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Driver ratings in F1 2020 are purely based on facts and statistics

Driver ratings in F1 2020 are purely based on facts and statistics

26-06-2020 13:53

GPblog.com

F1 2020 has a driver market in the career mode as well as the MyTeam mode and recently Codemasters announced the drivers' ratings. This was criticized by the developer, George Russell would have a too low score and Valtteri Bottas would have a too high score again. GPBlog asked Codemasters how they came to this rating.

Subjective

"All of our driver ratings are derived purely from real data collected over a number of years", says game director Lee Mather to GPBlog, "I agree, it’s very easy to say that George has the ability to be a future World Champion, but can we prove that?"

"It’s purely subjective, and peoples opinions differ. There are still people out there who won’t acknowledge Lewis as one of the greatest drivers of all time, and always point to the car as being the most important factor", with which Mather emphasizes that they do not rely on opinions for the game, but on actual performance to determine the scores.

"In order to keep things fair and balanced, we worked very closely with the team at F1 to eradicate the vehicle performance from the driver stats. All data is compared against each driver in such a way as to remove the performance of the car from the equation. It’s been a very intense process, but this is just the beginning, and we will continue to work and evolve the system where need be."

Only one small aspect

Codemasters will continue to monitor developments, so any changes cannot be ruled out. It is clear that these statistics are only based on what drivers are performing on the track and an objective analysis has been made which has led to the current driver ratings.

"Ultimately, the end goal was to rate drivers based on facts and figures, not how we all feel about them, and their potential ability. Of course, the one thing to take in to account is, all of the drivers in F1 are amongst the best drivers on the planet, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the sport of Formula 1."

"The difference in numbers may look significant, but at this level, it’s more marginal in their performance on track."