Comparing drivers across regulation eras

A season leaderboard of era-adjusted driver ratings on one comparable scale, anchored by drivers who raced on both sides of the 2022 regulation change.

The era translator answers the bar-argument question: was a 2019 season better than a 2024 one? It puts every driver-season on a single comparable scale, correcting for the 2022 ground-effect regulation shift, and presents it as a leaderboard rather than a timeline so you can line up drivers from different eras within one ranked view. Negative means faster than the era-normalised field average.

What it shows

Each row is one driver-season rating:

• Era-adjusted rating: a Bayesian-shrunk seasonal residual, offset by the era shift estimated from 20 bridge drivers who raced on both sides of the 2022 boundary. Negative = faster than the era-normalised field average.
• 95% CI: propagates both within-season sampling uncertainty and the era-offset uncertainty. A wider interval means fewer qualifying seasons for the bridge anchor or fewer clean laps for the driver.
• Bridge anchor (★): drivers with ≥8 clean-race seasons spanning pre- and post-2022, used to anchor the era shift. Their ratings are the most directly comparable across eras.

This is the same underlying data as the era ratings timeline, presented as a season leaderboard for direct within-season cross-era comparison.

A minimum of 5 races is required for a driver-season to appear, so part-season cameos are excluded.

How to use it

1. Select a season to rank that year, or compare ratings across seasons on the shared scale.
2. Look for the ★ bridge-anchored ratings are the safest to compare across eras.
3. Read the CI before ranking two adjacent rows; overlapping intervals are a statistical tie.
4. Export the data to build your own cross-era comparisons.

Reading the signal correctly

The rating is era-normalised and relative it answers “how far ahead of their own era’s field was this driver?”, not “what lap time would they set today?”. The cross-era comparison rests entirely on the bridge-driver offset.

Non-bridge seasons inherit the era offset without anchoring it themselves, so their absolute cross-era level is less certain than a bridge driver’s. Weight ★ rows more heavily for cross-era claims. See the decomposition limitations.

Data source

The chart queries int_era_normalized_driver_rating via DuckDB-Wasm in the browser.

Column	Meaning
era_adjusted_rating_s	Era-normalised seasonal rating, the leaderboard value
rating_ci_lower_s / rating_ci_upper_s	95% credible interval
is_bridge_driver	Whether the driver anchors the era offset (the ★)

The data window covers 2018–2024.

For the full model definition, see the int_era_normalized_driver_rating reference.