Striking Gold With A Silver - Sportscar Amateur Driver Rankings
- A Discussion on FIA WEC Spa Francorchamps Amateur Driver Analysis
Sportscars has a rich history with amateur ‘Gentleman Drivers’ taking their cars racing; originally being a sport for the wealthy taking their new toys across Europe to go racing. Despite the sport becoming more competitive and focused around professional teams and drivers at the top of the rankings the Amateurs remained. There has been and will always be a route for anyone with the means to take part in the top Sportscar races like Le Mans and Daytona – most likely sharing a car with professionals. How is this Pro-Am format regulated however?
First off, how do you classify an Amateur Driver? You could theoretically have a multimillionaire paying for the car and team around them, who also is in their own right driving at a professional standard. They’re amateurs, paying their way to a drive, right? This would be unfair to the spirit of the inclusivity of Gentleman Drivers; who would spend the big money to race at a world championship if you had to compete like-for-like against professional talents? Regulations would be needed therefore to ensure stability and longevity for Pro-Am classes, a key to the survival of Sportscar motorsport.
To resolve this, and ensure competitive racing in each Pro-Am class, Driver Ratings are used. Every driver is categorised based on previous success and skill, and are put in bands between Bronze, Silver, Gold and the top Platinum reserved for the top factory-backed drivers and world champions. Bronzes and Silvers are classified as Amateurs.
LMP2 must have at least one Silver or Bronze rated driver in the line-up (Bronze entries eligible for the confusingly named Pro-Am sub-class). GTE Am must have one Bronze driver and another Silver or Bronze.
In recent years we have seen young Silver rated drivers in OEM young driver programs racing in GTE with a view of becoming a professional, arguably becoming professional whilst still being Silver rated... So are all Silvers Amateurs?
Pros and Cons of Driver Ratings
The key to this method is ensuring each driver is representative with their performance on track compared to their respective driver ratings. If they are too slow, then they will find it hard to compete, and on the other end of the scale it would be unfair having a driver too fast for their peers.
A downside of this system is having the ratings locked in for the season. The goal is to find a driver as far up the driver rating band you can to get the most pace. The teams with bigger budgets will find the best drivers at the top edge of each driver rating band and be able to support them reaching the funds needed to drive, leaving those lower down in the band less likely to get a drive, and/or having to pay more to get the team together. Unless a driver improves through the season, this scouting advantage is pretty fixed for the year.
Another downside is the impact to driver careers. If a young up-and-coming driver as a Silver impresses and gets uprated to Gold but maintains their performance, they will then be at the bottom rung of the Gold driving stable and may lose opportunities to drive. Where this switching point between ratings is positioned can have a huge effects on the complexion of the grid/driver market; the top teams finding those other drivers that now fit under the new boundary. An unfortunate example of a Silver to Gold move is Andrea Pizzitola, 2018 ELMS champion with G-Drive Racing. He became a Gold in 2019, had a season with Algarve Pro (not a team with the biggest budgets) and things seemed to fizzle out despite once being one of the most talked about drivers.
Andrea's championship winning team G-Drive have become known for finding the best outliers. Ever since their driver bringing the budget (Roman Rusinov) was uprated to Gold, they needed to find the best Silver available, regardless if they expected to lose them at the end of the season. In 3 consecutive seasons, this squad has had to find a new Silver due to them being uprated (Andrea Pizzitola, Job van Uitert and Mikkel Jensen). The car is a revolving door of ‘Super-Silvers’, spitting them out at the season finale only to find a new one by the Preseason Test. It is a worthwhile strategy if you get the selection right due to the driver ratings freeze, but is it exploitation of the young up and coming drivers alongside the good experience and opportunities?
Michelin Le Mans Cup has decided to test a ‘Bronze Plus’ system to add a handicap adjusting for those that are punching above their weight during the season, will this help or be a hinderance for the series? Could it work in LMP2 and GTE for Silvers also?
So who are the standout Amateur drivers of this WEC Season? The following takes a look at the data from the 6H of Spa earlier in the month to hopefully shine a light on some of the key names to look out for.
LMP2 Performances
The plot below shows the Race Trace of the top laps of each amateur to give an indication on the pace and consistency of each driver. Overlaid on this are the driver rating bands in Silver and Bronze for the best and worst traces to illustrate the range of driver skill and lap times.
The top half of the Silver band has four drivers in a class of their own, consisting of Franco Colapinto, Fabio Scherer, Charles Milesi and Anders Fjordbach. These are drivers to search for when reclassification comes and may be referred to as Super-Silvers. They will most likely be at the top of the results sheets, though the Dane Fjordbach also has a Bronze sharing the car. Colapinto usually drives in ELMS, both G-Drive squads opting into a one-off round in preparation for Le Mans. It gives a good insight into what they can do for the 24 Hour – indeed one to look out for!
Around a second from the drivers named above come Galael, Sophia Floersch, Roberto Gonzalez, Rui Andrade, Tatiana Calderon, Jakub Schmiechowski and Beitske Visser.
For the Bronzes, Falb and Patrick Kelly were both closely matched around a second ahead of the rest, nipping at the heels of the Silver drivers for their one-off races. Behind them followed Henrik Hedman, Frits van Eerd and Dennis Andersen. Lastly was Garcia a further second back from them, he appeared nervous behind the wheel, a steep learning curve for the Swiss driver.
The biggest performance gap between cars in this class is for Amateur stints, so effectively the top three teams on paper to highlight going into Portimao are United Autosports, Team WRT and maybe the #28 JOTA.
GTE Am Performances
First up for this class we will look at the Bronzes.
The clear favourite from Spa in this sub-category was Ben Keating. His opening stint was impressive not only overtaking a GTE Pro Corvette in turn one, building a gap at the front of the class through the first dozen laps but also going wheel to wheel for several laps holding off Porsche Pro Matt Campbell in the #77. Next up were Francois Perrodo, Roberto Lacorte, newcomer Andrew Haryanto and the Astons of Paul Dalla Lana and Satoshi Hoshino. Perrodo wasn’t as fast as Keating but had better consistency (flatter gradient) so one to look out for in the longer races at Portimao and Le Mans. It’s refreshing to see Lacorte being competitive compared to his times in a Dallara LMP2, a revelation in GT. The same can be said for Haryanto, a fine debut, and for Hoshino having that pace on return; his consistency was not as good as the others in this grouping however and has had some history with mistakes - so he may prefer the shorter 6H rounds!
Around another second down were Christian Ried maintaining his 100% WEC attendance record despite the car rebuild after Qualifying and Thomas Flohr. Again, another second slower Manuela Gostner and then Schiavoni behind at the foot of the class.
Are we looking at a changing of the guard within Dempsey Proton with respect to the faster car? Has Christian Ried gone out of his way to find a competitive Bronze to try and win another Le Mans entry for winning or is the addition of Haryanto blind luck?
We saw Keating do this ‘hero stint’ in Bahrain driving away from the field from the front. I would like to see if he can do it from the middle of the pack if they have a bad qualifying position in future.
GTE Am Silvers
Looking at the Silver GTE drivers is where things get interesting. The bulk of the class was grouped together with one exception: Alessio Rovera. I will take a closer look at his data later on. Dylan Pereira looks like a good find from Porsche Supercup too in the #33, building on the success of Ben Keating’s best Bronze times. The rest shook out to be Andrew Watson and Matteo Cressoni, Marcos Gomes (from Brazilian Stock Cars), Francesco Castellacci, Rahel Frey, Giorgio Sernagiotto, Marco Seefried and Jaxon Evans (from Porsche Carrera Cup) who unfortunately had fewest laps completed due to retirement so hard to compare with.
A Super-Super-Silver...
If he did so long in the car, how long did the pro in the #83 do? His Gold teammate Nicklas Nielsen barely did over the minimum drive time of 45 minutes… It gets more interesting if you place Nielsen on the Silver chart (somewhere he used to sit before being uprated since last season). As a fully fledged Ferrari pro driver he was placed worse than any other Silver! Are all of these Silvers breaking the system?!
The top 32 laps the #83 car recorded were driven by Rovera. The below plot shows his lap trace compared to all in GTE Am - including his own car; showing how the top laps were all his marked in green before diverging. The plot also introduces the laps of each pro driver in the class, him being faster than former F1 talent. It makes sense then why you’d maximise the seat time for this young superstar.
Considering his future looks to be set as a Pro GT driver, how does he look compared to the GTE Pro field?
Not only did he hold his own vs professional drivers but he also performed better on peak pace than both Ferrari Pro cars! GTE Pro cars do have to conserve tyres however, and GTE Am have more rubber allocation at their disposal to keep pushing with lap after lap. If you half the gradient of the Pro traces to match Rovera’s half-race driver time, they would not be too far off consistency-wise either.
This young man is one to certainly look out for, not only to be uprated to Gold ASAP, but to see how many championships the team can get out of his skills. If pole position and a race win last weekend in ELMS alongside their WEC win at Spa, AF Corse are favourites for some silverware in 2021, including Le Mans.
‘Fixing’ Driver Ratings – Where can we go from here?
So we’ve discussed what Driver Ratings are, how they are controversial and highlighted where they are failing; what is in store for the future of Amateur racing?
Scrap Driver Ratings: Let the teams run paying drivers regardless of skill level, and see Pro Am racing drive budgets up in a bubble ready to burst reminiscent of GT1.
Status Quo: the rules are there for a reason, and they are the 'lesser evil' choice. But if a driver is too good, then it is a long wait until they are upgraded at the end of the season.
Success Ballast: Season 8 introduced Success Ballast to GTE Am to avoid teams running away with a championship. It affected podium finishers from the previous 3 races, and the top three teams in the championship. This applied to the car as a whole and would do well to hide any potential up and coming talent in the data. If applied too harshly with excess weight, then it could slow down entries too much leaving them out of contention like the Success Handicap system in the same season for LMP1. A potential political nightmare.
Driver Handicaps: If a driver is shown to be clearly ahead of the rest like we have described above, then introduce the Bronze Plus system to Silvers to help equalise without having to wait through a season. This can be done with longer pit stops after that specific driver gets out of the car for example. The driver is not hindered with ballast, so their talent is still showcased in lap time to help them progress to become a future professional. Wouldn’t closer racing help with their development too?
For the longevity of Pro-Am format racing (especially in GTE Am) if any change would be made, I feel that a Driver Rating Plus handicap could be made appropriate for extreme circumstances such as described above where factory affiliated silvers are following a trajectory towards Pro status only when applied to pit stop times. I would also like to see more clear communication on how the borders between driver rating pace is defined. Whether any regulation will change in this class as GT transitions its focus more to Pro-Am racing and if Bronze Plus is a failure in the Michelin Le Mans Cup, there still are lots of paths ACO Amateur racing can go down.
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