Who is the best? Who is the fastest? We all have opinions, and as the saying goes, ‘like arseholes, we’ve all got one.’ Even solid statistical fact doesn’t always tell the truth. A fast driver in a slow car often can’t match an average driver in a fast car, usually with the latter getting the better times. So that leaves the door wide open for argument.

As usual there were 30 BTCC races last season. It’s not unusual for a driver to finish all of them in a year, but it is a tiny proportion of the grid that manage it. In the 30-race era the first driver to finish all 30 contests was Matt Neal in 2005. In a brand-new Honda Integra Neal took his first BTCC crown with points finishes in every race with 20 podiums (including six race wins.)

Last season two drivers were classified as finishers in each contest. Dan Cammish banked 29 points finishes on his way to fifth in the final standings (an 18^th at Brands Indy blotting the copybook) and Árón Taylor-Smith bagged a score in every race of the year.

Flick through the ordered gallery below in reverse order to see who the top 12 fastest drivers were across the 23 races where they all finished, with their average lap time.

Comparing drivers to one another is an inexact science. The variables are infinite. Whether engineering or style based, or ability and results based, it’s hard to find the truth of who the fastest driver actually was across a season. On the other hand, hard data tells a tale in itself, so the notion of working out which race driver was fastest in the BTCC in 2024 has to have a couple of simple parameters.

First off we chose the top 12 championship finishers, and we then worked out that collectively there were 23 races in which all of them finished. From there we took their fastest lap of each race, added together their lap times for those races and divided it by 23 to create an average lap to see who was the fastest from the top 12 – in races where all of them saw the chequered flag. Again it’s an inexact science, and decisions made by teams and drivers that were negative and positive skews the results.

There are unequal totals in terms of tyre choice with some removed races eliminating some faster runs for some drivers while rivals were on harder tyres. Then there is Snetterton. All of the top 12 finished all three races. While Jake Hill was a second or two faster than most of the field in his dominant race one victory, his fastest lap in the final race (on wets while others were on slicks) was seven seconds off the ultimate time, and that alone hits negatively in the average lap time. In the same instance Árón Taylor- Smith was a few seconds a lap quicker than most of the grid in the second Snetterton race, which reflected well on his final ranking of the top 12 fastest drivers of 2024.

The seven races where all the top 12 championship drivers did not finish were:

Donington National Race 2

Oulton Park Race 3

Knockhill Race 3

Silverston Races 1 & 3

Brands Hatch GP Races 1& 3