I do not enjoy seeing essentially fake entries used to boost grid size so it would meet the FIA requirement for Super License points (looking at you, “Ret DNS DNS” drivers at the bottom of the championship standings). So I am not going to say much about this generally uninspiring series of events. Instead, here is the championship table sorted by the average number of points earned per race.
Driver
Races
Points per race
Joey Alders
15
17.7
Sebastián Fernández
6
16.0
Jack Doohan
15
15.3
Mikhael Belov
3
13.0
Nikita Mazepin
15
12.4
Devlin DeFrancesco
9
11.2
Daniel Cao
3
10.3
Jamie Chadwick
15
9.3
Pietro Fittipaldi
15
7.9
Yu Kanamaru
15
6.9
James Yu
15
4.7
Jake Hughes
6
4.0
Tatiana Calderón
9
3.4
Tommy Smith
15
3.2
Miki Koyama
3
2.0
Alessio Deledda
15
1.4
Khaled Al Qubaisi
3
0.7
Thomas Luedi
15
0.2
The unexpected success of Alders got its share of headlines, but I would also remark on Belov’s 4th place by average points, considering that he came directly from F4. At the moment it is unclear where either of them is headed next: hopefully, Formula Renault Eurocup.
The late addition of Jehan Daruvala to the team reshuffled the standings, so here is an update. Because Daruvala’s statistics are current as of today, for the sake of consistency I updated Lawson and Tsunoda who took part in Toyota Racing Series 2020. Generally, Lawson’s statistics got slightly better and Tsunoda’s slightly worse.
Lawson, Hauger, and Tsunoda end up in the top half of the roster more often than others. Obviously, they did not participate in the same series: some statistics of Daruvala and Vips are lower because of the stronger competition they faced recently.
It was a close one. Igor Fraga vs Liam Lawson, points after each race:
Fraga wins 362 : 356
They were always within 20 points of each other:
The impact of 3rd race at Hampton Downs looms over the rest
That one Hampton Downs race, where Lawson briefly lost power and got hit from behind, had disproportionate impact on the championship, more than any race victory by either driver.
Fraga and Lawson are headed to FIA F3 next. I recalculated the TRS results using FIA F3 scoring, which also awards reduced points for reversed grid races. Result: Lawson wins 226:216.
F3 scoring: Lawson wins 226:216
By F3 scoring, Lawson led almost throughout the championship, only trailing once, by 1 point, after his Hampton Downs retirement.
This graph is not as much dominated by a single race.
Neither competitor ever finished below 8th place. Comparing the scoring systems, one can conclude that TRS essentially gives about 10 points just for finishing, or equivalently imposes a 10 point penalty for a non-finish.
Place
TRS
F3
TRS rev
F3 rev
1
35
25
20
15
2
31
18
18
12
3
27
15
16
10
4
24
12
14
8
5
22
10
12
6
6
20
8
10
4
7
18
6
9
2
8
16
4
8
1
“rev” = reversed grid races
Final remark: in the points-free comparison of sorted results, from best to worst, Lawson beats or matches Fraga in all except the last line.
Fraga
vs
Lawson
1
=
1
1
=
1
1
=
1
1
=
1
2
<
1
2
=
2
2
=
2
3
<
2
3
=
3
4
<
3
4
=
4
5
=
5
6
<
5
7
<
6
8
>
Ret
Last line trumped the rest of them
(By the way, I am glad that Fraga won, I was rooting for him. But that is besides the point.)
I try to track the movement of drivers between the following categories: F1, F2, F3, F3R, and F4. Here F3R (“regional F3”) category also includes Formula Renault and Euroformula Open.
F2 to F1
Nicholas Latifi
F3 to F2
Marcus Armstrong
Jehan Daruvala
Felipe Drugovich
Christian Lundgaard
Pedro Piquet
Robert Shwartzman
Yuki Tsunoda
Aside: Jüri Vips moving from F3 to Super Formula.
F3R to F2
Guilherme Samaia
Marino Sato
Daniel Ticktum
This is an oversimplification of events, but most of Sato’s and Ticktum’s races in 2019 were on F3R level.
Aside: Pietro Fittipaldi moving from F3 Asia to Super Formula.
F3R to F3
Enaam Ahmed
Olli Caldwell
Cameron Das
Jack Doohan
Lukas Dunner
Enzo Fittipaldi
Sophia Flörsch
Igor Fraga
Federico Malvestiti
Matteo Nannini
Clement Novalak
Oscar Piastri
David Schumacher
Alexander Smolyar
Frederik Vesti
Calan Williams
F4 to F3
Dennis Hauger
Théo Pourchaire
Skipping F3R is a bold move, and the only two drivers to attempt it in 2020 are the winners of two most competitive F4 championships: Italy and Germany.
F4 to F3R
William Alatalo
Paul Aron
Ido Cohen
Hadrien David
Sebastian Estner
Alessandro Famularo
Reshad de Gerus
Gillian Henrion
Arthur Leclerc
Zane Maloney
Emidio Pesce
Gianluca Petecof
Oliver Rasmussen
Grégoire Saucy
Josh Skelton
Roman Staněk
Laszlo Toth
Glenn van Berlo
This list is inevitably incomplete due to the fuzziness of F3R category.
Karting to F3R
David Vidales
I am not going to track the drivers coming to F4 from karts due to sheer numbers, but going directly to F3R is sufficiently rare to be mentioned.
The 2020 roster of Ferrari Driver Academy looks impressive, with 5 of 9 drivers having already reached Formula 2. But with very little room available at the highest step of the ladder, chances are that only a small fraction of them will reach it. Instead of making predictions on this matter, I will simply rank them using a few hugely flawed metrics and pick top 5 each time.
Following the method of a previous post, I count only the Super Licence points earned in F2 and FIA F3 in the past two seasons.
Robert Shwartzman 50
Marcus Armstrong 33
Mick Schumacher 30
Callum Ilott 15
Giuliano Alesi 3
The rest have not yet reached the aforementioned series.
Number of races won
Not counting karting, of course. As the previous indicator, this one favors more experienced drivers; but the amount of experience is also a relevant thing to consider here.
Mick Schumacher 29
Marcus Armstrong 26
Robert Shwartzman 16
Callum Ilott 11
Enzo Fittipaldi 10
Winning percentage
I expected this to favor the less experienced drivers, who spent more of their time in lower level series. But the list looks quite similar to the previous one.
Mick Schumacher 16.4%
Marcus Armstrong 15.8%
Robert Shwartzman 9.7%
Enzo Fittipaldi 9.1%
(tie) Arthur Leclerc and Gianluca Petecof 7.5%
Number of podiums
These are the same 5 drivers as in the list based on the number of wins, but they are not in the same order.
Marcus Armstrong 76
Robert Shwartzman 63
Mick Schumacher 51
Enzo Fittipaldi 36
Callum Ilott 32
Podium percentage
Marcus Armstrong 46.1%
Arthur Leclerc 40%
Robert Shwartzman 38.2%
Enzo Fittipaldi 32.7%
Mick Schumacher 28.8%
Summary
Dino Beganovic, who is yet to make his single-seater debut, could not possibly appear in any of the above lists. Giuliano Alesi only appears as #5 on the Super Licence list. Overall, the top 3 are clearly Armstrong, Schumacher, and Shwartzman but at this point I cannot put them in any order other than alphabetical. If this is not a satisfactory conclusion, you can look at the Future Racing Stars ranking from Driver Database, which was also my source for most of the above statistics.
Who had a better season? Looks pretty clear to me.
Yet, Shwartzman became the champion with 916 points versus 911 for Verschoor. Because for the TRS scoring system it did not matter much who won a race, or in what order the drivers finished it, as long as they finished at all. The second place was worth 67/75 = 89.3% of the first place; for example, 9 second places were valued more than 8 wins. Even finishing last, in the 13th place (there were never more than 13 cars on the grid) was worth 26 points, a third of a race win. Verschoor had one retirement, and that was it.
Forward to 2020
The scoring system is different now. It no longer attempts to distribute points among (non-existent) 30 cars on the grid. Just among the 20. And finishing 2nd is no longer worth 89.3% of winning a race. It’s just 88.9%. And 9 second places are now worth exactly the same as 8 wins.
So, not much changed in essence, except for the value of finishing last (now 1 point compared to 26 in 2018). But finishing last was not the issue in 2018: neither Verschoor nor Shwartzman were ever classified below 6th.
The amounts being different between three races held each weekend, I use averages: the first place gets (35+20+35)/3 = 30 points on average, while the second place gets (31+18+31)/3 = 26.7 points and the third (21+16+21)/3 = 23.3.
After the first round in 2020, Liam Lawson has 82 points while his expected rival Ciao Collet has 18 (car damage + a cruel and unusual penalty). Which in the TRS reality means that Collet might as well pack and go on vacation. Even if he wins all of remaining 12 races, and Lawson gets an equal mix of 2nd and 3rd places, the championship will be decided by:
Collet: 18 + 12*30 = 378
Lawson: 82 + 6*26.7 + 6*23.3 = 382
Sure, Lawson might retire too. But what fun is a championship that hinges on retirements rather than victories?
What if
If 2020 scoring (for “normal” races) was applied to 2018 results, Verschoor would have won by 1 point: 418 : 417. I do not take it to mean that the problem was fixed, though. The table at the beginning of this post is telling me the championship was not that close. With the current F1/F2/F3 scoring, Verschoor would have won 261 : 233, clinching the title with a race to spare.
Disclaimer
This is not meant to be an anti-Shwartzman post. He did not invent the scoring system. Handed an early advantage due to Verschoor’s retirement in Round 1, he did what he had to do to maintain the championship lead and minimize the risk of losing it.
FIA Super Licence points are too complicated for most people to follow in detail, especially when quite a few otherwise eligible series fail to reach the required grid size.
This does not stop series organizers and commentators from talking up the point amounts at any opportunity (aside: if during a race, a commentator cannot find a more interesting subject than Super License points, perhaps the series isn’t good enough to be awarding them). The points earned at F4 and regional F3 levels do matter for getting Grade A licence, but in most cases they will either expire or become redundant before the driver is ready to enter Formula 1.
So I prefer to simplify the picture by counting only Super License points earned in the last two years in F2 and (FIA) F3. (Since the latter did not exist in 2018, I counted both of its precedessors, European F3 and GP3).
Driver
Points
F2 ’19
F2 ’18
F3 ’19
F3 ’18
Nyck de Vries
70
40
30
Robert Shwartzman
50
30
20
Luca Ghiotto
46
40
6
Nicholas Latifi
44
40
4
Alexander Albon
40
40
George Russell
40
40
Lando Norris
40
40
Sérgio Sette Câmara
40
30
10
Marcus Armstrong
33
25
8
Mick Schumacher
30
30
Anthoine Hubert
28
3
25
Dan Ticktum
25
25
Jehan Daruvala
21
20
1
Artem Markelov
20
20
Jack Aitken
20
20
Jüri Vips
20
10
10
Nikita Mazepin
20
20
Callum Ilott
15
15
Leonardo Pulcini
13
3
10
Pedro Piquet
13
8
5
Guanyu Zhou
11
8
3
Nobuharu Matsushita
10
10
Louis Delétraz
9
6
3
Antonio Fuoco
8
8
David Beckmann
7
7
Christian Lundgaard
6
6
Jake Hughes
6
4
2
Ralf Aron
6
6
Richard Verschoor
5
5
Álex Palou
4
4
Jordan King
4
4
Giuliano Alesi
3
3
Enaam Ahmed
2
2
Yuki Tsunoda
2
2
Max Fewtrell
1
1
Ryan Tveter
1
1
The exclusion of other series like IndyCar or Super Formula has mostly to do with the fact that most of the drivers in those series are not on a trajectory that would lead them to F1 (sorry, Nick Cassidy). I might reconsider this next year depending on how much success Vips has in SF.
Reality check
Where are the drivers who already earned 40 or more points required for Super Licence? Albon, Norris, Latifi, and Russell indeed reached F1. Shwartzman moved up to F2 so far. The others appear to have left the F1 ladder: de Vries went to Formula E, Ghiotto to GT, Sette Câmara is rumored to join IndyCar.
