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The era translator answers the bar-argument question: was a 2019 season better than a 2024 one? It rates every driver-season by the same yardstick, how far ahead of (or behind) his teammate the driver was in the same car, and presents it as a leaderboard. Because both teammates share the car, the car cancels, and so does the 2022 ground-effect regulation change, which moved both teammates alike. That is what puts 2018 and 2025 on one scale; no era offset is applied. Negative means faster than his teammate.

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What it shows

Each row is one driver-season rating:
  • Rating (gap to teammate): per race, the median of the driver’s lap-by-lap gap to his teammate on laps both ran clean; averaged over the season and shrunk toward the season mean with a 5-race prior. Negative = faster than his teammate(s), in seconds per lap. Most seasons sit within ±0.4s.
  • 95% CI: the season rating’s posterior uncertainty. A wider interval means fewer races.
  • ★: drivers with at least 8 races on each side of the 2022 regulation boundary. Shown for context; no rating depends on them.
This is the same underlying data as the era ratings timeline, presented as a season leaderboard.
A minimum of 5 races is required for a driver-season to appear, so part-season cameos are excluded.

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How to use it

  1. Select a season to rank that year, or compare ratings across seasons on the shared scale.
  2. Check who the teammate was before comparing two rows: the rating is a margin over that teammate.
  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.

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Reading the signal correctly

The rating is teammate-relative: it answers “how far ahead of the driver in the same car was he?”, not “how far ahead of the field?” and not “what lap time would he set today?”. A −0.3s season next to a weak teammate and a −0.3s season next to a strong one are not the same achievement.
Until 2026-09-28 this page applied a “bridge driver” era offset to every pre-2022 season. It was not statistically distinguishable from zero and it inverted the gap it was meant to remove, so it was dropped (audit finding F45). The per-race statistic also changed then, from a best-laps ceiling against the teammate’s typical lap to a like-for-like lap-by-lap median (F40). See the decomposition limitations.

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Data source

The chart queries int_era_normalized_driver_rating via DuckDB-Wasm in the browser. The data window covers 2018–2025. For the full model definition, see the int_era_normalized_driver_rating reference.