Long read

OK, but who's the LuckiestOfAllTime?

The companion question to the GOAT debate is not just who was best, but who benefited most from circumstance. This page treats luck as a same-car comparison: your reliability, your inherited gains, and your safety-car timing versus your teammate's.

Data: teammate-normalised reliability, inherited-position, and safety-car marts. First two cover 1950 onward; the safety-car lens begins in 2018. Indy 500 rounds excluded at source.

1 · Mechanical luck

Same team, same engine supplier, same garage - so if your teammate's car broke twice as often as yours, circumstance tilted hard in one direction. The diagonal is equal fate; above = the teammate broke more, below = you did.

drivers plotted.

Driving style leaks in. "Mechanical" is a status-text classification, so a blown gearbox from missed downshifts still counts. The 10+ pp tails are too wide to wave away as rough driving, but some of the signal is.

2 · Earned vs inherited

Every grid-to-finish gain is either earned (you passed or outlasted them) or inherited (they retired). The inherited share asks how much of a driver's progress came from attrition around them - compared against your teammate's share. Above the diagonal = more of your gains came from retirements than the person sharing your pit bay.

drivers plotted.

Pace and inherited share are mechanically linked. Out-qualify your teammate and there are simply fewer cars ahead to inherit from - so the racecraft quadrant is reading partly skill, partly opportunity. Don't read it as "unlucky"; read it as "outperformed my teammate when chaos was equal".

3 · Safety-car timing

FastF1-only, 2018 onward. For each SC/VSC window, compare where a driver was before the neutralisation and where they were when it ended, then compare that average gain or loss against their teammate on the same windows. Positive values mean you usually came out better.

Every driver with 30+ teammate-paired SC/VSC windows since 2018. Bars to the right of zero mark drivers who usually came out of neutralisations better than their teammate; bars to the left mark the ones who usually lost out. Red highlights the five strongest positive swings, black the five strongest negative ones.

Pit wall leaks in. Teams split strategy between their two drivers, so some of this is engineer-luck rather than driver-luck.

4 · The composite verdict

This is a scorecard, not an inferential model. Percentile-rank each driver on each lens, add the ranks, sort. There are two boards because the safety-car lens only goes back to 2018: Modern LOAT (three axes) or All-time LOAT (reliability + inheritance).

Each bar is one driver. Total length is their aggregate luck score out of . The coloured segments break that down into component percentile ranks — a bar that's mostly one colour had lopsided luck; a bar that's even across all dimensions was lucky everywhere. Ranked across the drivers who appear in .

Read as a ranking, not a score. Percentile ranks are within each mart's cohort, so the totals order drivers sensibly but aren't absolute luck units. The "unluckiest" tail is also where the best drivers often end up — see the skill residual above. Hard luck here is usually the flip side of outperforming the chaos around you.