Talk:European Championship (auto racing)

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[edit] Points question?

There are different points noted for the drivers of the 1936 season on European Championship (auto racing) and on 1936 Grand Prix season. Which one is right? John Anderson 10:31, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

If I compare the numbers given on this page with those on the Golden Era of GP Racing by Leif Snellman, it seems only the numbers for 1937 are the same. Who has compiled the numbers on this page, and are they right or wrong??? John Anderson 10:43, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm the person who compiled the original table. I used (as indicated on the page) Chris Nixon's book, "Racing the Silver Arrows". The championship results aren't given in a single appendix (although individual race results are), but are scattered throughout the book, as follows: 1935 - pp. 65, 1936 - pp. 108, 1937 - pp. 178, 1938 - pp. 232, 1939 - pp. 290.

I am at something of a loss to explain the discrepancies. E.g. in 1938, Nixon clearly indicates 13 points for Caracciola ("Caracciola did better - just - in the other races, to finish first by one point. 1) Caracciola - 13 points; 2) von Brauchitsch - 14 points"). However, but his results (French, German - 2nd, Swiss - 1st, Italian - 3rd) clearly give him 8 points - although since the German and Italian results were shared with a co-driver (Lang and von Brauchitsch, respectively) perhaps that had some effect.

In general, I would avoid contemporary recalculation of what the numbers ought to be, and prefer contemporary press reports, but I don't have access to them. I assumed that we could rely on Nixon's fairly magisterial book, but perhaps not. Noel (talk) 22:25, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Nixon's book has several errors in it. Readro 09:23, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to Readro for cleaning the page up! It makes my questions above obsolete. John Anderson 15:22, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Table contents

I see that when the results table was redone, we lost information on who was second, third, etc each year, and instead got more details on the winner (laps led, etc).

I feel that it's more interesting to see the top N people, so you can see the overall shape of the championship over time (which is, after all, what an overall survey article like this should cover); you can follow people from year to year, e.g. with Manfred von Brauchitsch always being a contender, but never winning.

Detailed data such as laps led could be relegated to pages on each individual year's championship, where it would quite naturally fit into a matrix: each driver would have a row (in championship finishing order), and the columns could be data items (e.g. points, wins, laps led, etc, etc). That way, we'd also get this information for all the drivers competing in any given year, not just the top driver.

So, with both of those in favour of the other style of table, is there any reason not to revert to the other form? Noel (talk) 22:52, 11 August 2007 (UTC)