F1’s Driver Of The Day began in 2016. The vote is a fun and mostly harmless way to increase interaction with fans, without the issues of interfering with the racing or championship itself. (This is unlike the Fan Boost experiment attempted by Formula E.) Here we look at the data behind the Driver Of The Day (DOTD) results, including which drivers have the most DOTD awards and what results make a DOTD more likely.

DOTD Winners

As of the end of the 2023 season, there have been 116 Driver Of The Day Awards given out. These have been shared amongst 25 drivers. Of the 22 drivers who raced in 2023, 19 of them have won DOTD at least once in their career. The three exceptions are Zhou, Sargeant and Lawson. This is mostly explained by their lack of experience, although Lawson did come 2nd in the vote in Singapore, behind Sainz.

Verstappen leads the way for the most DOTD awards, and has won almost a quarter of those given out. Perhaps surprisingly Vettel is the second most successful, with Hamilton and Perez tied for 3rd. This already hints at the fact that the DOTD is not just awarded to the race winner, or the driver who is generally considered the best by fans. After all, very few people would put Perez and Vettel level with Hamilton (or beyond in Vettel’s case) since 2016.

How Strongly Does Driver Of The Day Correlate To A Strong Result?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a race winner is the most likely to receive a DOTD. However, the results are relatively spread out, with the DOTD more likely to be somebody off the podium than be the race winner.

When looking at the data further, we can see that DOTD’s are often awarded to drivers who have stronger results than expected. Whilst 29% DOTD’s go to the race winner, this falls to just 16% if that driver also won the world championship that year. Conversely, a race winner who doesn’t win the championship has a 48% chance of winning driver of the day. This general relationship holds even in the early season when the championship winner is unclear. There is a heavy preference of fans towards unexpected winners, and united results more generally.

In 2023, DOTD was awarded to 11 different drivers. Ocon, Hamilton, Albon, Leclerc and Tsunoda received one each. For all of them it was for their best result (or equal best) of the entire season. Norris, Piastri, Sainz, Verstappen and Perez also received at least one DOTD at their best/equal best result of the year.

Driver Of The Day Results By Team

In theory, the driver of the day should be independent of the team they drive for. However, we see that the results are significantly concentrated in the top teams. This is further evidence that the level of performance is an important indicator in the probability of receiving DOTD.

McLaren, for example, received just 4 DOTD awards in the first 5 years (2016-2020). This is despite having drivers some exceptional drivers during this period (Alonso, Button, Sainz, Norris and Ricciardo). By contrast, they received 7 DOTDs in 2023 alone. All of those 7 occurred after the Austria upgrade, which further hints at competitiveness being a pre-requisite for regular DOTDs.

The drivers at Red Bull tell a similar story. Whilst the majority of Red Bull’s DOTDs are from Verstappen, Red Bull still have more than expected by chance from Verstappen’s teammates. Ricciardo and Pérez in particular were significantly more likely to win DOTD at Red Bull than at other teams they drove for. Whilst it’s typically accepted that Ricciardo’s Red Bull era was his peak, the same cannot be said for Pérez.

Of course, we also know that better teams are more likely to attract better drivers. This cannot fully explain the massive discrepancy between bigger and smaller teams, but could explain some of it.

The most successful drivers (in terms of DOTD awards) outside of Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren are:

Vettel, 5

Pérez, 4

Alonso, 4

All of these drivers drove for at least one of these top teams at some point.

Driver Of The Day Trivia

-A solid one-off performance is often enough to merit a DOTD. Russell and Hülkenberg both received DOTDs in 2020 after standing in for drivers with COVID. Similarly, de Vries’ one-off race at Monza 2022 was enough for the award.

-Romain Grosjean was voted driver of the day at Bahrain 2020, despite not completing a single lap. This was of course a response to him miraculously surviving the lap 1 crash and subsequent inferno.

-Vettel, Räikkönen and Alonso all received DOTD awards at their final race. (Alonso “retired” in 2018 before returning in 2021.) The vote was influenced by a desire to honour these driver’s legacies in the sport.

-There are multiple instances of fans suggesting that F1 has fixed the DOTD result. At the 2019 Hungarian Grand Prix, Kubica was initially announced as the DOTD, before it was subsequently awarded to Max Verstappen. Some believe that Kubica fans may have influenced the vote, before F1 intervened and decided that the vote was somehow illegitimate. There is also a theory that Nakita Mazepin was voted DOTD at the 2021 Portuguese GP, after an online campaign to award him the title as a joke/protest vote. However, Mazepin was not announced as the winner. The announcement was delayed for several hours, with no official reason was given for the delay.

-There has been one race where a DOTD was not awarded: The 2021 Belgian Grand Prix. This makes sense on the surface as the whole 2 lap “race” was completed under the safety car. However, it does seem strange that the race was deemed insufficient enough for a pointless award, but sufficient to hand out championship points and not offer refunds to spectators.

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