Autosport Magazine, Max Verstappen, Gary Watkins discussed on The Autosport Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
The insights. So that's the start point obviously you move people around if they've done more than one category. They're sort of what I like to call the Sebastian Buemi criteria and he gets moved up or down depending on his wet versus formula E things. But then also, of course, you have to have a hierarchy of the championships. So obviously the obvious ones is like what F one would take is a Pinnacle of the sport, but how good a season has it been and how good a season is everything because it changes over time. The overall order is usually pretty similar. But some championships have strong years and some have weaker. You'd expect, for example, that next year drives in the world endurance championships hypercar class will be a lot higher up the list. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, suddenly we're going to have many more teams in professional drivers in well, both wet can hipster. So yeah, absolutely. I think sports car drivers. And sports car drives are very high a few years back when we had the really quick super LMP1 cars and we had Audi Portia and Toyota. They were higher. Now it's not been quite so strong, so they drop down. So we try and factor in that sort of thing as well. But we're trying to be fair, I think, is probably the point. Something I've wondered, when you look back over those 20 list 21 lists now, how good a job do you think we've done at creating a snapshot in time of motor sport in that year? Have we largely got it right, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I mean, obviously, I'm having to say that I was involved in a lot of them, but yeah, I did a last year because obviously it was the 20th, so I went back and I added up all the scores of every single driver that appeared in it. Well, you know, it seemed like a fun thing to do over Christmas, right? So was it just before? But anyway, yeah, so, and if you do that, you come up with a list of drivers that I think most people would agree. Okay, you can argue about the exact order, but the list of drivers was the ones that you'd say, yeah, they've probably been the standout drivers internationally for the last 20 years. I think towards the back end of the list, the second half of the list is also about trying to give drivers and championships that maybe answer obvious a little bit of a spotlight and just say, we haven't forgotten about this. This person deserves deserves a mention of a couple of those on this list this year. So it's getting them, I guess it's doing two things. One is it's trying to absolutely assess the top drivers in each year. That snapshot and the other snapshot is oh and here's some other highlights that you don't want to miss. It's one other thing before I started working here as an auto sport reader. I always felt that when you read that list, I always thought I had a bit of a good oversight of if you read autosport magazine every week, you think, well, I know, I know motor sport, but you're always there's always names now. You're like, who are they? They were. There have been certain members of staff during the process you've gone. Who's that? And they got an official warning, but they weren't sacked. But yeah, so that's why you do need. You need some people who've got an overview and obviously I'm receiving for the magazine I'm receiving copies from all the championships. Yes. James has a very good overview, Tom's enthusiastic enough that he's interested in lots of series. The F one guys perhaps not so much because they're on the F one beat all the time so they don't know as much outside of F one. So you try and dip into the areas of deep expertise that you've got. Yeah, Gary Watkins as well. We rely on him heavily with the sports car ones because you can look at stint averages, for example. You don't necessarily know who's running on the old tyres, he's looking after them, he's on the new ones, what they've been told to do, et cetera. So you really need the people on the ground, but then it requires it requires people like us as well to have a bit of an overview and go, yeah, but let's not dig too carried away with that championship, you know, we've got a slot in somewhere, so yeah, it's quite an involved process. There is one driver that I know Kevin is not particularly happy about how high we placed him on the list, but we gradually wore him down, didn't we Tom? Absolutely. We'll come to that. No doubt, but there's definitely enough evidence to back up that decision, I think. We will talk about some of the new entries, some of the drivers we've lost, including a top ten name last year who's nowhere to be seen in 2022, and it's not as if we're going to make your way to the end of the podcast. We're not going to count down the list. So we'll also give you the top 5 right now. It's an F one heavy list, as you may expect, and number 5 was George Russell. Number four was Lewis Hamilton, number three, Callie Robin perra. Number two Charles Leclerc number one Max Verstappen. Let's start with talking about number one. In previous years, Lewis has been number one. It's been a no brainer. There's been very few people arguing against. Although this list isn't really about arguing drivers out, you should be arguing in your drivers from your series. But James max being number one, any sort of contentious arguments there. I don't think there is really. I mean, the records that he's achieved this year. You can't really argue with that. Obviously we're going by what the Formula One guys have decided. So in some respects, that's out of our hands because we're not going to swap the order around and go, no, we think that guanajuato should be number one. Tell me what though, that did happen in the early days of the list if you go back there was less coherence between the contributor top tens and the top 50, but oh really? Yeah, yeah, looking at in 2005, we really hedged our bits. We had, I think, we get this right, I think the F one review had Alonso number one. Raikkonen was number one in the top 50 of the F one drivers, but the overall number one was best in life. Really hedging their bets that year. Just in case you missed someone. And we do, we do look down those lists of drivers through the field. So it's not a case of just picking out, well, he got the most points. You know, back in 2018, we put charla Clare in the top ten. And that certainly wasn't based on what he finished the championship, but we could see that that promise and that he had a great year. I mean, Daniel Ricciardo's topped the list twice, Robert Koch has topped the list as well. So it's not necessarily always about who wins the championship is the automatic number one pick. But this year, the weight of evidence does support, I think, a Max Verstappen at number one. He was very close last year. It must be said. It did go pretty much open until the last two weekends of the year where our poor correspondent, we weren't able to commit to giving him a word count of who was going to be number one and number two. But in this zone, this podcast last year we had a very extensive debate about the Lewis Hamilton versus Max Verstappen and things last year that they were so close and I think I made the point that when you've got two drivers who are so close, both in terms of results and I think they are overall level of performance. The way we basically differentiated it in the end was the will to will stuff and the fact that max had overstepped the mark on more occasions. So there was just edged it whereas in previous years it had been more obvious this year. Okay, so max had that slightly dubious thing with mixing your accuracy over stone, but that wasn't a crash and then he obviously switched to the magnets back on interlagos, but that was one