By ghost_726
As mentioned in the final edition of the CRL magazine, the media team has made the decision to retire the Driver Rating System for season 4 due to a lack of clarity around how the ratings were calculated, and the generation of minimal insights from the data. Instead, this season we will be piloting a series of driver analytics that will attempt to quantify how well CRL drivers perform during qualifying and races. These analytics have been broken into four categories; qualifying performance, race performance, scoring and penalties.
Please note these analytics are by no means final. We will continue to add and modify these as we move through the season to try to get to the most insightful statistics.
Qualifying performance includes the best, worst and average qualifying positions a driver has obtained throughout the season. The more interesting statistic though is ‘qualifying pace’. Qualifying pace is how much faster or slower your best qualifying lap was for a given race, compared to the league average lap time for that race. A positive number indicates that you were that percentage faster than average, a negative number indicates that you were slower than average. For example, if a driver posted a qualifying lap of 70 seconds, and the league average was 77 seconds, their qualifying pace would be 9.09% ([77-70]/77), indicating they were 9.09% faster than the league average. Best, worst and average qualifying pace are all presented.
The race performance stats capture a driver’s best, worst and average finishing positions. Additionally, it captures how many positions they’ve gained or lost from grid to final classification over the season, and a new metric called ‘overtaking ratio’. Overtaking ratio is an attempt to quantify how many positions a driver gains or loses out of the most possible positions they could have gained or lost. This gives a more total view of a driver’s overtaking performance than positions gained/lost alone, as it captures how difficult it is to gain positions at the front of the grid, and the fact they are fewer positions to be gained if you qualify well. This ratio is calculated differently depending on whether you gain or lose positions:
- If you gained positions, overtaking ratio = positions gained / (grid position – 1)
- Ex. If you start P18 and finish P3, your ratio would be 15 / (18 – 1) = 15 / 17 = .882
- If you lost positions, overtaking ratio = -positions lost / (20 – grid position)
- Ex. If you start P3 and finish P10, your ratio would be, -7 / (20 – 3) = -7 / 17 = -.411
- If you did not gain or lose positions, your overtaking ratio = 0.
To get to the full season overtaking ratio, the total positions gained/lost is calculated over the total season, as well as the maximum potential positions gained/lost.
The final stat in race performance is “+/- ratio”. This is similar to the plus/minus calculation in hockey, where a player receives a plus every time a goal is scored by their team while they’re on the ice, and receives a minus every time their team is scored against while they’re on the ice. For every race a driver improves from their grid position, regardless if it’s one position or nineteen, they receive a plus. For every race a driver loses positions from the grid, they receive a minus. For example, if a driver enters four races and gains positions in 2 of them, loses positions in 1 of them, and stays in the same position in 1, their plus minus ration would be 1.
For example, if a driver scored 25, 15, 1 and 0 points in four races, their points scored percentage would be 39.42% ([25+15+1] / [26 x 4]), and their point scoring percentage would be 75% (3 / 4).
