- A platinum rating (the highest rating for an accomplished professional) or a gold rating designates a driver as a professional driver.
- Silver and bronze medals are allocated to amateurs, who are often described as gentleman drivers.
- IMSA’s LMP2, LMP3 and GTD classes limit the number of Platinum or Gold drivers, ie Professionals.
- It’s a great system for those with the money — but not so much for those who want the driver’s seat.
So, do you want to drive a sports car in a recognized series?
First you need a driver rating. You are then audited annually by the FIA, who receives input from Stephane Ratel, founder of the SRO Motorsports Group. In other words, your career is governed by an arcane process.
A platinum rating (the highest rating for an accomplished professional) or a gold rating designates a driver as a professional driver. Silver and bronze medals are allocated to amateurs, who are often described as gentleman drivers. This is where the clarity ends.
Why does a series like IMSA rely on driver ratings? When no manufacturer is footing the bill, sports car racing is often financed by gentleman drivers who buy the cars and pay for the teams and their co-drivers. Given the huge sums of money involved, gentleman drivers hope to compete for victory on an equal footing with other teams.
“A lot of people want to get rid of them, but I don’t think they see what the outcome will be,” said Bill Riley, whose Riley Racing Team is offering two Rolex 24s to paying drivers at Daytona. One is for the silver medal The LMP3 car for driver Gar Robinson and the GTD-class Porsche 911 GT3 R for bronze medalist Alan Metni with Kellymoss. “A lot of racers are paying. They want to race against their peers. That’s what the driver ratings are for. The cloudiness is between all the grades, especially silver and gold and bronze and silver. It’s really blurry.”
IMSA’s LMP2, LMP3 and GTD classes limit the number of Platinum or Gold drivers, ie Professionals. It’s a great system for those with money – but not so much for those looking for the driver’s seat. Depending on whether the paying driver is bronze or silver, teams are limited by rules about how many pro drivers they can run.
However, in the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, the fourth driver can be of any class – as long as the team can afford it, eg a platinum driver. That’s why last year’s Rolex championship co-driver, Oliver Jarvis, ended up in PR1-Mathiasen’s LMP2 team, the class favorites, with Ben Keating the bronze medal driver. But being a platinum driver usually means it’s hard to get a job if you’re not a factory driver being assigned to a team to increase your chances of winning or if you’re not relatively young.
“Everyone wants to get the lowest possible rating, how unusual it is,” said Johnny O’Connell, who recently became a bronze medalist for his 60th birthday. “It prevented a lot of people from getting a job. The best example in my mind is Joey Hand. Ford left and he got dumped because he was platinum (no factory contract).
“I haven’t raced in five years,” continued O’Connell, the overall winner of the 2001 Rolex 24 Hours with Corvette Racing, whose contract with General Motors The car was never found again after it was over – but his platinum rating continued. “I think if I was bronze I would have raced. It’s a crazy competitive environment right now and I have sympathy for any young driver who wants to break out in sports cars.”
Age is one of the many caveats in the often puzzling rating system, and O’Connell’s new bronze status immediately opens up opportunities for this year’s GT America series.
Arguably, the fast silver medalists are gold, as they need to find driver teams to carry inexperienced drivers while meeting entry requirements that limit the use of professional drivers.
Last year, driver Stevan McAleer took Team Korthoff’s Mercedes-AMG GT3 to the GTD Championship in the WeatherTech Championship, finishing third in points as a silver medalist. After his promotion to Gold, his opportunity to continue working at Korthoff ended this year.
“I definitely went back to Mercedes in GTD,” he said, “but on the condition that I’m still silver. If you get better, you get promoted and the chances decrease.” McAleer went on to compete in IMSA’s Backing the series and working as a driving instructor, but losing WeatherTech rides meant his income dropped significantly.
Drivers can pay to appeal their ratings, often focusing on getting lower ratings.
McAleer was told his appeal was dismissed based on his lap times for the 2022 season.
Patrick Long, Platinum, would like to see a more consistent review process. A longtime Porsche factory driver and now retired, Long applied for a review of his platinum status for more opportunities to continue as an independent racer, but was rejected without explanation. “Drivers should know why their appeal was rejected,” he said.
Ben Keating is the most successful and famous bronze medalist in motorsport. He will be racing a Corvette C8.R in this year’s World Endurance Championship, and the GT3 class requires a bronze medal driver. Keating won the LM GT Am drivers’ trophy at the WEC last year driving an Aston Martin Vantage AMR or TF Sport.
“If you’re going to do a pro-am class,” Keating said, “you’ve got to have a way of determining who’s a pro and who’s an amateur? There’s no perfect system. I think the FIA, any series, will have a way of determining who’s a pro and who’s an amateur. The rating system generates a lot of buzz. Everyone’s talking about whether the rules are one way or another, and I don’t believe that. I believe the one they have now is pretty good. I say that because there is no perfect system.”
In fact, the system has generated a lot of animosity and slander in various racing series garages about who gets unwanted upgrades and who gets to downgrade or stay in the usual “gold” silver category, best described as semi-professional, drivers Whether to race for a living.
“There’s a lot of people who think I should move up to silver,” said Keating, who is ineligible to compete in the WEC this season because the Corvette is silver. “Yeah, it’s based on lap times, it’s based on performance. There has to be a reasonable definition of the back-end class. Because I own a bunch of businesses, because I’m 51, because I pay all the budget myself for the races I do, Because I don’t have ambitions to be a pro, I’m the perfect definition of a bronze driver.”
In the past, that definition has enabled Keating to choose which fast silver medal driver he hires to co-drive in longer races — as the rating system changes each year — as well as hire a professional. Much of Keating’s success with various teams and various cars at IMSA has come from a long-standing relationship with Jeroen Bleekemolen, who was fast but was always a gold medal driver, not a platinum driver.
The FIA publishes the driving ratings of nearly 4,000 drivers at fia.com/fia-driver-categorisation. “The initial classification,” the webpage reads, “is based on the age and career record of the riders and may be adjusted in subsequent seasons based on recorded race pace and results from series using the classification system.”
The ambiguous section begins and ends with “maybe tweaks in subsequent seasons.”
Click here to see a list of the FIA driver ratings for over 4,000 drivers.