What do they mean by the “best of the rest” term in F1?
In: Other
Well check out max verstappens points compared to everyone else. He is by and far the best driver in f1 now and it’s starting to seriously look like he is the best driver ever.
Good cars and bad cars. “The rest” are anybody not in the classification of ‘good car’. It’s rare that bad cars perform better than good cars, no matter who the driver is.
Good: Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari
Bad: Racing Bulls, Williams, Alpine, Stake/Kick, Haas
Aston Martin can’t seem to decide which pile they want to be in but for the most part it’s bad.
F1 is a very pay to win sport and every season theres typically 2-3 teams that ALWAYS win the top 6 positions. Most recently its typically red bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes. So when people say best of the rest, theyre referring to every team except the top 3 that dont have near bottomless pockets to always win.
F1 is a very Us vs Them sport
It is not a spec series meaning that each team runs their own custom car, vs Indycar where the chassis are all fundamentally the same.
Only a handful of the teams in any given year have the money and resources the win races consistently. They have a clear advantage over the other teams.
The rest of the teams are then categorized as the mid-field and back-markers depending how they are doing.
Best of the Rest refers to the non-able-to-win races team that scored the highest in the race.
To put F1 dominance into perspective…
The first race of the 2013 season was won by Lotus.
The eighth race of the 2020 season was won by Alpha Tauri. A hefty deal of luck was involved.
*Every* race between these two was won by either Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull. There were 146 races and over 7 years between these two.
Since 2013, the top 3 drivers in the World Driver’s championship every year have driven for one of those three teams too. Currently, the 2024 season has a decent chance of breaking the streak, but that’s 11 years.
Since 2013, the top 3 constructors were these 3 teams every year except 2014 and 15 (when an incredibly powerful Mercedes engine propelled Williams to third) and 2020 (when Ferrari had a massive collapse some consider suspicious after an investigation into their engines being illegal was concluded with no announcement). Every one of those years, the top 2 was from this trio.
If you were a fan of one of the seven other teams, or one of the 14 drivers *not* with one of those teams in the season, you had to accept that your team/driver was almost certainly not going to win. Fans of a middling team in most other sports can at least celebrate a decent number of wins, but not in F1. Instead, fans celebrate beating everyone except the top two or three teams – being the best of the rest of the teams.
This year is slightly different, but not by much. There’s four teams now, as McLaren (a team with numerous great periods in the past) is able to compete with Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes. They were able to compete towards the end of last year too – the main reason why they weren’t third last year was that they were **awful** at the start of the year.
There are some teams with a really good chance of winning the race. They’ve probably won races before in this season and are regularly getting at least 1 car in the top 3.
The “rest” are teams that so far haven’t shown theyre fast enough to win. Anything is possible but realistically in a straight race, they aren’t fast enough to compete for the win and would be lucky to get in the top5 cars.
They’re still competing for points which are awarded to the top10 cars and it can still be very competitive getting those last few points for 8th 9th 10th places.
Latest Answers