Originally Posted by
N4D13
Normally I enjoy reading your opinions and may agree with many of them, but quite frankly this sentence here is the most utterly clueless line I've ever read in this forum and I've been here for quite a few years now.
Jesus Christ, a mathematical model is absolutely anything but subjective. That's the whole point of actually using one. You still need to take the results it gives you with a pinch of salt since every model is just that, a model, and it can't reflect absolutely all of reality (for instance, the Rosberg thing I pointed out), but it sure as hell is a more honest attempt that having anyone alter their GoaT list with their own biases, intentionally or not.
Take, for instance, the common creed that "Hamilton beat Alonso in the same car, thus Hamilton is the superior driver". journeyman racer correctly pointed out about the fact that they were tied on points and race wins, there's a couple of things that were completely out of the drivers' hands. E.g., Alonso's car damage in Bahrain, Hamilton's tyre blowouts in the Nürburgring and Turkey, Alonso getting a gearbox failure in France qualifying or getting a stop-and-go penalty in Canada for refuelling under the safety car, that ridiculous strategy call by McLaren which prompted Hamilton's retirement in China... so in the end, there were so many circumstances altering their fight that the fact that they actually finished tied in the championship only tells you that they were very close. And of course, there's the fact that 2007 was a particular singular season (switch to single tyre maker, no TC, etc.), and most notably, the obvious notion that Alonso pretty much went to war against his own team that season and is considered the lowest point of his career. WDC standings are definitely not the ultimate benchmark of driver performance, as showcased by Sainz and Verstappen's year together in which Sainz got 4 or 5 mechanical DNFs to Verstappen's one - or Rosberg's last F1 season in which he benefitted from Hamilton's reliability issues.
Anyway, the fact that there is an objective model which ranks drivers' performances compared to their teammates through their entire career can actually give us a much more honest vision that a single, very skewed and unrepresentative, data point - 2007 was an utter clusterfuck for Alonso, but also Hamilton's rookie season, so you'd have expected both drivers to have raised their game since then. And it's been 11 years already since that, so surely there's a lot more information that you could use to gain a bit more knowledge on who has been driving at a higher level.
Well, that, of course, or you can dismiss knowledge gained from objectively looking at raw data because it just doesn't fit in with your biased views. That went really well for the peeps in the US.