Apologies to the long-passed Mr Adams, but crikey, one race in 7 weeks!? And it's bloody Hungary!
A bit hard to get excited one has to say.
With nothing else to grab hold of (except Bernie's pending oppotunity to write his own version of Mein Kampf whilst a guest of the Bavarian Corrections Department), the media are getting stuck into the RR (Raikonnen/Ricciardo) contest.
If you look at it squarely, there actually isn't that much being said officially on that topic either.
So with a commentary on the German GP now being effectively redundant, what is their to do?
Well I saw elsewhere that people weere questioning whether F1 is truly still the pinnacle of motorsport. A curious question without one has a rock solid interpretation of what Pinnacle means in this case.
What would the criterea be?
1. Technical Innovation?
2. Speed?
3. Skill?
4. Ambition?
5. Universality of spectator appeal?
6. Closeness of Racing?
Who are the contestants? According to most of what I have seen, they appear to be;
Formula One
WSC
WRC
NASCAR
DTM
INDYCAR
V8-Supercar
I wonder would assembing a table of ratings for the critera be a good start?
So I did up a table to rate each category against each of the criterea. Very subjective, but hard to argue that for closeneess, NASCAR & Indycar cannot be beat, and WRC is a clear last, etc.
The outcome for raw scores was:
F1 - 48
WSC - 43
Indycar - 43
NASCAR - 42
DTM - 39
V8 supercar - 38
WRC - 35
Then we apply some basic error correction, and it comes out like this:
F1 - 31
WSC - 30
NASCAR - 29
Indycar - 29
DTM - 26
V8 Supercar - 25
WRC - 23
And then looked at which categories were rated best (or equal best) in each category, and here it is:
F1 - 3
Indycar - 3
WSC - 2
NASCAR - 2
WRC - 1
DTM - 0
V8 Supercar - 0
Finally, where are they ranked in each of these assessments, and what would be an aggregate ranking (lowest score is good).
F1 - 3
Indycar - 6
WSC - 7
NASCAR - 9
DTM - 16
V8 supercar - 18
WRC - 19
So what does it mean? nothing of course, because the ratings are subjective, and the analysis is rubbish, but I'm bored.
Intuitively, it looks about right though, i reckon.
for a start, you cannot compare DTM and V8 supercars with the others. They just dont have enough going for them to be the 'Pinnacle'. WRC is a bit of a surprise, but it isn't what it used to be.
Folks will of course argue that WSC is a better series than Indycar, and it promises over the next few years to be something, but with Indycar's 200MPH+ speeds, unbeleivable closeness, and driver skill at least the equal of F1 & WSC, and huge popularity in its home country, it probably deserves second place.
Here is the table:
F1 WSC WRC NASCAR DTM Indycar V8
Tech 7 8 7 4 5 5 5
Speed 8 8 5 8 7 9 6
Skill 8 8 8 7 7 8 7
Amb 10 8 6 7 6 6 6
Uni 8 5 5 7 6 6 6
Close 7 6 4 9 8 9 8
R Tot 48 43 35 42 39 43 38
Corr 31 30 23 29 26 29 25
Best 3 2 1 2 0 3 0
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