2025 Touring Car Model Update

I finished all my remaining touring car tables too.

Finally, I complete my series of model updates with tonight’s post updating my touring car model. While I had already updated both my stock car and open wheel models several times this year previously, this was the first update of my touring car model since I was working on last year’s list. This model is a lot more cumbersome, thorough, and significantly larger than the other two, and I was curious how long it would take to update after I automated my code. My stock car model takes 7 minutes to run my 30 iterations now once I have the new data entered and the open wheel model takes about 17. The touring car model is much larger and took 44 minutes to update, but that’s still a lot faster than the several hours it took when I was iterating it manually.

Because I am much more expansive in terms of deciding which series to include for this model, this list of active drivers could have been even longer, but I made some restrictions when deciding which drivers to include. For the most part, I included only drivers who made at least one start in either the TCR World Tour, Supercars, BTCC, DTM, Stock Car Pro, or Porsche Supercup in 2025. I realize pedants will say DTM and Porsche Supercup don’t count, but I have made my point on that many times, so I don’t need to reiterate that again here. I have also included other active drivers if they had five or more teammate comparisons with other drivers in the model this year even if they did not make a major league start (for example, Felipe Giaffone who won either his sixth or seventh title in Fórmula Truck/Copa Truck (depending on whether you count the two titles he won in 2011 separately or not). This mostly affects a bunch of drivers in the Porsche factory system who once drove in Porsche Supercup but made no starts this year (most notably former Porsche Supercup champion Dylan Pereira, who dominated the much weaker Porsche Carrera Cup Asia with 11 wins in 14 starts and swept both of his teammates). This means there are a number of prominent drivers like Agustín Canapino you won’t find here. Even though Canapino had arguably the best season of his career by winning three championships, he had no teammates integrated into the model this year so he doesn’t appear here. (But trust me, even though I grew to strongly dislike him during his IndyCar years, I’m still going to rank him very highly.) I had to draw the line somewhere.

Over the past few days, I also finished my statistical tables for BTCC, DTM, and Porsche Supercup. I’d never been able to find sufficient data for the latter series before, but this year for the first time. I was able to find both lap leaders and lap times so I decided to construct a table for that series as well. (If only the TCR World Tour would take over its own timing rather than using different timekeepers for each round of the championship, most of which do not provide lap times…) I still need to finish my WEC and IMSA statistical tables, which will be my last two. There is a blizzard forecast for tomorrow in Syracuse, the buses don’t run on New Year’s, and I will probably stay home on New Year’s Eve as well to try to clean up the snow. Hopefully, over those three days, I’ll finish the last two statistical tables, and then all I have to do is rank and write the remainder of the list. I’m not going to do the European Le Mans Series this year because I don’t think it’s prestigious enough to be worth my while.

There was one major error I caught after I finished last year’s update: I had two separate entries for the BTCC driver Dan Lloyd, one under Dan and one under Daniel. I have integrated all his data under Dan. Unfortunately, I noticed that I made another similar era and have separate entries for “Nelson Piquet Jr.” and “Nelson Piquet, Jr.” I had already calculated most of this before I noticed that and decided I wasn’t going to rerun my model again to fix that, although I might do that after the list is finished so whenever I write new 1,000 greatest driver entries for touring car drivers, their data will be as accurate as possible.

René Rast continues to lead all active drivers in my touring car model. Although his DTM dynasty years are now some years in the past, this was one of Rast’s best years in a while as he led more statistical categories than any other DTM driver this year even though he only finished 6th in points. 2024 DTM champion Mirko Bortolotti ended up finishing 14th in points in 2025 and finished no better than seventh. That looks bad until you realize that his teammate Nicki Thiim (who is still also one of the highest-rated drivers in my model) finished 18th in points. Bortolotti’s 10-2 defeat of Thiim this year was enough for him to lead my model anyway despite an ostensibly mediocre season. Throwing in his 24 Hours of Spa win, he’ll probably make my top 100 anyway. I continue to think all the DTM drivers are overrated relative to the drivers in other series, mainly because the series does not have field inversions while many other touring car series do, which inflates the top DTM drivers over drivers in other touring car series who I think are comparable.

I don’t find Chaz Mostert’s Supercars title as egregious as most people probably do. Considering he’s been the highest-rated Supercars driver since I launched my touring car model (even before Shane van Gisbergen left the series), it would’ve felt wrong if he never won a title. Should it have been this year? No. Having said that, surprisingly the highest-rated Supercars driver in my model this year was retiring 2010 champion James Courtney of all people, mainly because he demolished an overrated rookie teammate in Aaron Cameron, who I actually listed once before quietly removing him retrospectively.

In the BTCC, Tom Ingram was the only driver in any series to lead every statistical category I track, which I think is worthy of a top ten placement (yes, I think I’m actually going to rank him over Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri, and every Cup driver; I know people will scoff). Ingram still trails BTCC runner-up Ashley Sutton in my model overall. I don’t think Ingram’s seven-win season is as good as Sutton’s twelve-win season two years ago when I ranked him second overall.

The TCR World Tour was pretty cut and dry as that was the only other major league touring car series where the champion Yann Ehrlacher also was the highest-rated driver this year. The nephew of Yvan Muller also continues to be the highest-rated driver in the series overall. For the most part, the driver ratings for that series pretty closely followed the actual points standings, probably more than in any other series.

Although this year’s Stock Car Pro champion Felipe Fraga remains the highest-ranked Brazilian touring car driver in my model, the ratings in that series tend to wildly oscillate between years more than any other. They also tend to be less accurate than most other series because every other race has a field inversion (even the BTCC and TCR World Tour, the other two series that use field inversions, typically only have them once every third race). That volatility makes the single-season ratings rather unrepresentative. So no, I do not think Arthur Leist, the third-place points finisher who was the highest-rated driver this year, was better than Fraga. The difference between Fraga’s 962 points and Leist’s 763 is quite a bit too large for that, and I also have to at least somewhat take into consideration how dominant Fraga has been as a sports car racer as well, even though this was not one of his best years in that regard.

Finally, I was struggling to decide whether to rate Alessandro Ghiretti or Robert de Haan as the top Porsche Supercup driver this year. Ghiretti won the Porsche Supercup title by 15 points over de Haan, but de Haan nosed out Ghiretti in Porsche Carrera Cup Germany, where most of the Porsche Supercup title contenders compete simultaneously. Between them, those drivers swept every statistical category I track on my Porsche Supercup table although Morris Schuring’s little brother Flynt (who finished third in points as Ghiretti’s teammate) tied de Haan for the most poles with two. Although de Haan is now the highest Porsche system driver both this year and overall while Ghiretti is much lower on the list (not to mention that de Haan had nine wins across all series to Ghiretti’s eight), I think I’m going to go for Ghiretti because Porsche Supercup is more prestigious than PCC Germany, he had a 3-1 lead change record while de Haan’s was 0-1, and de Haan actually only led one Porsche Supercup race all season, a win at Monaco that was shortened to four laps. Nonetheless, you can count on both of them making my top 100 at least.

Second-order effects play a much bigger role here than in my open wheel and stock car models as you might expect simply because this model consists of many more drivers and many more teammate comparisons. Brodie Kostecki’s dominance over his once-great but now washed-up retiring teammate Will Davison finally lifted him to a rating worthy of a champion, and it lifted his long-time Erebus Racing teammate Will Brown with him. Even though Broc Feeney absolutely throttled Brown to an even greater extent than Kostecki had done in 2023, Brown still went up from -.058 to -.010 even though he posted a rating of -.058 (exactly the same as his career rating after 2024). I still suspect Kostecki, Brown, and especially Feeney are all lower than they should be, but it looks like that situation is starting to clear itself up.

You might notice a bunch of drivers tied at zero. This happens sometimes when two drivers are each other’s only teammates. Sean Chang swept his teammate Wang Yi Min this year, but neither of them have any other teammate comparisons. This is how Chang has an overall rating of 0 but a single-season rating of .500, while Wang has the reverse. Chang’s single-season rating of .500 reflects the fact that he swept Wang who is rated 0 and Wang’s single-season rating of -.500 likewise. I won’t have an accurate read on any drivers like that until they have other teammates.

I only included drivers who had ten or more teammate comparisons overall (so no Austin Cindric this year, but his debut rating was not too good). I also only listed single-season driver ratings for drivers with five or more teammate comparisons. This means a lot of the part-time Supercars drivers who enter the endurance races, even World’s Greatest Backup Driver Todd Hazelwood, don’t have ratings listed for 2025, but you can still see the impact of the endurance races felt here as Hazelwood did go up from .011 to .037.

There will probably be a break after this post until I complete the year-end list, although I might post the WEC and IMSA tables when I finish them.