A Tier

6) Lewis Hamilton, 98% (⬇2)

Faced with a more competitive teammate and a worse car that the team struggled to understand, Hamilton’s early season results were mixed. Much has been made of him doing more than is fair share of set-up experimentation in the early season, and it’s true that mid-season on wards he was typically the faster Mercedes driver.

Although failing to achieve either a pole or a win (unlike his teammate), Hamilton can hold his head high, and the expectation is surely that both he and Mercedes will rebound next year. His season is considered to be below average (remember an average Hamilton here is calibrated at 100%), but it’s a tantamount to his quality that even this is easily enough for a top 6 ranking.

5) Carlos Sainz, 102% (⬇2)

An unusually inconsistent year from Sainz, whose rating swung wildly due to a combination of DNFs, mishaps and beautiful drives. An early season slump (clearly seen on his rating below) lead to rumours of an immanent sacking, but within just a few weeks he’d completely turned thing around. Strong drives in Monaco and Silverstone (his first win) also showed a driver capable of leading a team and using his head. Whilst Sainz wasn’t quite able to keep pace with Leclerc across the year, that is a very high bar for any driver and the model is impressed with his level overall.

4) George Russell, 107% (⬆3)

Before the start of the season I ran a twitter poll on the McLaren driver line-up. Whilst some thought it would be close between he Mercedes divers, not one person was confident that Russell would be ahead come the end of the season. Regardless of the circumstances, it was an extremely impressive season from the young Brit, and when it mattered most it was him that grabbed the win and 2 poles. A few blunders in wheel-to-wheel combat were the only negatives, as Russell surely answered any questions of why he was being given the opportunity to drive at Mercedes.

S Tier

3) Charles Leclerc, 120% (⬆2)

After the opening 3 rounds of the championship, Leclerc looked odds on for the title. Whilst his championship campaign unraveled pretty quickly, he maintained an edge over his teammate and was still performing at a very high level across the year. Nine poles showed his searing one lap pace was as good as ever, and a run of 5 consecutive podiums towards the end of the season showed that he (and Ferrari) could be consistent at times.

Criticism came from some painful driver errors in Imola and France, as well as some hesitation when questioning team strategy (particularly when compared to Sainz). However, it’s questionable whether his reputation for cracking under pressure is justified. His early season battles with Verstappen in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia showed he could race, and it’s a tantalising view of what the whole season could have been had Ferrari managed to keep pace with Red Bull.

2) Max Verstappen, 120% (⬇1)

A record breaking year for Verstappen. After some initial reliability woes, Max stretched his legs as the season progressed, winning the title comfortably in the end. So after dominating the driver ratings last year, why is such a successful season considered worse? The main factor is that Pérez was closer to Max than he was last year, particularly in the first part of the season.

His season is still considered extremely good though, and Max is of course a worthy champion. Singapore was the only major low point all year from a driving perspective, demonstrating that even the elite of the sport don’t have perfect seasons.

1) Lando Norris, 123% (⬆1)

Last year Norris was in a fierce battle with 4 other drivers for 2nd place. This year he’s been in the battle for 1st throughout. Contrary to expectations, the already notable gap to Ricciardo extended further in 2022.

Whilst the car was less competitive than last year and gradually lost ground to Alpine in the midfield, Norris was the only midfield car to finish on the podium and the only one to score more than 1 fastest lap. Comfortably finishing 7th in the championship in what the model thinks was the 5th best car, Norris’ performances have often flew under the radar in 2022. He consistently extracted everything the car was capable of, something that his talented teammate seemed unable to do.

The model often tends towards one driver being ranked the best performing driver regularly over an era. Beating Verstappen in the rankings (or matching, once DNFs are accounted for below) is a fantastic achievement, particularly given that Max was the dominant force this year.

Now that we have every driver, let’s smush them all together onto one graph. This is a bit too much to read everything at once, but hopefully gives a bit of context for how close difference drivers and tiers are to each other.

Rankings Including DNFs

Here I will present some adjusted rankings for 2022, obtained using the same system as above with one difference. Instead of using a total number of points, it instead produces an adjusted total based on how many mechanical DNFs the driver suffered. For example, finishing in all races with a total of 22 points would now be considered the equivalent of 11 points if a driver’s engine blows up every other race (i.e. each one would be an average of 1 point per counting race).

One major reservation I had about implementing such a system is that it would be difficult to objectively decide which incidents to account for and which to not. The current system is that anything referencing a spin, accident or crash (regardless of the perceived fault) would receive no mitigation, whilst a DNF for other reasons (e.g. gearbox) would. In cases of DNS, the reason for the non-start is explored in a similar way. Sprint races are also factored in, with a roughly 1/3 rating compared to a full GP.

Whilst reliability differed significantly across teams, the main factor here is how the differences manifested themselves within a team. Only at Alpine was there a difference of more than 1 counting DNF, with Alonso recording 3 more mechanical DNFs than Ocon (and an additional sprint race too).

So, let’s see how this change affects the driver rankings:

Original Ranking	Ranking including mechanical DNFs	Change in position
1) Lando Norris	1) Max Verstappen	+1
2) Max Verstappen	2) Lando Norris	-1
3) Charles Leclerc	3) Charles Leclerc	–
4) George Russell	4) George Russell	–
5) Carlos Sainz	5) Carlos Sainz	–
6) Lewis Hamilton	6) Lewis Hamilton	–
7) Esteban Ocon	7) Fernando Alonso	+4
8) Sebastian Vettel	8) Sebastian Vettel	–
9) Alex Albon	9) Esteban Ocon	-2
10) Pierre Gasly	10) Alex Albon	-1
11) Fernando Alonso	11) Pierre Gasly	-1
12) Sergio Pérez	12) Daniel Ricciardo	+1
13) Daniel Ricciardo	13) Sergio Pérez	-1
14) Valtteri Bottas	14) Valtteri Bottas	–
15) Yuki Tsunoda	15) Yuki Tsunoda	–
16) Nicholas Latifi	16) Lance Stroll	+1
17) Lance Stroll	17) Nicholas Latifi	-1
18) Kevin Magnussen	18) Kevin Magnussen	–
19) Mick Schumacher	19) Mick Schumacher	–
20) Zhou Guanyu	20) Zhou Guanyu	–

Half the drivers stay in the exact same position, with the biggest changes unsurprisingly at Alpine. The change at at the top is small, but significant. Given the difference between Verstappen and Norris in this system is less than a tenth of a % (which translates to a prediction of less than half a point across a season in the same car), it can effectively be considered a draw for top ranking. Extra data from subsequent years may even cause this ranking to swing backwards and forwards between the two of them.

Alpine are the only team to swap driver rankings, with Alonso’s season now considered more impressive than Ocon’s. Whilst a jump of 4 places seems like a big change, he only actually increased from 82% to 86%, with much of the jostling due to an extremely tight midfield.

We can see how big the changes are in the bar chart below:

You can see that large adjustments in score are not really apparent over the course of the season. However, I’m sure including DNFs would stabilise driver ratings across a season significantly better, as a random DNF early on can have a significant impact on a driver’s points total (e.g. 40 points instead of 50 at the start of the year is much more significant that 240 points instead of 250 at the end).

I’m pleasantly surprised with how the results turned out for DNFs, and I plan on using it from the start of 2023, as well as going back across seasons passed too.

Let me know what you think of the 2022 rankings!

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