When we looked at the biggest raw improvements of the 2023 WTCS season, the athletes that rose from a lower starting point stood at an advantage over those that had earned a top-10 race finish in the season prior. Anyone trying to match the 29 place improvements made by Rosa Maria Tapia Vidal and Max Studer would have faced a challenge had they finished 2022 with a season best result of 8th.
In this article, we will therefore visit the 2023 improvements once more albeit this time in terms of percentage improvement. This metric reflects how the closer an athlete is to first place, the harder it can be to further rise.
Men
Having made the third biggest improvement in the men’s Series in terms of raw placing, Tim Hellwig made the biggest percentage improvement in the men’s field in 2023. After logging a best result of 20th in 2022, he powered to the silver medal at WTCS Pontevedra.
Hellwig’s improvement also pipped the biggest male percentage jump from 2021 to 2022. In 2022, Matthew Hauser led the improvement charts after climbing by 88.9%. Having finished 18th in Montreal in 2021, he rose to 2nd place in Hamburg in 2022. Hellwig’s rise was very similar to Hauser’s – in both the places gained and the season best finish – although there was one key difference.
Whereas Hauser’s 2nd place was a personal best at the time, Hellwig had already won a WTCS race in 2021. His 2023 best, then, was a return to the top rather than something new.
Speaking of returns to the top, Dorian Coninx timed his perfectly. He made the second largest male improvement by rising from a best of 6th place in 2022 to winning WTCS Pontevedra in 2023. It was a similar story with his teammate Pierre Le Corre. Le Corre made the fourth biggest rise after finishing 5th in 2022 by winning WTCS Sunderland.
While neither French athlete made up a lot of places in raw terms, given their proximity to 1st place in 2022 their percentage growth was significant.
Meanwhile, Max Studer had the best raw improvement of the men which was enough to take third place in the percentage rankings.
The Canadian duo of Tyler Mislawchuk and Charles Paquet then rounded out the top-6. Interestingly, they each improved by less than 70%. In 2022, an improvement of 76.9% was the lowest seen in the men’s top-6. The implication is thus that there were fewer drastic rises from 2022 to 2023 than there were from 2021 to 2022.
In addition, half of the athletes that made the biggest raw improvements from 2022 to 2023 did not make the top-6 percentage improvements. Switching the measurement therefore yielded notably different results.
Women
On the women’s side, Rosa Maria Tapia Vidal is on top again after having the biggest improvement in raw places. The season before, Lena Meißner made the biggest relative improvement (84.2%) yet her jump was surpassed considerably by Tapia. Unlike the men’s improvements, which had no first time medallists, Tapia led a group of three maiden medallists at the top of the women’s improvements.
Annika Koch (third in raw terms) had the next best improvement after claiming the bronze medal in Sunderland. Kate Waugh only improved by 10 places on her way to the silver medal in Pontevedra yet that was enough to take the third biggest percentage improvement.
Nicole Van Der Kaay took fourth place in the relative improvements which was the same as her rank in the raw improvements. In relative terms, she made the best comeback of 2023. The three athletes ahead of her all scored personal best finishes last year. Van Der Kaay was different insofar that her personal best was achieved in 2021 (2nd in Hamburg).
In another quirk of the numbers, Van Der Kaay had an identical percentage improvement to the fourth ranked man: Pierre Le Corre (80%).
Having been second in the raw improvement list, Noelia Juan takes fifth here while the fifth ranked woman in raw terms, Jolien Vermeylen, takes the final spot in the top-6.
Juan and Vermeylen’s percentages offer an interesting insight when compared with the season before. The women’s relative improvements in 2023 were fairly consistent with those of the 2022 season. Last year, the cut-off for the top-6 was 71.9%. In 2022, that number stood at 71.4%.
Unlike the men’s Series, then, the women’s competition saw a fairly stable level of movement in the improvements.
