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The Car Driver Quandary

 

If you were a Formula 1 team principal, would you rather have the best driver or the best car?

For those of you who are regular readers of the blog, firstly, thank you for your support. It means a lot to me. Secondly, this might seem like a weird hook, considering my previous articles have all been about basketball. While that is true, I am actually a big fan of multiple sports, including football (soccer to American readers), baseball, Formula 1, and yes, basketball. Instead of creating a different blog for each sport, I figured it would be better to write about multiple different sports on the same blog.

The dilemma of car or driver popped into my head while I was watching the US Grand Prix this past weekend. While Max Verstappen was comfortably on his way to another victory, the 50th of his career, there were many interesting battles throughout the rest of the field. This got me thinking about the age-old question of whether having the best driver or the best car brings more success. Watching Verstappen and Red Bull lap the field (sometimes literally) over the past couple of years, the answer seems obvious. It would be ideal to have both the best driver and the best car. That, however, would be too easy, and wouldn’t make for a particularly entertaining discussion. So, using statistics, I am going to try and answer this question.

My goal for this analysis is to provide a numerical method to determine whether a car or a driver has more impact towards winning. For the number of points a driver contributes, I will compare the Championship winner and their teammate that season. I am going to compare the first place and second place finishers in the Drivers’ Championship between 1950 and 2023 based on points scored over the course of the season. This will provide a reference for the number of points that the car contributes. In case teammates finish first and second in the championship, I will compare the first and third place finishers for that season. Comparing the number of points the driver and car contribute towards the final tally should provide an idea of which is more important, and by how much.

This analysis is a starting point to determine the impact of the car and the driver in Formula 1, and after I find these results, I hope to expand upon my analysis and improve it further, so that I can provide a more accurate outlook for car and driver performance. In the meantime, comment on what you think is more important to winning and the reasoning behind your choice.

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 27, 2023 at 7:25 AM

    Interesting how you are trying to isolate attribution to the car versus the driver. And i think you are right, given the number of confounding variables and absence of a matched control, it makes sense to include as many data points as you have...ergo data from 1950. Look forward to the analysis!

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