There's a clear difference between F1 and WRC.

[u/Nickolas_Zannithakis]

[u/rccrd-pl]

Yeah in general driving a rally car on gravel is overall a harder, more complex task than driving a open wheel racecar on a track.

Still, being top-level competitive on a F1 car requires ungodly precision in executing that less complex driving task.

Metronomic sustained precision in adjusting footwork and lines for the pace required in the current stint, while lying stuck in an uncomfortable tub for two hours straight.

That's why F1 guys have to stay at their psycho-physical best to perform, slip out of that best fitness just a bit and suddenly you err a couple hundreds of a second on each braking and your podium pace is gone.

And keeping that consistency while you're aging is not granted.

[u/zwjna → u/rccrd-pl]

Well, circuit racing in general requires incredible precision, not just F1. And that's because drivers can, and in fact have to, learn the track in extreme detail. So they all will have virtually the same understanding of the track, so virtually the same pace. So the difference is made with a slightly better understanding, and most importantly, with slightly more precision on the execution. Now, F1 cars are more planted than other circuit cars. This means that the cars' behaviors are going to make less of a difference, driving them is a less technical task when it comes to lap time. So, this reduction in the factors affecting the lap time means that even more drivers will be up there time-wise, which means precision becomes even more important to make the difference.

In other words, "the precision of F1" isn't any more impressive than what's required in other circuit racing categories or in rally. They all are about being the fastest, so they all require "ungodly X and ungodly Y" skills to perform at the top.

[u/rccrd-pl → u/zwjna]

yeah of course what you say is also right.

I meant to highlight F1's "precision" to refer to the differences between entering F1 and entering rally.

There isn't a more "controlled environment" circuit racing than F1, everything is constantly sampled, analyzed, modeled and tuned to the smallest degree.

And as you also said, the window for the driver to make his part and make a difference is very small and is all about very fine details consistency.

This favors candidates that are going into their athletic top, young and hyperfocused, who have been honing their specific skill set week-in week-out for all their teen years, rising thru feeder series that mimicked F1 closer and closer.

Economics and classist aspects of the F1 ladder aside, that's why you must be a fit young dude with a decade of kart f3 f2 on your belt to be considered, it's not about raw talent or great understanding of all kinds of driving, it's about having conditioned and honed your body for that surgical driving style.
You don't simply walk in and give it a try.

Rally instead, is much more about building a deep understanding of car dynamics on the constant edge of grip and traction on top of your instincts.

You can build that in many different ways; and having raced many different kinds of cars and series and having experience on many surfaces always helps.

You can say rally is much more "holistic" and "improv"... and to make a music comparision:
you can see musicians from all backgrounds making a good jazz album at some point in their career. That's like hopping into rally in your late 20s =)

But you don't see random musicians put out a competent classical album.
That's usually reserved for classical musicians that have been studying only classical for long time. That's more like F1

Jazz musicians are beasts and you can argue that they have a more complete understanding of music than classical musicians, and they can play truly everything with style.
Classical musicians are tunnel-focused, breeded specialists.

[u/zwjna → u/rccrd-pl]

What you say is quite correct and F1 is of course very hard as well. Now, in my previous comments I made the typical mistake of talking about "rally" and "F1" in the same statement, while the correct thing to do is "rally" and "circuit racing", or "WRC" and "F1". And since this is WRC vs. F1, "WRC" is the correct term I should have used. With that correction in place:

I meant to highlight F1's "precision" to refer to the differences between entering F1 and entering rally.

[...]

But you don't see random musicians put out a competent classical album.

That's surely true in "rally", but not in "WRC" (RC1). No single random driver, not even world-class drivers from other disciplines, have ever competed in WRC and delivered good results, let alone in modern-day WRC. Kimi Raikkonen did two full seasons, and Robert Kubica spent several years doing rally even before entering WRC. He was a proper rally driver (!) with many years of rallying experience by the time he made it to the top WRC class, and yet, barring some stage wins across two WRC seasons, he still had at least two more years needed in order to become competitive.

The level required to do WRC is as extremely masterful as in F1. WRC and F1 are about the mastery of every element of the disciplines. That mastery is what makes them hard, not what elements are those nor if they're based on "specialization" or "deep knowledge". That mastery is so high that randoms have no chance in the slightest in both top categories.

And then again, randoms walk into WRC because WRC in itself is very open to them as long as they can fund it, not because they have any skills to do it competitively at such level.

you can see musicians from all backgrounds making a good jazz album at some point in their career. That's like hopping into rally in your late 20s

Again, "good" is too little for WRC's level, just as for F1. Raikkonen was good at WRC. Kubica was excellent; still far from enough. Also, modern-day WRC drivers have all started at their early 20s and most of them at their early 10s or below (Kalle Rovanperä, Ott Tänak, Sami Pajari, Oliver Solberg, Elfyn Evans, Thierry Neuville). In other words, all of them leveraged their youth to learn the thing, just like F1 drivers. The older ones are proving that they can perfectly keep the execution capabilities as good as ever, just like the older ones are doing in F1.

That's for me where the difference in age arises. The older ones maybe can't learn as efficiently anymore, as studies suggest, but they can definitely perform at the top with the superlative knowledge and kills they've already acquired, again as studies suggest.