Author's Note

It is January 1911, and participants in an event unlike anything the world had ever seen are gathering in the tiny Principality of Monaco. The Rallye Monte‑Carlo is about to begin – the first motor rally in history.

It is hard to say whether those taking part realized that they were at that very momentopening a new chapter in history, one that would go on to tell extraordinary stories of human enthusiasm, courage, stubborn determination, and the desire to triumph– over time, over the weather, over the forces of nature, and above all, over themselves. Not all of these stories would have happy endings. Motorsport carries considerable risks, and that only deepens the aura surrounding the few exceptional individuals who would one day wear the victor's laurel.

Those names fascinated me from an early age. I remember how they slowly entered my life through motoring magazines and books. My childish hand – not yet accustomed to writing – carefully copied them down, while my naive mind feverishly tried to make sense of those scattered notes.

And they were truly great names. They belonged to different eras, often vastly different and difficult to compare. The era of Group B was just beginning, and the new cars were faster than the old ones – but what about the drivers? How would today's drivers have fared in the days of Timo Mäkinen, Erik Carlsson, or even Jean Trévoux? It was clear to me that I was unlikely ever to receive a satisfying answer.

Then the age of the internet arrived, and suddenly everything began to move. Dusty archives finally came to light, old results were gradually being pieced together, and all that remained was to find a way to turn this flood of data into answers to the long‑standing questions I had been asking for so many years.

But how could drivers from different eras be measured against one another – and how could such a comparison claim any degree of objectivity? It would require an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical model, one capable of moving through time while remaining highly resistant to the differences between individual epochs. It would have been a wonderful challenge for a brilliant, mathematically minded scientist who, by sheer coincidence, also happened to be a fan of rally statistics – which was, of course, a rather absurd notion. There was nothing left to do but take on the task myself.

For more about how the Rally Star Ranking came into being, please read the chapter entitled The Making of the Rally Star Ranking, which follows this introduction. And if you would like to learn more about Race Day Original, I recommend using the QR codes for a direct link to the website.

The ranking alone, however, was not enough. I also needed a book if I wanted to present it to the world. I envisioned it as a collection of the very best that motor rallying has ever given us: the famous faces of great drivers, as well as those long forgotten; the breathtaking shapes of classic cars; in short, the entire post‑war history of rallying in images – and, above all, in tables.

The sheer volume of material eventually required the book to be divided into two consecutive volumes. All the more, I hope that the result will bring you at least as much pleasure as its creation has brought me.

It is hard to imagine how many people have poured their dreams, money, fortunes, health – and sometimes even their very lives – into this beautiful yet cruel sport. Rallying, however, continues to draw new generations of brave and devoted enthusiasts who once again set out to do battle and accept all these risks, even though most of them will never earn their own place in a book like this.

So let us pay tribute to the 500 exceptional drivers who did.And let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of others without whom the history of rallying could never have become as rich as we know it today.

Carlos Minea, author

The Making of the Rally Star Ranking

Every great dream strives for its own fulfillment.Some dreamed of a self‑propelled machine. Others added the dream of competition between such machines. And many more dreamed of becoming part of that competition themselves.This is how the world of motor sport was born.And I dreamed of grasping that world and giving it clear, comprehensible measures – across its entire historical breadth.

In its own way, this was an ambitious idea as well, and if anyone had attempted it before me, their methods and results remain unknown to me.

Why couldn't the World Championship statistics be used?

At first glance, it seemed like an easy solution: take the number of titles, the number of rally wins, assign each item a coefficient, add everything up, round it off – and finito. But why did that feel so superficial? Let us take a closer look at where the problem lay.

When the first season of the World Rally Championship began in 1973, its calendar included the Rajd Polski. The organizers selected the most demanding roads in all of Poland – but they likely had no idea how drastically this would reduce the size of the field. Only three crews were classified at the finish, whereas the RAC Rally that same year had ninety‑one! Where would one rather stand on the podium?

The fundamental problem with statistics is that they treat every victory and every finishing position as equal.

What makes one performance different from another?

Let us stay in Poland for a moment. The winner in 1973 was Achim Warmbold in a works Fiat, accompanied on the podium by two small‑capacity Wartburg and Polski Fiat cars. It hardly needs to be said that his winning margin was enormous.

Two months later, Warmbold won another world‑level event– the Austrian Alpine Rally. But this time he defeated a full roster of the world's best drivers in powerful works machinery.

So we have two victories, achieved under completely different conditions. What made the biggest difference?

1. 1.the difference in vehicle classes

   2.the quality of the starting field

   3.the number of top‑level drivers classified at the finish

Had a drivers' title existed in 1973, it would likely have gone to Jean‑Luc Thérier. He could have added a fourth win (in Poland, of all places) to his three victories – but he missed the start of a special stage and was excluded. On the road he dominated, winning the vast majority of stages, yet he scored no points at all.

A driver's performance on the road often says more about his ability than his final position. And what reflects such performance best?

1. 4.the number of special stages won

Unfortunately, with the exception of the World Championship, historical archives are not particularly forthcoming in this regard.

I was equally interested in Europe, and I could not overlook the national championships either. Anyone who wanted to succeed in Great Britain, France, or Italy had to overcome strong works teams – with their top domestic drivers and the international stars alongside them.

The key factor, therefore, had to be the quality of the opponents.

What should be the measure of opponent quality?

The most logical approach would be the official driver rankings for each year of the WRC and the earlier European Championship. But there are far too many blind spots. The original European Championship has results for individual rallies, but its scoring system was so chaotic that at times no one could calculate it reliably.

It also became clear that the FIA's preferences changed over time. Some eras rewarded speed, others reliability. Some focused on class positions, only to shift attention later to manufacturers, as if drivers no longer mattered.

If official results alone could not be used, I had to create an alternative version. This required two basic conditions:

• – unify scoring standards across history

  – find an ideal way to allocate points

The fairest system seemed to be 9–6–4–3–2–1, derived from Formula 1. It best captured the value of each victory and offered the right spacing between points.

A unified scoring system allowed me to fill in missing years and provided an interesting comparison with actual historical results.

This gave me the fifteen most successful drivers of each season – the very drivers who earned the personal credit to distribute points into the Rally Star Ranking. All one had to do was beat them, whether in the overall classification or in my recalculated results incorporating all the factors mentioned above.

With that, the foundation was laid – and what followed was a mathematical immersion in processing results sheets.

How does one give history a sense of order?

For the ranking to function across time, it was necessary to accept that points could also have negative values. The average of a driver's points had to decline with each passing year unless new results were achieved. This provided a clear picture of performance across all seasons.

Perhaps the most important aspect was progress itself. If I had not accounted for the fact that modern rally cars are more reliable, rallies shorter, more numerous, and better documented than in the past, drivers from the 1950s would hardly appear in this book at all.

For that reason, the Rally Star Ranking could not be based on the sum of all points, but only on the average of a driver's best point‑scoring results – and the number of such results had to vary across eras. It may sound like a flexible solution; therefore, it was essential not to exceed the right balance.

To eliminate any room for subconscious influence on the ranking, I created a simple milestone in time at which the average would change. I chose the millennium. Mathematically, the most accurate solution was an average of three best results before the millennium, nine best results after it, and six results spanning both eras.

And that was the moment when I, a mere amateur mathematician, discovered the genius of the numbers 3, 6, and 9 –without having the slightest idea of it at the time.

It happened that a driver achieved a point‑scoring result – and then everything was cut short by death. The more recent such a result was, the more likely it was that another similar result would have followed. In such cases, I included a mathematical factor of potential. For many of these drivers, it was the only way to avoid weakening their average.

This, in essence, is the core of the Rally Star Ranking methodology. I created a multi‑layered system in which each layer influences the others, producing a unit of measurement applicable to a wide range of aspects and historical differences.

In conclusion

To date, more than 7,000 classifications have passed through this mathematical model, with more than 7,000 drivers scoring points.

The ranking is presented not only in overall order but also in national and continental rankings. The overall ranking is additionally shown next to each driver's photograph in the form of a white numeral.

National rankings of certain countries were merged where their automobile federations were historically interconnected. If some countries once formed larger national groupings, I reflected their modern separation instead. Only the former Yugoslavia remains unified, as it is no longer possible to reliably determine which successor state older drivers should be assigned to –which would result in incomplete and overly small tables.

Since the creation of the European Championship in 1953, it has almost always been clear which championship represented the highest level. Therefore, I consistently followed the official FIA calendars when awarding points. To preserve this consistency in the book, I refer to these rallies as WRC, regardless of their actual historical designation at the time.

The Rally Star Ranking is now being presented to the world for the first time. Its purpose is not to replace rally statistics, but to measure the history of rallying in a way that has long been missing.

It is not a dogma. It is a mathematical perspective on history – one that will always be only as accurate as the data from which it is derived.