MotorSport Ratings

[msratings]

Hi,

I have been working on a project for the last few years which is aiming to compare and rate every driver from the major forms of racing, both 2 wheels and 4, and have just gotten to a point where I am happy to start showing to the general public. I know there are already a few sites which seem to rate and rank current drivers but I feel they tend to favour F1 far too much and don't give the credit to other series. I have tried to be fair by creating a system which could apply to all championships and work on a race by race basis regardless of number of races in a season.

I won't post the link to my site yet as still got a little work to do but was wondering if people are interested in this and had any other ideas :)

thanks

Rich

[msratings]

I should also mention I am aiming to feature all races i can get my hands on from 1894 to date so will hopefully give a list of the greatest racers of all time :)

I have to admit in creating this i have discovered some unknown to me racers in all sports and it has made me much more aware of the other series out there as I was for a long time just an F1-head and didn't care for other forms of racing. I even love WTCC now... :eek:

But anyway .. hopefully will have something on my site I will be happy with by the end of the week so will post a link then but if anyone has any ideas of what would could make the site more interesting (without even seeing it) then please let me know :)

[Bogador Xp]

nice idear, do have something rdy to show us?

[msratings]

i do have most of it up and running now... just a few tweeks to be perfect but i can do that this week ... i wont post a direct link as not sure if allowed... but clicking my profile will let you vist my home page if you wanted to see :)

[sandokan]

Biggest problem with this kind of pages is, how to "put into the world", if You want to be worldwide...

[Rollo]

I know there are already a few sites which seem to rate and rank current drivers but I feel they tend to favour F1 far too much and don't give the credit to other series.

Autosport openly say in their rankings that:
How it Works | AUTOSPORT World Driver Rankings (http://rankings.autosport.com/how-it-works)
AUTOSPORT's team use their expert knowledge to assign a mathematical weighting to each series based on status and competitiveness – for instance, an international race carries more weight than a national one. With series having a varied number of rounds in their championships, that is factored into the final reckoning to keep the calculations scrupulously fair.
Each driver’s score is multiplied by the series’ weighting, then adjusted to a theoretical 20-round series. The result is a rankings points total for every driver.

Of their current top 20, only 7 are in F1. As for the suggestion that it might "tend to favour F1 far too much", there is the rather obvious paradigm that any raking system should favour F1 because it is the world's highest class of motor racing.

What is of greatest interest to me is the methodology behind your rankings system. Any rankings system will by nature produce a different set of results, so the how and why is quite interesting.

[msratings]

I am aware of the Autosport ratings and it do think it is very good and more in depth as it takes into account overtaking and many other factors. Where as mine only take race results.

I actually agree that F1 is the highest level and they should rate highly... infact in my ratings F1 drivers DO feature heavily especially in the past. I have however decided on 6 championships which are the highest level and have equal weighting. Those are F1, MotoGP, World Endurance Championship, WRC, WTCC and NASCAR Sprint Cup. I was thinking of adding Indy Car as well to this level but I always have a feeling that Indy Car is a feeder into F1 rather than the highest level of its competition.

I have also taken a 24 month rating span instead of just 12 months for current ratings. And I have historical and complete career ratings so there is info on all racers not just the current batch. I also take into account all races that someone takes part in even if they do 2 complete season in 1 year as the ratings are an average rather than total points earned with a weighting to make sure everyone has raced enough races in that time.

And just of interest of my current Top 20.. 4 are F1, 3 WTCC, 2 WRC, 5 WEC, 4 MOTOGP, 2 NASCAR.

[msratings]

Been doing some tweaks to the ratings and hope to get some updates done tonight...I hope to add most of the pre war races added this month and then will be up and running fully. Just then need to get people to use the site :-)

[D-Type]

I would appreciate it if you don't simply use this bulletin board to advertise or publicise your site.

Can you please post some details of your methodology: scoring system and weighting so we can discuss it, eg points per race result, weighting for importance of different races, etc.

Off the top of my head, the following need thought and discussion:

How you address the issue of the number of World Championship qualifying races (Grande Epreuves?) varying from six to twenty?
Non-championship F1 races where the field could be comparable to World Championship field or not much more than a national race?
How you assess World sports Car Championship qualifiers being 24-hour races, 12-hour races, 6-hour races, 1000km races, and even hillclimbs in some years?
How do you address the fact that a cars have on occasion had 7 drivers?
What about non-Championship sports car races?

How do you assess US races?
The problem of different sanctioning bodies - AAA, USAC, NASCAR, EOO, ARDC, etc
Open wheelers - length, paved or dirt, championship qualifiers (includes Pikes Peak), midgets
Where does Can-Am fit in? Both in its first and its second incarnation?
NASCAR Winston /Sprint Cup, Nationwide, Truck series?
IMSA, Transam?

South American formulae?
South African F1?
Australian V8s
Tasman Series

Junior formulae
GP2
Formula 2 (remember that F1 regulars used to also race in Formula 2)
Formula 5000
Formula 3
Formula Atlantic
Formula Pacific

[msratings]

hi yeah... i didn't actually want to just advertise... was looking for more in the way of opinions and help with harder to find race info....

there is a lot of info to post on how i calculate but the basics are that the ratings are an average of performance rather than total points scored in complete career... I don't think it is fair on a racer who has only done 6 years to be lower than one who did 18 years just as they competed in less races.

the easiest way to compare seasons was to give each season a specific total weighting and make each race a fraction of that depending on how many races there was in a year... e.g. a 10 race f1 season from the early 70's is the same total weighting as a 20 race season today.

thus a complete season in f1 (the highest rated championship) would be worth a total of 1000 points and a weighting of 1 year.

I put a minimum weight of 5 years on the ratings average so that any driver/rider with less would have a lower average due to the career weighting.

each championship is then given a value to correspond with how i felt it stood in the ladder of championships.. F1 highest at 100%, then motogp, wec, wrc, wtcc, nascar sprint cup slightly lower at 90%, and then indycar and world superbikes at 80%.

feeder series get much lower values around 10-20%

I have tried to stick to mostly world and european championships as they tend to have the highest level of competitors though there are some national level championships included. I would love to add much more if/when i can find the info.

as for duration/difficultly of the race being taken into account then I have pretty much ignored these and taken the complete series into account. yes this does mean that some races are "lower" than they should be and some races are "higher" than they should be but most actually championships ignore this on point allocations these days anyway.

If you want i can post more detail and exact points allocations and also exactly how it works if you have any questions :)

[D-Type]

The whole approach seems to be based on the situation in 2013 but not necessarily relating to the way things were previously.
Taking Formula 1/GP racing first. You do seem to have found a good way of treating the number of races - if I understand correctly each championship race in a 10-race season is worth twice those in a 20-race season. But what about non-championship races? For example in 1950 Fangio drove an Alfa Romeo in the 6 championship races. But he also drove an Alfa in 5 non-championship F1 races and a Maserati in 3 other F1 races. He also drove a supercharged Ferrari 166 in the 3 Formule Libre races of the Argentine Temporada and 3 other Formule Libre races., a F2 Ferrari in 3 races and a F2 Maserati in one race. Have these been included in his total for that year? And the period when top line drivers also drove sports cars , eg in 1955 in addition to coming second in the World Championship, Stirling Moss also drove the 300SLR to the 3 victories that gave Mercedes the Sports car Championship. And he drove his private maserati in some non-championship races. Does your scoring take these into account. And prewar where not all Grandes Epreuves counted for the European Championship, how do you score them?

I think there is a lot of scope for discussing these type of issues before you finalise your scoring system.

[msratings]

ah the trick is here that "non-championship" races are considered a different championship.. thus the racer would earn more points for a 2nd/3rd/4th etc... championship but the rating is an average rather than total points for the year.

e.g. racer 1 only enters world championship races earns 600 points and has a weighting of 1 thus a rating of 600... racer 2 enters multiple championships and earns 1500 points and has a weighting of 3 so a rating of 500... racer 3 enters just the world championship and 1 extra race may earn 610 point and a weighting of 1.02 thus a rating of 598

I have generalised all non championship races as a separate championship... e.g. in 1950 there is F1 and non-champ F1 as well as Sports cars etc...

i have tended only to have non championship races for F1 and sports cars so far (due to difficultly findings results of other races) but i will add much more as I go along if I can find them

[Don Capps]

While I do have some level of understanding for what you are trying to do, I also have real problems seeing the point of the exercise given that you are taking such an omnium-gatherum approach to this. It will be simply yet another highly subjective answer to a question some could really care less about, especially given its highly subjective nature. On the other hand, it could lead to an appreciation of the very futility of the quest and then the realization that the destination might actually be not at all relevant, while the journey itself might be what counts. There are as many fans, Enthusiasts, statisticians, wannabees, and whatever else one wishes to use to refer to them as there are grains of sand on the beaches of Florida and California combined. However, the number of automotive historians who specialize in automobile racing could just about hold a convention in a phone booth and have lots of space left over.

Just saying...

[D-Type]

ah the trick is here that "non-championship" races are considered a different championship.. thus the racer would earn more points for a 2nd/3rd/4th etc... championship but the rating is an average rather than total points for the year.

e.g. racer 1 only enters world championship races earns 600 points and has a weighting of 1 thus a rating of 600... racer 2 enters multiple championships and earns 1500 points and has a weighting of 3 so a rating of 500... racer 3 enters just the world championship and 1 extra race may earn 610 point and a weighting of 1.02 thus a rating of 598

I have generalised all non championship races as a separate championship... e.g. in 1950 there is F1 and non-champ F1 as well as Sports cars etc...

i have tended only to have non championship races for F1 and sports cars so far (due to difficultly findings results of other races) but i will add much more as I go along if I can find them
I half get the picture but I think we need a few actual worked examples. At first reading it appears that you are penalising racer 3 for entering an extra race and scoring 10 points there (or is it for entering and not scoring points?).

[msratings]

i think your second analogy was more accurate... i.e. he didn't perform as well as he usually does in the extra race... thus his overall rating is lower...

but for a real example to explain the rating method would be better to look at it for a complete career rather than a single season.

e.g.

Jacky Ickx has 11035.506 points and a weighting of 14.499 giving him a rating of 761.1
Ayrton Senna has 5182.148 points and a weighting of 6.582 giving him a rating of 787.3

if just using points you can see Ickx would be far ahead of Senna but using the rating after the weighting it shows Senna was the "better" racer.

To break it down better if we compare the 2 racers in 2 of the championships they raced in (f1 and world sports car)

F1
Ickx -> 2718/4.339 = 534.7
Senna -> 5151/6.500 = 792.6

Sports Cars
Ickx -> 5814/6.993 = 831.5
Senna -> 30/0.082 = 6.1

this shows that senna only entered 1 sports car race and didn't perform well and it has hardly effected his overall rating where as Ickx has entered roughly similar number of sports car and f1 races but had more luck in sports car thus a higher rating there but after combing them his rating is lower than that of Senna.

and just to show how his complete rating was calculated Ickx also has 2505 points and a weighting of 3.166 and rating of 500.5 for "other races" not sports car or f1 (Senna has no other entries)

[msratings]

the calculation of how many points and weighting you score for each race is based on the number of races in the championship and the seeding of the championship

e.g.

1000 points is allocated for a win (my base figure) this is then scaled down to 280 points for 10th (will explain another time)

For a 20 race F1 season which has a 100% seeding in championships (highest level)

a win would earn 50 points and a 0.05 weighting for that race.

for a WRC season of 13 races (90% seeding)

a win would earn 69 points and a weighting of 0.07

but for an F3 race of 30 races (15% seeding)

a win would only earn 5 points with a weighting of 0.005

[Bruce D]

I personally think this whole business of ranking F1 as the highest series just because it's F1 is total rubbish. I know that there is more talent in the current Indycar field than the F1 field, just witness the Sao Paulo street race two weekends ago, versus most of the F1 grid who are only there because of some rich backing.

[D-Type]

You have to rank the World championship ahead of any national championship.

[Don Capps]

You have to rang [sic] the World championship ahead of any national championship.

Why? What makes that series intrinsically any "better" or more difficult or challenging than many of the nominally national -- or regional -- events or series?

Of course, balanced against the above, I also think that other than the possible gains for the individual while digging around for information, that this sort of thing tends to be a waste of time given the essential subjectivity involved as well as the "So What?" factor.

Back in the Sixties, someone -- off the top of my I believe it was something like Ralph Money -- used to do a similar effort in ranking drivers by using a weighted formula, which resulted in a somewhat forgettable result each year.

[D-Type]

Typo corrected :mad: