Ratings and licences
How ELO, Safety Rating, licences and divisions are calculated, and which races count.
Every driver has two ratings per game: ELO measures pace against the drivers you race, Safety Rating (SR) measures clean driving. This page explains how both move and what your licence means.
Where to find them
- Drivers (under People) is the leaderboard: every driver with at least one ranked race, best ELO first. Use the game buttons at the top to switch game. The Races column counts ranked races.
- A driver's profile shows ELO with their division, Safety Rating with their safety licence, Races (and how many were ranked), Wins, Podiums and Corners / incident, plus a chart of each rating over time.
- The Race results table on a profile shows what every race did: Inc (incident points), ELO and SR (the change), Pts (season points).
New drivers start at 1500 ELO and 3.50 SR. Their ELO moves faster at first; see New drivers below.
What counts
| Needs | |
|---|---|
| Season points | The session belongs to a race on the calendar |
| Safety Rating | A Ranked host, and a Ranked series |
| ELO (a "ranked" race) | A Ranked host, a Ranked series, and at least 6 drivers in the result |
The 6 drivers include seated drivers who did not show up. Cars the result could not match to a bdr account do not count. A race's result shows Ranked · SOF or Unranked with the reason, for example Untrusted host or Too few drivers. The Requirements card on a race page shows whether ELO and Safety Rating are on for that race.
Pickup races on open servers
Races on an open server count only if the platform has made that server ranked. Only servers on the platform's own machines can be. A ranked pickup race counts like this:
- ELO moves at half the rate of a league race, because nobody entered it and the field is whoever turned up.
- Safety Rating counts in full.
- Everyone who drove at least one lap is in the result. Leaving early counts as a DNF, so quitting doesn't protect your rating. Drivers who never left the pits are not rated.
- There are no season points.
Races on an unranked open server change nothing.
A session flagged by the ingest checks is not rated at all until a steward releases it. See Stewarding.
ELO
A race is scored as a set of head-to-head duels: you against every other driver in the result. For each duel bdr compares what happened (1 if you finished ahead, 0.5 for a tie, 0 if behind) with what your ratings predicted. A 400-point ELO gap means the higher-rated driver is expected to win about 10 duels out of 11.
Your change is the sum of (result minus prediction) over all duels, multiplied by K / (drivers − 1). K is 32, multiplied by the series' K factor (organisers raise it for longer races, for example 1.7).
Example. Six drivers, all rated 1500, K factor 1.0. Every duel is predicted 50/50. The winner beats all five others: 5 − 2.5 = 2.5, times 32 / 5, gives +16. The finishing order pays +16, +9.6, +3.2, −3.2, −9.6, −16. Beating higher-rated drivers pays more, losing to lower-rated drivers costs more.
- Drivers who did not finish are placed by the result like everyone else.
- Seated drivers who never joined get DNS. They share last place and lose ELO like anyone else who is beaten.
New drivers
A new driver's 1500 says nothing about how fast they are, so two things change until a driver has about 10 ranked races:
- Your own ELO moves faster. Your first ranked race counts three times as much. The extra shrinks with every ranked race and is gone after 10. You find your level in a handful of races.
- Duels against new drivers count less. A duel counts as much as the platform knows your opponent's rating: about a tenth against a driver in their first ranked race, in full once they have 10. Losing to three newcomers costs an established driver very little, and beating them earns very little. A race where most of the field is new moves an established driver's ELO less than a full race would.
The example above is a race of established drivers.
Where you start. If you race on Low Fuel Motorsport, you can link your LFM profile before your first race so your rating starts closer to where you are. It also counts as two ranked races towards how much your rating is believed. See My racing.
Without an LFM profile, your lap times can set the start. At your first rated race, bdr compares your best dry lap on that track and car class over the last 90 days with the drivers whose ratings are established. Qualifying laps are compared with qualifying laps, race laps with race laps. You start halfway between 1500 and the ELO your pace suggests, and at most 250 points away from 1500. Pace isn't racecraft, so this only sets where you start. It needs at least 8 established drivers with a lap there; otherwise you start at 1500.
Safety Rating
SR runs from 1.00 to 9.99. It is measured in incident points per corner, where corners are laps driven times the track's corner count.
Incident points
| Incident | Points |
|---|---|
| Contact with another car | 4 |
| Spin | 1 |
| Invalid lap (off track) | 1 per lap |
- Contacts and spins within 10 seconds of each other count once, at the highest points in the group. A multi-hit crash costs 4, not 12.
- Contacts are detected automatically. A contact only counts when the detection is confident enough or a steward confirmed it, and never after a steward dismissed it.
- An upheld or accepted report can refund incident points to the driver who reported it. See Reports.
- If a steward confirms that a driver kept running into others in a race, that driver takes the points of all their contacts in that race, and the drivers they hit take none.
Per-race change
The neutral rate is 1 incident point per 50 corners.
- Below the neutral rate you gain. A spotless race gains up to +0.30, and 3 or fewer points add a +0.10 bonus. The gain shrinks the closer you get to the neutral rate. Races under 150 corners gain proportionally less, and gains shrink as your SR rises (full gains up to 3.50, a quarter near the top).
- Your first contact is forgiven on the loss side: 4 points are ignored before a loss is worked out.
- Beyond that you lose, growing with the rate, up to −0.50 per race.
- Crossing 5.00 upwards adds an extra +0.25. Dropping below 5.00 costs an extra 0.25.
- A DNS does not change SR. Steward SR penalties are subtracted after the race's change.
Example. 20 laps on a 12-corner track is 240 corners. At 3.00 SR:
| Incident points | Change |
|---|---|
| 1 (one invalid lap) | +0.34 |
| 4 (one contact) | +0.05 |
| 5 (one contact, one invalid lap) | 0.00 |
| 13 | −0.11 |
| 30 | −0.50 |
Licences
Your licence needs both an ELO and a number of ranked races. It is recalculated after every race, so it can go down as well as up.
| Licence | Min ELO | Ranked races |
|---|---|---|
| Rookie | – | 0 |
| Iron | – | 10 |
| Iron+ | 1000 | 10 |
| Bronze | 1300 | 10 |
| Bronze+ | 1500 | 10 |
| Silver | 1700 | 25 |
| Silver+ | 2000 | 25 |
| Gold | 2500 | 50 |
| Gold+ | 3200 | 50 |
| Platinum | 4000 | 100 |
| Diamond | 5000 | 100 |
| Legend | 6000 | 150 |
| Alien | 8000 | 200 |
| Hero | 10000 | 200 |
Safety licence
Your SR also gives a letter from A1 (best) to F4. Each letter covers 1.5 SR and has four steps, 1 being the best. A new driver at 3.50 is E2.
| Letter | SR |
|---|---|
| A | 8.50 – 9.99 |
| B | 7.00 – 8.49 |
| C | 5.50 – 6.99 |
| D | 4.00 – 5.49 |
| E | 2.50 – 3.99 |
| F | 1.00 – 2.49 |
Divisions
Your division (Div) comes from your current ELO: 1 from 3200, 2 from 2500, 3 from 2000, 4 from 1700, 5 from 1300, 6 below 1300.
Series can require a minimum licence, SR or ELO to sign up. See A race page.
Why did my rating change without a race?
Every night, and whenever a report ends in a penalty, bdr replays all rated races in order. A penalty on an old race changes that race's result, and everything after it is recalculated. This is how a time penalty, an SR penalty or an incident refund reaches your ratings.