What does a weak second driver cost? 1,200 seasons with the seat swapped
F1 Legend Sim · Staff · 18 August 2026 · 8 min read
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. The driver ratings are not an editorial judgement: they come out of calibrating the engine against the real results of each season, which we explain in how the simulator works.
The four cases
| Team | Pairing | As it was | Average driver | Clone | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 Ferrari | Alonso (93) + Massa (79) | 557 · 3% | 623 · 36% | 690 · 89% | +134 |
| 2013 Red Bull | Vettel (92) + Webber (80) | 811 · 100% | 854 · 100% | 879 · 100% | +68 |
| 2019 Mercedes | Hamilton (95) + Bottas (82) | 815 · 100% | 861 · 100% | 886 · 100% | +70 |
| 2024 Red Bull | Verstappen (97) + Pérez (75) | 696 · 98% | 812 · 100% | 876 · 100% | +179 |
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 — 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, no star, 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 22 rating points, 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 a rating point is worth in championship points
Dividing the cost by the rating gap gives a useful figure: how many constructors’ points each point of difference between a team’s two drivers costs.
| Case | Rating gap | Total cost | Points per point |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 Ferrari | 14 | 134 | 9.6 |
| 2024 Red Bull | 22 | 179 | 8.1 |
| 2013 Red Bull | 12 | 68 | 5.7 |
| 2019 Mercedes | 13 | 70 | 5.4 |
It is not a constant, and that is the interesting part: the same gap costs almost twice as much at some teams as at others. Ferrari 2010 pays 9.6 points per rating point; Mercedes 2019, 5.4. The difference is not in the drivers, it is in where the car is.
A dominant car already puts its second driver on the podium even when he drives poorly: 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 cars to beat, and every rating point turns into real positions. The second car’s ceiling belongs to the car, not to the driver — which is a counter-intuitive way of saying that the front-running teams are precisely the ones that need two stars least.
What this does not say
- The ratings — Pérez 75, Bottas 82, Massa 79 — come 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.