What this pillar does
Every feature here attacks the same confound: in Formula 1, the car and the driver are almost perfectly correlated, so raw pace rankings are mostly a car ranking. The Drivers pillar isolates the driver’s contribution using multiple independent identification strategies, each reading a different signal:- Rating chains. Era Ratings Timeline and Era Translator read
int_era_normalized_driver_rating, a four-stage pipeline (car FE → LORO teammate baseline → Bayesian shrinkage → era bridge) that produces one comparable number per driver per season across the 2022 regulation boundary. - Circuit and weather slices. Driver Circuit Affinity, Wet-Race Specialist, and workload features ask a narrower question at a specific grain a circuit, a weather condition, or a traffic pattern.
- Pairwise. Synthetic Teammate and Quali vs Race read the driver’s own residual against a tightly controlled comparator (a synthesized same-car teammate, or the driver’s own qualifying signal vs their race signal), eliminating the car by construction.
- Technique. Corner-Phase Skill uses braking and mid-corner deviations relative to the driver’s own car baseline so technique is isolated even within the same chassis.
Every feature in this pillar
Era Ratings Timeline
Each driver’s era-adjusted pace rating across seasons, corrected for the 2022 regulation
change and shown with honest confidence ribbons.
Era Translator
A season leaderboard of era-adjusted driver ratings on one comparable scale, anchored by
drivers who raced on both sides of the 2022 rule change.
Consistency
How reliably each driver extracts pace from the car, lap to lap, using the residual
skill signal from the seven-term decomposition.
Quali vs Race
Each driver’s skill residual in qualifying plotted against their skill in the race,
separating one-lap merchants from drivers who come alive over a stint.
Circuit Affinity
How much faster or slower each driver is at a specific circuit, relative to their own
season average, after removing car and field effects.
Wet-Race Specialist
Each driver’s wet-weather edge: race skill residual in the wet minus their dry baseline,
across their full 2018–2024 career.
Workload Heatmap
Four tyre and traffic stress signals aggregated per driver per season push, stint age,
dirty-air share, and cliff risk revealing who races hardest on their rubber.
Synthetic Teammate
A pace comparison that weight-corrects each driver against a synthetic teammate,
isolating pure skill from strategy and track-position effects.
Corner-Phase Skill
A skill index built from braking, mid-corner, and exit deviations relative to each
driver’s own car baseline so a fast car can’t flatter a driver.