Same car, same race who would be faster?

A pace comparison that weight-corrects each driver against a synthetic teammate, isolating pure skill from strategy and track-position effects.

The fairest comparison in motorsport is teammates in identical cars but even teammates diverge on strategy and track position. The synthetic teammate comparison removes that divergence: instead of comparing raw lap times, it weight-corrects each driver’s pace against a teammate’s condition-adjusted lap time, isolating pure skill from strategy and position. The result answers a clean question: given the same car in the same race conditions, which driver would be faster?

What it shows

Each driver carries a skill proxy built from like-for-like lap pairs:

• Skill proxy: the driver’s pace minus the synthetic teammate’s world-coordinate-adjusted pace, averaged over non-divergent laps. Negative means the driver is faster than their synthetic benchmark.
• Quality weight: confidence in each comparison lap. A higher weight means the lap pair is in similar conditions (tyre age, position, fuel load); low-weight laps are down-weighted in the average.
• Strategic divergence: laps where the driver and teammate are on different stint strategies are excluded, so non-pace factors don’t contaminate the comparison.

A minimum of 3 non-divergent races is required, and the comparison is aggregated to season level.

How to use it

1. Select a season from the filter bar; the comparison reloads.
2. Read the skill proxy sign negative means the driver beat their synthetic benchmark.
3. Weight your confidence by the quality weight a small proxy on low-weight laps is weaker evidence than the same proxy on well-matched laps.
4. Export the data to compare teammates head-to-head on the condition-corrected scale.

Reading the signal correctly

The benchmark is a synthetic teammate constructed from condition-matched laps, not a literal head-to-head average it is designed to strip out the strategy and position noise that makes raw teammate gaps misleading. A near-zero proxy means two drivers are genuinely matched once conditions are equalised.

Drivers on persistently divergent strategies from their teammate yield few non-divergent laps, so their proxy rests on a thin, possibly unrepresentative sample. Read the quality weight before trusting an extreme value.

Data source

The chart queries int_synthetic_teammate via DuckDB-Wasm in the browser, aggregated to season level.

Column	Meaning
skill_proxy_s	Ego pace minus the synthetic teammate’s adjusted pace (negative = faster)
quality_weight	Condition-similarity confidence for the comparison lap
is_divergent	Whether the lap pair is on different strategies (excluded if true)

The data window covers 2018–2024.

For the full model definition, see the int_synthetic_teammate reference.