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?
Drivers who had to deal with the pressures of a title fight can get ‘bonus’ points compared to those performing further back. On the other hand, one-off races against regulars also boost drivers, such as Shane van Gisbergen winning on his NASCAR Cup debut at Chicago in 2023.
There also has to be an element of ‘artistic licence’. We like to make sure lots of series are represented. It’s surely more interesting to include the driver who wins both the World Rallycross and Extreme E titles rather than the 11th, 12th or 13th best F1 driver. There are hundreds of professional drivers operating at a high level all around the world, some in series that fly under the radar, so we like to pick out some less obvious candidates when the chances arise.
Once a list of around 60-80 names has been constructed using the above criteria and a draft order established, it is sent around the Autosport team for feedback. Suggestions of moving drivers around or including other names are quite common, though deciding who needs to be removed to make space is usually more challenging. It’s much easier to nominate who you think should be added than argue who should be taken out…
Eventually, after feedback has been considered by the core panel putting the list together, a final top 50 is established. This is then only tweaked if there are late results that change things.
There are so many factors to be considered and unknowns that no such list can ever be definitive. What we do attempt is to make it as objective as possible. It’s not Autosport’s list of favourite drivers or those we’d most like to go down the pub with
Due to the length of the process, we have to start before all series have been completed. This is normally fine but does sometimes create problems. For example, Naoki Yamamoto’s charges to both the Super Formula and Super GT crowns in the COVID-hit 2020 season came so late he missed the list altogether!
There are so many factors to be considered and unknowns that no such list can ever be definitive. What we do attempt is to make it as objective as possible. It’s not Autosport’s list of favourite drivers or those we’d most like to go down the pub with.
In short, we take the process of putting the list together seriously, but the result should be regarded as an interesting snapshot, giving a variety of drivers around the world credit for a job well done.
Perhaps Lewis Hamilton, Sebastien Ogier and your favourite will be higher next year…
