Top 200 of 2024: The C- Tier

See minus. See minus run. Run, minus, run! (No, that will not be my only dad joke here.)

For each year since 2021, I have conducted a ranking of the top 200 global motorsports drivers across all racing series, starting with my C- tier where I list the 151st-200th best drivers unranked, followed by the C tier (101st-150th), then the top 100 drivers ranked in numeric order, starting with the C+ tier (51st-100th), then the E- (26th-50th) and E tiers (1st-25th). I think it’s too silly to make distinctions for drivers outside the top 100 because the distinctions are certainly far too narrow at that level. I will be releasing this year’s series in four columns of 50 initially on my Substack before eventually releasing them all on Racermetrics at some point when I am done. As with all of my post-World War II rankings, I award 100 cumulative career points to the driver I have ranked at #1, 70 to the #2 driver, 50 for #3, 30 for #4, 20 for #5, 10 for all remaining E drivers (6th-25th), 5 for E- drivers, 3 for C+ drivers, 2 for C drivers, and 1 for C- drivers. The 1,000 drivers who score the most cumulative points will be selected for my list, although as I mentioned, I will be making adjustments for the pre-war years when there was a lot less racing out there.

I rank based on impact and I would always prefer to pick a driver who overachieved in a slow car to a driver who underachieved in a fast car if they were otherwise equivalent or even if the driver in a slightly faster car posted slightly better stats. My rankings are based on some combination of dominance, consistency, impact on teams (as measured by my teammate models), level of competition, speed, passing, and versatility (I particularly like when drivers win in multiple different disciplines and/or series in the same season). Obviously I ultimately have to go with my gut a lot, particularly when it comes to drivers who are just breaking out (Formula 2 this year was a mess), although it does seem like I guess correctly on a lot of them although I definitely missed on one of this year’s big ones.

While I’m not going to spoil the list to non-subscribers yet, I will publicly state who my last 27 cuts were. It was going to be 25, but I ultimately decided at the last minute to cut Augusto Farfus for a sports car driver who was similar but had in my opinion a stronger profile, and I was going to list Thiago Vivacqua, who led my touring car model overall, but that felt too contrarian even for me for a guy who finished 12th in TCR South America. Besides Farfus, these were: Greg Anderson, Brady Bacon, Alessandro Balzan, Alex Bowman, Franco Colapinto, Mike Conway, Antonio García, Felipe Giaffone, Maximilian Götz, Jules Gounon, Ayhancan Güven, Buddy Kofoid, Takashi Kogure, Esapekka Lappi, Hunter McElrea, Luke McMillin, Christopher Mies, Theo Oeverhaus, Hayden Paddon, Franck Perera, Alex Riberas, Mick Schumacher, Aaron Stanfield, Rinus VeeKay, and Bubba Wallace. At this level it gets kind of arbitrary, and you could just as easily make cases for any of these as the drivers I actually listed, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

I am pretty consistent from year-to-year about how many drivers appear on my lists in consecutive years. It’s usually right around 125. This year it was 126, so there were 74 drivers who made my list this year who did not make my list last year, although some of them did make my lists in previous years. For drivers who did make my list last year, I placed either their tier group for the past C/C- drivers or their top 100 rank if I had them in my top 100 last year. There were 13 drivers who made my top 100 last year who I cut this year. These were: Ritomo Miyata (#3), Ricardo Feller (#14), Shane van Gisbergen (#16), Raffaele Marciello (#25), Nicky Catsburg (#26), Colin Braun (#62), Bastian Buus (#63), Mattias Ekström (#65), Matt Hagan (#76), Tom Blomqvist (#81), Liam Lawson (#85), Antonio Giovinazzi (#86), and Mike Conway (#98). You could certainly make cases for a few of those, particularly SVG, Catsburg, Lawson, Giovinazzi, and Conway, but I elected not to. Deciding which of 40-50 similarly-placed sports car drivers to list is usually a serious pain in the ass.

I’m trying to write 20 driver capsules a day, which should have me finishing on either December 30 or December 31. For the last three columns, I don’t really think I’m going to write much before the paywall, but I think I will copy the overall ratings for my open wheel model for 2024 at the start of article #2, followed by the stock car ratings at the start of article #3, and finally the touring car ratings at the start of article #4. Here you go. Thank you for your patience.