The Official Motorsport Sanity Rankings: How Mental Do You Have To Be?

Before we start, a disclaimer. We work in motorsport. We love motorsport. We have stood in more paddocks than we can count, met more drivers than we can remember and watched more things go sideways (sometimes literally) than is probably healthy for normal people. This list comes from a place of enormous respect. It just so happens that enormous respect and taking the absolute piss are not mutually exclusive. Right. Let's go.

So here's the thing about motorsport. On the outside, it looks like one sport. Fast things, loud noises, someone wins, someone doesn't, everyone goes home. But spend five minutes actually inside it and you realise pretty quickly that "motorsport" is an umbrella term covering everything from mildly competitive to clinically, certifiably, should-probably-have-a-chat-with-someone deranged.

The gap between a weekend club rally driver and a Dakar motorbike rider is not a gap. It's a chasm. It's the difference between someone who enjoys a brisk walk and someone who runs barefoot across broken glass for fun and genuinely cannot understand why you're looking at them like that.

We've been arguing about this list internally for longer than we're going to admit. What follows is our definitive, completely unscientific, entirely correct ranking of motorsport disciplines by the specific and measurable quality of being absolutely off your head.

We've scored each one across five categories: Bollocks Rating (raw courage required, 1 to 10), Death Wish Index (how far removed from basic survival instinct, 1 to 10), Thrill Factor (for participant and spectator alike, 1 to 10), Explain It To Your Mum (how that conversation goes, 1 is fine, 10 is she cried) and Life Insurance Status (descriptive, ranging from Manageable through to They've stopped answering).

These people are not brave. Brave implies a choice. These people have moved beyond choice into a state of philosophical acceptance that the rest of us will never understand.

The top of the list. Uncontested. If you disagree, you haven't looked at the route.

So the Isle of Man TT is famously dangerous and we'll get to that shortly, but at least you know where the road is. At Dakar you're navigating across actual desert (sand, rock, dried river beds, the occasional camel) on a motorbike, alone, for sixteen days, covering up to 9,000 kilometres, sleeping in a bivouac in the middle of nowhere, getting up and doing it again. The navigation is part of the competition which means getting it wrong doesn't just cost you time, it costs you the small detail of knowing where you actually are.

Riders have died. Riders get lost for hours. Riders break bones on stage eight and ride stage nine anyway because the alternative (stopping) apparently doesn't register as an option.

The bike class has the highest attrition rate of any Dakar category. More than half the field doesn't finish in a typical year. These are not people who gave it a go and found it a bit much. These are elite athletes at the peak of human fitness and still more than half of them don't make it to the end.

Bollocks Rating: 10 | Death Wish Index: 10 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 10 (She asks if you can do something safer instead, like boxing) | Life Insurance Status: They wrote back. Once. To say no.

Here is a person who has looked at the Isle of Man TT (which is already, by any measurable standard, an insane thing to do) and thought "yes, but what if I did it with absolutely no control whatsoever."

The driver steers. The driver brakes. The driver has, in the loosest possible sense, some influence over what happens next. The passenger has none of that. The passenger's job is to shift their bodyweight around the outfit to keep it balanced and planted, hanging off the thing through corners at 150mph between stone walls and lamp posts, lying flat on the tarmac through Mountain Mile, face approximately six inches from the road surface, with zero input into what happens and complete faith in the person next to them.

Some TT sidecar passengers are the partners of the drivers. Actual couples who have decided that this is a thing they do together. If that's not love I genuinely don't know what is. It's also completely deranged.

Bollocks Rating: 11 (we're not adjusting the scale, it just is) | Death Wish Index: 9 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 10 (She met your driver. She cried anyway) | Life Insurance Status: The broker went quiet after the words "sidecar" and "TT" appeared in the same sentence.

Yes they're below the passenger. They have the steering wheel. That counts for something. Not much, given what they're doing with it, but something.

Bollocks Rating: 10 | Death Wish Index: 9 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 9 (She met your passenger. She cried then too) | Life Insurance Status: The broker went quiet. Same broker.

So you might think that being in a truck (a large, heavy, comparatively stable vehicle with a roll cage and a co-driver) would make Dakar significantly less mental than doing it on a bike. And you'd be right, relatively speaking. Relatively. You are still crossing a desert in a truck that weighs four and a half tonnes, through terrain that would end a normal vehicle in about forty seconds, at speeds that would raise eyebrows on a motorway, with a co-driver reading navigation instructions at you while you're simultaneously trying not to roll it down a dune.

The Kamaz trucks have won the class so many times it's basically their event. They run in convoy sometimes, which sounds civilised until you see the convoy and realise they're doing it at 130 kilometres an hour across open desert while drafting each other. In a truck.

Bollocks Rating: 8 | Death Wish Index: 7 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 7 | Life Insurance Status: Expensive. Possible. They asked a lot of questions about the truck.

Thirty-seven miles of closed public road. Stone walls. Lamp posts. Kerbs. Hedges. Houses. A mountain. Average lap speeds north of 130mph for the front runners. The fastest laps recorded around 136mph average, which means sections considerably faster than that. On roads that in any other context you'd drive carefully because there's a farmhouse at the end of the straight.

There is no run-off. There are no gravel traps. There are no tyre walls in most places. There's a hedge and then there's a field and neither of them care about your lap time.

The TT has a death toll that would end any other sporting event on earth. It hasn't ended the TT because the riders keep coming, because the island keeps hosting it and because the people who've ridden it will tell you, without exception, that it's the most extraordinary experience in motorsport. They say it quietly and seriously and you believe them completely and that's somehow the most unsettling part.

To put all this into context, I once met a TT rider the day before his race, who had fallen off the day before in the testing and broke both his wrist and his ankle on opposite sides, I asked him why my company was still fitting stone chip film to his screen assuming he wouldn't be competing. His answer was he had spent several hours since in the hyperbaric chamber and hoped to be fit 'enough' to ride the following day. I saw him in the pit lane the following day about to race, with two dessert spoons duck taped inside his race suit as a makeshift splint having removed his cast and somehow he had managed to put his race boots on. He came second.

Bollocks Rating: 10 | Death Wish Index: 9 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 9 (She's heard of it. That's actually worse) | Life Insurance Status: No.

These people have done the risk assessment. They just reached a different conclusion to everyone else.

Pikes Peak is 12.42 miles, 156 corners, from 9,390 feet above sea level to 14,115 feet, and until 2012 the top half was unsealed gravel with a drop on one side that went down until it stopped being measurable.

It's all tarmac now which should make it feel safer and doesn't particularly, because the cars have got significantly faster in response and the air is so thin at the summit that your engine loses power and your brain works slightly less well than it should. That is a specific combination of problems when you're arriving at a corner at considerable speed.

Sébastien Loeb's 2013 run (8 minutes 13 seconds in a Peugeot 208 T16) was considered untouchable at the time. The kind of lap you watch and assume that's it, that's the ceiling, nothing goes faster than that. Then in 2018 Volkswagen built an electric car specifically to prove that assumption wrong, gave it to Romain Dumas, and he drove it to the summit in 7 minutes 57 seconds. The first sub-8 minute run in the event's history. In a car from the future, on a road that doesn't care what century your drivetrain is from.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 8 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 8 (The altitude thing confuses her but the cliff edge she gets immediately) | Life Insurance Status: They read the waiver and called back to clarify. You clarified. They declined.

Enduro is what happens when someone looks at motocross (which we'll get to) and thinks "that's good, but what if we added rocks, tree roots, river crossings, vertical climbs and about six hours of sustained suffering and also did it somewhere that makes the terrain itself actively hostile to human survival."

Hard enduro makes this point emphatically. The Roof of Africa in Lesotho is the obvious reference point. Lesotho is a landlocked mountain kingdom sitting entirely inside South Africa. The terrain is brutal, the altitude is savage and if falling off a cliff at elevation wasn't sufficient deterrent, the broader geographical situation means the wildlife situation is not entirely reassuring either. These riders look at all of that and decide the answer is to go faster.

Watching elite hard enduro riders on that kind of terrain is one of those sporting experiences that makes you feel genuinely inadequate in a way that takes a while to shake off.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 7 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 8 (She watched the footage. She turned it off at the cliff section. She doesn't know about the lions) | Life Insurance Status: Costly. They have a specific clause. It also has a geographical exclusion you should probably read carefully.

Right, so here's the thing about Top Fuel. The numbers don't sound real until you say them out loud slowly.

Eight thousand horsepower. Approximately. Three hundred and thirty miles per hour. In roughly three and a half seconds. The G-forces on acceleration are comparable to a space shuttle launch. The clutch generates enough heat that parts of it vapourise during the run. The engines are so violent that they are effectively rebuilt between every single pass (not serviced, rebuilt) because the internal components have been used up.

The drivers sit at the front of this. Behind eleven feet of engine. In a car that is producing forces that should, by any reasonable logic, be tearing itself apart, and sometimes does. And they volunteer for this. They enjoy it. They come back.

The bravery required isn't the obvious kind. It's the very specific bravery of someone who has genuinely done the maths, understood what could go wrong, and got in the car anyway. That's a different category of mental entirely.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 8 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 8 (The three seconds she understands. The 8,000 horsepower she does not) | Life Insurance Status: Strangely not as bad as you'd expect. The safety record is actually remarkable given what they're doing.

Consider this. You are not driving. You cannot drive. You have a set of pace notes in your hand that describe, in a shorthand language you and your driver developed together, every corner, crest and hazard on a stage that you drove once in a recce at reduced speed and are now covering at full commitment in the dark, in the rain, on a gravel road in Wales or a snow-covered mountain pass in Sweden.

You are reading those notes ahead of the corner, not at it, because if you read them at the corner it's too late, and if you get one wrong your driver finds out about it in a way that neither of you will enjoy. Your driver is Sébastien Ogier or Elfyn Evans or Ott Tänak, someone who could probably navigate the stage reasonably well without you, but they're trusting you completely because the margins are in the tenths and the alternative to trusting you is thinking about it themselves and that would slow them down.

You do this all day. Every day of the rally. And then you go and do it again at the next one.

Bollocks Rating: 7 | Death Wish Index: 6 | Thrill Factor: 8 | Explain It To Your Mum: 6 ("I read a book while someone else drives fast." She thinks that sounds nice. You don't correct her) | Life Insurance Status: Fine, actually. They're not the driver. This is why they sleep better.

So motocross looks, from the outside, like the entry point to the Tier Two list. It's a circuit. It's marked out. There are jumps, yes, but they're built jumps, not accidental ones. How mental can it be.

Then you watch a MXGP round or the Supercross season opener at Anaheim, and someone like Tim Gajser or Jeffrey Herlings goes past and you understand that the discipline required to do what they do (to read a rhythm section at forty-something miles an hour and hit every single take-off at the exact right angle, to scrub speed in the air by deliberately going sideways, to absorb a 60-foot double landing through your legs while already setting up for the next corner) is something that took years of progressively insane commitment to build.

Also they start doing this at approximately seven years old. Which tells you something about their parents as much as them.

Bollocks Rating: 8 | Death Wish Index: 7 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 5 (She's seen it on television. She thought it looked exciting. You don't tell her about the injury statistics) | Life Insurance Status: Doable if you started young enough that it's just normal to you by now.

Serious people doing serious things. Let's not understate it. But also, you know. Relative.

Everything we said about the co-drivers but with the additional element of actually having to drive the car, which presumably is both a comfort and a burden depending on the moment. The fastest point-to-point drivers on earth, on surfaces that change mid-stage, in conditions that range from dusty to icy to actively on fire in Australia, in cars that cost enough to fund a small film and need to survive a full day of stages in order to score points.

The commitment required to push a WRC car at the limit on a gravel stage is something that doesn't fully translate on television. In person, in the stage, with the noise and the dust and the speed of it, it is one of the most impressive things in all of motorsport.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 7 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 6 | Life Insurance Status: Expensive but available. The manufacturers' safety programmes help.

MotoGP in particular. Carbon fibre machines producing 260-plus horsepower, on tyres the width of your hand, at lean angles that defy what you thought physics permitted, ridden by people who have (and this is the bit that gets me every time) developed the ability to feel the front tyre losing grip, assess in a fraction of a second whether it's going to recover or high-side them into the barriers, and respond accordingly. At 200mph. While racing twenty other people doing the same thing.

Marc Márquez's career injury list reads like a medical textbook and he keeps coming back. That's either inspiration or information, depending on your perspective.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 8 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 7 (She likes the leathers. She does not like the lean angles) | Life Insurance Status: They know who you are.

Water is not soft at 120mph. That is not a metaphor or an exaggeration, it's physics. The surface tension of water at speed behaves closer to concrete than to anything you'd want to land on, and offshore powerboats catch air constantly because the sea doesn't level itself out for you the way a race circuit does.

Class 1 offshore powerboats are twin-engine, twin-cockpit machines running 2,000-plus horsepower that hit 165mph on open water and have to navigate waves, wash and each other. The throttleman and the driver work as a unit (the throttleman managing power while the driver steers) and both of them are bouncing across the sea in a carbon fibre shell that is not, in any meaningful sense, designed to be in the air as often as it ends up being.

We work closely with offshore powerboat racing. We've seen it at close quarters. It's extraordinary and completely mad and the people involved are among the most committed in any sport.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 8 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 7 (She thought powerboats sounded glamorous. You showed her the footage. She revised her position) | Life Insurance Status: Specialist marine policy. Don't ask about the premium.

Here's where it gets interesting. BTCC is not the most dangerous thing on this list. Nobody is going to argue that. But the specific quality of madness required to race in the British Touring Car Championship is underappreciated and it deserves its moment.

Rubbing is foreplay in BTCC. The actual racing starts when the talent runs out and the door handles come off. Touring car contact is not a consequence of things going wrong, it's part of the competitive vocabulary. Drivers come into corners three-wide, knowing at least one of those lines doesn't exist, and go anyway. Bumpers are touched. Doors are traded. The manufacturers release statements about clean racing while their engineers quietly reinforce the door skins.

Nobody complains because everybody does it and also because the crowd absolutely loves it and the crowd's enjoyment is, at some level, the point.

We've been in the BTCC paddock. We know the people involved. These are skilled, serious racing drivers doing a genuinely difficult thing (front-wheel drive saloon cars are not natural racing machines and making them fast is a craft) who also happen to be completely fine with contact that would end careers in other championships. That's a specific personality type and it deserves recognition.

Bollocks Rating: 7 | Death Wish Index: 4 | Thrill Factor: 9 | Explain It To Your Mum: 4 ("It's like a car park but faster and on purpose." She watches on ITV4 now. She has a favourite) | Life Insurance Status: Fine. It's the bodywork that's uninsurable.

The weekend warriors. The people with actual jobs who spend their Saturday nights servicing a car in a muddy car park in order to drive it very fast through a forest on Sunday morning because this is what they do with their weekends and their money and apparently their marriages.

Club rally is the most democratic form of motorsport there is. You don't need a manufacturer behind you. You don't need a management team. You need a car, a co-driver, a service crew who may well be your brother-in-law and a set of overalls with your name on them that you paid for yourself. The stages are the same stages. The trees are the same trees.

The commitment from the people at the back of the field who are never going to win anything but do it anyway is, in its own way, as admirable as anything else on this list.

Bollocks Rating: 7 | Death Wish Index: 6 | Thrill Factor: 8 | Explain It To Your Mum: 5 (She doesn't know why you need a co-driver. You've explained it twelve times) | Life Insurance Status: Manageable. They do ask about the forests.

Yes. Bottom of Tier Three. Hear me out.

Modern Formula One cars are the safest racing vehicles ever built. The halo, the monocoque, the barrier standards, the medical protocols. The sport has spent thirty years systematically engineering death out of it following Imola 1994 and by any measurable standard it has succeeded. The cars are extraordinary. The driving is extraordinary. The competition is fierce and the physical and mental demands are immense.

But compared to everything above this point on the list, an F1 driver operates in a controlled environment with a safety car, DRS, blue flags, a medical helicopter twelve seconds away and a car that will, in most circumstances, protect them from the consequences of getting it wrong.

They are still among the best racing drivers on the planet. It's just that the planet includes people doing it on a motorbike at the Isle of Man TT without a run-off area, and that context matters.

Bollocks Rating: 8 | Death Wish Index: 4 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Explain It To Your Mum: 2 (She watches the Netflix series. She has opinions about team principals) | Life Insurance Status: Pricey but sorted. They have people for that.

People and things that don't fit the categories but absolutely belong on the list.

Not a person. Not a team. Not even, technically, a competitor. Tech Pro barriers are the foam and composite barrier systems you see lining the walls at circuits across the world, absorbing impacts that would otherwise be absorbed by the driver, doing it without complaint, without recognition and without so much as a post-race interview.

They have saved careers. They have possibly saved lives. They ask for nothing in return. When a driver hits one at 140mph and walks away, the driver gets the headlines and the barrier gets replaced in the night by a team of anonymous circuit workers.

Bollocks Rating: Not applicable. Doesn't have any. | Death Wish Index: 0 | Thrill Factor: Inverse (the lower the thrill, the better they've done their job) | Life Insurance Status: Doesn't need it. Is itself a form of insurance.

One job. You have to lift the front of a Formula One car, hold it steady while two men change both front tyres simultaneously, and get out of the way before the car drops and accelerates into the pit lane.

If you're slow, you cost the driver positions. If you're in the wrong place, the car lands on you. If you drop it early, things go wrong in a way that gets replayed on television for years.

The fastest pit stops in F1 are under two seconds. The front jack man is part of that. He does it at every pit stop, every race, every season and nobody knows his name. He probably earns a fraction of what the people he's servicing earn. He does it anyway.

Bollocks Rating: 8 | Death Wish Index: 3 | Thrill Factor: 10 | Life Insurance Status: Sorted by the team. He checked.

A different category of bravery entirely.

Every outfit reveal is a crisis that arrives without warning. Every paddock entrance is an event. Every pre-race press conference is a communication exercise that requires the specific skill of making whatever Sir Lewis is currently thinking sound both considered and commercially viable.

They are not in physical danger. But the psychological load of managing the intersection between genuine sporting greatness, a fashion sensibility that goes its own way on a regular basis and a global media presence that analyses everything (the outfits, the statements, the hat choices, the hat choices again) is something that deserves acknowledgement.

They turn up. They prepare. They watch the hat emerge and they find something to say about it. Every time. For years.

Bollocks Rating: 6 (specifically the hat-related kind) | Death Wish Index: 2 | Thrill Factor: 5 (variable, depends heavily on what he's wearing) | Life Insurance Status: Their own mental health provision is presumably comprehensive.

This is the one that keeps me up at night, genuinely, because I understand it and I find it completely baffling and those two things coexist in a way that says something true about parental love.

Formula Four is a single-seater racing series for young drivers. The cars look proper. They drive proper. They're fast enough to be serious and accessible enough that it functions as a pathway for the next generation of racing drivers. And it costs (depending on programme, team and ambition level) somewhere between £400,000 and £600,000 for a season. Sometimes more.

The dad (and it is almost always the dad, standing in a cold paddock at Croft in October in a team-branded waterproof that cost two hundred quid) has taken out a second mortgage, renegotiated the pension, had a conversation with his wife that he is still in the recovery phase of, and is now watching his sixteen-year-old go into the barriers at the hairpin while a sixteen-year-old from another family whose dad is standing twenty metres away in an identical waterproof holds the apex slightly better.

And he'll be back next weekend.

It's the parenting inverse of boarding school. Boarding school, you spend a fortune to get your kid away from you. F4, you spend a fortune to stand in a field in North Yorkshire in horizontal rain watching them race. The love is identical. The logic is not even slightly the same.

Bollocks Rating: 10 (financial bollocks, a specific and equally valid subcategory) | Death Wish Index: 1 | Thrill Factor: 11 when it goes well, 2 when it doesn't, average 6.5 | Life Insurance Status: He's fine. It's the savings account that didn't make it.

This is a real thing. Course reconnaissance happens before the event. Someone drives, rides or travels the route to assess it.

We don't know exactly who does this job. We don't know what they're paid. We know that they go out there, into the desert, before the race, before the safety infrastructure is in place, before the bivouacs are set up, and they look at the terrain that the world's best off-road racers are going to struggle with and they ride through it on something significantly less prepared for the purpose.

And then they go home and presumably don't tell anyone what they saw because it would put people off.

Bollocks Rating: 9 | Death Wish Index: 9 | Thrill Factor: 7 (there's nobody watching, which takes something off) | Explain It To Your Mum: 10 (She doesn't know this job exists. You're not going to tell her) | Life Insurance Status: Unknown. Possibly also unknown to them.

If you've read this far and you work in motorsport, two things are true. First, you almost certainly disagree with something on this list, which is the point. Second, you're probably mentally composing a comment about where we got it wrong. Good. That's also the point.

We're SuperHub. We do motorsport marketing. We've put together millions in motorsport sponsorship deals across F1, BTCC, GT and offshore racing and we've been in enough paddocks, at enough events, across enough series to know that every single person on this list (from the F4 dad to the Dakar bike rider) is doing something most people will never understand and wouldn't attempt. That deserves respect. It also deserves a league table.

Tell us where we got it wrong

James Foster is the author of Race Funded, a practical guide to winning motorsport sponsorship. SuperHub is a motorsport marketing agency based in Devon. Get in touch.