Tuesday 13 March 2018

Season Summary Tables 1894 – 2016

The 17th volume of the Patrick O'Brien Rating System is available:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/patrick-obrien/patrick-obriens-grand-prix-rating-system-season-summary-tables-1894-2016/paperback/product-23560514.html

This book constitutes an appendix to my Rating System study. It follows my ‘Explanatory Chapters’ (2016) and ‘Further Analysis’ (2017).

The 2013 Formula One season was dominated by the Vettel/ Red Bull-Renault package, which won 13 of the 19 races. Many reckon that Vettel is one of the great drivers. Some however argue that Vettel was fortunate in having the fastest car, the Red Bull-Renault. Just how good was Vettel compared with his peers? This publication compares grand prix and Formula One drivers, cars and packages in simple arithmetic terms. For the first time the driver has been separated from the car and each is expressed as separate performance elements that make up the performance package. Just how much current four-time champion Vettel contributes to the Red Bull-Renault’s recent dominance is explained and quantified. The author’s analysis starts from the first car race in 1894, from Paris to Rouen, and includes over 1,200 grand prix races. The 17th volume of the Patrick O’Brien Grand Prix Rating System, this book is an appendix of season-summary tables from 1894-2016.

“I don’t think that an honest person can criticise [Patrick O’Brien’s] driver-rating figures without going through his methodology (i.e., calculating all the figures for all the races). But naturally if someone is, let’s say, a Damon Hill fan and sees that he didn’t top driver-rated at 100.0, these types of fans will definitely disagree with the figures – even without checking them, as we saw a while back on that post in the forum we talked about. But this is natural: every fan will be biased towards their favourite driver. This provides healthy and interesting discussions in my view. Unless one has a points system (i.e., World Championship), every rating will be debatable. Nevertheless POB’s methodology is the closest, most reliable, most accurate and least subjective rating I have ever seen and sincerely I do not believe that a better Rating Methodology will ever exist.”

~ Nuno Moreira, Grand Prix enthusiast and statistics expert, personal correspondence, 5 January 2018.

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3 comments:

  1. I would very much appreciate more information about what is contained in this volume. Does it have just the tables for each year for drivers and cars or does it also have comments on the seasons?
    Thank you

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  2. Thank you for your enquiry. This book is an appendix to the Season Summary volumes (1894-2016). Accordingly it contains tables only; it does not contain comments on the seasons. Comments on the seasons are instead found in POB's 14 'Season Summaries' volumes, one for each decade, with the present decade divided into two smaller volumes (2010-2013 and 2014-2016).

    This 17th volume, the Season Summary Tables, does however contain a 14-page introduction, giving further information about POB's methodology to enable interpretation of his figures and replication of his method. His methodology is discussed throughout his 17 Rating System volumes: mainly in the 'Guidelines' of each of the Season Summaries, and in his thesis titled 'Explanatory Chapters'. This 'Season Summary Tables' volume is a third place in which he clarifies his methodology e.g., by answering some FAQs.

    If you click on the Lulu.com link in this blog-post, you will be taken to page where you can click on a preview of the book. Although no actual tables are shown in the preview, it gives the first few pages of the introduction. Page 4 enumerates the table headings and specifies where exactly these Season Summary Tables fit into his Rating System i.e., at what point in his analysis he generated them. I hope this helps.

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