Crashiest Driver

[marksawatsky]

What driver has crashed the most (as a percentage of races started) and what driver has crashed the least? I'm guessing there is a driver or two who have started once and crashed out of the race, giving them a 100% crash rate. I'm mostly interested in our current crop of drivers.

 

[TR]

Sounds like you have a project...

 

[KekeTheKing]

Incredibly complicated, difficult, and ultimately fruitless (IMO) task.

You would have to set some fairly narrow criteria in order to accomplish this though.

 

[FB]

Doesn't Andrea de Cesaris have the record for most DNF's relative to starts? Andrea de Cesaris - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not sure how many were crashes though.

 

[Greenlantern101]

He did drive many shit cars.

I think Taki Inoue would be disgusted if he didn't get a mention.

 

[KekeTheKing]

Doesn't Andrea de Cesaris..

How can you not use "de Crasheris" in these circumstances?

But realistically it would be nearly impossible to identify all the true "crashes" from his multitudinous DNF's.

And I think part of his reputation was built on plenty of practice shunts in 1981 and Murray Walker would regularly bring us up to speed on how many chassis he wrote off that week.

 

[TR]

He did drive many shit cars.

I think Taki Inoue would be disgusted if he didn't get a mention.

Going by the reasons for retirement given on Wikipedia, I count 6 instances of retirement due to either collision or "spinning off" out of 18 starts. That gives Taki Inoue a "crash" rate of 33%

 

[Incubus]

You would have to set some fairly narrow criteria in order to accomplish this though.

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Plus, you'd also have to pick each individual crashes and see how many of them were caused by mechanic failures, as well as cases of drivers being simply driven into by someone out of control.

 

[Spinodontosaurus]

The safest hands in the business

^This article attempts to answer that using data up to and including Bahrain 2014, and although it includes several types of "driver related" DNFs not just crashes, most of these DNFs were crashes anyway. Of drivers with 50 or more race starts the most crash prone was Ukyo Katayama with one driver-related DNF every 3.2 starts whilst the least crash prone was Juan Manuel Fangio with one driver-related DNF every 50 starts.

Bottas is the least crash prone of current drivers in that article, although the article is missing the most recent 2 years of races. I decided to check Bottas' data myself and as of Austria 2016 he now has 1 driver-related DNF every 64 starts using the same metrics used in the article. I specify the last part because the author notes in the comments he did not include incidents where the driver was still a classified finisher, meaning Bottas' late race crash at Russia 2015 wouldn't be counted. I personally think that is the wrong way to go about it but it is what it is.

 

[Incubus]

Interesting to note that according to that chart there is a disproportionately high percentage of pre-1975 drivers among the top-rated ones.
Maybe it's a reflection of the greater dangers faced by drivers back then, and the subsequent need to keep something in reserve. You wouldn't last long in those days if you went all-out attack on every lap......

 

[Titch]

Andrea de Cesarus was the first person I thought of, closely followed by Maldonado.

 

[KekeTheKing]

So I felt compelled to compile Katayama's incidents together. Here's 1992-94

 

[Bleu]

It's also worth taking a note that in some cases driver may have been involved in crashes but continued so that doesn't show in retirement statistics. There may have been long pit stops or other delays.

Some good examples are David Coulthard in Spa 1998, Michael Schumacher in Monaco 1998 and Mark Webber in Brazil 2005.

 

[MartijnK]

No mention of Maldonado?

 

[Titch]

I think we ran out of things to say about Maldo. But it goes without saying that he's hard to beat.

 

[Olivier]

I wonder if we are looking for the crasher or the crashee ...