What does a weak second driver cost? 1,200 seasons with the seat swapped

Massa next to Alonso, Webber next to Vettel, Bottas next to Hamilton, Pérez next to Verstappen. Every few years the paddock has the same argument: how much does a weak second seat cost a team? Nobody has ever answered it with a number, because 2010 was only run once. This analysis ran it twelve hundred times, changing nothing but who sits in that second car. The answer has a predictable half and a surprising one: the team that loses the most points to its second driver is also the one that notices it least.

The experiment

We take the real grid of a season (the cars with their performance and reliability, and the twenty drivers with their level) and run the whole championship. Then we repeat it with the same seed, the same car and the same rivals, changing one single thing: the level of the driver in the second seat of the team we are looking at.

Three versions of that seat, a hundred 22-race championships each:

• As it was: the real second driver, at his real level.
• An average driver: exactly halfway between the two team-mates.
• A clone of the number one: the same level as his team-mate.

Everything else is frozen. The points difference between the first and third versions is, literally, what the seat cost. Each driver’s level comes out of calibrating the engine against the real results of each season, not out of an opinion of ours, and we explain it in how the simulator works.

The four cases

Average constructors’ points, and next to them the share of constructors’ titles won across the hundred runs.

The championship Ferrari left in the second car

2010 is the case that turns this into more than a curiosity. With the real pairing of Alonso and Massa, Ferrari wins the constructors’ championship in 3% of universes. With a second Alonso alongside the first, it wins 89%.

It does not even take that: with a merely average driver, halfway between the two and nothing remarkable, Ferrari already wins 36%. A third of the 2010 constructors’ championships were sitting in that seat, not in the car.

That is what makes 2010 special: it was a year in which the title was genuinely open: we measured it separately in how many races it takes for the best driver to win. And when a championship is tight, every point from the second car is worth exactly what it looks like.

The paradox: the biggest loser notices least

2024 is the opposite case. The gap between Verstappen and Pérez is eight grid places, by far the largest of the four cases, and the cost is the largest too: 179 constructors’ points a season. That is close to giving away four wins a year.

And it changes absolutely nothing: Red Bull takes the constructors’ title in 98% of universes with Pérez and 100% with a Verstappen clone. The biggest hole of the four is also the only one with no sporting consequence at all, because the car was covering it on its own.

It explains something that sounds like an excuse in the paddock and turns out to be true: a dominant team can carry a weak second driver for years. Not because it costs nothing, it costs a fortune, but because the points it loses were spare.

What each place of difference costs, in championship points

Dividing the cost by the gap gives a useful figure: how many constructors’ points each point of difference between a team’s two drivers costs.

Each place costs much the same across the four cases, between 17 and 22 points, so what drives the bill up is not the price of a place, it is the size of the gap. Red Bull 2024 pays 179 points because the gap is eight places, not because each one is expensive.

There is still a difference, and it points where you would expect. The two cars that were fighting for the title, the 2024 Red Bull and the 2010 Ferrari, pay 22.4 and 19.1 points per place. The two that were already clear, the 2019 Mercedes and the 2013 Red Bull, pay 17.5 and 17.0. A dominant car already puts its second driver near the front even when he drives poorly, because the only car ahead of him is his own team-mate, so improving him gains few positions. A car fighting in the pack has six or seven to beat, and there every place turns into real points. It is a 30% difference rather than double, but it runs in the same counter-intuitive direction: the front-running teams are precisely the ones that need two stars least.

What this does not say

• Each driver’s place on the grid comes from calibration against real results, not from an editorial judgement of those drivers. A second driver also performs with the car, the strategy and the team orders he is given, and all of that is inside that number.
• This measures the constructors’ championship. In the drivers’ title the second seat matters far less, except when it takes points off a rival, which is exactly what a team wants from it.
• And it measures nothing a second driver brings off track: development, a data reference, calm in the garage. That exists and does not fit in a simulator.

What the numbers say

When a big team sticks with a disputed second driver, both things are true at once: it is costing them between 70 and 180 points a year, and it does not change their result. When the team doing it is a midfield one, the championship really is sitting in that seat.

Individual pairings can be tested one by one: the Garage builds a team mixing eras and What if? puts any driver in any car. The other side of the question, two drivers with exactly the same machinery, is covered in the twelve teammate duels.