TAKUMA SATO

SATJapanese·Born January 28, 1977·2002-2008 · 7 seasons · 3 constructors

One line per season AND per constructor, which is why Sato has 7 lines over 7 seasons. Across the archive that is 3,422 season-constructor lines against 3,129 driver-seasons, so folding on the season alone would silently merge 293 of them and credit a driver with a full year at a car driven for a fortnight. Champ and Champ pts belong to the SEASON, not to the spell, and are printed once on a season’s first line; a dash in those two columns on a continuation line means the figure is above it, not that it is missing. Race pts is the sum of Grand Prix points and does not have to equal Champ pts: 139 of 3,129 driver-seasons differ, 68 of them from 1950 to 1990, when only a driver’s best results counted toward the title, and 71 from 2021 on, when sprint points began landing in the standings while this archive holds the Grand Prix result alone. Best is the best CLASSIFIED finish, read from position_text.

The log is ordered by round, which is the calendar. Pos prints position_text, the source’s own classification, so R is retired, W is withdrew and D is disqualified rather than a finishing place: 0 of 1 row in 2003 are one of those. Grid 0 means the car started from the pit lane or took no recorded grid slot and prints as PIT. No fastest-lap column is drawn: the source has no lap timing before 2004, so 2003 has none to show and an empty column would read as missing data. A Grand Prix name links to that race’s full classification. Sprints are not in this archive at all, so no sprint appears in the log and no sprint point is in Pts.

The portrait is the lead image of this driver’s Wikipedia article, shown only where that image was measured to hold a face at portrait scale: 374 of 881 drivers have one, 78 lead with a photograph of a car and 385 have no free image at all. Picture from Wikipedia by Wolkenjaeger, CC BY-SA 4.0. File description