speed and championship-caliber potential if he simply improves at starts, which is certainly not impossible. And there have been plenty of legends who have fumbled on starts too (like Alain Prost's 1993, which was a title season). Okay, maybe Norris will never be the best F1 driver in a year like a lot of people thought he would, but he's definitely the kind of driver who could win a title with a greater car advantage than what he had this year. His season does kind of feel like Damon Hill's 1995 which many people have compared it to, but I think Norris is definitely more naturally talented than Hill was. But Hill's 1996 title season immediately followed his 1995. All he needed was for Michael Schumacher to have a slower car (which happened in 1996), just like all Norris seems to need is for Verstappen to have a slower car, and that could totally happen now that Newey has left Red Bull. I have not lost faith in him as a championship contender like a lot of people have, although I think Charles Leclerc and George Russell were both better than him. Besides the categories I listed, Norris ranked 2nd in the championship as well as natural races led (5), wins (4), TNL (5), lead shares (4.33), races with the most lead shares (5), CRL (4.40), and races with the most laps led (5). The only elements of his season that seemed really weak to me were the lead change record (3-8; but Leclerc's 1-3 and Russell's 2-4 don't seem much better) and his placement in my teammate model, where he only ranked 29th at .159 and 10th among F1 drivers, even behind the likes of Lance Stroll, which is funny but not something I take very seriously. The problem is that Piastri is clearly a lot better now than where my model has him probably because he didn't beat Logan Sargeant by enough in Formula 3 before Alex Albon ended up sweeping him. It's clear that Piastri was a lot better this year than he was in previous years and once my model accounts for that, Norris's season is going to look a lot better in retrospect than it did at the time I think. I haven't lost faith in him yet. But I sure as hell wasn't going to rank him 2nd or even 3rd among F1 drivers.
While I didn't quite rate Estre as this season's best WEC Hypercar driver, a strong case can be made that he was the best sports car driver this year. Not only did he win his first top class WEC championship for Penske's Porsche operation in 2024 after previously winning the LMGTE Pro class championship in 2018-2019, he was overwhelmingly the fastest driver on the team with a speed percentile of 82.42 to Michael Christensen's 68.20, Matt Campbell's 66.73, Laurens Vanthoor's 64.69, André Lotterer's 60.35, and Frédéric Makowiecki's 59.96. He was also the most dominant driver in the class with 0.72 CRL and the only driver to lead the most laps in two races in the class. While I knew who my top four drivers on my list would be very early on in the process, I couldn't decide on who should be fifth and I thought Estre might be a contender. The main reasons I didn't place him that highly and ended up rating him below two other sports car drivers were because he had no on-track passes for the lead this year while both his substantially slower teammates Vanthoor and Lotterer did and also because unlike a lot of the other WEC drivers, he had no other significant accomplishments in other series while the three sports car drivers I rated higher definitely did. He remains one of the best sports car drivers in the world and he was obviously the best Penske driver this year in any series, but I think two other Porsche drivers and one other Hypercar driver were better.
Kristofferson is usually a perennial in my top tens as he has a history of winning World Rallycross titles while also dominating some other season, but that didn't really happen this time. Although he still won the World Rallycross title, giving him his seventh title in the last eight years (and the only year in that period he didn't win it was 2019 when he didn't compete there), the rest of his record was not as impressive as usual. In the 2021 and 2023 seasons, he had won the World Rallycross title and the Extreme E title simultaneously. This year Extreme E shut down after four of ten races and it's believed that the championship was never official. However, at that point in the year, he and his teammate Mikaela Åhlin-Kottulinsky only ranked 3rd in points behind the Kevin Hansen/Molly Taylor and Fraser McConell/Laia Sanz teams. It's possible as the sample size increased over those next six races he would have dominated the rest of the year had it continued, but it looked like Hansen had really overtaken him there (although Hansen still isn't anywhere close to him in terms of rallycross performance). It was the lack of dominance in Extreme E that caused me to rate him lower, even though I know that series is far more niche than even the World Rallycross Championship is, which is also very niche as I'm not sure most international fans have heard of Kristoffersson even though he's clearly a top five driver over the last decade. Nonetheless, he's still one of the world's best drivers but I had to dock him for only dominating one series this year instead of two.
As I mentioned in the Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy entries, Wehrlein certainly had a lot of help to win this year's Formula E title as he first needed his Porsche teammate António Félix da Costa to take out Nick Cassidy (who entered the season-ending London doubleheader as the points leader) then Evans had to make his self-inflicted mistake in the same race by missing the corner and failing to activate his attack mode, which handed Wehrlein the title. While it really felt like the sea parted for him this year, I still think he was the best driver of the three. Wehrlein and Evans's advanced stat lines were extremely similar. Wehrlein had 7 natural races led, a 14-15 lead change record, 3 wins, 2 TNL, 2.75 lead shares, 2 races with the most lead shares, 2.50 CRL, 3 races with the most laps led, 3 poles, 0 fastest laps, 3 fastest races, and a speed percentile of 61.65. Evans had 8 natural races led, a 14-13 lead change record, 2 wins, 3 TNL, 3.07 lead shares, 3 races with the most lead shares, 2.26 CRL, 2 races with the most laps led, 3 poles, 1 fastest lap, 1 fastest race, and a speed percentile of 61.51. Those look almost identical, right? One of the weird oddities is that both Wehrlein and Evans were slower than their respective teammates da Costa and Cassidy, since da Costa's speed percentile was 67.14 and Cassidy's 69.74, but maybe the speed percentiles really mean nothing here since the peloton-style racing this year arguably came closer to resembling restrictor plate racing than any other open wheel racing I've ever seen. Nonetheless, I think Wehrlein was better than Evans since he had a clear advantage over da Costa (even though da Costa won the most races) while Evans did not have a clear advantage over Cassidy. Wehrlein ranked 13th overall in my open wheel model with a rating of .300 and 5th among Formula E drivers. Admittedly, Cassidy rated higher but I think Wehrlein's advantage in the advanced stats was greater than Cassidy's advantage in my teammate model. But ultimately, all three of these drivers were clearly similar and what I think mainly separates them is that Wehrlein had zero major errors down the home stretch while Cassidy choked the title with his Portland spin and Evans choked it even harder with the missed attack mode. I suspect some will have issues with me taking Wehrlein over Kévin Estre as the best Porsche driver, but I think most people give Formula E drivers short shrift. Yeah, the series is a total gimmick-fest and it has no marquee races, but I genuinely think the drivers on average are better (definitely no ride-buyers here), and the competition is way better (yet I have to listen to people talk about how competitive IndyCar still is when there's usually only one or two wins from outside Penske/Ganassi a year). The fact that the series still lacks any sort of gravitas and aura causes people to not take these drivers as seriously as they should. But Wehrlein was always great. In addition to becoming the youngest DTM champion ever, his F1 career was honestly quite fine as he swept Rio Haryanto, tied Esteban Ocon (but people underrate him too...), and beat Marcus Ericsson. I definitely think he's one of the best open wheel drivers in the world right now, although this year I decided to take the best IndyCar driver one spot higher.
It figures that once his Formula One dreams were gone seemingly for good, Herta would finally deliver the kind of elite season everybody originally expected from him even though in the past couple years prior to this one, people were starting to doubt that it would ever happen. I think Herta was pretty obviously the best IndyCar driver of the year, although that might be a tough sell for a lot of people who have (justifiably) been going on about how overhyped and overrated he was. In the years when he seemingly cracked under the pressure while he was a hot F1 prospect, I might agree but this year, I felt like he erased any of my doubts about his future to the point that I think if he doesn't jump to F1 first (which I suppose is still a possibility now that Andretti Global was finally approved to run Cadillac's F1 entry for 2026, albeit after the team namesake Michael Andretti was ousted), he's an inevitable IndyCar champion. My main criticisms of him were his inconsistency, his wild overdriving and seeming inability to conserve his tires, and his lack of performance on ovals. This year, none of these were issues anymore. He still made two high-profile mistakes in back-to-back races, crashing out of second place in the Indy 500 then crashing into the tire barrier the next week at Detroit after a failed divebomb on eventual champion Álex Palou. If he had managed not to crash in either of those races, he might have won the title. However, for the most part he was very clean otherwise as his two other finishes outside the top ten weren't his fault as he got trapped a lap down after pitting before a caution in the first Iowa race then he lost a tire in the first Milwaukee race. He ran in the top ten pretty constantly on all track types and I would say he ran more consistently than Palou despite having a clearly slower car. He ended his two-year winless drought by giving the Andretti team its only wins this season at Toronto and Nashville, where he also won his first oval race after a ballsy pass on Pato O'Ward with five laps remaining, which propelled him to second in points after he had been lower than that for most of the season. While it didn't feel on the surface like he was actually a title contender, I think he was clearly the best performer this season even though Palou led the points for most of the year and Scott McLaughlin's numbers were better. First off, Herta led IndyCar in lead shares for the third time in his career just as he had done in 2021 and 2022. He actually had more lead shares in both of those seasons (5 and 3.9) then in this one (3.33) but I think his advantage in consistency this time is enough to compensate for that. He tied McLaughlin for the most TNL and races with the most lead shares as well, but McLaughlin led most other categories. He also ranked second to McLaughlin in natural races led with 4, CRL with 2.33, and poles with 3, while outperforming Palou in more categories than not. He vastly outperformed his teammates Kyle Kirkwood and Marcus Ericsson who finished only 7th and 15th in the championship. After last year when Kirkwood won twice while Herta failed to win, many people expected Kirkwood to overtake him for good but after this year it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon and I guess that shouldn't be surprising since Herta is actually a year and a half younger than Kirkwood, which people forget since he started so much earlier. Herta ranked 10th overall in my open wheel model (again ahead of all the other title contenders, but behind Felix Rosenqvist in 2nd place, which is definitely kind of a joke). Finally, he had the best speed percentile of his career at 74.55 and blew the crap out Ericsson's 60.19 and Kirkwood's 56.06 (it's kind of weird that Ericsson came out faster than Kirkwood since he ran way worse, but whatever). As I mentioned in the Palou entry, Herta beat Ericsson worse this year than Palou did any season (even in Palou's truly dominant 2023, he only beat Ericsson by 9.13 in speed percentile and Herta just crushed that). People don't want to admit he was the best driver because they're sick of how overhyped he is and I get that, but come on. Herta was always more naturally talented than Palou and that should be obvious. It was just a matter of if he could get his consistency figured out and now he is consistent and he was even really fast on every oval this year (which Palou still isn't). And I haven't even mentioned the fact that he got arguably the biggest win of his career in the 12 Hours of Sebring this year. If Herta finishes 4th or better in points in 2025, he will accumulate enough Super License points to make him eligible to land the Cadillac F1 ride in 2026. I now think he can do it, but I also feel it would be kind of a waste. I'd rather see him remain in IndyCar. But even though I think he was the best IndyCar driver this year and it was enough to finally get me to declare him a lock for my 1,000 greatest drivers list, one season does not a career make and I still kind of think he's overrated. He was the best driver this year, but I'm still not sure he's the best driver to such an extent to justify his absurd $7 million/year salary, which is far more than anyone else is making. But at least for once he didn't underachieve relative to his hype...
Even though Fuoco and his Ferrari AF Corse teammates Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen lost the WEC Hypercar title to Kévin Estre, André Lotterer, and Laurens Vanthoor, I think Fuoco (the Ferrari team leader) was better than Estre. First off, Fuoco, Molina, and Nielsen beat their teammates substantially worse as they scored 115 points, nearly as many as the James Calado/Antonio Giovinazzi/Alessandro Pier Guidi (59) and Robert Kubica/Robert Shwartzman/Yifei Ye (57) cars combined while Estre/Lotterer/Vanthoor (152) beat Matt Campbell/Michael Christensen/Frédéric Makowiecki's 104 points by a much smaller margin. Just like Estre, Fuoco outperformed all his teammates (which is why I don't understand why all these sites like Sportscar365 and Autosport have been giving Nielsen all the props when Fuoco was clearly better. Granted, Fuoco's teammates came closer to him in speed than Estre's teammates as Fuoco's 74.06 wasn't much better than Pier Guidi's 71.51 or Shwartzman's 71.02 (and I didn't even list him), but he definitely soundly defeated Giovinazzi (65.17), Ye (58.44), Nielsen (57.69), Calado (53.47), Molina (48.48), and Kubica (37.65). I don't think you can really justify Nielsen over Fuoco when Fuoco was 16 percentage points faster. I guess people's apparent criticism is that he didn't lead enough because his 0.08 CRL were actually the least of the nine Ferrari drivers. However, despite all that he actually led the class with 2 TNL and 1.40 lead shares because he was arguably the best passer in the series, even though he tended not to lead much because he would make pit stops shortly after taking the lead. For all the hype of Nielsen's impressive fuel-saving run to the finish at Le Mans (and I agree it was impressive), Fuoco was actually the TNL in the race as his pass of Makowiecki was instrumental in giving the team control of the race. He was also TNL at Imola after winning the pole in a race where there were no lead changes, although he only led one lap in the race because his teammates had lost the lead before he got in the car and he was unable to get it back. Nonetheless, he and his teammate Kubica (who was a lot slower and less consistent) were the only drivers with two natural races led in a very competitive Hypercar class this season. It was definitely close between Fuoco and Estre, but I opted for Fuoco because I am more impressed with him leading in lead shares and how much he beat the other team cars more than I am by Estre's greater dominance and speed in a faster car. Additionally, Fuoco also had impressive runs in IMSA while Estre did not. In the IMSA GTD class, he absolutely trounced his Cetilar Racing teammates with a speed percentile of 88.12 to Giorgio Sernagiotto's 43.36 and Roberto Lacorte's 13.92. He also had two passes for the lead in the 24 Hours of Daytona and won the pole for the 12 Hours of Sebring (although he was admittedly passed by Parker Thompson right at the start). If it was debatable before, I think Fuoco's IMSA performances push him over Estre, albeit only barely slightly. But there were still a couple sports car drivers I rated higher.
Leclerc is the guy who most F1 fans would rate as the second-best F1 driver of the year. I couldn't quite get there myself because ultimately I decided George Russell handily beating Lewis Hamilton was more impressive than Leclerc handily beating Carlos Sainz, Jr. or Lando Norris handily beating Oscar Piastri. I did want to rate both Russell and Leclerc over Norris because of how much Norris left on the table, but deciding between Russell and Leclerc was a lot harder. After all, both of them had lame-duck teammates after it was announced that Hamilton would be replacing Sainz at Ferrari in 2025 so it's clear that Leclerc and Russell were both clearly going to be getting some heavy favoritism from Ferrari and Mercedes in general. I ultimately went with Russell because it seemed like he beat Hamilton worse than Leclerc beat Sainz and surely outperforming a seven-time champion is worth more than outperforming a four-time race-winner, right? Nonetheless, all these guys from around 5th-15th could have been solid top five contenders in my book and I think the gap between most of them is really narrow. Leclerc's season seems better to me than Norris's because I think Sainz was a lot better than Oscar Piastri in 2024. Indeed, both Leclerc and Sainz ranked higher in my model (22nd at .232 and 24th at .210) than Norris did, but I think it's safe to say that Leclerc has many of the same issues in terms of bottling races and not being as fast in races as in qualifying that Norris does. The best Monegasque driver of all time finally made his principality proud with a dominant hometown win from pole after two previous pole runs turned futile. His one pass for the lead this year came when he overtook Norris for the win in the USGP, but his lead change record of 1-3 was actually worse on percentage terms than Norris's 3-8, so I honestly think both of them left something on the table. I mean it's telling that both McLaren and Ferrari ended up beating Red Bull in the Constructors' Championship yet neither Norris nor Leclerc were anywhere to be seen in the title chase and Leclerc actually ended up losing to Norris in the Drivers' Championship by a larger margin than Ferrari lost to McLaren in the Constructors' Championship. Truthfully, I think both of them had better seasons than this (Norris's 2022 and Leclerc's 2019 and 2022). Leclerc still outperformed Sainz in all statistical categories this year except for lead change record to his credit (2 natural races led to Sainz's 1, 3 wins to Sainz's 2, 2 TNL, lead shares, and races with the most lead shares to Sainz's 1, 3-1 in poles, 3-1 in fastest laps, 2-1 in fastest races, and 83.07-80.33 in speed percentile), but the exact same thing could be said for Norris and Piastri. You could make an easy case that they both had faster cars than Max Verstappen this year but still got blown out by him, yet it seems like far fewer people are criticizing Leclerc for this than Norris and people are just automatically assuming Leclerc was 2nd best when that's very debatable. I went with Russell over Leclerc, but I do still think Leclerc over Norris because I think in general beating Sainz is still a more significant accomplishment than beating Piastri (even though I decided to put Piastri higher on this list largely because of my tendency to grade inexperienced drivers on a curve).
The next three entries consist of three touring car drivers who I felt had very similar seasons: Norbert Michelisz (the TCR World Tour champion), Mirko Bortolotti (the DTM champion - yeah, yeah, I know it's not a touring car series anymore), and Jake Hill (the BTCC champion). Michelisz was the only one of the major league touring car drivers this year who actually both won the title and was the highest-rated driver in his respective series, as Michelisz was far above any of the other TCR World Tour drivers in my touring car model with a rating of .466 (which ranked 8th) to Thed Björk's .255 (30th), while Bortolotti was narrowly behind René Rast in 3rd and Hill was narrowly behind Josh Cook in 16th. So you'd think I have to take him highest of the three, right? The two main reasons I rated the other guys higher this year were because I think the level of competition in the TCR World Tour was generally weaker (because it only had 11 regular drivers who were joined by a variety of regional touring car stars in each race while DTM and the BTCC each had 20 full-time entries) and because Michelisz was definitively not the most dominant driver in the TCR World Tour while Hill and Bortolotti were a lot more dominant and led their respective series in a lot more statistical categories even though they weren't the highest-rated drivers in their series in my touring car model while Michelisz was by a huge margin. It's obvious that Michelisz's Hyundai factory entries weren't as fast as the Cyan Racing cars that dominated the TCR World Tour season as the top three drivers in lead shares (Björk, Yann Ehrlacher, and Ma Qing Hua) were all Cyan drivers while Michelisz was best of the rest in terms of dominance, ranking fourth in both lead shares and CRL (although he had more CRL than Qing Hua, he had fewer than his teammate Néstor Girolami, resulting in im ranking fourth in both categories). Normally that lack of dominance would lead to someone being rated lower than this, but it can easily be argued that he dominated his teammates just as badly as Björk did, and Michelisz's 1.67 lead shares were equal to that of his teammates Girolami and Azcona's combined lead shares, just as Björk's 4.33 relative to Ehrlacher's 2.33 and Qing Hua's 2. They each dominated by exactly the same amount, so I think I have to go for Michelisz because he won the title in a slower car because I think his significant advantage in my teammate model is too much to overcome Björk's also significant advantage in dominance. I think the main reason Björk dominated to the extent he did was because his cars were utterly dominant and I suspect that even if you think Björk outperformed Michelisz, Michelisz would have outperformed him given the same equipment.
Bortolotti won this year's DTM title despite only winning one race while the other two dominant drivers Jack Aitken and Kelvin van der Linde won thrice. Nonetheless, I do think he was the best driver of the three. Despite only winning once, I think Bortolotti was probably the unluckiest driver of the three as he was beaten out of the pits in three separate races by Luca Engstler in the second Oschersleben race, by Marco Wittmann in the second Zandvoort race, and by René Rast in the second Red Bull Ring race. Those three things when added to his win in the other Red Bull race give him four TNL and natural races led, which tie with Aitken for the most. Bortolotti was also the only driver this year to make two passes for the lead in a season that only had seven such passes overall. Although he narrowly had fewer lead shares than Aitken (3.67-4) and also finished behind Aitken and van er Linde in CRL (with van der Linde having 2.85 CRL to Aitken's 2.82 and Bortolotti's 2.64), Bortolotti was the fastest driver in the series with a speed percentile of 74.89 and he had a pretty big advantage over the second-fastest driver Maro Engel (who he passed for the win at Red Bull Ring, and whose speed percentile was 66.63). Although Bortolotti only ranked third in my teammate model and second among DTM drivers behind Rast at .611, he impressed me a lot more than Rast because he was both significantly more consistent and significantly more dominant and a significantly better passer. The only reason I ended up taking Jake Hill over him was because he was a lot more dominant with 8 wins to Bortolotti's 1. In addition to his DTM success, he competed in WEC and IMSA where he was less successful but still decent. He was a lot better in the WEC than in IMSA, where he led the three Iron Lynx Hypercar drivers with a speed percentile of 40.23 to Daniil Kvyat's 35.34 and Edoardo Mortara's 19.61. Considering how high Mortara was in my open wheel model based on his Formula E statistics this year, that's pretty impressive. His IMSA performances however were not. Although he, Jordan Pepper, and Franck Perera did win the season-ending Petit Le Mans in the IMSA GTD Pro class, Pepper was almost single-handedly responsible as he had a speed percentile of 71.07 to Perera's 64.06 and Bortolotti's 47.17, and Bortolotti was also the least dominant driver on the team as well. Nonetheless, that is only a three-race sample size, which is not enough to overcome what he did in his DTM and WEC full-season schedules which had a combined 24 races and he did still win a race in IMSA, proving that he was at least one of the more versatile sports car drivers in terms of winning in different series even if he wasn't the team leader there.
Last year was the setup and this year was the payoff. Hill's three-wide pass in the grass to win the 2023 BTCC season finale at Brands Hatch was the stuff of legends and it would have been a star-making role in much the same way as Alex Zanardi's famous pass at Laguna Seca against Bryan Herta if the BTCC were capable of producing stars, but the series gets so little press that the drivers are always typically overlooked even though the top performers in my opinion are always strong even on an international scale. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that Hill won the title as this portion of his career really does seem to echo Alex Zanardi's '90s in most ways with one big exception. Zanardi had a couple dominant CART seasons, sure, but that was more due to his equipment than him as his teammate Jimmy Vasser did not exactly provide much of a challenge. Hill by contrast has overtaken his teammate Colin Turkington (who is one of the BTCC's three four-time champions) to become the unambiguous team leader at West Surrey Racing and I'm definitely more impressed with Hill taking over his team from a legend than Zanardi becoming a star out of nowhere at the same time as Vasser also became a star out of nowhere, which suggests it was more car-dependent than Hill's rise. Hill did not quite lead BTCC drivers in my teammate model as 6th-place points finisher Josh Cook beat his equally-legendary teammate Rob Huff worse, but the difference is Turkington is a long-standing veteran in the series while Huff returned to it after a 20-year absence, so I'm definitely a lot more impressed by Hill. Even though Hill's stats look very similar to his fellow championship contender Tom Ingram as I mentioned in hi entry, I have to give Hill bonus points for dunking on a champion (although Turkington did win the 3rd most races with 5, Hill's 7-4 lead change record was way better than Turkington's 1-4) while Ingram's cars were so strong that both of his teammates Tom Chilton and Ronan Pearson (who weren't good) won while Hill's other teammate Adam Morgan (who's definitely a lot better than those two) didn't. Although he failed to win, I might say Hill's highlight of the year was driving from 9th to 1st on the first lap of the third race at Snetterton. This year alone should have made him a legend (and indeed I just added him to my lock list), but sadly BTCC drivers (unlike Supercars drivers) do not get the same level of international attention as the series seems too obscure to produce stars. He's way better than Will Brown is though.
While my top four were set in stone for a long time, I really had no idea who I would rate fifth until close to the end of my analysis. The top five slots are significant as far as my 1,000 greatest drivers list is concerned as I award 100 points for the #1 driver, 70 for #2, 50 for #3, 30 for #4, and 20 for #5, while I do not distinguish any of the lower-rated drivers outside of their tier groups: 10 for E, 5 for E-, 3 for C+, 2 for C, 1 for C-, so I put a lot of effort on my top five slots since they matter substantially more here. While my top four were pretty set in stone from the beginning as I think the gap between the driver I placed 4th and literally everyone else is massive, I could have made a case for the drivers I put between 5th-15th in almost any order, but I ultimately settled on Russell and I really don't get why people are underrating him. Autosport had him 11th and 5th among F1 drivers and the team principals had him 6th. Really, is all we're doing just looking at the points standings? It looks that way. Autosport especially surprises me since they love to overrate both British drivers and F1 drivers so he must be right up their alley. Russell in my opinion clearly outperformed his team more than any other F1 driver this year save Max Verstappen. Verstappen and Russell were the only drivers who finished higher in the championship than they should have based on their teams' Constructor's Championship finish as Verstappen won the title for the Red Bull team that finished 3rd while Russell finished 6th for the McLaren team that finished 4th, so based on the team performance, Verstappen would be expected to finish 5th-6th while Russell would be expected to finish 7th-8th. All the other winners this year finished in the same tier as where their cars finished in the Constructors' Championship (or worse in Sergio Pérez's case) other than Verstappen and Russell. Yet I see people rating Russell behind Norris and Leclerc and I really don't get it. I guess it is just results fundamentalism and where they finished in the championship. I remember all these guys ranking Lewis Hamilton first in 2021. I didn't but if you feel he was the #1 driver that recently, how is beating Hamilton not a bigger deal than Leclerc beating Carlos Sainz, Jr. or Norris beating Oscar Piastri? It obviously is. Sainz is never going to win a championship and I doubt Piastri will although I suppose it's possible. Russell is way higher in my teammate model than the other two at .484 (4th overall) while Leclerc is 22nd (.232) and Norris is 29th (.159); Russell is actually closer to Verstappen in my model this year than the other two. I mean yes, I think their performance was closer than that but that difference feels way too large for me to not place Russell ahead, yet it seemed like everyone else was and I don't get it. Norris's performance against Piastri, Leclerc's against Sainz, and Russell's against Hamilton all weirdly echo each other as in all three cases the higher-ranked driver beat the lower-ranked driver in all or nearly all statistical categories except for lead change record, where the better driver had the worst lead change record each time because they won more poles, giving themselves more opportunities to be passed for the lead. Hamilton did admittedly beat Russell with 3 fastest races to his none and they tied in wins, TNL, and races with the most lead shares (2, 1, and 1) respectively but I would say Russell outran Hamilton worse than the other two pairs considering he beat him 13-7 in races and 19-5 in qualifying. While Russell and Hamilton tied in wins, Russell outran him even in that perspective in my opinion since obviously he won on track at Spa before he was disqualified and Hamilton inherited the lead. I realize Mercedes may have given up on Hamilton since he was a lame duck driver, but the same thing can be said about Leclerc and Sainz. Of the three drivers, Russell had the best lead change percentage at 2-4 to Leclerc's 1-3 and Norris's 3-8 even though he had a slower car than the other two. It seems like by almost everything I look at, Russell is coming out ahead of Leclerc and Norris and it's making me second-guess myself that everyone else disagrees. I guess most people really just look at the championship...
Kyle missing the Championship 4 when he was clearly the best driver this year was a Grand Larsony. Despite missing the Coca-Cola 374 after rain delays at the Indy 500 prevented him from making the start of the race, he led nearly all advanced statistical categories this year with 16 natural races led, 6 wins, 6 TNL, 5.14 lead shares, 8 races with the most lead shares, 5.19 CRL, 5 fastest laps, 6 fastest races, and a speed percentile of 80.89. This also marked the first year he led my stock car teammate model with a rating of .250, although he admittedly posted a higher rating in 2021 but ranked behind Chris Buescher that year because Buescher utterly dominated a washed-up Ryan Newman. The only statistical categories on my big table he did not lead were lead change percentage (although his 42-33 was a better lead change pass differential than William Byron's 18-14), races with the most laps led (Christopher Bell's 7), and poles (Michael McDowell's absurd 6). Although many people want to criticize Larson for his supposed lack of consistency or his embarrassing crashes, that seems wrong to me as well. If you asked most NASCAR fans who the most consistent driver was this year, they would most likely say either Chase Elliott (because he had the best average finish) or Bell (because he had the most Latford points). But were either Elliott or Bell actually more consistent? If you look at this year's NASCAR Latford-era points, Larson would have lost the title by 130 points. But if he hadn't missed Charlotte because of his Indy run, he would have only needed to finish 11th or better (which he very likely would have done) to win the title even under that format. While Bell likely was more consistent than Larson, Larson's advantage in bonus points because he dominated more often would have definitely been enough to overcome that. And for all the discussion about how Larson crashed so much more often than Elliott and therefore Elliott was more consistent, Toby Christie's incident tracker indicates that Larson and Elliott were tied with 15 incidents. I realize that isn't quite updated through the end of the season, but it seems like even if it were Larson would at most barely have more incidents than Elliott. He was largely just unluckier that his crashes were more likely to take him out of the race than Elliott's, and that can be pure dumb luck especially in the Damaged Vehicle Policy era. Neither Bell's actual or Elliott's supposed advantage in consistency is enough to overcome Larson's far superior dominance and passing numbers. Larson also led nearly all of Ryan McCafferty's statistics and he also led the series in pass differential with 449 and you could really tell as he blasted through the field in several come-from-behind wins in 2024, including his win at Sonoma and his first Brickyard 400 win, probably one of his career highlights to date. His 6-2 TNL pass differential also matched Joey Logano of all people's 4-0 for the best pass differential on the final lead change of the race. Despite losing the regular season title to Tyler Reddick by a point (almost entirely because he missed Charlotte, which people for some reason want to give him shit for) he won the final races of the Round of 16 and Round of 12 at the Bristol night race (where he led 462 laps; the most for a Bristol winner since Cale Yarborough in 1977) and the Charlotte roval. However, a botched pit stop at Las Vegas and a blown tire at Homestead (neither of which were his fault) and a late spin at Homestead (which was) resulted in him only scoring 1 stage point in those races and his finishes just outside the top ten coupled with three other Round of 8 drivers winning kept him out of the Championship 4 even though he was the best driver. In some ways, you can argue his 2024 was better than his more-decorated 2021 because his advantage over the rest of the field was arguably larger this year and his level of dominance this year is arguably more impressive considering how the Next Gen car made the competition closer. In addition to winning the title, Larson's numbers in 2021 (17 natural races led, 46-39 lead change record, 11-3 TNL lead change record, 10 wins, 11 TNL, 7.33 lead shares, 14 races with the most lead shares, 8.84 CRL, 14 races with the most laps led, 7 fastest laps, 9 fastest races, 86.78 speed percentile, 0.314 teammate rating) were all better than this year's stats, usually substantially so (16 natural races led, 42-33 lead change record, 6-2 TNL lead change record, 6 wins, 6 TNL, 5.14 led shares, 8 races with the most lead shares, 5.19 CRL, 6 races with the most laps led, 5 fastest laps, 6 fastest races, 80.89 speed percentile). I think his drop in every statistic was probably greater than the increase in competition, not to mention that he won the title that year and didn't this year, he established a powerhouse operation in 2021 which impresses me more than sustaining it, and his extracurricular racing was a lot better that year when he won most of the big dirt races which he didn't this year. There's been a big debate of late between whether Max Verstappen or Kyle Larson is the best driver in the world. I get it. To me those are the two most obvious choices and I don't think Kyle is close to Max as I do not think he has ever been that much better than the rest of the field to the same extent, but if you want to argue Larson is better because of what he does in other series, I don't blame you. He certainly has a much better case as the heir to drivers like A.J. Foyt or Mario Andretti than Tony Stewart does, as I find his dirt career vastly more impressive than Stewart's and I think he'll go on to be the better Cup driver too. In addition to his Cup wins, he also won four High Limit wins, three World of Outlaws wins including his second Knoxville Nationals), an Xfinity win, a USAC Midget win, and Rookie of the Year in the Indy 500. That last one kind of bothered me because I honestly expected more from at Indy than he delivered especially because 2014 Kurt Busch finished 6th as a rookie at Indy and washed-up Jimmie Johnson finished 6th on his IndyCar oval debut at Texas. Since Larson is a lot closer to his peak than those two, I really thought he'd be a threat to win. I expected Pato O'Ward to outrun him, but I absolutely didn't expect Alexander Rossi to do so but he definitely did. But maybe my expectations were too high. I haven't forgotten that Busch was outrun by all his Andretti teammates in 2014 (including Carlos Muñoz and Marco Andretti, who were certainly Indy masters but not very good otherwise). Larson meanwhile was running 6th, behind Rossi but ahead of O'Ward and Callum Ilott at the time he sped and O'Ward eventually rallied to a 2nd place finish so maybe Larson would have indeed got a top five if he hadn't sped and I guess he was closer to O'Ward and Rossi in speed than Kurt was to his teammates that year who weren't as good. I still think I would've given Christian Rasmussen Rookie of the Year after Larson did speed though, but I knew that wasn't going to happen. Lastly, Maro Engel is wrong.
The greatest driver of the 2020s you've never heard of continued to be the greatest driver you've never heard of as ten Voorde did a 10-4 in 2024, going over and out on his Porsche Supercup career when he announced his retirement from the series immediately after winning his third title. Although I've listed him in the top ten before, I didn't have quite the nerve to put him in a top five yet but I definitely think this was his best season in the Porsche system as he tied for his most career wins across all the Porsche series with 14 and he also had his winningest Porsche Supercup season ever with 5 wins, the most wins for any driver in a season since René Rast in 2012 and I likewise ranked him 3rd that year. Admittedly, I think Porsche Supercup had deeper competition in 2012 than I did this year, but on the other hand ten Voorde also won the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany title as well (which Rast failed to do in 2012). In all three of his Porsche Supercup title seasons (2020, 2021, and 2024), he also won the PCC Germany title, and he won a fourth title in that series in 2023 as well. Although his three wins in Porsche Carrera Cup Germany were actually his worst since 2018, I still think this season was better than any of those, especially because he switched teams in both series. In all his previous title seasons, he at least remained with the team for which he competed the previous year. Not this time as he switched from Team GP Elite in both series to Schumacher CLRT (the team co-owned by Côme Ledogar, but no, none of the Schumacher drivers are involved) in Porsche Supercup while he returned to Team Huber, for whom he won his first PCC Germany title in 2020. Additionally, he also competed in Porsche Carrera Cup Italy, a title he won in 2023. I might have ranked him second instead of third if he'd won that title as well. He started out really hot there with four wins in his first six races but skipped the Imola round because there was a conflict with PCC Germany. Although he still led the PCC Italy points even after that round, Keagan Masters overtook him a she finished 5th, 6th, 2nd, and 3rd in the last four races while ten Voorde finished 26th, 10th, retired, and finished 6th in his last four races to fall 30 points behind Masters for that championship. That's the only reason I dropped him to third when I was originally going to put him second.
Boy, he really showed me what he could do. I kind of waffled about whether I really wanted to do this because I'm not sure whether my placing Ritomo Miyata 3rd on last year's list aged very well. While Miyata's 2023 was definitely a monster season as he swept both major league Japanese championships (Super Formula and Super GT) in the same season and had the most combined wins of any driver to do that since Pedro de la Rosa in 1997, Miyata only finished 19th in the Formula 2 championship this year and was not one of the 18 drivers to win a race. That of course has me wondering if I drastically overrated Miyata last year and I'm sure most people would tell me I had. However, even great drivers sometimes struggle when they change series. I rated Michael Andretti's 1991 and 1992 seasons third even though he busted in F1 and I definitely think Sébastien Bourdais was an elite driver during his run of four straight Champ Car titles even if his F1 stint was also a disaster so I ultimately decided that although Miyata did not have a good season this year that I'm not going to second-guess myself and rate that season lower historically. Instead, I've decided to double down since Tsuboi's season was even better! While Tsuboi was narrowly behind Miyata as the second highest-rated Super Formula driver last year, this year he significantly improved to 9th overall in my open wheel model with a rating of .342. This probably understates how good he actually was because he was one of only three major league open wheel drivers this year to sweep his teammate along with Max Verstappen and his Super GT championship-winning teammate Kenta Yamashita. Miyata had swept his teammates Giuliano Alesi and Ukyo Sasahara in 2023 and outscored them 114.5-3 but Tsuboi (who replaced Miyata at Team TOM'S when Miyata switched to Formula 2) actually beat Sasahara worse, as he finished 20th in points and failed to score a point. Sasahara is better than Alesi as he won two Super Formula races a mere two years ago and two Super GT races this year, but he failed to score a point up against Tsuboi, and he probably should have done better this year since he was full-time in 2024 after being a mid-season replacement for Alesi the year before. In Super GT, Tsuboi won his third title in the last four years and most impressively, he became the first driver ever to win the premier GT500 championship with three different teammates (Yuhi Sekiguchi in 2021, Miyata in 2023, and Yamashita in 2024). He is definitely a lot better than any of his co-drivers as he overtook Tomoki Nojiri to become the highest-rated Super Formula driver in my open wheel model this year with a rating of .138, while Yamashita (.003), Miyata (-.031), and Sekiguchi (-.252) are all rated significantly lower. Last year, I mentioned that Miyata and Tsuboi won the Super GT title by the largest margin ever (26 points). Well, this year Tsuboi and Yamashita won the title by 33 points to break even that record. After Nojiri's back-to-back titles in 2021 and 2022, Miyata beat him by 8.5 points in last year's championship (but Nojiri actually outscored Miyata in points if you exclude the race Nojiri missed). This year Tsuboi beat Nojiri by 30.5 points and he won 3 races in both series, an improvement over Miyata's 2 wins in Super Formula. By all accounts, this was simply a better version of Miyata last year. So am I gonna say I was wrong about Miyata? No, not really, because I definitely think that year was almost as good, but I admit part of the reason I rated Miyata so highly is because he is autistic and the grit and determination it took to overcome that truly impressed me and Tsuboi doesn't have that, but Tsuboi's season was still better. Last year, I rated Ashley Sutton (who tied for the most wins in a season in BTCC history) between Miyata and Verstappen but this time I definitely think Tsuboi deserves second.
Verstappen has now led all four of the top 100 lists I've done. There isn't much to say about it. This was obviously his best season and his drive from 17th to win in Brazil was likely his best drive. There isn't much to say about it. Obviously his numbers were better in previous years like 2023 but most people in F1 circles are usually more impressed when someone wins the title without the fastest car, and Verstappen delivered in spades. He became the first champion with a team that finished third in the World Constructors’ Championship since Nelson Piquet in 1983, while his teammate Sergio Pérez had the lowest points finish for a champion’s teammate since 1994. Verstappen continues to outperform Pérez by a larger margin year after year as his advantage in speed percentile over Pérez has increased from 8.92 in 2021 to 13.18 in 2022, 14.11 in 2023, and 22.17 in 2024. Despite only finishing third in the constructor's championship, he led all drivers with 12 natural races led, a 7-2 in lead change record (unless Oscar Piastri's 3-0 is a large enough sample size for you), 9 wins, 11 TNL, 10.67 in lead shares, 11 races with the most lead shares, 9.25 CRL, 9 races with the most laps led, 8 poles (tied with Lando Norris), and 7 fastest races (tied with Norris). The only categories he lost were fastest laps (Norris had 6) and speed percentile (Norris overtook Verstappen in the final race with a speed percentile of 88.58 to Verstappen's 87.96). Still, I think the gap between Norris and Verstappen in speed was more than their 0.62 speed percentile difference. Alex Albon's performance rise in recent years allowed Verstappen to overtake Mitch Evans as the highest-rated driver in my open wheel model in 2020, which means he led my model four of the last five years (every year except for 2022). The only two interesting things to talk about here are whether his performance will decline enough for him to finally lose the title after Adrian Newey's departure and whether Verstappen should be docked on ranking lists for his obnoxious driving. It is weird how much European racing purists sneer at NASCAR for awful driving standards or whatever but accept it from F1. Verstappen clearly does not need to shove people off the track (most infamously this year Carlos Sainz, Jr. at Mexico City) to win but he still does it and it could be argued that that taints him. I would not as I think drivers should be judged for their best performances rather than their worst, but it obviously can make drivers like him more difficult to root for. As for whether his cars will finally be slow enough next year for him to finally lose the title, I haven't got a clue.
