This is a follow up to a post from last season where we gawked at the salaries of all 20 F1 drivers: https://f1datadriver.com/driver-pay-and-performance/
It turns out that another data source for driver salaries is provided by the F1 23 video game, produced by EA Sports. You may surprised to know that I do not own this game, but it won’t be long before I buy it, as well as a Playstation 5 to run it on and a hardcover strategy guide. I can’t afford not to!
The game comes with ratings in the range of 0-100 for all of the drivers in 4 categories: Experience, Racecraft, Awareness and Pace, as well as an overall rating. Also provided is each driver’s salary for this year, as well as a “Buyout” number. The Buyout is a payment from the new team to the old team and not to the driver directly.
The ratings will be good fodder for a post later on, but for now we will just take the Salary data, ignoring the Buyout numbers.
What I would like to know is how good of an “investment” the drivers have been so far this year, in terms of points earned during races.
Here is a look at everyone’s salaries, from the video game data. The days of annual payments in the tens of millions are over, largely thanks to the budget cap rules in place for all teams as of 2021. Hamilton and Verstappen, both world champions, are slight outliers from an otherwise narrow range of $2.5 – $4.0 million for most drivers across the board.
[Note: I have left Daniel Riccardo of AlphaTauri in there, even though he broke his 4 million dollar hand after 2 races and has been replaced with another driver (Liam Lawson), after he himself replaced Nyck De Vries who was fired in front of everybody after 11 races for poor performance.]
One metric to look at would be Points Won per Dollar of Salary. For example, Verstappen has 374 points and a salary of $8 million, so his cost has been $21,390 per point. Logan Sargeant’s cost has been $1,000,000 for zero points, much worse value.
We can convert this Points/Dollar metric to something easier to visualize. In fact we will use the same formula that converts spreads in sports betting markets to win probabilities so that we have a number for each driver that:
(1) Is in a range from 0-100
(2) Gives higher numbers to drivers with better value, and lower numbers to drivers with lower value.
[For more on such spreads, see: https://f1datadriver.com/formula-1-betting-markets/]
The same numbers can be generated for each team by combining the points and salaries of the drivers:
I am left with the impression that the payouts for these drivers is somewhat unfair. Over the next couple of years, the “driver market” will become volatile. I am excited to see which drivers make moves $$$
