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This video topic was prompted by an engineer friend of mine, Abhinav, who asked me what
I think is something of an age old question in Formula 1: what’s more important - the
driver or the car? And this is a difficult question to unpick,
as most things are when you have inter mingling variables.
In spec series where all the cars are the same or almost the same, we get a clearer
idea of who the best driver in the field is as the team can do much less to influence
their success. Obviously team members do work very hard to
give their drivers the best possible chance through things like setup, strategy, coaching,
etc, but a huge amount of the responsibility for getting points on the scoreboard sits
on the shoulders of the driver. In series like Formula 1, where the teams
build and develop the cars, causing a margin in performance between the best and worse
cars on the grid, the question becomes muddier. Have a look at 1999-2004. Would Schumacher
have have 5 world driver’s titles without Ferrari? Would Ferrari have won 6 World Constructor’s
titles without Schumacher? It’s not so easy to say, is it?
So let’s start having a look at some data. The constructor’s championship has been
running since 1958. In those 62 seasons run since, 53 times the
champion driver was in the champion car. Only nine times did a driver win in a, quote, “losing”
car. Which kind of looks like the car makes a lot
of the difference right? Drivers are struggling to win without the best car underneath them,
clearly. Or… do the teams struggle to win without
the best driver or drivers racing for them? So let’s break this apart a little further.
If we chart the championship position of the lead driver of the title winning team, we
see they mostly come first overall (winning the double), but sometimes come second or
once third! But what if we also chart the position of
the second driver in the same title winning team? It’s not as clear cut.
Ignoring the occasional big gaps in results between the two drivers, we can see that the
second driver doesn’t always finish runner up behind their title winning team mate. In
fact, just looking at the last twenty championships at least one driver from another team has
finished between the title winning driver and their teammate on 14 different occasions
- 70% of the time. If the car was definitely the be all and end
all of performance, its drivers would be finishing 1-2 much more regularly in the overall standings.
If we look back one more year earlier, to 1999, we see quite a big gap where Irvine
finished 2nd in the championship, but Schumacher finished 5th. But this is a bit of an unfair
statistic as Schumacher missed 6 races due to a broken leg and Mika Salo deputised for
him. If you add up all the points from both of them, the ‘second CAR’ then would have
finished 3rd overall, just behind Irvine. Now I’m not going to do this for every year
because that gets… messy. But what I can do is set the number one car of the title
winning team as a baseline of 100%. I can then plot how many points the second
car got in total as a percentage of the lead car’s point.
So in 2019, Hamilton got 413 and Bottas got 326 points, which is 79% of Hamilton’s score.
In 1999 Irvine scored 74 points and Schumacher and Salo - in the other car - scored a combined
total of 54 points - 73% of Irvine’s. And so on.
The second car is quite wildly all over the place, sometimes close to the lead car, sometimes
not at all. So let’s compare this to the lead driver of the nearest rival team.
So in 2019 the nearest non-Mercedes rival was Max Verstappen, who scores 278 - 64% of
Hamilton’s points. Trace this back over the years and we see
that overall a good driver in non-championship winning car is matched quite similarly against
the second driver in the championship car. So, this prompts questions like - in 2018
and 2017, if Mercedes hadn’t had Hamilton and had instead had two Bottas-level drivers,
would either of their drivers have won the championship? Or would Vettel have got both
of those titles? In 2012 - Alonso was much much closer to Vettel
than Webber was. Without Vettel, would Red Bull have got the driver’s title? Seems
unlikely. And again and again we see times where a driver
from another car is much much closer to the lead driver of a championship-winning car
than their own team mate. And that’s part of the reason teams spend
huge amounts of money locking down the very best drivers.
Now, I need to make absolutely clear - this data as presented does not present the entire
picture. If, in 2018, everything was the same except Mercedes had two Bottas-level drivers
You can’t say for certain that Vettel would take the title. We can’t say where these
two Bottases would finish or how much more successful Bottas might be without Hamilton
in the other seat. That’s something we can only speculate.
And I want to be clear I’m not saying Bottas is a bad driver at all. He’s just not Hamilton
or Vettel. Not yet anyway. So you can’t just stick any old driver into
the best car on the grid and get a championship out of them. And the same is true the other
way around. McLaren stuck one of the very best drivers
of the time, Alonso, into their car just as they had one of the worse troughs of performance
in their lifetime. And Alonso couldn’t do very much with the car at all. Hell, McLaren
had two world champions in their team and still struggled.
Which isn’t to downplay what a driver can bring to the team. Racing at official events
is just part of their job. They work the simulator, help with testing, can galvanise the team,
bring in sponsors, attract high-tier staff and help transform a team from midfield running
to top tier. Schumacher did it to Ferrari, though not single handedly, obviously.
So here’s where I fall on this issue or car versus driver. I think it comes down to
performance spread. What do I mean by this? Well in any given
season you could crudely evaluate a team’s car on a scale of goodness from “very good”
to “very bad”. In 2019, you might arguably lay the teams on the axis of goodness like
this, with the Mercedes being a step above the rest, Ferrari and Red Bull being good
and Williams and Haas being at the bad end. Other years may vary - sometimes you might
get a close packed field, where performance is quite tight among teams. Sometimes you’ll
get quite a big spread in performance where the worst teams are practically in a junior
series in comparison to the front runners. Similarly you could rate the drivers in a
similarly crude way, with some of them being the absolutely cream of the crop and some
being just a smoking garbage fire who need to be booted back to go karts.
Again, some years have a tighter spread of talent that other years.
So why is this important? Well, clearly if you’ve got years where
the performance of the cars is very spread out then that has a massive weighting on overall
success. In 2019 you may have been able to argue that
Hamilton might still have won a title in a Ferrari or Red Bull maaaybe but any car below
that and the question is absolutely off the table.
If the field spread was tighter then you could more easily argue that Hamilton (who was arguably
in the form of his life last year) could drag a lower performing car towards a championship
challenge. Similarly if the drivers were all fairly closely
matched, talent-wise, then you might be able to argue that Mercedes could have won last
year’s title with any of the top handful of drivers.
But, if there’s a clear discrepancy in skill, then while you could argue that Vettel could
have been champion in a Mercedes, you probably wouldn’t say the same for - I don’t know
- let’s say Grosjean. And I like Grosjean. And this is where I go back to my grand plan
of turning F1 Communist again… I’m… quite into the idea of a championship
where the drivers rotate through teams as the season goes on. It would be a massive
departure from F1 as we know it and would require a lot of thought but… think about
it. If there are 20 drivers, then each driver
can spent two races with each team over the first 20 races. In that span of time, each
driver has had to use every different car and each team has run every driver. And while
there will be some randomness thrown in with reliability errors, botch pitstops, weather
and so on - over time this evens out as much as any other season.
So, over these 20 races you’ve got a really good idea of who the best drivers is AND who
the best team is because you’ve evened out the nature of having the best drivers in the
best teams. Now you can either run seasons where the number
of drivers always equals the number of races OR, after 20 races are complete you can then
put the best drivers in the best cars for the remaining few races for a final showdown.
In this scenario you’d have to take driver salaries away from the teams. So the teams
don’t pay the drivers anymore. Instead, F1 pays drivers on a sliding scale depending
on where they finish, and drivers can still get sponsorship and stuff so they can buy
their fancy watches or whatever. Sponsorship might be weird. I don’t know - they can
figure it out. This takes some financial load off the teams
as they don’t have to think ‘how can I afford a Verstappen?’ anymore. And they
can even arrange for special sponsor deals and match-ups for when they DO have a top-tier
driver on board. Teams can focus on the team stuff, drivers can focus on the driver stuff.
It would never happen and some purists would hate to see it, but… but I think this is
kind of *more* pure? There are downsides like… if you’re looking for a Leclerc vs Verstappen
battle it might happen less frequently if they are in unmatched cars. But, it’s statistically
unlikely they will be frequently MILES apart in performance.
Something to think about! That’s my video. Stuart out.