2015 Formula 1 British Grand Prix

Spurgy 777
That is somewhat meaningless though as it doesn't account for how good a car they've had during their career. Hamilton has been very lucky in that his team have finished in the top 3 in the constructors championship for 8 out of the 9 seasons he's done. (Including this season)
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Never get these arguments, like there's ever been a successful driver or world champion where you could go "Ya know what, can't believe that midfield car/driver won the WDC"

Although I guess compared to others in the field it wasn't the worst, but Alonso in 2012 from my memory and knowledge was closest to having a dog of a car but winning the title.
 
Especially in this racing era where car is king, but even going back to 50's and 60's it is difficult to think of many occasions the top teams didn't hire the best drivers to race the best cars...
 
First I'm going to point out that I forgot Hamilton was in Mercedes and not Mclaren in 2013 which means he's never had a car that's finished outside the top 3 in the constructors, in fact he's only had 2/9 seasons outside of a top 2 car.

Second thing I want to clear up that lots of people seem to be confused with, I am not arguing that Hamilton is a bad driver, or that he's not one of the top drivers on the grid, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in ranking drivers using Famine's system.

Famine
Turns out that drivers who are good get recruited by good teams and score good points for them, putting the cars at the top of the constructors' championships...

Other top 10 drivers include Michael Schumacher who drove 15 top 3 cars in 19 seasons (the other 4 were 4th, 4th, 4th and, in his last season, 5th), Alain Prost who drove 12 top 3 cars from 13 seasons and I'm sure if Juan Manuel Fangio, Nino Farina or Alberto Ascari had been driving a constructors' championship too, they'd have been exclusively in top 3 cars...
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Your first part is an oversimplification, as I'm sure you know being a good driver doesn't guarantee you'll end up in a good car, just like with Alonso and Button this season. Same can be said that being a not so good driver doesn't mean you won't end up in a good car, and your ranking system doesn't take that into account, in fact no ranking system I've seen does, which is why they are all somewhat meaningless.

And the second part of your post pretty much proves my point, looks like all the drivers in the top 10 using your rankings spent the vast majority of their careers in top 3 cars, but that doesn't make them the top 10 drivers in F1 history, at best it gives you a very rough idea of where they would rank.

Saidur_Ali
He made his own luck by being so good. If you look at whole grid, Nico Rosberg seems one of the best. This year he is losing 8-1 in qualifying battle and Michael considered him his strongest teammate. Lewis did also manage to win WDC without team winning WCC which is rare. Fernando Alonso also considers Lewis the strongest. Nico Rosberg relishes the challenge and can't think of a better teammate. There is also high praise by Jenson Button. He can't be too bad if his colleagues think so highly of him...
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See top of this post, I'm not arguing that Hamilton isn't a good driver, of course he is, I'm arguing that Famine's ranking system is inadequate for making anything more that rough estimations. Also you can't really say whether or not Rosberg is one of the best drivers on the grid as his entire career has either been in a car where it was virtually impossible to get a good result, or a car where it's difficult not to finish in the top 2 every race. Or in other words, he never really had a car where he can compete fairly with all the other top drivers.

niky
While it would be nice if all drivers were in equal cars, racing set-ups can and do make equal cars less equal. Take note, when Hamilton won the GP2 trophy, one of his best races was when he pulled all the rear wing out of his car at Turkey. Nobody else did that because it was suicidal. He spun out from fifth, recovered, and having found out how little grip he had in the corners, drove from the back of the grid to the podium.

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Aside from open-wheelers, however, there's always ROC. But not everyone competes there. Schumi and Vettel have cleaned up quite a few team trophies at ROC in the past...

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In the end, though, you make your own luck. Vettel earned his way onto the Red Bull "main" team, then made the jump to Ferrari at the right time. Hamilton made the jump to Mercedes just before McLaren completely imploded, a move few of us thought would work... though the suspicions were there given Merc had been pirating good people from the other teams for a while. A champion must give himself every chance to succeed.
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I would disagree that you make your own luck, and that luck shouldn't enter the equation when ranking drivers, which it does with Famine's system. When Hamilton moved to Mercedes, he had no idea that in a years time they would be dominating every other team, same when Alonso moved to Mclaren, although he probably didn't expect to be winning, I very much doubt he expected to be in such a bad car. So you can't really attribute good a bad luck to the drivers decisions, and so it shouldn't come into consideration when ranking drivers.
 
Spurgy 777
Your first part is an oversimplification, as I'm sure you know being a good driver doesn't guarantee you'll end up in a good car, just like with Alonso and Button this season.
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Indeed. Nor does it particularly guarantee that you can pick your car, as Damon Hill found out. But the fact is that the best-paying teams want the best drivers and they're usually the teams with the biggest sponsors or - or because of - the biggest prize money.
Spurgy 777
Same can be said that being a not so good driver doesn't mean you won't end up in a good car, and your ranking system doesn't take that into account, in fact no ranking system I've seen does, which is why they are all somewhat meaningless.
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Of course they don't take it into account - and they can't.

Fact is, if you score a lot of points, your car does too. That means that if you win the championship, your car is probably on the podium even if Luca Badoer is your teammate. You can't separate how many points a driver scores from how many points a team does...

... unless you use my adjusted constructors' championship, of course :D
Spurgy 777
And the second part of your post pretty much proves my point, looks like all the drivers in the top 10 using your rankings spent the vast majority of their careers in top 3 cars, but that doesn't make them the top 10 drivers in F1 history, at best it gives you a very rough idea of where they would rank.
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That's because they won driver titles.

If Rubens Barrichello hadn't existed in 2004, Ferrari would still have won the driver's title because Schumacher on his own won 13 races and scored 148pt. Was it Schumacher getting 148pt because the car was a top 3 car, or was it the car getting 148pt because Schumacher was world champion? At the very least FACC tells us that it's a bit of both because Ferrari would have scored 12 maximums from 16 races, along with Schumacher's 13 wins.


How do we modify the driver rankings to account for how good a car in a particular season is though? Perhaps because the Ferrari scored 220% the points of the BAR we should just mulitply the BAR drivers' points by 2.2 - and do the same for the other cars' proportional points difference?

Button 187
Webber 183
Panis 174
Montoya 173
Raikonnen 171
Fisichella 170
Heidfeld 157
Schumacher M 148
Alonso 147
Trulli 115
Barrichello 114
Glock 105
Massa 92
Coulthard 91
Da Matta 87
Klien 79
Sato 75
Schumacher R 71
Pizzonia 18
Villeneuve 0
Gene 0
Zonta 0
Pantano 0

Which all looks fine (for certain values of "fine") until you spot that Zsolt Baumgartner scored 262pt for a freak 8th at Indianapolis...


Edit: Cripes, FATC is amazing...

I've re-ranked and rescored the teams in 2004 for FATC:
1 Ferrari 154
2 BAR 74
3 Renault 74
4 Williams 72
5 Sauber 71 (+1)
6 McLaren 54 (-1)
7 Toyota 36 (+1)
8 Jaguar 32 (-1)
9 Jordan 18
10 Minardi 14

If we then express the FATC scores as "difficulty of scoring points in this car" we get:
1 Ferrari 1.000
2 BAR 2.081
3 Renault 2.081
4 Williams 2.139
5 Sauber 2.169
6 McLaren 2.852
7 Toyota 4.278
8 Jaguar 4.813
9 Jordan 8.556
10 Minardi 11.000

And then modifying the drivers' points to relative difficulty we get:
Button 177
Schumacher M 148
Raikkonen 128
Montoya 124
Alonso 123
Barrichello 114
Trulli 96
Sato 71
Coulthard 68
Schumacher R 51
Fisichella 48
Webber 34
Massa 26
Panis 26
Heidfeld 26
Glock 17
Klien 14
Pizzonia 13
Da Matta 13
Baumgartner 11


I like that. Of course it can only be used on FATC seasons, which are only those where teams were permitted no more than two entries (so... 1980?)
 
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Spurgy 777
I would disagree that you make your own luck, and that luck shouldn't enter the equation when ranking drivers, which it does with Famine's system. When Hamilton moved to Mercedes, he had no idea that in a years time they would be dominating every other team, same when Alonso moved to Mclaren, although he probably didn't expect to be winning, I very much doubt he expected to be in such a bad car. So you can't really attribute good a bad luck to the drivers decisions, and so it shouldn't come into consideration when ranking drivers.
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It's not so much luck as it is working to further your career.

Champions typically shine in lower classes and lower-tier teams before going to a top team in F1. And those who don't get to a big team quickly can still earn their way there through good driving And once you've proven your worth in a big team and have options open to you, you take the ones you think will pan out.

Alonso made only one good team change. The first move to McLaren. He moved to Ferrari in a huff because he wasn't number one at his team... even if McLaren was in better shape to win the championship... suffered through a few semi-competitive years... then moved to McLaren at exactly the wrong time, right as Ferrari finally started taking F1 seriously again and put an experienced F1 insider in charge of the team.

And he moved back to McLaren... which hasn't had much success recently, and which was going to start with a brand new engine... yes... nobody expected McLaren to be this bad, but everybody knew that the team would be nowhere close to front-running this season, thanks to the untested package.

Button... well, he's done well perhaps two or three times in his career, but wasn't really all that impressive against good team-mates until he whipped Hamilton in 2011... which I think was his best season ever. (yeah, his 2nd place at McLaren was more impressive than his championship at Brawn)

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Damon Hill got lucky. I think Williams were vindicated for dropping him after that championship when Heinz Harald Frentzen whipped him in Jordan two years later... :D ...but still, Williams made a lot of stupid driver changes back then... so that doesn't prove much. :D

 
Whodoyouthink
What does carbon fiber feel like? Anything special or is it pretty bland? Granted, paint will skew the sensation, so maybe I shouldn't even ask. You have gloves on anyway...
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It's got a kind of glass-like texture. It feels like it would snap cleanly if you tried to bend it because it has so little flex, but even thin sheets take quite a lot of force.
 
what an amazing weekend.even got sunburnt on friday and saturday.Never seen so many people enjoying themselves and every toilet was clean. silverstone really have got their act together.great races too all weekend. cant wait for next year.
 
Spurgy 777
See top of this post, I'm not arguing that Hamilton isn't a good driver, of course he is, I'm arguing that Famine's ranking system is inadequate for making anything more that rough estimations. Also you can't really say whether or not Rosberg is one of the best drivers on the grid as his entire career has either been in a car where it was virtually impossible to get a good result, or a car where it's difficult not to finish in the top 2 every race. Or in other words, he never really had a car where he can compete fairly with all the other top drivers.
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I just don't find it being "very lucky" given how good he is, naturally all the best teams will be after him. Also Famine's ranking system should find all the successful drivers as to be in that position, you need to be decent.

Nico Rosberg scored highest on Williams engineering aptitude test. McLaren were also after him and Mercedes ended up getting him. These top teams must see something good about him to want him to drive for them compared to a lot of other drivers on the grid. He also beat a 7 times WDC 3 years in a row which many consider a top driver... Also got a multi-year deal with Mercedes again.

Cream rises to the top. ;)
 
Saidur_Ali
Nico Rosberg scored highest on Williams engineering aptitude test. McLaren were also after him and Mercedes ended up getting him. These top teams must see something good about him to want him to drive for them compared to a lot of other drivers on the grid. He also beat a 7 times WDC 3 years in a row which many consider a top driver... Also got a multi-year deal with Mercedes again.
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I'm never sure about the MSC comparison for Nico... certainly Nico's a solid, dependable driver but MSC was completely new to the Formula in that time. I still don't see the raw je ne sais quoi from Nico when it counts - he can either number-crunch his way to success or he can't, there's nothing else.


Saidur_Ali
Cream rises to the top. ;)
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Nonsense, Badge peaked at 34 in the UK singles chart.
 
TenEightyOne
I'm never sure about the MSC comparison for Nico... certainly Nico's a solid, dependable driver but MSC was completely new to the Formula in that time. I still don't see the raw je ne sais quoi from Nico when it counts - he can either number-crunch his way to success or he can't, there's nothing else.
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He did have a lot of experience from before and also it likely was a new experience of the Formula for a lot of drivers at the time if not all. He had three years to get on top of it, seemed closer in his final year IIRC. Nico did a great job of chasing down Lewis in changeable conditions in this race when on the dry tyres, I think there is more to him than number-crunching.
TenEightyOne
Nonsense, Badge peaked at 34 in the UK singles chart.
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Didn't say always. ;)
 
Nico doesn't make mistakes like Lewis does. He's like Bottas in that you can rely on him getting the car to the end no matter how badly the race has gone. Lewis on the other hand can push too hard when he doesn't need to (eg Italy 2009), and has been involved in more incidents than Nico.

However, when he needs to, Lewis can get it together. Often (but not always), when Lewis has it together properly, he's faster than Nico.
 
Jimlaad43
Nico doesn't make mistakes like Lewis does. He's like Bottas in that you can rely on him getting the car to the end no matter how badly the race has gone. Lewis on the other hand can push too hard when he doesn't need to (eg Italy 2009), and has been involved in more incidents than Nico.

However, when he needs to, Lewis can get it together. Often (but not always), when Lewis has it together properly, he's faster than Nico.
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Lewis is one of the best at getting to the end of the race. Also this race he broke Sir Jackie Stewart's 45-year record of leading 17 consecutive grands prix.

Also this is something Williams said when asked if Nico Hülkenberg is ready to make jump up to F1 if Nico Rosberg left.
He probably is actually. But they have all got to learn. They all make mistakes. Lewis made fewer than anybody else, but someone like him comes down from heaven only once every 20 years.
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Lewis_Hamilton_
I'm not sure about this, Nico has cracked and made mistakes numerous times under pressure, I wouldn't say the same about Bottas who seems very good at remaining collected.
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Since the start of 2014, lets see what I can remember.

Nico
2014
(Monaco Quali)
Belgium crash with Lewis
Italy chicanes
Russia turn 2 lockup

2015
Running wide in Bahrain
Austria Quali

Lewis
2014
Austria Quali
Austria Quali (again)
Britain Quali
Crashing into Button in Germany
Spinning off on lap 1 of Hungary
Spin on the inlap in Brazil
Abu Dhabi Quali

2015
Letting Vettel through in Spain
(Monaco Pitstop)
Austria Quali

Definitely more for Lewis, but he still gets the job done.
 
Interesting to see that Rosberg's mistakes have always been detrimental to his performance (negating Belgium where he "maintained" the second he had before the crash but wiped out Hamilton's win effectively). Hamilton's have mostly either been recovered by the finishline, or were as part of a recovery drive already. All events are different though, and Formula 1 is all about making the least amount of mistakes.
 
Spurgy 777
your ranking system doesn't take that into account, in fact no ranking system I've seen does, which is why they are all somewhat meaningless.
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Right, I've created one :D

FATC does a good job, but there's a problem in that it can't be used for seasons where teams were running three or more cars at once. That meant coming up with some way of ranking cars other than that.

I had the 2004 data to hand, so I've used that season. I felt that using any points system was a bit arbitrary and we should just let the raw ranking talk, so this is broadly what I've done:

Added up all the drivers' finishing positions, divided by the number of race finishes*.
Added up all of the cars' finishing positions, divided by the number of race finishes*.
Divided each driver's average finish by the car's to create a performance coefficient.

So 2004 looks like this:

1. Button (BAR) - 0.663
2. Raikkonen (McLaren) - 0.770
3. Schumacher M (Ferrari) - 0.809
4. Alonso (Renault) - 0.818
5. Montoya (Williams) - 0.855
6. Webber (Jaguar) - 0.866
7. Da Matta (Toyota) - 0.931
8. Heidfeld (Jordan) - 0.934
9. Baumgartner (Minardi) - 0.934
10. Schumacher R (Williams) - 0.935

And so on. You can see from that though that we're really just ranking how effective a driver is against his teammate - there's only one team with two drivers in the top ten, and that's because they had four guys driving for them, two of which sucked - so we should use the coefficient to modify the position data, and we get:

1. Schumacher M - 1.71
2. Button - 2.39
3. Barrichello - 3.71
4. Alonso - 3.77
5. Raikkonen - 3.93
6. Montoya - 4.01
7. Schumacher R - 4.79
8. Trulli - 6.76**
9. Fisichella - 7.73
10. Webber - 7.97

And so on. If I were to do this for every season we could generate a list defining outright driver performance tempered by the quality of machinery they had.

It might give an advantage to newer drivers (with fewer cars starting) or to older drivers (with fewer cars finishing), but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

* Race starts may work also. I'll come back to that some other time.
** Trulli is awkward. He drove 15 races for Renault and 2 for Toyota, so that's his weighted, modified, average finishing position per finish in each car.
 
TenEightyOne
Would it be better (although it wouldn't be easy) to differentiate between "team" DNFs (pit-stop failure, design fault) and "driver" DNFs (hits wall)?
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Maybe, but then Senna's results at least would be in limbo for all eternity.

I think that point-per-start may cure that somewhat, as it reflects the quality of machinery. But I've spent an hour on that one season already and don't really want to look it up just yet.

Edit: Ah, I've just remembered why. Because I'm dividing positions by races, in order to make starts relevant I'd have to mark down the positions of retirements. That means 65 years looking at each individual race...

Edit edit: Ugh, disqualifications... Well, here's the positions/start results for 2004:

1. Schumacher M - 2.06
2. Button - 3.95
3. Barrichello - 4.84
4. Montoya - 6.72
5. Alonso - 6.89
6. Fisichella - 7.95
7. Pizzonia - 8.03
8. Trulli - 8.79
9. Coulthard - 9.44
10. Glock - 11.52

Yeah, so nuts to that. So back to positions/finish, here's 2015 so far...

Edit, scratch that. I just spotted I made a mistake and have modified the calculation.

Now the formula is...

(Driver positions/finish)/(average position/finish/car) and 2015 looks like this:

1. Vettel - 1.66
2. Hamilton - 1.81
3. Bottas - 1.86
4. Nasr - 1.87
5. Alonso - 1.88
6. Sainz - 1.88
7. Grosjean - 1.96
8. Mehri - 1.98
9. Ricciardo - 1.98
10. Perez - 2.00
11. Hulkenberg - 2.00
12. Kvyat - 2.02
13. Stevens - 2.03
14. Maldonado - 2.07
15. Button - 2.09
16. Massa - 2.12
17. Ericsson - 2.13
18. Verstappen - 2.14
19. Rosberg - 2.19
20. Raikkonen - 2.43
21. Magnussen - A Suffusion of Yellow

I shall revisit the per start scores now I've thought through that error. That's a fascinating looking list, though I can't help but notice that the top is Ferrari-Mercedes-Williams-Sauber-McLaren-Toro Rosso, while the bottom is Williams-Sauber-Toro Rosso-Mercedes-Ferrari - and the two Force Indias are tied...
 
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This is for Niki Lauda and his spaghetti call. :D
There you go Niki! :P

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This isn't going to go down well with a lot of others:

Famine
1. Vettel - 1.66
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There's no doubt he's earned it this season, however. Interesting to see how it compares with last season.

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Where was all of this when I was working on my Top Ten British Drivers article? Would have come in handy when rating Button... since he's spent quite a few seasons in crappy cars.

Interestingly, though... 2004 was one of his three seasons that was actually great. He thoroughly deserves that ranking there.
 

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