7 Tiers of F1 Greatness

    

    Don't get me wrong, just making it to F1 means you an amazing driver. However, there are so many extremely talented drivers that won't even get a whiff of being able to drive in F1. With that being said, there are clearly different levels of greatness in the small subset of athletes that get to call themselves an F1 racecar driver.

    There are a lot of stats in other sports, especially in North American sports, that can help determine how good a player is. In the NBA, the main definer of greatness is Rings, how many championships did you win? But there are gall of famers, all time greats (Barkley, Dominique, Nash), who do not have a ring. For those players that don't have a handful of rings there are a number of stats you can point to to determine how good they are. Points, Rebounds, Assist, Field Goal percentage, 3 point percentage, blocks, steals, usage rate, PER..etc. 

    With F1, there aren't too many things you can point to, mainly Driver Championships, wins and poles. But I am looking to have a tiered system to break down performance. And it won't just apply to new drivers, you can go back in history to look at all the drivers and be able to place them in a tier.

TIER 1 - RACED IN F1

    Of course this is the most basic level, the only barrier to entry is that you have driven in an F1 race. There have been 774 drivers in the 1080 race history of F1, dating back to 1950. This is the easiest Tier to get into, but still extremely difficult to get to this level.

TIER 2 - SCORED POINTS 

    This is the next tier up and it happens to be a little easier to achieve for current F1 drivers because they expanded the amount of points available. It use to be only the top 5 got points. Up until 2002, only the top 6 scored points. that was increased to the top 8 and since 2010, the top 10 drivers now score points in F1. Since it was so much harder to earn points for a lot of the races in history, there is a step drop of from 774 to 348 drivers who have scored points. A little over half the people to take a seat have scored points in an F1 race. Mick Schumacher and Zhou Guanyu were able to do it last season, hopefully Logan Sargeant and Oscar Piastri will do it as rookies this year. 67 drivers have scored points in their debut race, making the leap to the second tier very quickly. Nick De Vries was the last driver to do that when he subbed in for Alex Albon at Monza.

TIER 3 - MAKING A PODIUM

This tier falls just a little below tier 4. Points scorer and race winner is quite a difference, but point getter to podium finisher isn't as far of a stretch. This achievement shows that you are on the right track and can put together a race weekend that leads to being in contention for a win. There are a few drivers on the grid in 2023 that have made it to a podium but have yet to make the jump to winning a race. Lance Stroll has a 3rd place finish and Lando Norris, a driver many people feel has the talent to be a world champion, has multiple podium finishes without getting to stand on the top step.

TIER 4 - RACE WINNERS

There is a similar drop from Tier 2 to Tier 3 as there was from 1 to 2. The 348 drivers to have scored points is shaved down to 113 who have won a race. Two drivers made the leap last year, with Carlos Sainz winning at Silverstone and Georgle Russell winning in Brazil. Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon are also current F1 drivers that have picked up a win in recent seasons. This tier is were you start to differentiate between drivers and "good" drivers. Winning a race is something only 14% of drivers have done in F1 history. This isn't like points were you have more of an opportunity to achieve it, ever since the beginning of the sport each race has only had 1 winner and it takes a certain caliber of driver to achieve that.

TIER 5 - MULTIPLE RACE WINNERS

    Bit of a drop off going into tier 4, 67 of the 113 race winners have won multiple races. There may be some outliers in tier 3, there may be some drivers in there that had the drive of their life and lucked into an F1 win even if they may not be as good of a driver on paper as some of the other race winners, but there aren't many drivers to luck into multiple wins. There are a few drivers on the grid currently that fall into this category. Charles Leclerc has fought through AWFUL Ferrari strategies to win multiple races and Bottas racked up double digit wins being Lewis Hamilton's wingman for so many years.

TIER 6 - DRIVER CHAMPIONS

    With these last two tiers we are starting to get into the legends of the sport. Winning a Drivers title is something only 34 drivers have ever done and you need to be the best driver in the world for an entire year. Some championship years are more dominate than others. James Hunt and Jenson Button both won 6 races in their championship year. Impressive, but not as impressive as Schumacher's 15 of 19 wins in 2004 and Verstappen's 15 race wins last year. There have been 2 father/son duos who have won driver titles, Keke and Nico Rosberg and Damon and Graham Hill. I am Canadian and I remember watching Jacques Villeneuve in 1997 not really understanding how important and rare it is to have someone from your country be an F1 champion.

TIER 7 - MULTIPLE DRIVER CHAMPIONSHIPS

    Tier 7 is reserved for the best of the best. half of the drivers to win a title have won multiple, 17 out of 34. We currently have 3 of them on the grid in 2023, Hamilton(7), and Alonso and Max each have 2 under their belt. I'm not going to add more tiers like "3 time or 4 time champions", I think these 17 drivers are the pinnacle of excellence in the sport. I haven't taken into account other things outside of the driver in this tier, but when it comes to multiple driver champions, it is definitely the driver paired with a world class constructor that allows for multiple championships. and having this tier be the last will lead to some interesting debates on who you think is the best driver ever. Some people consider Aryton Senna the best driver of all time even though he has 4 less championships than Schumacher and Hamilton.

    The only major stat that didn't have any representation in these tiers was pole positions. I based the tiers off of what the drivers did in races, so it was kind of hard to make an exclusive tier for pole positions because there would be a mash up of drivers in separate tiers having reached pole position. A pole sitter who has no wins should not be in a tier with Lewis Hamilton.