We are well into the 2022 CFR Organized Play season and I've updated the rankings. Finally. Thank you for your patience.
Note that these rankings do not account for the 2nd races from my series. Updates from those races will occur when all results are in.
A note on the aforementioned ranking tweak. I noticed as I was entering race results that we had a larger then usual number of low player-count races -- 4, 5, 6. These results seemed to be skewing the rankings so I made a tweak to how I adjust race scores based on the field. I used to simply use the average ELO of the top 10 drivers in the race. This was designed specifically to not penalize people for smaller races.
Now, I'm taking the top 8 driver ELOs and dividing by 8. So if there are fewer than 8 drivers in the race, it will not be worth as many points. I am happy with this fix but there is another big consequence. This spread out the value of wins a lot more than in previous seasons. Most wins were pretty close in value, maybe with a difference of 2-5 points. Now there is enough spread that there is some overlap in the total points for "bad" wins and "good" 2nd places.
I'm doing the same thing with tournament points now as well. For tournaments I used to be looking at the average of the top 20 drivers. Now I'm taking the top 8 divided by 8. I haven't yet seen any 4 driver tournaments but this does mean that the top heavy tournaments will be worth more. Which I think makes sense since only the top 3 drivers can get tournament points. So the 18th best driver in that series is not too important.
Back to this year's rankings. One result of the bigger point spread for wins is that there is still plenty of opportunity for the top drivers to improve their scores as the season closes out. A high quality win could be worth 10 points or more to any of the top drivers and the top 4 drivers are all currently within 8 points.
So I'm going to be keeping a close eye on the top series in my PBeM. Stephen P, Chris L, Don T, Michael P, and James B are all in that series and a race win there is a big win. Stephen and James are also neck and neck for the series win. That should set everything up nicely for the last tournament of the season at WBC 2022.
