The first thing to remember is that it is not who we think the 50 best drivers are on the planet. It’s the 50 we think have performed best in a particular season, our effort to highlight the standout drivers each year. We’ve done other articles on the greatest ever…
PLUS: Who is the greatest of all time?
It’s also worth noting that there’s probably not a single member of the Autosport staff who agrees with the position of every driver on the list. With so many correspondents covering dozens of series, there have to be some tough decisions and compromises made.
The starting point is the top 10 driver lists for the various championships. Unless a driver does multiple series (such as Sebastien Buemi), the order of the season review selections must be maintained in the Top 50, even if some of us would like to change it. So, if Scott McLaughlin is ahead of Pato O’Ward in the IndyCar ranking, he has to be in the Top 50 as well.
That consistency wasn’t the case in the early days of our Top 50, which started in 2002, but has been corrected in more recent times.
PLUS: Top 50 the first 20 years: drivers of the century
One of the biggest factors is, of course, ranking the various series. Formula 1 and the World Rally Championship are relatively easy, given their positions at the pinnacle of their branches of the sport. So the top performers there are going to be high on the list. But trying to place, for example, F2 against Australian Supercars or Super Formula/Super GT is rather more tricky.
The strength and competitiveness of various championships also varies from season to season, so we try to take that into account. Although the major series sit roughly in the same order each year, there are changes and tweaks. It can never be an exact or fixed pyramid.
And then there’s the question of the strongest drivers within those. Is a dominant performance in a ‘weaker’ championship more worthy than a narrow success in a competitive one? There is no one answer, it depends on the context of each comparison every year.
Under all this are plenty of other factors. Did the driver have a car advantage or disadvantage? Were they struck by unreliability or problems outside their control? How did they compare to their team-mate(s)? Were they a rookie or a veteran of the series? Was there a standout performance from a driver that turned the result of a major race?
Source: Autosport