Even though I don’t watch it, I’ve always been a Formula E defender. Almost no open wheel series in history has ever had better competition (maybe late ‘70s/early ‘80s F1 comes close) and so many of the races are barnburners with nonstop lead changes, but the series also lacks that je ne sais quoi that causes people to take it seriously. I know the racing is better than IndyCar nearly all the time lately, and yet I don’t watch. The series has no compelling narratives or marketing, but the manufacturer interest is sky-high because a lot of manufacturers believe electric racing is the future of motorsport and electric cars are the future of cars. Because the manufacturers almost entirely fund the teams, there are essentially no ride-buyers so as a result the average field strength is pretty much always better than IndyCar (which typically has a couple awful drivers every year), even if you could justly call it a series of F1 castoffs. But it’s also easy to argue that part of the reason the field is so even (only one repeat champion in 11 seasons, and that’s even with the series’s all-time win leader Mitch Evans never winning a title, and 12-time winners Bird and Nick Cassidy not doing so either) is because all the drivers are very good and no one is great. I can see that argument. I happen to disagree with it since Formula E drivers typically compare favorably with IndyCar drivers in my model, but I’ll also admit there certainly isn’t a Max Verstappen or Álex Palou in there (even though Cassidy beat Palou for the Super Formula title when both of them were competing there). I decided to discuss my thoughts on the series in the Bird entry specifically because as the most career-compilery of Formula E’s big stars, he is probably the least interesting to talk about, so it’s a good opportunity to talk about the series as a whole, while whenever I get to one of the series’s true greats like Jean-Éric Vergne or something (Vergne’s two titles + 11 wins > Bird’s zero titles + 12 wins, especially since he’s still the only two-time champion), I will want to put more emphasis on his actual races and less on that stuff.

Maybe this is giving short shrift to Bird because I know he was one of the series’s most exciting drivers, with a lot of gallant passes for the win. But I haven’t gone through all the lead changes for a lot of those seasons yet, so it is what it is…

SAM BIRD………………………………UK

Born: January 9, 1987

Best year: 2015
Best drive: 2024 São Paulo ePrix

One of Formula E’s most consistent superstars, Bird tended not to receive a great deal of attention because he never won the championship, and the series itself won few casual fans because electric cars had minimal appeal to gearheads, it had few historic venues, its street races were unpopular with television viewers, and its embrace of NASCAR-esque gimmicks made it uncouth to open wheel purists. This means Formula E stars tend to be underrated relative to comparable but more famous Formula 1 or IndyCar drivers. Bird was never really the best Formula E driver, but he remained a constant presence as the only driver to win in its first seven seasons.

Bird never won an open wheel championship, but showed potential with a season-high five wins en route to finishing second in F1’s then-top feeder series GP2 in 2013. Nonetheless, F1 teams weren’t interested, but Formula E and sports car teams were. In 2014, Bird won class poles in his first two World Endurance Championship starts, then began competing in Formula E from the drop. Record mogul Richard Branson launched Virgin Racing and hired Bird, who won the series’s second race in Putrajaya, Malaysia, then inherited the 2014-15 season finale in London after Stéphane Sarrazin was penalized for using too much energy, becoming the first driver to win his home race.

Bird peaked in 2015 when he competed in Formula E while simultaneously winning the WEC LMP2 title with four class wins and eight podiums in nine starts in a G-Drive Racing Nissan, utterly dominating their team car, led by eventual superstar Pipo Derani. In 2016 and 2017, Bird won four Formula E races and four WEC class wins for AF Corse Ferrari, but he never won at Le Mans. In Formula E, he peaked with three wins in 2017 and a third-place points finish in 2018, but he subsequently fell off and switched to Jaguar for the 2020-2021 season. Although he unexpectedly won twice while his teammate, Mitch Evans (the then-highest-rated Formula E driver in my model), went winless, Evans then won eight races the next two seasons while Bird went winless. Bird next switched to McLaren for the 2023-2024 season and gave them their only win in São Paulo, getting the last laugh by passing Evans on the last lap. However, that would be his final win. After rookie Taylor Barnard dominated Bird the next season and McLaren withdrew, it seems unlikely Bird will race again unless he returns to sports cars.

Bird is tied for fifth with 12 Formula E wins and tied for second amongst non-champions with Nick Cassidy, although Evans, the all-time win leader with 16, still hasn’t won a title either, and both of them were much more dominant. Bird might’ve mostly been a career compiler, but from 2015-2017, he made himself into something more via his successful crossovers. Although he’ll probably never have the profile that his talent level deserves, he has had enough great seasons to merit a place on this list.

Open wheel model: #179 of 931 (.126)

Teammate head-to-heads: 109-98 (1-0 vs. Valtteri Bottas, 4-1 vs. Jaime Alguersuari, 2-10 vs. Taylor Barnard, 8-7 vs. Jules Bianchi, 14-3 vs. Tom Dillmann, 3-12 vs. Maro Engel, 7-8 vs. Marcus Ericsson, 9-15 vs. Mitch Evans, 7-8 vs. Robin Frijns, 1-0 vs. Brendon Hartley, 2-4 vs. Jake Hughes, 1-0 vs. Fabio Leimer, 2-4 vs. Jose Maria Lopez, 8-1 vs. Alex Lynn, 13-1 vs. Mario Moraes, 10-5 vs. Kazuya Oshima, 2-1 vs. Bruno Senna, 7-8 vs. Alexander Sims, 4-7 vs. Koudai Tsukakoshi, 4-3 vs. Jean-Eric Vergne)

Year-by-year: 2012: C-, 2013: C, 2014: C-, 2015: E, 2016: E-, 2017: E-, 2018: E-, 2019: C+, 2021: E-, 2024: C-

I talked to him before when I was briefly doing a “This Day in Typing History” series that I ended up giving up on because I didn’t think the number of views I was getting was worth the effort I was putting into it. Also, I had already published my book, so I had stopped enjoying a lot of that stuff to begin with, as I wanted to pivot towards this book. I think if I remember right, I wanted to include his birthday on my calendar of events, and then I just gave up on it. He didn’t really emerge in a big way until after I finished my book, although Josh Hu (who is actually the best typist today, not Rocket) was just beginning to break out in the last year or so before I published, and I did mention him a couple of times. We talked only once really, but I did step out of retirement to compete on the site Keymash in the summer of 2023 when I was very broke after my previous job got automated the previous year. I was hoping to win a nominal cash prize, and then Rocket swept me in round 2 before I got eliminated in the losers’ bracket because I got a tougher draw after that. This was basically the last time I competed, although I got hoodwinked into making a few videos on the rising site TypeGG a couple months ago, but I didn’t really enjoy them. I was trying to pivot to racing content on my YouTube channel, but that didn’t do well either, and I effectively killed my channel both through the long strings of inactivity, pivoting from typing content that I didn’t want to make but all my fans expected to what I actually wanted to make (uploading home videos and racing content). I still have 6,000 subscribers from years ago, but I have now faded into irrelevance. I prefer this platform anyway because I’m better at writing than I am at anything visual or artistic.

After venting too much and going into way too much personal detail last week, I knew I should be venting to my peer group and/or my counselor instead of a bunch of Substack subscribers who don’t need to hear it. So, I went down to Unique Peerspectives on Tuesday to go to their men’s group again. Canceled. They had a Cinco de Mayo party instead, when what I needed was to talk deeply, not to party. Oh well. At least I got to vent at my counseling session today instead of on here.

I ended up bumping Seton’s 1997 up from just a plain E to #4 once I read that he had a ten-win season despite losing his sponsorship due to the anti-tobacco legislation. I still don’t think I can take him over Michael Schumacher, Laurent Aïello (who had the highest touring car rating globally at .569 in his 11-win French Supertouring Championship season), or Jacques Villeneuve, but I could be talked into elevating him to 2nd or 3rd place. I think I’m going to hold off because Craig Lowndes had 16-win and 14-win seasons the year before and after, suggesting the competition was not great that year, especially because Lowndes made a failed attempt to climb the F1 ladder in 1997 by competing in the Formula 3000 series, where Juan Pablo Montoya steamrolled him so effectively that he was back to the ATCC in no time flat. Had Lowndes been there that season, he presumably would have won three straight titles. However, I did place Seton over Alain Menu (who I previously had #4) and Colin McRae (who I previously had #5). Menu did become the first driver to win 12 races in a season in the British Touring Car Championship, a record Ashley Sutton would later tie in 2023, but Menu was also driving for Williams’s BTCC team that was just as dominant as their F1 team at the time and Menu’s rookie teammate Jason Plato finished third in points immediately, so I guess you have to say Seton did more with less. And McRae didn’t win the WRC title, even though I think he outperformed Tommi Mäkinen that year, so I feel comfortable dropping him.

GLENN SETON………………AUSTRALIA

Born: May 5, 1965

Best year: 1997
Best drive: 1990 Sandown 500 at Sandown Raceway

The last owner-driver champion in Australian touring cars, Seton would be one of the most dominant Australian Touring Car Championship drivers of the ‘90s, with 36 of his 40 wins coming during that decade. The son of 1965 Bathurst 500 winner Barry Seton, Glenn first co-drove at the Bathurst 1000 with Barry in 1983. The next year, he joined Howard Marsden’s factory Nissan operation, where Barry joined as an engine builder. Seton primarily focused on endurance racing in those years and typically didn’t run the entire ATCC schedule. After another former Bathurst 500 winner, Fred Gibson, bought the team, Seton finished second in ATCC points in his first full-time attempt in 1987, beating his teammate George Fury. Fury and Seton also combined for three Australian Endurance Championship wins in 1986, including Seton’s first Sandown 500, but I give Fury more credit since he was significantly faster that year.

In 1989, Seton formed his own team, and Barry again followed. He switched to Ford for the remainder of his full-time career and retained his sponsorship from cigarette manufacturer Peter Jackson, but went winless in his first three ATCC owner-driver seasons. In the AEC, he was more successful, winning another Sandown 500 with Fury. After sweeping the Symmons Plains round in 1992 for his first ATCC wins since 1987, he struck pay dirt when Barry developed a new Ford Falcon that dominated the sport for the next half-decade.

Seton would be teammates with Formula One World Champion Alan Jones from 1993 to 1995, but he only won four races to Jones’s 20, although Jones was admittedly past his prime. Seton won his first title in 1993, but the team struggled for funding after Australia banned tobacco sponsorships and was forced to drop to one car in 1996. Nonetheless, Seton had his most dominant year in 1997, winning ten races and the championship. Even though Ford eventually pitched in with more factory backing, the team never really recovered, and Seton only won two more races through 2000. He was particularly snakebitten at the Bathurst 1000, which he never won despite leading with nine laps left in 1995 before blowing an engine. In 2002, he was forced to sell his team to Prodrive, and he switched to Dick Johnson’s team in 2005, but he was fired after one year and never competed full-time again.

While drivers winning championships as owner-drivers is by no means unheard of in the ATCC, Seton was the last to do it, and his not only winning the championship but also dominating for an unsponsored family operation is something we’ll likely never see again. My touring car model doesn’t truly capture his greatness because he had no teammate in 1996 and 1997, his poor late-career seasons in the 2000s dragged him down, and Jones’s negative touring car rating ignores his World Championship past. Nonetheless, as one of the last great grassroots successes before the series became monopolized by factory teams in the Supercars era, Seton’s career is something to celebrate.

Touring car model: #485 of 1676 (.064)

Teammate head-to-heads: 161-108 (2-0 vs. Neal Bates, 0-2 vs. David Besnard, 2-0 vs. Geoff Brabham, 0-1 vs. Dean Canto, 39-14 vs. Neil Crompton, 2-0 vs. Will Davison, 1-0 vs. Taz Douglas, 3-0 vs. Rodney Forbes, 6-7 vs. George Fury, 2-0 vs. Allan Grice, 1-0 vs. Darren Hossack, 2-0 vs. Russell Ingall, 9-22 vs. Steven Johnson, 39-13 vs. Alan Jones, 0-1 vs. Owen Kelly, 0-1 vs. Rick Kelly, 0-2 vs. Todd Kelly, 10-22 vs. Craig Lowndes, 2-0 vs. Adam Macrow, 1-0 vs. Alain Menu, 15-1 vs. Wayne Park, 4-0 vs. David Parsons, 0-1 vs. Nathan Pretty, 1-0 vs. Drew Price, 1-0 vs. Tony Ricciardello, 0-1 vs. Jim Richards, 11-16 vs. Steven Richards, 2-0 vs. Gary Scott, 3-1 vs. Terry Shiel, 1-1 vs. Mark Skaife, 0-1 vs. Garth Tander, 0-1 vs. Dale Wood, 2-0 vs. Luke Youlden)

Year-by-year: 1986: C-, 1987: E, 1990: C, 1991: C, 1992: C+, 1993: E, 1994: E, 1995: E, 1996: C+, 1997: 4, 1998: C, 1999: C, 2000: C+

However, I found that I had already calculated speed percentiles for the 2013 Grand-Am season and the 2014 and 2015 IMSA seasons, and the changeover to Al Kamel wasn’t until 2016, so I should be able to obtain speed percentiles for all the years after the IMSA reunion, and I already have 2022-2025 so 2017-2021 are the only years I haven’t finished calculating. I thought I’d like to do that before I finish the Taylors. I was already looking at adapting my natural races led/on-track passing data to IMSA as early as 2015 so I do have all the lead changes for all classes for 2015 and 2016 also, hence I should be able to have complete statistical tables for all the categories I track for IMSA after 2014 at some point. Unfortunately, I didn’t go back and collect the lead changes for 2013 and 2014 so now I probably won’t be able to for the GT classes. I do still have all the overall lap leaders for those races previously obtained on race-database.com at the time and at this point, I’m not sure anyone else does because most of the other sites that do list lap times only list what car led each lap and I think I might be the only one who still has driver data listed. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered updating race-database for this reason, but I just stopped thinking it was worth the effort once I knew it would never be profitable. However, it’s obviously going to take me several weeks if not months to complete all those other seasons, so yeah, I should probably skip the Taylors until I can do that. What I can tell you is that my memory at the time was that Jordan was way faster than Ricky, and I have confirmed that. His speed percentiles are vastly faster from 2013-2016 (yes, I know they drove for different teams in 2013) almost to a Palou v. Dixon extent, so maybe Ricky is less of a lock than I thought. However, I believe that Ricky overtook Jordan and then was faster at some point while he was at Penske, but I haven’t done most of those seasons yet and obviously knowing which driver was the bigger contributor in 2017 when they were both dominating all over the place is going to be important for both of their careers so yeah, I should wait.

I’m still finding all sorts of new information that I had missed periodically too. While I was researching Hurley Haywood, I discovered that he had won a title in the IMSA Supercar series in 1991. I had somehow never heard of this and I’m not sure why because I already have a lot of the obscure IMSA and SCCA series fully archived on my master driver list, even the RaceTruck Challenge. This series didn’t seem to have great competition overall, but there were a few great drivers competing in it, mainly Hans-Joachim Stuck and Haywood and to a far lesser extent Randy Pobst and Doc Bundy, who are both hovering right around the bubble right now. If you forced me to go with my gut instinct right now, I would say Pobst will be just barely on the right side of the bubble and Bundy just barely on the wrong side, but don’t quote me on that obviously. But yes, this means what I just wrote about Haywood literally yesterday was wrong as he has more wins and championships than I thought because of this series, and I’m going to have to rate a couple more of Haywood’s and Stuck’s seasons than I thought I would because I didn’t realize they were competing there in the early ‘90s so I think I didn’t rate some of their seasons that I should have.

Because of the multi-driver teams in endurance sports car racing, being unable to determine which driver was doing most of the work is going to be a major problem, but I would really say only for the 2000s American drivers. From the early 2010s on, like I said, I should be able to have complete statistical tables for IMSA and I think the World Endurance Championship and European Le Mans Series and Asian Le Mans Series (if I want to bother with those last two). For the decades prior to the 2000s, there were numerous solo IMSA wins and many of the top American sports car drivers also simultaneously earned solo wins in series like Can-Am, Trans-Am, or other single driver series in addition to their solo IMSA wins. For the European drivers, most of them were big stars in either open wheel or touring car series simultaneously and are therefore I can get a measure of their talent captured in those models. But for the American drivers who strictly competed in sports car racing, it’s much harder because touring car racing was never really a thing here. NASCAR’s popularity proved such an element in the room that it probably prevented a major touring car series from ever emerging, even if NASCAR is not a touring car series itself. So I’m gonna have real trouble determining whether say, Memo Rojas deserves a spot on this list or not or what to do with drivers like Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney because their heydays are too far in the past to be able to capture lap times or on-track lead changes, but they’re also too recent to have won in solo drives so I can’t really distinguish them properly. (Okay, maybe I can if I scour video footage… I do have Grand-Am lap leaders all the way back to 2004 and ALMS lap leaders back to the beginning, but that obviously won’t help me with the GT drivers.)

I also invariably end up finding that I’ve been overrating sports car drivers in general on this list, but maybe that is just me being biased towards drivers who competed in single-driver series. When I’m going through and rating sports car drivers season-by-season, I end up rating their seasons lower than I expected to after I did more research, especially the ones who competed in GT classes and not for overall wins. Some of those classes were very weak so I ended up recently dropping Andy Lally and Robin Liddell off my lock list onto my bubble list (although they’re still on the right side of the bubble) because Grand-Am GT racing was just not very strong, and during the IMSA split, it’s obvious to me that ALMS GT racing was where it was at. I also find that I’ve overrated a lot of the ‘60s era World Sportscar Championship drivers, particularly those who competed for class wins and not for overall wins. There were a lot more classes back then and a lot of those classes ended up having only two or three finishers at times, so I can’t be as impressed with class wins back then as I thought I would be. I think the overall wins were even more important then, not less, particularly because some of the best drivers in the world including F1 superstars were competing for the overall wins, while the sports car-only drivers then were in my opinion much more second-rate than would be the case later. I ended up dropping Raffaele Pinto from my lock list entirely off and he’s now in my near miss category for this reason. I was impressed by Pinto’s combination of sports car wins and his European Rally Championship title, but even though the WRC didn’t exist yet, there was an international rally championship that was sort of a proto-WRC at that time, and I believe that series had overtaken the ERC in talent by then, so I ended up moving a driver from my lock list entirely off the list. Like I said, I get it wrong on sports car drivers a lot. I think I will be doing the same for André Rossignol when I evaluate him today. Rossignol was the first driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice and in back-to-back years, which you’d think should make him a lock, but I don’t think the competition was as strong as either the IndyCar or Grand Prix racing at the time, so I didn’t give Rossignol any top five seasons, which a pre-World War II driver typically needs since I award substantially fewer points to that era, and I think I’m going to have very few if any 1920s sports car drivers on at all. I’ll have to think about that one, but for now, I think he’s off.

Obviously, none of these issues apply to Gregg, so I’m okay writing this one. Gregg was a prolific winner and he had a lot of solo wins in IMSA, Trans-Am, and even IROC, so I feel like I have the narrative arc of his career pretty nailed down and I don’t have to do as much research on him to complete this as I feel I’m going to have to do especially for the 2000s and 2010s American sports car drivers who never competed in single-driver/touring car series, etc… I think I’m starting to figure out what I’m doing with sports car drivers, but there are still a bunch of blind spots. Maybe there will be fewer if/when I complete my post-IMSA merger and WEC statistical tables.

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However, over the next eight days, I will be covering both halves of two of the most famous American sports car racing duos: Hurley Haywood and Peter Gregg and Ricky and Jordan Taylor. Curiously, Haywood and Gregg were both born on May 4 (Gregg eight years earlier) so it makes sense to do them both consecutively. I chose to do Haywood first but I could have done them in either order. Technically, this was the one for May 3 but since Haywood’s birthday is May 4, no big deal that I didn’t have it posted until then. Jordan’s birthday is May 10 so I whooshed Ricky into the previous slot because I had an empty slot on May 9. There was only one great driver born on May 9 and that’s Shane van Gisbergen and I already did him when I probably should have waited. Now normally, I don’t like to do current drivers and the Taylor brothers are very much active and I’m sure neither of them are done winning, but it seems equally clear that their best races are probably behind them so I won’t be missing much by writing those articles now.

This week’s schedule:

May 3: Hurley Haywood (paywalled)
May 4: Peter Gregg (paywalled)
May 5: Glenn Seton (free)
May 6: Sam Bird (free)
May 7: Denny Hulme (paywalled)
May 8: Jo Bonnier (free)
May 9: Ricky Taylor (paywalled)
May 10: Jordan Taylor (paywalled)

I watched both the F1 race at Miami and the NASCAR race at Texas today and I liked both, but I also don’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about either of them except that I’m kind of surprised that Alan Gustafson has finally figured out strategy after being maybe the worst strategist among elite NASCAR crew chiefs of the last 20 years.

If anybody wants another Alex Zanardi piece in the wake of his death, let me know. There’s probably a lot I’d change about the one I released over a year and a half ago…

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Anyway, there are two guitarists who frequently play in the nursing home - probably one or two times a month each. One of them played at happy hour in the first floor auditorium yesterday. However, my mom, who lives on the fourth floor, was forced to wear a Wanderguard when she was admitted, so she isn’t allowed to change floors unless a nurse enters a special code on the elevator. If you try to go on the elevator with a Wanderguard, usually a siren plays while the elevator doors remain open and do not shut until a nurse has opened the code. It can take 15 or 20 minutes to go anywhere unless it’s something in the fourth floor cafeteria. Anyway, I was going to take her down yesterday and some nurse in the cafeteria snottily said to me, “You’re not gonna get it.”, which I took to mean “F off. I’m not helping you let her on the elevator.” If that was her attitude, she didn’t have to say anything. No big deal. We’ve already seen this guitarist like ten times. I probably would’ve forgotten about it if not for what happened next.

So, my mom goes back to her room after her elevator transfer was shot down and her roommate out of nowhere accuses me of stealing money from her. I did nothing of the sort. A couple weeks ago, she claimed somebody stole $1,400 off her bed. I think what might have led to the accusation is that I had to pick up Mom’s social security money and deposit it at the bank. Since she is on Medicaid and Medicaid takes all but $50 out of her bank account, her social security checks are now deposited directly at the nursing home, so I have to withdraw the $50 from the nursing home then take a bus/walk to the bank to deposit it to cover two of her life insurance policies at the bank, which are the only things now being auto-deducted (I long ago gave up on maintaining her credit cards…) I think maybe my mentioning that is what convinced her roommate that I was stealing money? So, I began to argue with her. I told her that I had even given back her purple shoes after my mom literally had taken them from her a couple weeks ago and I would not steal money.

Then a couple of the nurses got on my case again just like they did for me using the bathroom in her room because I was arguing with another patient. Then my mom calls her roommate a whore and the N-word even though she’s white. I guess this is because her roommate carries around her most cherished possession, which is a black doll who she calls her baby. Mom became convinced somehow that her roommate is apparently dating one of the black nurses and is worried he’s going to rape her. After Mom said this shit, her roommate threw a large pile of ripped up paper at her wheelchair.

What bothered me beyond just my mom’s racism is that the nurses seemed to have a bigger problem with my behavior even when both of their behavior was significantly worse. The head nurse at least explained it to me afterward that she grants them more leeway because they have dementia and I don’t. Okay, I knew my mom had dementia. I did not actually know her roommate also had dementia until yesterday. That does put a little bit of a different perspective on it, and I don’t know how I can learn to be more patient and not have outbursts myself, even though any outbursts I’ve had were mild in comparison. They’re telling me I shouldn’t try to argue with either of them and they’ll just forget all these events in a half hour and that’s probably true. But none of this would’ve happened if Mom had been allowed to go to the concert…

Anyway, I dont know what to do, man. I still want to keep visiting Mom three times a week even though it’s probably not in my best interest financially or career-wise or whatever. She has nobody else who gives half of a shit about her, and I’m sure anybody who went to college is going to look at this and say, “Good riddance.” You’ll often hear ardent social justice advocates saying things like “no disability excuses racism because I have that disability and I am not racist” or whatever. I get that a lot of the disability community wants to completely separate any form of bad behavior from the disability so people will not negatively stereotype their disabilities based on the bad behavior of others with those disabilities. So, if any school shooter has autism (and a lot of them do), you need to separate it out so people don’t assume all autistic people are school shooters. Look, I get it. I’ve had people whisper on the school bus that I was “the most likely to bring a gun to school” even though I never did.

But is it always true that disability can’t influence bad behavior? I don’t know that I’m convinced. The nurses seem to let a lot of Mom’s shit slide even though most of them are black. They seem to think the only reason she is doing this is because she’s not in her right mind. In the last couple years before she was forced into the nursing home, she was coming to some sudden late-in-life revelations about her mom’s bad behavior and how she didn’t care about her, and I feel myself having the same late-in-life revelations about her. My mom used to crusade for social justice. She wanted to go on a Freedom Ride in the ‘60s but her mom wouldn’t let her. She aided a Vietnam draft dodger. She wanted to be a nurse to save lives, even though she didn’t end up becoming one. She launched the Epilepsy Association for Central New York and fought for disabled civil rights in the ‘90s, giving a couple speeches for disabled advocacy organizations. She spent many years in the 2000s calling lots of people “rich fat white men” (a term that constantly irritated me tbh) and was vehemently anti-Trump despite her own personal bigotry, to the point where she would say just as offensive stuff about him. I really don’t know where this late onset racism came from but I think it started around Trayvon Martin.

Seeing the nurse’s reactions has given me a weird perspective. Why are they more chill with it (even though most of them are black) than I am? It’s weird. My mom often forgets my name and thinks I’m her brother half the time and that doesn’t bother me at all. I’m willing to accept that but I’m not willing to accept the dementia causing her racism and all. Perhaps this is because maybe I’ve read too much of these woke arguments about how “disability never justifies bad behavior” and taken them to heart too much. Granted, a lot of people who make arguments like that are very okay with dehumanizing people as long as they’re dehumanizing a person in a historically privileged group, which they call “punching up”. Man complains about loneliness? Must be an incel who only wants sex rather than just anyone to talk to in real life at all! Yes, dehumanizing the members of historically privileged groups is probably less bad than dehumanizing the members of historically underprivileged groups, but neither should ever be okay. So, maybe I need to learn to stop listening to those sorts of people so I can hopefully be more patient with Mom. It’s not like any of the kind of people who graduated college want anything to do with me anyway since I’m not sophisticated enough for them so I don’t know why I sometimes yearn to impress those kind of people anyway…

I wonder how much of the boomer hate these days really comes down to what people say it’s about (they ruined the economy! they hoarded all the housing stock!) and how much of it really just comes down to woke kids hating hearing their parents say bigoted stuff. Since dementia can cause people to revert to childhood in a way, for boomers, that sends them back in time to an era when racism was more culturally acceptable than it is today so people end up saying vastly more racist things than they would have in the decades before losing their faculties. This is probably gonna happen to every generation, isn’t it? How many millennial liberals when they get dementia are going to get late-onset homophobia? Or zoomer liberals and late-onset transphobia? It seems like that will happen and then we will suddenly become the evil generations. I wonder how much of this is actually punching down on defenseless people losing their faculties. And of course when an old person with dementia who says awful things suffers, a lot of wokes will take glee in their suffering because they seem to genuinely believe in the just world fallacy and “if you were just a Good Freaking Person(TM), you wouldn’t be suffering.” Thinking every boomer is like Donald Trump is exactly like thinking every millennial is like Mark Zuckerberg, but there do seem to be a lot of people who unironically agree with these things. So I condemn Mom’s racism wholeheartedly, but I condemn this kind of schadenfreude people seem to feel when evil people suffer, which also seems pretty immoral to me, which is why I can’t get down with the “rest in piss” brigade either. No one can predict what their behavior might be like after they lose their faculties, so I guess I want to show mercy to Mom. But it is hard. Boy, is it hard.

Anyway, here’s another one of those “pioneering Renaissance man drivers who did everything” who you’ve probably never heard of.

ALESSANDRO CAGNO……………ITALY

Born: May 2, 1883
Died: December 23, 1971

Best year: 1907
Best drive: 1906 Targa Florio

A Renaissance man who served as an important pioneer in the fields of auto racing, aviation, and powerboat racing, Cagno is probbly best-known as an aviator but he earned three major Grand Prix victories during his brief auto racing career, most notably a win in the inaugural Targa Florio in 1906. At the age of 13, Cagno became an apprentice for Luigi Storero, a bicycle racer and engineer who was being to manufacture motorized tricycles with Daimler engines. Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli frequently visited Storero’s shop and recruited Cagno as the car manufacturer’s third employee, eventually bringing Storero along to form a racing division.

Initially, Cagno served as Agnelli’s personal chauffeur. He began racing primarily in hillclimbs in 1901 but made his international debut two years later at Belgium’s Circuit of Ardennes. He finished third in the 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup, Europe’s then-biggest race, but his biggest successes came after he switched from Fiat to Itala in 1906. The Targa Florio, Italy’s most prestigious sports car race, drew considerable interntional attention as most spectators had never seen a car before. Cagno won the 277-mile race in 9.5 hours, inheriting the lead after Paul Bablot and Victor Rigal’s cars had accidentally been filled with water instead of gasoline. The race marked an important turning point where the balance of power in European motorsports shifted from France to Italy. Fiat’s lead driver Felice Nazzaro was clearly better, but Cagno wasn’t far behind. He also won the Monaco powerboat race in 1906 in a Fiat-powered boat.

After winning the 1907 Coppa della Velocità, Cagno retired after the 1908 season to launch an aviation career. He got his pilot’s license in 1909, founded Italy’s first flying school in Pordenone in 1910, and became the first person to fly over Venice in 1911. He served in the Italo-Turkish War and built the first aircraft bomber before running the General Testing Office for both the Italian and French armies in World War I. After the war ended, he returned to Fiat primarily as an engineer and remained there through the late ‘60s. After Fiat driver Evasio Lampiano was killed, Cagno briefly filled in and resumed his racing career, winning his final Grand Prix in a voiturette race in Montichiari and the first race in the Soviet Union later that year before retiring again.

Although Nazzaro was the best pioneering Italian driver and Cagno was probably more elite as an engineer and aviator than as a driver, he was still both early and dominant enough in his brief heyday to justify placement on this list. He was one of only four drivers with multiple Grand Prix wins in 1906 and 1907 along with Nazzaro, Louis Naudin, and Targa Florio founder Vincenzo Florio, but his wins were much more important than Florio and Naudin’s. I ended up rating his 1907 season higher mainly because there was less significant American racing competition that year. He’s definitely a worthy talent even if his aviation career is probably his bigger legacy.

Year-by-year: 1905: C+, 1906: 3, 1907: 2, 1923: E-

So I missed that entire block when Malcolm was originally on, but I’ve wanted to watch it for a long time, in keeping with how I’m always 20 years behind the times. As someone who identifies as both trailer trash and a nerd with Malcolm’s character being the archetype for that rare fusion, I really thought I’d relate. But it was never really syndicated anywhere back then and when I was watching lots of old TV shows on Netflix when I used their DVD service (which I always preferred to streaming from them), only the first season was ever released on DVD so I didn’t bother. But when I got a Disney Plus subscription to watch the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, I saw this was on there and I went for it. It was good timing both because of Frankie Muniz’s bizarre NASCAR excursion and because of the sequel series that came out a couple weeks ago. I did already watch Arrested Development so I knew what I was in for. I had largely stopped watching traditional television except for racing and news for most of my adulthood after graduating college, so I’m way more knowledgeable about ‘70s-’90s television than anything from this century, especially anything considered “prestige” although there was a period when I went through and liked most of the key 2000s teen dramas. And I liked Arrested Development too despite hating what the show represents. It was well-written and funny enough to overcome my complaint but it is a big complaint. That show is intentionally designed to cater to an audience of intellectuals only and then whines in the text of the show that it doesn’t get better ratings. That reminds me of that apocryphal quote Adlai Stevenson probably didn’t say when some woman came up to him and said, “Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.” To which he probably never replied, “Madam, that’s not enough. I need a majority.” Obviously, Malcolm in the Middle started the movement that Arrested Development was part of. Not just single-camera sitcoms ‘cause there had been plenty of those before, but the particular style with quick cuts, postmodern narrative structures, and where nearly every single character is a loathsome human being. So I predicted that I would like it with reservations and that is indeed correct.

My first point is that the show may be about white working class people, but it isn’t actually for them, is it? This is an important distinction ‘cause there had been plenty of smash hit working class family sitcoms from the ‘70s-’90s, starting with All in the Family and Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons going on to Roseanne and Family Matters and Home Improvement (really more working class in affect than in actuality, but it was still part of this wave) and Grace Under Fire. The difference is in those days, television success was based on overall ratings and the goal of a TV show in this period was to get the maximum possible audience for itself, full stop. When I grew up, newspapers would always display like the top 50 highest-rated programs each week and enraptured as I was with any kind of statistical minutiae, I read that stuff all the time.

By the 2000s, this had changed. This is the era when suddenly marketing demographics mattered more, the overall popularity of a show mostly stopped mattering, and all anyone cared about was how popular a show was amongst 18-to-45-year olds with money because advertisers no longer wanted to cater to anyone else. I first learned about this when my favorite show when I was in college, Joan of Arcadia, got canceled even though it was acclaimed and its overall ratings were fine because it had too old an audience. As the then-CBS head Les Moonves put it in an immortal line I have never forgotten, “Ghosts skew younger than God.” I’ve been hating on him ever since and boy, was I vindicated when I found out later how he took a personal vindictive pleasure into ruining Janet Jackson’s career when Justin Timberlake caused that incident anyway.

So from what I remember The West Wing was the most profitable show even though it was neither the most popular (American Idol) or the most acclaimed (The Sopranos) because it had the widest possible appeal among professional managerial class yuppies who the advertisers wanted to market to. The point I’m trying to get to here is that while I admired both Arrested Development and Malcolm, the big difference between them is that I laughed very often at the former and almost never at the latter, and I think I know why. Arrested Development is punching up and making fun of the foibles of the rich, while Malcolm is punching down and making fun of the foibles of the poor. The difference between Malcolm and all those earlier working class shows is because it was going after the hip yuppie 18-45 audience of educated intellectual professionals because that’s where the money was. So as a result, a show like Roseanne in striving to attain the biggest possible audience for itself successfully pandered to both the genuine working class as well as the people who wanted to make fun of working class people at the same time. Malcolm, by contrast, because like Arrested Development it seems to want only an audience of smart people, actually ends up holding the working class in contempt. Personally, while it’s better to pander to no one, I prefer a show that panders to everyone over a show that panders only to a specific demographic niche if the quality of the writing is the same. So, I still don’t like Malcolm as much as the first six seasons of Roseanne for this reason even if it’s become impossible to defend now considering everything she has done in the last decade.

Any “comedy” you get from Malcolm for the most part comes from making fun of poor people. With the old style of multi-cam working class sitcoms, you were laughing with the characters. With the new style of single-cams, you are laughing at them, and I find that deeply annoying. The implicit message of Malcolm seems to be a very neoliberal one where poor people deserve to suffer due to their bad decisions. If you’re trying to appeal to a group of urbane 18-45 year old hipsters with money, I guess that’s how you have to write it. All those poor people wuldn’t have any problems in their life, don’t you know, if they didn’t do things like intentionally steal a car and drown it in a lake, or blow up a refrigerator, or steal $10,000 from their children to buy an antique dollhouse that immediately catches on fire, or waste money they don’t have to send a son to military school, or rip one of the teeth out of their mouth, or crash a hot-air balloon into the window of a church, or accidentally remain on a 1-900 paid sex line for hours because you forgot to hang up the phone, or set fire to your friend’s house or camper, etc…, etc…, etc… The hidden message is that you’re supposed to point and laugh at poor people and argue that they wouldn’t have any problems if they didn’t do any of these cartoonish things that almost no poor person actually does and that really bothers me.

I also don’t get why people praise it for its realism. I guess it was one of the few sitcoms of its time that even tried to depict the working class after every other sitcom was trying to copy Seinfeld and Friends with all these people living in spacious apartments despite doing little work. But the cartoony elements constantly undercut the realism to the point that it ends up almost something like Family Matters where on one episode, you have a seriouss discussion of racism and then the next one, Steve Urkel invents a dancing robot. There are so many instances where in real life, any of the kids would have been killed doing many of the stunts they end up doing, but it’s in there for the lulz. I’m sort of reminded of a couple Roger Ebert quotes here: one of them from Home Alone 2 where he wrote: “The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn’t funny.” I think most people actually disagree this since I think most people like slapstick, but I think I agree with it.

The other one that comes to mind is from his review of Napoleon Dynamite: “I’m told the movie was greeted at Sundance with lots of laughter, but then Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate.” Now, he’s definitely wrong about that movie and I think it’s great and I don’t think Malcolm is bad either, but I think the quote applies. I almost never found myself laughing or even relating to these gruesome characters, but as a grim, Todd Solondz-esque sociological study, I think it’s very successful and I do like it.

I definitely do not relate to Malcolm as I was expecting I might. All we really ever had in common was an ability to do quick arithmetic in our heads, a certain kind of shrill whininess, and a tendency to be clingy with the few people who ever gave us the time of day. That’s not nothing, but the biggest problem is that like all his brothers, he wants to beat the others up, blow things up, engage in wacky antics, and engage in dangerous activities. I don’t relate to any of that at all thankfully. The secondary problem is his refusal to own his own nerdiness. He ends up ultimately becoming the uncoolest person in the series not because he is a nerd but because he tried to deny it. That I can relate to. Almost all Malcolm’s classmates in the gifted “Krelboyne” classes are much more obviously nerdy in their mannerisms or unable to mask their autism in the modern parlance, but they are who they are and they don’t thirst for coolness and they accept their marginal social position and own it. The Krelboynes and the first teacher are actually the only characters in the entire series I think I like. I know when I was denying my nerdiness in middle school despite my thick glasses, protuberant stomach, social ineptitude, lack of fashion sense, and dominance at math, spelling, and computers, I was way less cool and popular and picked on way more than in tenth grade when I embraced my nerdiness and stopped trying to mask. Of course, at that point, I didn’t even know I was autistic because the criteria were much stricter back then. But it seemed like Malcolm never learned that lesson, so even if Stevie (my favorite character) is way nerdier on the surface, he is also cooler because he’s not trying to be something he’s not.

One thing I do really like is that it’s one of the few shows I think I’ve ever seen that tried to depict both gifted and special ed classes. As a formerly-twice-exceptional fellow, I was enrolled in both kinds of classes, which gives me more of a perspective on this. Dewey’s special ed classes seemed more true to life to me than Malcolm’s gifted classes. I realize I went to the worst of the Syracuse public suburban high schools, but I was the class nerd and neither I nor anyone I met in school was doing the kind of chemistry experiments shown in this show in their free time (another place where the supposed realism fails). Even when I was on the bus going to the state math league meets as both a junior and a senior, even nobody at that level would have thought to do “9,801…9,604… bottles of beer on the wall” by squaring all the numbers from 99 down in descending order as is depicted on that show. I will admit that made me laugh though.

The special ed classes felt more true to life and perceptive to me: how nobody is really disturbed all the time, how most supposedly “disturbed” people can really act normal most of the time but it can be punctuated by outbursts that seem to come randomly out of nowhere. I definitely related to that more than any of the gifted stuff where none of those people were written like any high schooler I ever met. I had a ton of temper tantrums in elementary school through ninth grade and was considered disturbed by a lot of people. It mostly stopped after that, but I know I got in major trouble in second grade when I pushed a desk over even when I hurt no one. There was one psychologist who I think was trying to throw me out of the school and at the very least declare me to be hyperactive (this was in 1993; I guess that’s before ADD and hyperactivity were combined?) I don’t think I ever had ADHD and the child psychologist my parents took me to said no but somehow, the Asperger’s was missed. So, I feel the show handles emotional disturbance better than giftedness, and I have to give a thumbs-up for that.

As for the other characters I have less to say. I have to say Francis’s storylines were probably the most unique. You’re not going to find many works set in an Alaska diner or on a dude ranch. Although I hated Francis at the beginning, I kind of liked him at the end, maybe because he was the only brother who basically gave up on violence at a certain point. I kind of even wish I had an on-location job like that since I am so lonely and isolated and I glamorize community to such an extent that working in some weird on-location service job rather than the various unending string of online gig jobs I’ve had might give me the community I crave so much. Reese is certainly the most loathsome character, but although he’s supposed to be stupid, I find myself never being convinced by that. He’s very smart in his scheming and the way he manipulates people and his ability to remember sordid details to torture people with, and he primarily seems dumb because he’s impulsive (like all the brothers are), naive (which most of them aren’t), and makes no effort in school because he didn’t see the point (and honestly, he was correct). Honestly, for most of the series Hal seemed dumber than Reese to me, and he irritated me more than most. Dewey mostly doesn’t bother me but using his cuteness to manipulate people got very tiresome over time.

As for Lois, I guess the question is whether she abuses her kids and they act out as a sign of rebellion or the kids rebelled first and this was her attempt to obtain a nexus of control. It’s probably a little of both. I never like her but for the most part she doesn’t seem that unreasonable until the very end of the series when she steals Malcolm’s money, buys the aforementioned dollhouse, and then tells Malcolm she was intentionally making his life difficult so he could run for President. Like huh? You need charisma to succeed in politics and Malcolm’s skills are mainly in math and science. Who elects a socially inept scientist for President? All the Democratic Presidents are lawyers and all the Republican Presidents are crappy businessmen these days. I wouldn’t call him a scientist, but it’s not like Mark Zuckerberg’s political career went anywhere because of the creepy vibes he gives off and Malcolm gives off similar vibes. Obviously, that was just something they threw in for the finale to change the meaning of everything that came before, but I can see why someone might say it ruined the series.

Nowadays, I think most people would realize that a guaranteed $100,000 a year job is probably worth eschewing college entirely for. One thing that’s always bothered me about high school shows (especially the working class ones) is that they never seem to acknowledge that student loans exist. On Roseanne, Becky runs off (as an excuse for her actress to leave the series before returning and then re-returning) because she doesn’t have a college fund so they’re not eligible for full financial aid, and the way Malcolm depicts it, somehow they needed to raise all the money for him to go to Harvard themselves with student loans not even being discussed at all. I suspect this is because these shows were written by boomer writers who didn’t understand how college had changed since they were in college. Furthermore, I learned years after the fact that Princeton offered a free ride to anyone accepted there starting around 2001 or so, and Cornell offered a free ride to anyone with a family making less than $75,000 literally the year after I graduated (and I was fucking pissed, man). The time the end of Malcolm is set is probably around the time Harvard itself offered a free ride to anyone, and the Ivy Leagues decided to do this 1) because they had big enough endowments to do it, and 2) because it greatly increases the number of applicants, therefore lowers their acceptance rates, improves their college rankings, etc… So if you can get into an Ivy League, it’s actually worth it now because they’ll all pay your ride if you’re poor. Anything else if you need to take loans, you probably shouldn’t bother, and this was already changing around the time that was written. I will say this: if I knew Princeton alone offered a free ride when I was graduating, I might have targeted them instead, but I suspect my SAT scores exceeded the Cornell level but weren’t good enough for Princeton.

I like listening to a lot of episodes of the Michael and Us podcast where they analyze movies from a socialist perspective (even though I don’t quite share their politics and share their cultural tastes rather less as I actually like the kind of middlebrow schlock they tend to abhor) and they’re always going on about “End of History” movies that were written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War when Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” before deciding he was wrong. It’s the moment of time when people believed neoliberal capitalism would continue to stampede across the world for the rest of time. A lot of this stuff from the late ‘90s has aged really strangely, especially any Gen X works capturing the ennui of suburbia and how unsatisfied people are with their cubicle jobs, which I know a bunch of embittered failed PMC millennials like me sometimes longingly wish we’d had. But I do actually think Malcolm is an exmple of this tendency also. The family gets in more and more and more debt, blows up/destroys/sets innumerble things on fire, yet never suffers any consequences. This wouldn’t be possible except in a bubble where people believed everything was going to continue to improve forever, and then the end of history ends with the Great Recession almost immediately after Malcolm in the Middle does, so it becomes an unintentional period piece.

I’d also say the same thing for a different reason. One of the other distinctive features is how nearly every single character is a reprehensible human being, and I think that is connected to the rise of George W. Bush and the neocons as well. In the ‘90s, both the Democrats and the Republicans were going on about family values. Politicians of both parties were going afte violent music, movies, and video games. The PMRC was obviously a Democratic thing since Tipper Gore ran it. Then on the Republican side you had Dan Quayle condemning the TV character Murphy Brown for being an unwed mother and George Bush, (Sr.) literally saying American families needed to be “more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons”. (I’m not gonna say Bush was wrong about that necessarily. I never watched The Waltons but from what I know about it, it’s a tight-knit family building solidarity during the Great Depression, and that does sound like the kind of attitude we might need today. But boy, was he the worst possible messenger for it, and of course I’m sure he did not exactly reflect the economic values of that show.)

But, in the 2000s, that started to change. As Aaron Renn wrote in his famous article on evangelicalism, religion was generally seen positively by the average American prior to the ‘90s, neutrally in the ‘90s and negatively in the last decade. You would get social benefits from being religious in the 20th century and now you get social benefits from being atheist. But I think what Renn is talking about is broader than that. It seems like the idea of virtue itself is something nobody takes seriously now. Granted, I never took it seriously from the Republicans in the first place. But at a certain point, it seems like people stopped believing virtuous characters were realistic because so many people who claimed to be virtuous were hypocritical about their ideals. So nothing is seen as realistic anymore if it aspires to virtue or even optimism, and I think that’s the other thing Malcolm leans on a lot. Showing an exaggerated version of people’s depravity might have been a necessary corrective to the smarminess of ‘80s/’90s family sitcoms, but it also reflected a change in how trustworthy people felt the average person was, and exemplified America’s collapse into a low-trust society where everyone is out to get everyone else and nothing else is seen as “realistic”. I strongly dislike this trend and I see Malcolm as a part of it, but I’m not one of those who think TV shows really cause it. I get that it was a cartoon that was designed to be funny (although I insist that it’s hard to laugh if you’re genuinely working class yourself and not somebody looking down on the working class who want to use it as an example of why poor people shouldn’t get benefits since they’re only poor because of the bad decisions they make). I know Calvin and Hobbes has skewered this idea: "Yes, we all know how funny good role models are." But honestly, I think there have been plenty of shows where likable characters could be funny. Even the adult sitcoms. My all time favorite sitcom is WKRP in Cincinnati and I would say six of the main characters in that ensemble are likable (all except Herb and Les and I suppose you could debate Les). It’s definitely possible to write funny characters who aren’t loathsome, but it seems like at a certain point, people stopped trying because they viewed even aspiring to virtue as unrealistic.

Unfortunately, I think the character who reminded me most of me wasn’t Malcolm, but Craig minus his gross womanizing. A slovenly nerd with strong ambition in his personal projects but minimal career ambition who is the butt of everyone’s jokes and seems to have more shit happen to him that isn’t his fault than any other character. It really bothered me that I related to him of all people more than any of the other characters. I definitely never liked him, but then I never liked me either so that tracks.

As for the reunion series, I’ve got to say I was disappointed they made all the kids successful. You’d have to figure as maladjusted/socially inept/abusive as all those kids were, at least one of them would have to still be living at home under Lois’s thumb? Especially with their poor socioeconomic background, their bad attitudes that would keep anyone from wanting to hire them (the number of jobs they had in the show is something I actually find unrealistic at that time), multiple recessions, and the general tendency for most millennials to be less successful than their parents, the fact that not one of them (especially Dewey) “failed to launch” did not ring true to me.

I also feel like the family really should have lost their house in the Great Recession considering how overextended they were on credit, but one of the defining unrealistic tendencies of this show is that “status quo is God” and that nothing bad seems to stick for more than one episode. The most hilarious example of this (and not in a good way) was when in one episode, their refrigerator is repossessed and in the next one, it instantly returns without any explanation. THAT’S how real life works, am I right?

No TV revival will ever be as good as the original show, and I don’t think it was bad exactly, but I’ve got to say the Roseanne and Gilmore Girls revivals were more brave by showing the kids utterly failing and coming back home to live with their parents. That captures the reality way more than anything I saw in the Malcolm revival. Rory Gilmore’s story was way closer to mine than any of the Malcolm children (at least if you erase all her philandering ‘cause I never have had or presumably will have sex), and that seemed most true to life to what would really happen to a gifted child with low ambition and a bad attitude.

I know I talked a lot of shit, but I still did like it and do recommend it (both the series and the revival) even if I think it succeeds as a sociological study about a white working class family exaggerated to cartoonish extremes more than it succeeds as comedy. And I will end this by sharing what I think the two best quotes from the entire series are:

“I’d rather you were the best toilet scrubber in the world than a slapdash Supreme Court justice.”

“Maybe you believe that because all you’re good at is thinking. And if the world isn’t logical, then you’re lost.”

So, Greg Shahade ended Jamie Ding’s 31-game winning streak on Jeopardy! I didn’t realize this until I saw him comment on it on a Reddit thread, but I had actually read his post on how he ascended from the very lowest tier of LearnedLeague (lower than where I was) to the top tier in only a year and a half right after I joined LearnedLeague myself. Made me wonder briefly if I should try the same thing he did. But now that I watched him lose only three games later, I’ve probably concluded that it wouldn’t be worth it.

While I was watching all the Malcolm episodes, as I said I was also entering data for this project, even if I wasn’t uploading columns sometimes. Typically, I’ve been going through ten of my lock drivers a day and rating all their seasons. I now have a bunch of seasons that are “overextended”, where I have more drivers I want to place in certain tier groups for each year than the number of slots I have available, and I want to consistently keep to my usual rubric of 25 E and E- drivers and 50 C+, C, and C- drivers for each post-World War II year, so I’m going to have to rejigger a lot of these drivers to shift them up or usually down tiers when necessary, but I think I’m going to wait to do that until at least I’ve gone through all my lock and near miss drivers. I’ve already gone through all my bubble drivers.

I’ve been going through the Ls and Ms, and I ended up dropping six drivers I originally had as locks to the bubble category: Andy Lally, Pierre Lartigue, Robin Liddell, Herbert Linge, Attilio Marinoni, and Jaime Melo. For Lally and Liddell, the issue is that I just don’t think that during the IMSA split that Grand-Am’s GT class had competition anywhere near as strong as the GT classes in the American Le Mans Series, so I’ve tended to downgrade a lot of those drivers, and that’s part of the reason why I currently have Boris Said and Joey Hand out too. For Linge, he had an awful lot of World Sportscar Championship class wins, but these were usually in small classes that only had a few entered cars and he had no overall wins and was usually many laps behind the overall winner, so I thought he should be dropped especially when I realized I had Edgar Barth on the bubble as well and Barth was a Porsche contemporary of Linge who was probably better. Finally, Lartigue was a three-time Dakar Rally winner, but my issue there is that’s all he did. I realize a lot of the Dakar winners didn’t typically enter any other rallies, but I tend to prefer the WRC drivers who competed in a wide variety of major rallies around the world than those who competed and won in only one, even if it was the more prestigious one. Marinoni was the first three-time 24 Hours of Spa winner, winning this race three consecutive years in 1928-1930 each time with a different co-driver, but I ended up lowering him because I award fewer points to the pre-World War II era and also because I had to take Woolf Barnato, who won all three of his 24 Hours of Le Mans starts (coincidentally each time with a different co-driver himself) over him those same years. Nonetheless, I still have all six of those drivers on the right side of the bubble currently.

I also moved up Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney. I decided to give them both E’s for their seven-win 2007 Grand-Am season instead of the E-s where I previously had them. They did really dominate the season and it was even with both drivers leading over 300 laps. This elevates Fogarty from the bubble into lock status and elevates Gurney from near misses to the right side of the bubble. I’m sure I’ll continue to tinker things like this in the years to come. I tend to be at my least accurate with evaluating sports car drivers (along with drag racers and grassroots drivers). And I ended up dropping Andrea Aghini to the near miss category when I realize I had overrated one of his WRC seasons, but I may change my mind on that later.

I spent way too much time on my regular work and also thinking of Malcolm so I blew off a number of the scheduled posts, but maybe I made up for it with this one. And I paired my long entirely unrelated intro with a post profiling a driver who a lot of people consider the best driver ever. Maybe for some of the mega-legends like Fangio, I should extend the limit beyond my usual 500 words and I’ll think about doing that at some point later. For the time being, I’m gonna stick to 500 words for each driver though. And I probably should have combined the review with a less important driver…

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IAN GEOGHEGAN………….AUSTRALIA

Born: April 26, 1940
Died: November 19, 2003

Best year: 1969
Best drive: 1972 Australian Touring Car Championship Race #3 at Mount Panorama, Bathurst

The greatest driver from the pioneering decade of Australian touring car racing, Ian followed in the footsteps of his brother Leo, but they had different specialties with Leo focusing on open wheel, where he won four minor league titles in Australia, while Ian won the Australian Touring Car Championship five times in six years from 1964-1969. Most of Australia’s championships in the ‘60s were held over a single race with the exception of the Australian Drivers’ Championship, the country’s top open wheel title, which Leo won twice.

Geoghegan’s first major race came at the inaugural Australian Touring Car Championship in 1960 in a self-owned Holden where he didn’t finish, but he did finish third in the inaugural Australian GT Championship later that year while Leo won. After a runner-up finish in the 1961 ATCC, the brothers teamed up to win Class F at the one-off Bathurst 6 Hour in 1962. Although they completed four more laps than anyone else, race officials for some reason decided not to declare an overall winner. Geoghegan’s first solo win came in the 1963 Australian Tourist Trophy, the country’s most important sports car title at the time, but his competition was terrible.

Geoghegan’s greatest performances came in the ATCC. After Jaguars won the first four races, Geoghegan’s win in 1964 was the first of six consecutive Ford championships and they were all his except for Norm Beechey’s 1965 win. Geoghegan and Beechey had a storied rivalry as Geoghegan took the lead from him with seven laps remaining to win in 1964, Beechey lapped him in 1965, Geoghegan passed Beechey again with six laps to go to win in 1966 and he inherited the lead when Beechey crashed in 1967. After winning again in 1968, he won the first multi-race ATCC championship in 1969, but his 1972 win at Bathurst was his greatest as he and Allan Moffat lapped the field and made repeated slipstream passes throughout what many call the most exciting touring car race ever where Geoghegan kept taking the lead uphill while Moffat repassed him at the summit. Geoghegan ended up winning by 0.6 seconds because his car was leaking oil while he led and Moffat had to remove his belts and look over his windshield to see. This was also Moffat’s only ATCC win as an owner-driver. Moffat and Geoghegan later teamed up to win the 1973 Bathurst 1000.

You can ignore the poor touring car rating here as his sample size is very small and the fact that Geoghegan tended to dominate single-race championships more than multi-race championships didn’t help. Besides his touring car titles, he also won two additional sports car championships, another Tourist Trophy in 1965 and a multi-race championship in 1976. He held the ATCC win record until Bob Jane overtook him in 1972 and the title record until Jamie Whincup overtook him in 2014. Although the competition was certainly nowhere near what it would become in the Supercars era, he remains one of Australia’s greatest racing legends.

Touring car model: #926 of 1676 (-.106)

Teammate head-to-heads: 7-8 (1-0 vs. Greg Cusack, 0-2 vs. Harry Firth, 1-1 vs. Fred Gibson, 0-1 vs. Alan Hamilton, 1-1 vs. Bob Jane, 2-0 vs. Spencer Martin, 1-0 vs. Jim McKeown, 0-1 vs. Allan Moffat, 0-1 vs. John Reaburn, 0-1 vs. George Reynolds, 1-0 vs. Barry Seton)

Year-by-year: 1961: C-, 1962: C, 1963: C-, 1964: E-, 1965: C, 1966: C+, 1967: C+, 1968: E-, 1969: E, 1970: C+, 1971: C, 1972: C+, 1973: C, 1976: C-, 1978: C

But Massa actually beat Räikkönen worse (8-3) than Hamilton beat Heikki Kovalainen (8-5). Now, I think Kovalainen is underrated, but he’s not the Finn anyone will pick first. As a result, Massa’s rating in my model was .430, way higher than Hamilton’s .236. He also led eight of the 14 statistical categories I track in 2008 (natural races led: 8, lead change record: 3-1, wins: 6, TNL/lead shares/races with the most lead shares: 8, CRL: 5.75, races with the most laps led: 5), while Hamilton only led three categories (overtake record: 34-6, races with the most laps led: 5, tied with Massa, and poles: 7). I don’t even think this is all that close, and moreover, Massa actually led 9 of the 14 statistical categories I track as well, even though Räikkönen, Hamilton, and Fernando Alonso stole all the headlines. He is massively underrated now and it really sucks that he had eight races with an on-track pass for the lead and only won one of them. I can’t think of many records more underrated than that even discounting the injury and the stolen championship. Still, I definitely don’t blame Hamilton for it anymore than I blame Glock for it. This is all on Renault.

But I still rated Massa’s season only fourth globally while leaving Hamilton out of the top five. Honestly, in a year with so much parity, I honestly think the best performances were elsewhere (I put Sébastien Loeb #1, Jamie Whincup #2, and Dixon #3 for that year). Gave Jimmie Johnson my last spot in the top five although I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to pick Hamilton, Vettel, or Carl Edwards instead.

Boy, that Talladega race sucked, didn’t it? I’ve generally had low expectations ever since the two caution-free races in 2001 and 2002, but after the three godawful fall 2008 to fall 2009 races in a row, my expectations are that they will always be bad. The 2020s were a bit of an improvement and honestly, I didn’t even hate the 2X2 gridlock and the fuel-saving as much as everyone else did. It was pretty to watch drivers in formation like that as long as they didn’t crash. However, yesterday’s race was the first time the gridlock annoyed me and I think it’s because unlike last year’s spring race (which I actually enjoyed even though most did not), most of the cars crashed and that was still the result. Once it came down to a battle between Chris Buescher and Carson Hocevar, I totally knew that Hocevar would win though. Hocevar has a competitive fire, an élan, that Buescher does not have and will never have. A wild overdriver like Hocevar will try any slick move necessary to win, even if he ruffles feathers (like nerfing Erik Jones off the track), while a complacent conservative like Buescher seems to always back down in a duel. It’s like he’s becoming the Cup version of Bryan Herta, a very good driver who all the other drivers know they can push around, so he always loses in a fight except that one inexplicable Watkins Glen race where he punked Shane van Gisbergen. So, I knew Hocevar would win once I saw who his opponent in the 2X2 formation was and I was glad for him. I do like him even if I don’t like the way he drives, and he reminds me a great deal of Ernie Irvan who was my second favorite driver back in the ‘90s (until I learned long after the fact about how he intentionally blew several engines to get out of his contract with Morgan-McClure…)

Somebody slapped my mom in the nursing home. Apparently she had mouthed off and I’m sure whatever she said was not okay, but I’m still old-fashioned in believing physical actions are worse than words. At least she wasn’t hurt. All this makes me want to do is scream at the woman at Adult Protective Services who forced her in for hoarding and won’t let her out until the 13 months it takes to construct a ramp are completed. And they lost her dentures, one of her blankets, her cell phone, and I keep winning her Van Duyn Nursing Home-branded teddy bears, which are one of the few small possessions she’s had any sentimental attachment over since she’s been in there, and either she keeps losing them or they keep stealing them (this has happened about three times now). That’s a stupid thing to care about, I know. At least her behavior has been more pleasant than the last two years when she was at home.

Because I ended up delaying the Massa post and I also decided that Tracy Hines (who I originally scheduled for May Day) didn’t have enough cumulative points for lock status (he’s still close), I’m going to shift everybody a day from my originally schedule to catch up. I think I’ll leave Juan Manuel Fangio on his birthday since I usually stay home and don’t visit Mom on Thursdays and that one will probably take some time, so I’ll slide Mike Parkes in Hines’s spot:

April 26: Felipe Massa (paywalled)
April 27: Ian Geoghegan (free)
April 28: Cacá Bueno (free)
April 29: Russell Ingall (paywalled)
April 30: Juan Manuel Fangio (paywalled)
May 1: Mike Parkes (free)
May 2: Alessandro Cagno (free)

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ROLF STOMMELEN…………GERMANY

Born: July 11, 1943
Died: April 24, 1983

Best year: 1977
Best drive: 1980 24 Hours of Daytona

One of the most pivotal drivers in Porsche’s sports car success, Stommelen learned the engineering trade and raised money to race while working at his father’s garage. When his father bought him a Porsche 904, he began excelling in hill climbs and rivaled Porsche’s factory drivers in speed, which prompted Porsche’s sports director Huschke von Hanstein to hire him. He earned a Le Mans class win in 1966, his first major overall win at the 1967 Targa Florio with Paul Hawkins, and he was part of Porsche’s first overall winning team at the 1968 24 Hours of Daytona. He then won the 1969 24 Hours of Le Mans pole by two seconds.

F1 teams took notice and Stommelen made his debut at the 1969 German Grand Prix, finishing the race eighth overall in an F2 car that caught fire. He ran full seasons for Jack Brabham and John Surtees sponsored by the German magazine Auto Motor und Sport in 1970 and 1971 respectively. Although he made 63 starts, he only had a single podium in 1970, but he did inherit the lead for Graham Hill’s team at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix when Mario Andretti had a suspension failure before Stommelen’s rear wing failed, which vaulted his car across a barrier, injuring him and killing a spectator, a firefighter, and two journalists.

Although doctors told him not to race again, he actually improved afterward, winning the Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft touring car championship in 1977 and 11 wins in that series, two more 24 Hours of Le Mans class wins, including a memorable 1979 race where he willed his broken-down car to second place overall alongside car owner Dick Barbour and actor Paul Newman, and three more Daytona wins. He remains the only four-time 24 Hours of Daytona winner with no repeat co-drivers.* In 1980, he and Manfred Schurti had an epic nighttime hour-long battle for the lead, but Stommelen’s team won by 33 laps after Schurti crashed. Two years later, Stommelen and John Pauls, Sr. and Jr. set a Daytona distance record that lasted for 36 years. Sadly, Stommelen was killed in an IMSA race at Riverside in 1983 after another rear wing failure. His team initially intended to adjust his wing on a pit stop, but changed their mind to save time and forgot to re-tighten the right side wing nuts. This ultimately sent his car into the Turn 9 barrier at 190 mph and he died of massive head trauma.

At once a fair-minded, cerebral, and very fast driver, Stommelen delivered 46 major wins in his a short career. His try-anything-once ambition was very admirable; he even qualified sixth for his only NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega in 1971. His open wheel career might have been lackluster, but he was clearly universally respected there as well since he got the opportunity to drive for three world champions and German drivers of this era valued sports car racing more highly anyway, so I won’t hold that against him.

Touring car model: #244 of 1676 (.175)

Teammate head-to-heads: 23-9 (1-0 vs. Jurgen Barth, 1-0 vs. Josef Brambring, 1-0 vs. Carlo Facetti, 1-1 vs. Dieter Glemser, 2-0 vs. Toine Hezemans, 0-1 vs. Klaus Ludwig, 7-3 vs. Volkert Merl, 0-1 vs. Herbert Muller, 3-1 vs. Clemens Schickentanz, 6-1 vs. Tim Schenken, 1-0 vs. Manfred Schurti, 0-1 vs. Alex Soler-Roig)

Open wheel model: #663 of 931 (-.178)

Teammate head-to-heads: 4-19 (1-2 vs. Jack Brabham, 0-1 vs. Tony Brise, 0-2 vs. Wilson Fittipaldi, 1-3 vs. Graham Hill, 0-1 vs. Jochen Mass, 0-1 vs. Carlos Pace, 0-3 vs. Riccardo Patrese, 0-1 vs. Brian Redman, 0-2 vs. Carlos Reutemann, 2-3 vs. John Surtees)

Year-by-year: 1966: C-, 1967: C, 1968: C-, 1969: C-, 1970: C-, 1971: C, 1972: C, 1973: C-, 1974: C+, 1976: C+, 1977: E, 1978: C, 1979: C+, 1980: E-, 1981: C, 1982: E

* Technically some people will tell you Pedro Rodríguez also did this. I do not agree. His 3-hour win in 1963 and 2000-kilometer win in 1964 should not count as “24 hour” races.

My participation in bar trivia (even though I didn’t go the last two weeks) and LearnedLeague rekindled my interest in Jeopardy! just in time for Jamie Ding’s streak. I watched almost every day of my childhood until 2005 or something when Alex Trebek started to tell a lot more jokes, which made it harder for me to watch. But undercutting everything I’ve been saying about how I’ve lost my competitive spirit, I guess this might be the exception. I’ve started tracking my Coryat score and shit (I usually average about 13,000, but maybe I’d be averaging more if I didn’t have to compete with Ding). Brought this up today because man, I think today’s match between Ding and Patrick Nolan may be the most exciting Jeopardy! game I’ve ever seen and I’ve been watching on and off since the ‘80s. If you don’t normally watch, try to catch that one…

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Instead, I expended far too much effort into rating drivers’ seasons today (well, yesterday). I went through all the drivers who had win lists posted on Auto Racing Research Associates and awarded an E grade to all drivers with 50 or more wins at the grassroots level, an E- for 35-49 wins, a C+ for 25-34 wins, a C for 20-24 wins, and a C- for 15-19 wins. If a driver won a championship or a marquee minor league race like the Chili Bowl or the Race of Champions or something, I sometimes accepted a lower threshold for each win count. I also accepted lower thresholds in general if a driver was primarily competing in an established series like the NASCAR Modified Tour or the World of Outlaws or something rather than just in grassroots standalone races on local tracks. I also went through all the drivers who ranked in the top ten on The Third Turn’s all-time win list. After doing this, I have a bunch more new locks for my list: Will Cagle, Stewart Friesen, Brett Hearn, Doug Hoffman, Alan Johnson, Danny Johnson, Bob McCreadie, Billy Moyer, Dennis Nyari, Billy Pauch, Fred Rahmer, Shane Sabraski, Matt Sheppard, and Al Tasnady. I know most of these guys are regional legends and they got lots of attention in their local papers even if you might not have heard of them in the national press. For the record, I grew up in Syracuse so I certainly knew who Hearn and the Johnson brothers and McCreadie were because they were from my region and they raced and won at the Syracuse Mile a lot when I was a kid, but that made me unsure whether my own nostalgia is causing me to overrate them. Still, Hearn has 913 wins verified on ARRA, second only to Steve Kinser’s 926 and ahead of Dick Trickle’s 741, although they are all behind Sabraski’s 1,003 verified wins on The Third Turn. That seems to be too much to ignore.

Friesen I’ll admit is the one I have qualms about. On the message boards and Discords where I posted, Friesen was frequently the butt of jokes, none of the posters liked him, and he was mocked mercilessly. As a result, it was always harder for me to take him seriously than perhaps it should have been. But I looked up his record on the ARRA, saw he had 435 verified wins, which isn’t super far off from Richie Evans’s 518 or Donny Schatz’s 491, and ahead of Ray Hendrick’s 415, and he’s the winningest NASCAR driver ever. I convinced myself I guess I’ve got to go for it, but I know many of the people I hung out with on previous Discords and even my current one will probably be laughing at me, so I worry that listing him will cause me to not be taken seriously. Granted, the people on The Third Turn’s Discord are a lot more knowledgeable about grassroots racing, and when I was talking about it with them, one of the posters on there reminded me that he was an owner-driver in his 40s, so in a way, you could regard this as kind of analogous to how Dick Trickle and Butch Miller made their NASCAR moves rather late in their career as they were starting to decline so a lot of people were ignorant of the fact that they were regional legends. Granted, everybody knows that about Trickle, but there are probably a lot of people who incorrectly regard Miller as a mediocre truck driver also when he was so much more than that (I don’t think he quite did enough to make the list though). And even if Friesen’s truck career has been mediocre, which I think it has been, that does not erase what he did elsewhere, much like how Dario Franchitti’s terrible NASCAR career doesn’t mean he shouldn’t make the list for his IndyCar successes. And I have J.J. Yeley on the right side of the bubble because I do think his USAC career was dominant enough for me to ignore his decades of NASCAR mediocrity (he would have been a lock if he’d remained in USAC instead of becoming a bad NASCAR driver though). I think I’ve talked myself into it.

With these additions as well as additions to my bubble tier, the bubble is now officially a bubble as I now have 733 locks and 282 bubble drivers for the list of 1,000. When you look at some of the mediocre major leaguers I have on the bubble like Dick Brooks, Mauricio Gugelmin, Dave Marcis, Jamie McMurray, Roberto Moreno, and so on, I think I’d rather take a regional legend with hundreds of wins over any of those guys. Even though all those guys certainly all had solid NASCAR/IndyCar careers, I would say Brett Hearn definitely had more greatness than them even if others like Friesen and Jimmy Horton would probably be much harder sells for people because their NASCAR failures are more famous than their grassroots successes.

I went on The Third Turn Discord tonight and asked if anybody could make me a list of all the drivers who had 100+ career wins on the site and/or 15+ wins in a given season in any series. The webmaster Timmy Quievryn was able to get the list of all drivers with 100+ wins on his site done for me in barely an hour, and I thank him for that. This definitely contained a bunch of names that I didn’t have on my main spreadsheet, where I am evaluating each driver’s case, and now I’ve got a bunch more to look at; I’m also continuing to go through all the locks I already had. I’m still going to have to figure out how to weight each driver’s region. Like 50 wins in some regions aren’t necessarily the same thing as 50 wins in others. If I record Shane Sabraski’s 1,003 wins (including a record 80 in 2012!) according to my general grassroots scoring rubric, that’s going to be giving him lots of E grades, perhaps too many. I think I need to probably adjust the formula down for more recent drivers because I still continue to think the grassroots drivers of the ‘50s-’80s were better than the grassroots drivers in decades since, because there was a lot more money in minor league series before major league TV money started swamping everything in the ‘90s. It would feel a little silly to me to give Sabraski an E grade every year considering how weak I think his competition probably was, but he definitely belongs on the list. It’s probably going to be a while before I start writing the entries on these sorts of drivers since I definitely need to do more research.

I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow. One of my high school friends is going to help me try to push my mom’s car out of the garage, I finally got an assignment from my boss after weeks when he had hardly assigned anything, and I also received an assignment from my counselor to record a list of all the traumatic incidents in my life, which I will be scribbling the night before it’s due like a less conscientious student than I actually was because I was doing all this shit, but at least I have made it a source of income.

Oh, and I found that column I referenced in the Harry Hartz entry about how kids lost their self-sufficiency. I forgot that it was in the right-wing journal American Affairs, but it was Isaac Wilks’s The Zoomer Question. While I don’t support everything on that site by any means, I thought that article was good, but if you don’t want to give them a click, I don’t blame you.

MARTIN TOMCZYK………….GERMANY

Born: December 7, 1981

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2011 DTM Race #7 at Brands Hatch

Although Tomczyk spent most of his career as a support driver for Audi’s factory DTM team Abt Sportsline, he managed to escape his teammates’ shadows and earned an improbable championship in a three-year old car. The son of Hermann Tomczyk, a former driver, FIA vice president, Formula 1 race steward, DTM race director, and sports president for ADAC (Europe’s largest automobile club), Martin had witnessed every aspect of the sport. While his father’s connections no doubt helped facilitate his auspicious debut, he made the most of it.

Despite never winning a major European open wheel ladder race, Tomczyk nonetheless landed a DTM ride with Abt Sportsline’s junior operation in 2001, making him the series’s then-youngest starter. However, he quickly proved to be no mere nepo baby by finishing second in his third start in a qualifying race at the Nürburgring, then finished fourth in the championship race. The next year, he won the season-opening qualifying race at Hockenheim. It’s unclear whether this should count as a DTM win, so sources differ as to whether he has seven or eight wins. His first full championship race win wouldn’t come until 2006 at the Circuit de Catalunya.

Initially, Tomczyk typically played a support role for teammates Laurent Aïello, Mattias Ekström, Tom Kristensen, and Timo Scheider, and he often had to yield in team orders scenarios. Nonetheless, he was renowned for fair play, neither complaining nor exhibiting uncouth behavior. He had some very real strengths, particularly building up a reputation as one of the best race starters. However, despite back-to-back wins in 2007 and another in 2009, Audi relegated him to their Phoenix Racing satellite for 2011, which only had a 2008-spec chassis. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as Phoenix Racing’s cars were allowed to be 25 kilograms lighter and therefore faster, allowing Tomczyk to win the title and three races while his teammate Rahel Frey finished last in points. His biggest statement win came at Brands Hatch, where he ran down Mike Rockenfeller in the rain. However, he subsequently left Audi and switched to BMW, going winless before he retired in 2016. He made occasional sports car starts for BMW afterward, earning an IMSA class win at Laguna Seca in 2017.

Since the revival of DTM in 2000, Tomczyk is the lowest-rated champion in my touring car model and the only championship with a losing teammate record other than Maximilian Götz, who was widely regarded as one of the biggest travesties of a champion ever. It’s easy to conclude that Tomczyk simply got faster cars than he deserved due to his father’s connections, but I would argue he beat those allegations in 2011. He’s not any kind of all-time great, but he was always widely respected. It should come as no surprise that he followed Hermann into the business side of the sport, where he now serves as the motorsports director of Abt Sportsline. His career might have been rather bland and run-of-the-mill, but it was nonetheless deserving.

Touring car model: #316 of 1676 (.136)

Teammate head-to-heads: 127-163 (13-14 vs. Christian Abt, 4-19 vs. Laurent Aiello, 25-47 vs. Mattias Ekstrom, 11-15 vs. Antonio Felix da Costa, 5-2 vs. Heinz-Harald Frentzen, 10-0 vs. Rahel Frey, 6-1 vs. Joey Hand, 4-5 vs. Oliver Jarvis, 14-22 vs. Tom Kristensen, 3-0 vs. Katherine Legge, 0-4 vs. Allan McNish, 3-2 vs. Miguel Molina, 5-1 vs. Andy Priaulx, 7-23 vs. Timo Scheider, 6-3 vs. Bruno Spengler, 1-2 vs. Peter Terting, 9-3 vs. Karl Wendlinger, 1-0 vs. Markus Winkelhock)

Year-by-year: 2001: C, 2002: C, 2004: C, 2006: C+, 2007: E-, 2008: C-, 2009: C+, 2010: C-, 2011: E, 2012: C+, 2014: C+

I’m still planning on writing two tonight (the Weaver one scheduled for yesterday and the Martin Tomczyk one later today) to catch up, so I think I’m mostly going to dispense with the long intros today. I’m not going to post these together because I already announced the Weaver one would be paywalled and the Tomczyk one wouldn’t.

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Don’t get me wrong, the competition in this era was still very weak (although stronger than the ‘30s), since there were seldom more than 15 starters in the non-Indy 500 races, even the Indy 500s didn’t have 33 cars yet, and the race I picked for Hartz’s best only had eight starters in it. That’s why I award fewer points for each of my tier grade levels for pre-World War II drivers, but they’re definitely more fun to write about.

I did successfully go through all the minor league NASCAR Sportsman and Modified winners before the modern Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity/O’Reilly and Whelen Modified Tours started in 1982 and 1985 respectively, awarding an E grade to all drivers with 40+ wins in a season, an E- to all drivers with 25+, a C+ to all drivers with 15+, a C to all drivers with 10+, and a C- to all drivers with 5+ across Sportsman and Modified combined, but I’m starting to think that was too generous and I should make those thresholds higher, especially the lower ones. (I made some slight judgment calls lifting up drivers if they just missed these precise thresholds if they won in both series or other series in addition to minor league NASCAR or posted very strong championship finishes, etc…) I also think that for the years from the ‘50s-’80s, I’m going to do something similar with regard to grassroots drivers who mostly competed at home tracks and did not compete in major series. This was a major blind spot for me. When I was writing my Dick Trickle entry, I did not rate any of his seasons prior to 1977 and now I see that was obviously a mistake. Having reviewed his list of wins on the Auto Racing Research Associates website (and yep, I’ve already jotted down all the win counts for each driver on that site so I don’t miss anything; like I actually forgot to include Scott Bloomquist on my lock list because I just wasn’t looking at dirt late model racing at all - whoops!), I noticed that his winningest season of 1972 when he won 67 times (probably more race wins than any other driver has ever scored in a season) was a season I didn’t even rate because most of those races just came in weekend home track races and not in established series. I’m going to have to take that into consideration more, and I think for grassroots drivers of that ilk, I’m going to award an E grade for 50+ wins in a season, an E- for 40-49, a C+ for 25-39, a C for 20-24, and a C- for 15-19. Again, only for grassroots drivers who aren’t competing in series (for drivers competing in regional or national championships, obviously the thresholds should be lower), and I think primarily for the ‘50s-’80s, because in those decades you could genuinely make more money being the king of a small pond than you could from being a more marginal major leaguer. Major league drivers got way, way better after the ‘80s everywhere so I think minor league drivers should get much more representation before 1990 and much less after. I think this is a good way for me to capture the legacies of the truly minor league greats like Dick Trickle or Scott Bloomquist while also leaving off drivers like Stewart Friesen. I know according to the ARRA site, Friesen has over 400 wins but having watched him in the NASCAR truck series, I just do not think he belongs on this list. Under the criteria I have come up with here, I have added seven new locks to my list: Jack Bowsher, Ralph Earnhardt (okay, after years of believing all his Hall of Fame inductions and Greatest Drivers list inclusions and shit was only 100% a result of Dale’s success, I finally get it now), Sonny Hutchins, Tiny Lund, Jack McCoy, Marshall Sargent, and LeeRoy Yarbrough. Most of these I was already considering anyway, but Bowsher was a driver I had badly misplaced well below the cutline when he should have been easily far above it. I have also decided to start going through ten drivers a day and rate all their seasons until I’m finished with all the locks (maybe I’ll lower that), which I should finish by mid-May. I also lowered one driver I had as a lock to my bubble: Jack Baldwin. I still have him in, but I realized he was far less dominant a Trans-Am driver than I thought he was and he only really backed into that title even though Scott Sharp was waaaaay better than him when they were teammates.

I decided to skip the Olimpio Alencar, Jr. post originally scheduled because so little has been written about the Stock Car Brasil champions (especially the early ones) in English and I’m going to have to do a lot more research to do those justice, so I slid the Hartz post here. I had originally scheduled it for April 16, which was the anniversary of his first and best win on Easter Sunday in 1922. This means I only ended up skipping the Jack Ingram one for now.

This week’s schedule:

April 19 (yeah, very late): Harry Hartz (free)
April 20: James Weaver (paywalled)
April 21: Martin Tomczyk (free)
April 22: Roy Salvadori (free)
April 23: Joe Weatherly (paywalled)
April 24: Rolf Stommelen (free)
April 25: Felipe Massa (paywalled)

The Hartz post was timely since as I just mentioned in the post itself, he was literally just inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America a few days ago. I’m surprised they even remembered him since this era and really everything before USAC started and A.J. Foyt’s career began has been swept under the rug. Say, does anybody know why Hartz is a member of the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame? I see no evidence that he drove or even owned a sprint car. I don’t get it, but the biography on their site was useful, so thanks!

HARRY HARTZ……………………….USA

Born: December 24, 1896
Died: September 26, 1974

Best year: 1926
Best drive: 1922 Golden State Motor Derby at San Francisco Speedway

A veritable polymath of prewar IndyCar racing, Hartz was the only person who served as a riding mechanic, driver, car owner, engineer, and race official throughout his career. Although his driving career was very short, he won seven IndyCar races in the ‘20s, all on the wooden board tracks that made up almost the entire schedule except for the Indy 500. These board tracks were both faster and more dangerous than Indy itself was. Despite never winning an Indy 500, his three second-place finishes are the most of any non-winner.

Hartz was initially hired by Duesenberg to serve as a riding mechanic in the 1921 Indy 500 for eventual 1923 AAA champion Eddie Hearne before almost immediately getting the racing bug himself. In only his ninth start in 1922, he led all but one lap of a San Francisco 150-miler in his self-owned Duesenberg, lapping the then-best driver in the world Jimmy Murphy on the final lap in a race refereed by heavyweight boxing champion James J. Corbett. A month later, he started and finished second behind Murphy and led 42 laps at the Indy 500. In 1923, he again started and finished second at Indy, this time for Cliff Durant, IndyCar winner and son of General Motors founder William C. Durant, and won his second race in Fresno.

After a winless 1924 and 1925, he came back to win the IndyCar championship in 1926. Although rookie Frank Lockhart was significantly faster, winning the Indy 500 on his debut by over two laps against Hartz, who again finished second and both drivers won five times, Hartz ended up winning the title because he started five more races and was more consistent than Lockhart. His average speed of 134.091 mph at Atlantic City that year would remain the fastest race ever until the 1957 Indy 500. Hartz’s driving career ended when he flipped three times on the board track at Salem, New Hampshire, was ejected from the car and badly burned while his head struck the wooden surface. Although he was critically injured, he miraculously survived, won two Indy 500s as a car owner with Billy Arnold in 1930 and Fred Frame in 1932, served as a stunt driver for the Howard Hawks movie The Crowd Roars, drove a DeSoto backwards across the country in 1933, and served on the technical committees for both AAA and its replacement USAC.

Like all 1920s drivers, Hartz is underrated. Even his era’s Indy 500 winners aren’t well-remembered and many champions who didn’t win the 500 are quickly forgotten. In Hartz’s case, that’s a particular shame because his try-anything-once élan and unusually comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the sport stand out in any era. It seems his reputation is starting to make a comeback as he was just inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame literally days before I wrote this. The 1920s were definitely one of the most interesting eras for IndyCar racing, and that decade has never gotten the attention it deserved.

Year-by-year: 1922: E-, 1923: C+, 1924: C+, 1925: E-, 1926: 2, 1927: C+

RICCARDO PATRESE………………ITALY

Born: April 17, 1954

Best year: 1982
Best drive: 1978 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit

While never one of the best Formula One drivers at any point, Patrese was an extremely reliable one for many years, starting a then-record 256 F1 races as a consistently reliable presence. After nosing out his future teammate Eddie Cheever to win the World Karting Championship in 1974, he then won the European Formula 3 and Italian Formula 3 titles simultaneously in 1976. Patrese debuted for Jackie Oliver’s Shadow team in 1977, then followed Oliver to his new team Arrows in 1978. Arrows ran continuously through 2002 but never won. Patrese was actually the team’s most successful driver, earning three of its four second-place finishes and its only pole at Long Beach in 1981. In the team’s second race at Kyalami, he led 37 laps before blowing an engine.

Despite his accomplishments, his early career was overshadowed by controversy. James Hunt believed an aggressive pass Patrese made on him at the 1978 Italian Grand Prix forced him into Ronnie Peterson, triggering Peterson’s fatal crash; he was even tried in court for manslaughter but was acquitted. A cabal of drivers successfully lobbied to keep Patrese out of the next race and Hunt never forgave Patrese, but he gradually won the other drivers’ respect.

Patrese left Arrows to join Nelson Piquet at Brabham in 1982, where he inherited the lead at Monaco when Alain Prost crashed before spinning out on the penultimate lap, then inheriting the win when the top three drivers’ cars all stopped on the last lap. Although Patrese actually beat Piquet in points that year, Piquet utterly steamrolled him in 1983, but he won the season finale after Piquet intentionally slowed down in the Kyalami season finale to avoid a retirement. Patrese’s cars at Benetton, Brabham, and Williams from 1984-1988 were uncompetitive before Williams’s new Renault engines suddenly made them a powerhouse in 1989. Patrese won four races for Williams, but Thierry Boutsen mildly outperformed him before Nigel Mansell set the single-season win record in 1992 as his teammate. That year’s Williams FW14B was so dominant that Patrese finished a career-best second in points, but I generally find his earlier seasons in slower cars more impressive, and I think most of his best runs came in races he lost. Patrese retired after one final season at Benetton in 1993.

I tend to be harsher on drivers whose legacies are based more on longevity than peak performance and that certainly applies to Patrese. Having said that, in addition to earning most of Arrows’s success in only four years, he was an exceptionally strong overtaker with a lead change record of 12-5. I’m also impressed by his versatility. While simultaneously competing in F1, Patrese also earned 5 overall wins and 4 class wins in the World Sportscar Championship, even finishing second in points to Jacky Ickx in 1982. His career had enough flashes of brilliance over a long enough timeframe to justify his inclusion, even though he seldom hit high peaks and his ratings and records in my models are subpar.

Open wheel model: #355 of 931 (.007)

Teammate head-to-heads: 26-40 (4-9 vs. Thierry Boutsen, 3-1 vs. Eddie Cheever, 1-0 vs. Derek Daly, 1-0 vs. Bruno Giacomelli, 0-2 vs. Alan Jones, 1-0 vs. Lamberto Leoni, 1-15 vs. Nigel Mansell, 6-4 vs. Jochen Mass, 1-4 vs. Nelson Piquet, 1-0 vs. Jean-Louis Schlesser, 0-5 vs. Michael Schumacher, 1-0 vs. Siegfried Stohr, 3-0 vs. Rolf Stommelen, 3-0 vs. Derek Warwick)

Touring car model: #1393 of 1676 (-.304)

Teammate head-to-heads: 2-10 (1-0 vs. Michele Alboreto, 0-1 vs. Paolo Barilla, 0-3 vs. Thierry Boutsen, 0-1 vs. Alan Jones, 0-2 vs. Nicola Larini, 1-1 vs. Alessandro Nannini, 0-2 vs. Kris Nissen)

Year-by-year: 1976: C, 1977: C-, 1978: C+, 1979: C, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: E-, 1983: C+, 1984: C, 1985: C, 1986: C+, 1987: C, 1988: C, 1989: C+, 1990: C, 1991: C, 1992: C-, 1993: C

PAUL TRACY……………………CANADA

Born: December 17, 1968

Best year: 1993
Best drive: 1993 Long Beach Grand Prix

One of IndyCar’s most polarizing drivers, Tracy could’ve been the best driver of his generation but erratic behavior prevented him from truly fulfilling his potential. After becoming the youngest Can-Am winner in 1986, Tracy set a single-season record of nine Indy Lights wins in 1990 en route to the championship. In 1991, Tracy made his debut for Dale Coyne Racing before shortly thereafter signing a five-year development deal for Penske, then became full-time when Rick Mears stepped aside in mid-1992.

Tracy’s prototypical race came at Phoenix in 1993, where he crashed while leading by two laps with 40 laps remaining, but he came back to win at Long Beach despite being injured in a kart crash the previous week, tied Nigel Mansell for the most wins with five, and he actually led almost all my advanced statistical categories. In 1994, Penske added a third car for Al Unser, Jr. Penske’s drivers swept the top three points positions and won 12 of 16 races, but Marlboro wanted to sponsor only two cars in later seasons and Tracy instead switched to Newman-Haas Racing. When Emerson Fittipaldi washed up in 1995, Penske rehired Tracy in 1996, and his three straight oval wins in 1997 were Penske’s only wins between 1996-1999. However, Penske fired Tracy for insubordination after the 1997 season ended.

Team Green added a second car for Tracy in 1998, but he was mildly disappointing as his previously-unheralded teammate Dario Franchitti regularly beat him in points and he became the first CART driver to be suspended for rough driving in 1999. At the 2002 Indy 500, Tracy passed Penske’s Hélio Castroneves on the penultimate lap while a simultaneous crash caused a race-ending caution. IRL officials controversially argued the caution began before the pass, which many observers believed to be political as Green raced in CART while Penske had just switched to the IRL. Michael Andretti subsequently bought Team Green and moved it to the IRL, but Tracy boycotted the IRL, instead signing for CART’s biggest stalwart Gerry Forsythe. He dominated the 2003 season, but after the mass IRL exodus, his only real competition came from rookie Sébastien Bourdais, who eventually overtook and frequently feuded with him. Tracy never found a full-time ride when IndyCar reunited in 2008 because Forsythe had no interest in the IRL and a declining Tracy still demanded a large salary. Instantly retiring after being caught up in Dan Wheldon’s fatal crash, he was an IndyCar color commentator for NBC Sports Network from 2014-2021.

Although Tracy’s teammates typically beat him in points, those teammates were usually all-time greats and he frequently matched them. He and Franchitti are actually tied with 31 wins but Franchitti had more titles and Indy 500 wins against stronger competition. Tracy’s numbers were still great even if his performances wildly diverged between seasons. He led all CART drivers in my model in both 1993 and 1997. While few want to admit it due to his loathsome persona, Tracy is certainly one of his era’s greats.

Open wheel model: #177 of 931 (.126)

Teammate head-to-heads: 91-73 (0-4 vs. A.J. Allmendinger, 11-9 vs. Michael Andretti, 0-1 vs. Ana Beatriz, 0-1 vs. Townsend Bell, 1-0 vs. Ed Carpenter, 10-10 vs. Patrick Carpentier, 10-0 vs. Mario Dominguez, 14-8 vs. Emerson Fittipaldi, 1-0 vs. A.J. Foyt IV, 18-19 vs. Dario Franchitti, 0-1 vs. Davey Hamilton, 7-1 vs. Rodolfo Lavin, 2-1 vs. David Martinez, 1-0 vs. Rick Mears, 0-1 vs. Franck Montagny, 2-0 vs. Mario Moraes, 1-0 vs. Takuma Sato, 3-3 vs. Oriol Servia, 1-0 vs. Al Unser, 7-11 vs. Al Unser, Jr., 2-0 vs. E.J. Viso, 0-3 vs. Justin Wilson)

Year-by-year: 1990: C, 1992: C, 1993: 3, 1994: E, 1995: C+, 1996: C+, 1997: E, 1999: E-, 2000: E-, 2002: C+, 2003: E, 2004: E-, 2005: E, 2007: C-

Now one day late or possibly two (I probably won’t finish editing this down until after midnight), I go back 100 years and discuss one of only two transatlantic drivers who won both a European Grand Prix and an American oval race in the same year. Jimmy Murphy, the other one, is the best driver of this period but Bordino is definitely pretty close.

PIETRO BORDINO…………………ITALY

Born: November 22, 1887
Died: April 15, 1928

Best year: 1922
Best drive: 1922 Italian Grand Prix

Bordino stands alone with Jimmy Murphy as the only transatlantic Grand Prix and IndyCar winners of the 1920s. Described by future world land speed record holder Henry Segrave as “the finest road race driver in the world”, his reputation was typically greater than his official results as he frequently had mechanical breakdowns while leading races. Bordino’s father was a caretaker at Fiat’s headquarters in Turin, which landed him riding mechanic roles for some major drivers, including Vincenzo Lancia, Felice Nazzaro, and Ralph DePalma before he started racing himself.

Although Bordino had started racing before World War I, he wouldn’t become a star until Fiat reentered racing in 1921, where he primarily focused on the French and Italian Grands Prix. In the latter, he started its first running and took the lead at the start before an oil pump failure. After his Fiat failed to meet 1922 Grand Prix specificataions, he defied expectations by taking his Fiat to America to race. At the time, the American competition was stronger because only Europe had to rebuild its industrial infrastructure after the war. That year, Bordino won two races on the then-ubiquitous wooden board ovals, a 25-miler in Los Angeles and a 50-miler in Santa Rosa. At Los Angeles, he beat both the defending and eventual Indy 500 winners Tommy Milton and Murphy respectively.

However, his European exploits weren’t done. He took the lead on lap 4 of the 1922 French Grand Prix but broke an axle and crashed while leading with two laps remaining, handing Nazzaro his final major win. Bordino avenged his loss by beating Felice by two laps in the Italian Grand Prix, although only eight cars started. Bordino started on the second row at the 1923 French Grand Prix and took a 41-second lead on the opening lap before a supercharger failure seven laps later, then led the first 44 laps of the Italian Grand Prix with a broken wrist before the pain made it too difficult to continue. Bordino faded from view after that, winning only two minor events on both sides of the Atlantic before Fiat withdrew after 1927, which prompted Bordino to switch to Bugatti. While practicing at the Circuito di Alessandria in 1928, he struck a dog, which sent his car airborne into the Tanaro River and caused him to drown.

While I don’t think Bordino’s prime lasted long enough to agree with Segrave, you can easily argue that he was the world’s best road racer in 1922 and 1923. However, the IndyCar crossover is what really stands out to me. IndyCar, which raced entirely on ovals then and mostly on wooden ones, was vastly different from Grand Prix racing, which only took place on road courses. Winning in both disciplines in the same year proves his versatility matched his dominance even if he didn’t sustain either for long. This rare crossover makes him one of the most underrated drivers of his time, in an era when even the more dominant drivers are mostly forgotten.

Year-by-year: 1913: C+, 1921: E-, 1922: 2, 1923: E, 1924: C+, 1925: C+, 1927: C+

Well, I just wrote this bio for the Auto Racing Research Associates member page (I didn’t realize the picture I took at that photo shoot at Bach Photo in North Syracuse was going to come out like that):

I know this was supposed to be the April 13 post and I didn’t finish until April 15. On the night of the 13th, I was yakking it up at the Discord for the Who Cares About the Rock Hall? podcast because that was the night the Rock and Rol Hall of Fame inductees were released on American Idol (I don’t even know why I follow that). However, I go in and out of that Discord and pretty much all the Discords I’ve ever been a member of except usually whichever auto racing Discord I’m currently posting on. To be honest, I’m probably going to leave that one as well soon and use it almost exclusively as a chat platform. I’m getting less and less out of online chat and craving more and more real world connection. I was planning on going to tomorrow’s Neurodivergent Support Group at Unique Peerspectives until I realized it was next week because I thought tomorrow was the second week of the month until I realized it was the 15th.

I wish I could blame my slowness in updating on either that chat or filing my taxes (which I still haven’t done; I mean I almost have them done but I’m waiting until the absolute last possible day because I owe over $1,000 since all my jobs in 2025 were online gig jobs that did not have taxes automatically withheld. And I wasn’t really assigned work at my job today either. No, I was just working on my master driver list most of today and going through every NASCAR Late Model Sportsman and Modified Championship through 1955 to assign season grades to all the drivers based on their win counts, and considering both those series had hundreds of races at the time, it takes a while (even though I’m still only rating drivers who won 5+ races in a season, there are still a lot of them). I think I’ll skip the Ingram post for a bit until I’ve gotten all that done.

My mom finally has a new roommate at the nursing home, but unlike the previous one, she apparently finds her new roommate likable, so that’s good. She apparently vomited a lot today when I wasn’t there and then when I was on the phone with her, the housekeeper yelled at her for vomiting. That was not nice. I’m still waiting on a contractor for the ramp construction/roof repair. I finally got the lien release form to allow me the authority to give my mom’s car away to Habitat for Humanity, but nobody will take it unless I’m able to get it out of the garage and it hasn’t started for six years, so that’s the next big thing I have to think about. After I get that removed, I would like to take all the hard drives out of most of my old computers that are still in the garage (I don’t think we’ve gotten rid of any of them since the early 2000s; again, hoarding issues). It might be nice to see if any of the data is salvageable to see if there’s some content I could repurpose for something else. It might be neat if I can find the computer I had from 2000 where I ran a quirky fantasy game on a NASCAR message board and asked wacky questions every week. But if the data’s lost or I destroy the hard drive after I take it out, that’s fine. I need less stuff anyway.

DARREN TURNER……………………..UK

Born: April 13, 1974

Best year: 2002
Best drive: 2002 ASCAR Race #6

Aston Martin’s longest-tenured sports car driver, Turner won the prestigious Autosport BRDC award as the most promising British open wheel prospect in 1996 over two-time Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon amongst others. That won him a McLaren test driver role, but when his open wheel career stagnated, he pivoted to touring cars, where he was somewhat successful, and eventually to sports cars, where he was significantly more successful.

Turner made his major league debut in Germany’s newly-revived DTM touring car series in 2000, only achieving middling results for World Champion Keke Rosberg’s Mercedes team. However, he first became a star in 2002 in the odd and shortly-lived European NASCAR clone ASCAR, which at the time only raced at Europe’s recently-opened speedways, Rockingham Motor Speedway in England and the Lausitzring in Germany. While he had no oval experience, most of the other drivers didn’t either. Turner drove a Pontiac for the hilariously named Team HTML but proved he was up to code by winning a season-high six races including his debut against a field that also included defending British Touring Car Champion Jason Plato and defending British GT champion Kelvin Burt. Despite only finishing sixth in points due to missing three races, he averaged more points per race than the champion Nicolas Minassian.

Turner next moved to sports cars, earning two class wins in 2003 before Aston Martin hired him for their new factory program in 2005. For Aston Martin, Turner won back-to-back 24 Hours of Le Mans class wins in 2007 and 2008, three American Le Mans Series wins, one European Le Mans Series win, and four FIA GT wins before the formation of the World Endurance Championship in 2012. In that series, he won eight races in the LMGTE Pro class including another Le Mans win in 2017. He occasionally also dabbled in touring cars, winning 5 BTCC races for SEAT in 2007 and 2008, but he was far behind his teammate Plato, who won 14 races. Although he never won the WEC championship, he did win an ELMS title in 2016 before dropping down to part-time status to help develop the Aston Martin Valkyrie prototype.

While Turner wasn’t one of his era’s best sports car drivers, he was an undeniably consistent backbone for Aston Martin, making 15 consecutive Le Mans starts for the team from 2005-2019. What he might have lacked in dominance, he made up for in versatility because he won 44 races in 11 different series and I particularly admire that he’s one of the few sports car greats who also has many wins on ovals. My main reservations about his career are that his DTM and BTCC stints were both rather mediocre, and I value single-driver series performances highly when distinguishing sports car teammates. Nonetheless, he won enough races in enough different series and types of cars to distinguish himself, and being a factory driver for a manufacturer team for over a decade is almost enough to justify a place on the list by itself.

Touring car model: #752 of 1676 (-.033)

Teammate head-to-heads: 27-59 (1-3 vs. Ryan Briscoe, 1-2 vs. Tom Coronel, 4-12 vs. Pedro Lamy, 11-36 vs. Jason Plato, 9-2 vs. David Saelens, 1-3 vs. Garth Tander, 0-1 vs. James Thompson)

Year-by-year: 2001: C-, 2002: E-, 2003: C-, 2005: C, 2006: C, 2007: C+, 2008: C+, 2010: C+, 2011: C+, 2012: C, 2013: C+, 2014: C+, 2016: C, 2017: C-

April 12: Carlos Reutemann (paywalled)
April 13: Darren Turner (free)
April 14: Jack Ingram (free)
April 15: Pietro Bordino (free)
April 16: Harry Hartz (free)
April 17: Riccardo Patrese (paywalled)
April 18: Paul Tracy (paywalled)

I was going to do Irv Hoerr on April 14, but I swapped him out for Ingram because as with John Morton, I realized I do not think Hoerr did enough to qualify for lock status, although both of those guys are tentatively on my list. I hadn’t scored Ingram’s seasons yet and every time I visit the Third Turn to look up seasonal win counts in either the NASCAR National Modified Championship (before the current tour started in 1985) or the Late Model Sportsman tour (before it became the Busch Series in 1982), the number of wins for each driver per year often change. I realized I was rather inconsistent with regard to how I was evaluating drivers in those series, so I added more structure to it today. In general, I gave any pre-Busch Late Model Sportsman drivers and any pre-Whelen Modified Tour modified drivers a C- if they won 5-9 confirmed races, a C if they won 10-14, a C+ if they won at least 15, but I typically require either 25+ wins or 20+ wins and a title for an E- grade. After I did Ingram, I went back and adjusted some of his Late Model Sportsman contemporaries like Sam Ard, Harry Gant, Darrell Waltrip, and so on now that I’ve added more structure to this and am going off vibes less. I did allow for certain seasons with fewer wins than those thresholds if a driver had a strong points finish. I started going back through a bunch of Late Model Sportsman drivers to look at their complete win counts and I’ve decided to move Butch Lindley and Glen Wood to the right side of the bubble. I didn’t have them in the 1,000 before but now I do. There might be a couple more drivers from the Late Model Sportsman ranks that I might do that for, but it would probably indeed only be at most a handful more I think…

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But why, oh why, oh why did his parents name him Kasey Kenneth Kahne? I get they wanted to give him a quirky first name for alliterative potential but uh, those initials also stand for something else, you know? Granted, I also had a collection of 20 or 30 stuffed animals in the mid-‘90s (and I still have them; can’t bear to throw them out even though I haven’t looked at them in years; I’d rather donate them but they’re all well-loved enough that no one would want them) and I named one of my cherished Kitty Kitty Kittens “Kelly Kelly Kelly” because I liked the name of using the same first and last name. But I was a ten-year-old who at that point had not heard of the Klan. One would think Kahne’s parents were old enough to not make that mistake. Admittedly, Kasey’s cousin is named Kole and that’s almost as bad…

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FRANK STIPPLER…………….GERMANY

Born: April 9, 1975

Best year: 2003
Best drive: 2012 24 Hours of Nürburgring

Stippler didn’t get as much hype as his fellow Audi sports car legends because he never drove for their juggernaut 24 Hours of Le Mans operation, but he proved himself repeatedly in other marquee sports car events, winning the 24 Hours of Nürburgring three times and the 24 Hours of Spa once. He took his first laps around Nürburgring as a four-year-old passenger of his Alfa Romeo engineer father in 1979 before commencing his own career in 1993.

After starting in historic racing, he received a mechanical engineering degree while simultaneously crossing over into sports car racing as a Porsche system driver. After winning a Porsche Carrera Cup Germany race in three consecutive even-numbered years from 1998-2002, he had a breakout season in 2003 by winning both that championship and its parent series, Porsche Supercup. Although Porsche Supercup is ostensibly a major league and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany is not, most of the top championship contenders simultaneously competed in both over the last 20 years. Stippler was the first of five drivers to win both championships simultaneously. In addition to 5 Porsche Supercup wins, he won 3 Porsche Carrera Cup Germany races, and 2 races in VLN, the sports car series that races exclusively at the Nürburgring.

For the rest of his career, Stippler was primarily a Nürburgring specialist. He won 15 VLN races through 2025 (including seasons after the series changed its name to NLS) and had a decent DTM season in 2005, but he’s most noted for his endurance sports car wins. In 2012, he won both the 24 Hours of Nürburgring and 24 Hours of Spa overall for Audi despite having a completely different set of teammates in both races, becoming the first driver to do so since Marc Duez in 1998. At the Nürburgring, he delivered Audi its first win. While running second directly behind Jeroen Bleekemolen, he pulled out to make a pass just before Bleekemolen blew a tire and crashed. Although debris from the tire carcass hit Stippler’s windscreen, they suffered no terminal damage and won. He added two more 24 Hours of Nürburgring wins in 2019 and 2024.

Although most people, probably including Stippler, consider his Nürburgring wins the centerpiece of his legacy, I think I am most impressed by his 2003 season, since he won 10 races (usually in solo drives), while he won no more than four in any other season. I had to ask myself whether I’m overrating that season, but I decided I wasn’t. He was the only driver that year to win 10 races, multiple titles, and at least one major league title, and he did so in what was a pretty weak year for elite-tier competition. Although my decision to include the Porsche series in my touring car model is certainly contentious, he has a very strong rating and record as a result of that. It’s a shame Audi never entered him at Le Mans, because he’d probably have a much stronger reputation now if they did.

Touring car model: #100 of 1676 (.265)

Teammate head-to-heads: 62-20 (3-4 vs. Christian Abt, 5-1 vs. Tim Bergmeister, 3-4 vs. Thed Bjork, 6-1 vs. Rinaldo Capello, 7-0 vs. Dominik Farnbacher, 6-1 vs. Alexander Grau, 10-2 vs. Pierre Kaffer, 15-2 vs. Nicole Luttecke, 1-0 vs. Marcus Marshall, 1-0 vs. Ronny Melkus, 1-0 vs. Dominik Neumeyr, 1-4 vs. Timo Scheider, 2-1 vs. Frank Schmickler, 1-0 vs. Marco Werner)

Year-by-year: 2000: C, 2002: C, 2003: 3, 2005: C, 2012: E, 2013: C-, 2015: C, 2019: C-

Anyway, he just released a strategy book and I wanted to review it and riff on it even though I doubt there’s much crossover between what I’m doing and what he’s doing. His was not the first Scrabble strategy book I’d ever read. I’d read Joe Edley’s Everything Scrabble, Joel Wapnick’s Champion’s Strategy for Winning at Scrabble (I think it was that one - he wrote three), and Kenji Matsumoto’s Breaking the Game and Words of Wisdom. I admit I found it a little goofy that he named it How to Play Scrabble Like Matthew O’Connor because none of those other guys named their books after themselves, but he told me he didn’t mean it to be self-aggrandizing and he certainly acknowledges several times in the book that Nigel Richards is the goat and he does not claim to be.

Matthew’s book had quite a bit in common with Kenji’s. Kenji was the first person I read who explained why having a particular style isn’t good by arguing that an offensive player is right some of the time, a defensive player is right some of the time, but an optimal player should make an offensive play when the board situation calls for offense and a defensive play when the board situation calls for defense. This was a much bigger emphasis in Matthew’s book than Kenji’s. Once I read Kenji, that idea instantly clicked with me and I got it and agreed with it, but it also made the game honestly less interesting to me personally, not more, and I’ll get to that later.

Matthew focuses more on defense than other players so a lot of people see that as his “style”. He does not see it that way and just sees himself as choosing optimal plays and thinks that other players don’t pay as much attention to defense as they should. Honestly, I agree with that too. A lot of Scrabble experts determined the best play simply by calculating/estimating the “equity” of the play, which is the sum of your score and the expected value of the tiles you keep rather than an average leave. From what I remember (and maybe it’s changed) you’re expected to score about 25 points more with a blank than if you don’t have it, 8 more with an S, 4 more with an E, X, or Z, while Q used to be -13 before the words QAT and QI were added and now I think it’s -5 or something. And then sometimes if you put certain sets of tiles together they’re worth more or less than the sum of the tiles on your leave combined depending on whether they’re “synergistic” or not (frequently appear in words together). I never really bothered to get in the weeds with that personally and played on vibes more than that. I didn’t feel it was worth memorizing that shit because I knew these were just averages and obviously certain tiles would be worth more or less depending on whether the board is open or closed to different types of plays. I also thought personally that would be a waste of my time because I had bigger issues than that. I think my strategic instincts were always pretty sound, but my biggest problems were just that I was a lazy word studier (like I said, I had the lowest average bingo probability of any player ever, which obviously means my strategy was better than my word knowledge) and I was also not very good at seeing my options. If you gave me a multiple choice test between several candidate plays I could make in a given board scenario, I think I’d do pretty well. But I often struggled to see strong defensive plays, like 22-point 5-letter words that make 3 overlaps or something like that. I know those kinds of plays are the best plays a lot, but I just often didn’t see them and sometimes made dumb-looking plays because I couldn’t see my good options. Maybe if I’d been able to see my options, there would have been a point for doing equity calculations.

But I digress. The real issue is that equity does not factor defense and it simply measures what will maximize your point total when the winning percentage of your play is what you should be looking at. Apparently, a lot of players focused on maximizing points instead of maximizing winning chances. In some environments, that could be good. I know back in the ‘80s, British tournaments were decided by who scored the most points instead of wins or losses, so players actually worked together to open the board and create great opportunities for themselves so both players could maximize their scores as much as possible. You know what? I think I’d find that more fun. But American tournaments were never like that and the Brits gave up on collaborative games once the World Scrabble Championship started in 1989. You could certainly adjust equity calculations to factor in how many more points your opponent is likely to score based on different board positions, but that’s a lot murkier and harder to calculate than points + leave, so I guess a lot of experts defaulted to that, and I think sometimes my more vibes-based playing was actually even superior to that.

Matthew, like Kenji, put a lot more emphasis into board geometry and shaping the board so it will suit you than Joe and Joel’s books did. Matthew expanded that idea by arguing that players frequently should consider preemptive defense by blocking important lines earlier in the game before they even become relevant, and that wasn’t something I’d thought about much before. He also argued that people shouldn’t play Scrabble like chess because chess has complete information and Scrabble has incomplete information. That was never a problem for me since I was always into Scrabble first and I never played chess seriously, but a lot of people play both and I agree you’ll mess up if you try to adapt chess-based thinking to Scrabble except in the endgame when all the tiles have been drawn.

I agree with all that. I get it. Does it really make me have a hankering for wanting to play Scrabble again? Honestly, no. I agree that what Matthew and before him Kenji advised maximizes winning chances. I just don’t find it intellectually interesting. It’s really weird for me to be saying this as someone who’s trying to do auto racing sabermetrics, but I really kind of agree with the people who argue analytics has hurt sports. If variety is the spice of life, optimization to maximize the chances of winning genuinely makes things more boring aesthetically. Most players in a post-analytics world are conditioned to play in the same way, so there’s ultimately less variation, less creativity, and in my opinion, less fun. Every baseball player is swinging for the fences to hit homers so we’ll probably never see a Tony Gwynn again. Every basketball player is now focusing on 3-pointers so there’s less variance in strategy and most games look fundamentally the same. It feels like games are more fun before they’re optimized. The same held true in auto racing. People look fondly on the ‘60s as the greatest era of the Indy 500 because there were so many cars that looked wildly different until teams converged on the most aerodynamic types of chassis after which point almost everything looked the same, and it’s telling that that is when the gearheads started to lose interest. Sure, in racing, you can still have different-looking cars especially in sports car racing (which has always valued that), which is obviously why they’ve instituted all those balance of performance requirements to ensure different-looking cars have similar speeds.

Once you’ve figured out in any game or sport what the optimal strategy is, there’s no turning back. Players ultimately train themselves to be something akin to human robots or AIs making the calculated correct moves with no room for creativity because it’s suboptimal, and I guess that world interests me less and less. I realize attempts to play Scrabble with chatbots have proven hilarious over the years. Scrabble champion Will Anderson mercilessly made fun of ChatGPT for repeatedly suggesting playing the non-word OLEICAT. But even though now a lot of people seem to use AI, large language models, and chatbots interchangeably, AI covers a lot of things and I think it’s pretty safe to say that all the Scrabble computing engines that have been used from Maven to Quackle to Macondo count as AIs as well, so AI clearly can play Scrabble and often better than humans. I know the optimal strategy is to think like them. I know I’d probably be capable of it. I just don’t think I’d enjoy it.

I find myself disagreeing with my fellow sports analysts quite often. Not only do I kind of agree that analytics has made sports more boring (I think the real reason a lot of people prefer college basketball to the NBA, college football to the NFL, and the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series to the Cup Series is because the teams aren’t as good so their play is less optimized resulting in more mistakes, which can increase the excitement), but I also find myself disagreeing with all these guys especially when it comes to Hall of Fame inductions. <robotvoice>Beep beep boop boop. No players should be inducted into any Hall of Fame unless they are in the top 1.364% of all players to participate in their given league.</robotvoice> The amount of times I have seen my fellow stat bros use phrases like “Hall of Very Good” has constantly made me cringe. If we award too many players, it’ll diminish the honor! Well, not only were almost all Halls of Fame exceptionally permissive in their early years before becoming restrictive later on, but I personally think it’s fun to see people awarded for things. These “Hall of Very Good” arguments remind me very much of all the boomers who complain about us goshdarn millennials and all the participation trophies they awarded us, and I feel so much backlash towards conservatives whining about participation trophies that I’ve got to say at this point, bring them on! More participation trophies! As our world gets darker, we need more things to celebrate. Anything that brings people together should be supported in our atomized time.

I think my biggest gripe is the effects that the quantification and gamification of everything have had on our society. When the world runs on zeroes and ones, that increases the role of money over everything in our lives. Money by definition is easily quantifiable when most of the other things we care about in life are not (love, family, friendship, loyalty, bravery, health, community, companionship, creativity). Any time you try to quantify those things, you tend to fuck them up. Instead of love, we have OnlyFans. Instead of family, we have BetterHelp. Instead of friendship, we have parasocial relationships with streamers. Instead of bravery, we have online gaming. Instead of health, we have health monitoring apps that spy on you. Instead of community, we have social media apps that incentivize hatred because strong emotions increase the likelihood that you’ll become addicted to their platforms. Instead of creativity, we have chatbots.

In my old age, I’ve realized the best things in life aren’t quantifiable and so I’m craving competitive pursuits less and less (yeah, my LearnedLeague entry is a weird exception to that, but I’ll probably quit that after this year is up). Does that mean I’m not enjoying my racing research? No, I am, and it’s one of the only things I’m enjoying in recent years, but I honestly feel I enjoy my roles as a historian and an archivist more than my role as an analyst. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with being a sports analyst per se and creating new ideas. This does fuel my creative juices in a way I never felt Scrabble did and that’s why I enjoy it more. I also enjoyed writing Nerds per Minute more than I ever actually enjoyed the practice of competitive typing for the same reasons. In a world of AI, creativity (and most of the other items I listed above) are some of the few things it can’t truly replicate, so I’m really valuing them more.

The problem I guess is really with commodifying your work and selling it to multinational organizations like sports teams. I mean what has been the effect of sabermetrics? Mostly, it’s just to find better ways to exploit labor and reduce labor costs. That shouldn’t be a good thing! I realize it can be hard for a lot of precariously employed gig workers/freelancers/writers (which is much of the media now) to feel sympathy for much richer players getting exploited, but the fact is they are and we still see this as a good thing. And the rush to maximize profits or winning chances decreases almost any kind of loyalty. Take Roger Penske’s IndyCar team. He has seemed to have the knack for just releasing drivers at precisely the right moment when they are out of gas: from a business perspective, dropping Ryan Briscoe in 2012 and then eventually replacing him with Juan Pablo Montoya in 2014 was the right move, as was replacing Montoya with Josef Newgarden in 2017, dropping Hélio Castroneves in 2017, replacing Simon Pagenaud with Scott McLaughlin in 2021 (albeit maybe a year too late), and it looks like even replacing Will Power with David Malukas was since Malukas has been a lot faster on road courses than I expected him to be. Having said that, a lot of these sorts of moves can be wrong from a moral perspective (and I’m saying this even though Malukas is my favorite IndyCar driver). Again, it can be hard to sympathize if you’re a broke writer comparing yourself to millionaire athletes, but I personally would rather live in a high-trust society where employers and employees are working together and trust each other rather than being out to get each other. Let’s end at-will employment, please.

I admit it is weird for someone who is doing what I’m doing to admit the best things in life aren’t measurable, but I do think it is correct. I remember right before I quit Scrabble, I had a back-and-forth with Kenji and he told me that I could have become a very good Scrabble player but it wasn’t the right thing for me as a person. He was right and if I ever come back to Scrabble, it will only be for social reasons. I’m desperately lonely and there is nothing I am craving more than real world community. I still don’t feel I’ve found it yet…

RICK KELLY………………….AUSTRALIA

Born: January 17, 1983

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2004 Eastern Creek Race #1

Although Kelly was one of the most infamous, controversial, and least deserving champions in any major league series, he nonetheless was a reliably consistent Supercars performer for two decades, earning 13 wins including two Bathurst 1000 wins. The younger brother and longtime teammate of 19-time winner Todd Kelly, Rick became the first driver to win 12 races in a season in the Australian Drivers’ Championship (Australia’s top open wheel title) in 2001 before landing his first V8 Supercars ride in 2002 for Holden.

In 2003, Kelly became the youngest Bathurst 1000 winner in a shared drive with his teammate Greg Murphy, who otherwise significantly outperformed him. He achieved this despite the fact that his car owner Tom Walkinshaw ran out of money when his Arrows F1 team collapsed and had to sell off the operation. Holden initially bought it but quickly sold it to Rick and Todd’s parents, John and Margaret Kelly, because manufacturers were forbidden to own Supercars teams. Rick overtook Murphy in 2004, ranking second in laps led and tied for second with 4 wins, including an electrifying drive from 17th at Eastern Creek Raceway and another Bathurst 1000 win.

Garth Tander replaced Murphy in 2005 and typically had the measure of Kelly, but Rick backed into the 2006 title under controversial circumstances despite winning only one race to Tander’s seven and Craig Lowndes’s five. Entering the finale tied with Lowndes on points, Rick bumped Lowndes into Todd and wrecked him. Although he was penalized, Lowndes’s car was damaged enough that Rick still won the title with an 18th-place finish. Rick never really lived that down, but remained a reliable performer, finishing 8th or better in points nine straight seasons from 2003-2011. In 2009, John and Margaret Kelly severed their previous relationship with Walkinshaw and formed their next team Kelly Racing. Their equipment was a lot shakier and Rick only had one winning season from 2009-2017, his three-win 2011. I regard this season as his best since he outperformed Murphy significantly worse that year than in 2004. He was usually the team leader, as he posted winning records against all his regular teammates from 2007-2018 before retiring in 2020. The Kelly brothers, who had taken over their parents’ team in the intervening period, eventually sold it to Stephen Grove in 2022.

Although Rick won fewer races than Todd, I have to say Rick was better as indicated by his 163-89 teammate record and .164 to .048 advantage in my model. He never really achieved the level of greatness that many people might’ve expected considering his initial trajectory, but he remained reliably consistent for a very long time. Since Kelly Racing was one of the few four-car teams in this era, Rick has more teammate comparisons than any other driver in the history of my touring car model, ensuring a high degree of accuracy here. He does indeed trail most 21st century Supercars champions in my model and he had no business winning a championship, but he’s underrated regardless.

Touring car model: #270 of 1676 (.164)

Teammate head-to-heads: 800-476 (1-0 vs. Craig Baird, 18-5 vs. Jason Bargwanna, 8-3 vs. Tim Blanchard, 1-21 vs. Jason Bright, 6-1 vs. Alex Buncombe, 1-2 vs. Matt Campbell, 101-87 vs. Michael Caruso, 2-0 vs. Ben Collins, 1-0 vs. Tony D’Alberto, 65-14 vs. Simona de Silvestro, 1-0 vs. Jesse Dixon, 1-0 vs. Scott Dixon, 6-4 vs. Taz Douglas, 27-2 vs. Paul Dumbrell, 12-8 vs. Dean Fiore, 1-1 vs. Bryce Fullwood, 5-0 vs. Daniel Gaunt, 0-2 vs. Oliver Gavin, 43-39 vs. Andre Heimgartner, 18-8 vs. Garry Jacobson, 1-1 vs. Owen Kelly, 163-89 vs. Todd Kelly, 2-1 vs. Jack Le Brocq, 1-0 vs. Tim Leahey, 1-0 vs. Cameron McLean, 13-0 vs. Mark McNally, 0-1 vs. Tomas Mezera, 58-47 vs. James Moffat, 44-41 vs. Greg Murphy, 0-1 vs. Dylan O’Keeffe, 1-0 vs. Steve Owen, 20-2 vs. Jack Perkins, 2-0 vs. Nathan Pretty, 1-0 vs. Andy Priaulx, 20-4 vs. Karl Reindler, 25-4 vs. David Reynolds, 25-1 vs. Tony Ricciardello, 0-1 vs. Jim Richards, 2-1 vs. Aaren Russell, 9-2 vs. David Russell, 4-2 vs. Alex Rullo, 1-0 vs. Glenn Seton, 1-1 vs. Allan Simonsen, 1-19 vs. Mark Skaife, 3-1 vs. Alex Tagliani, 35-56 vs. Garth Tander, 1-0 vs. Anthony Tratt, 4-1 vs. Jacques Villeneuve, 1-0 vs. Cam Waters, 2-0 vs. Richard Westbrook, 2-0 vs. Justin Wilson, 39-3 vs. Dale Wood)

Year-by-year: 2001: C-, 2003: C, 2004: E-, 2005: C-, 2006: C+, 2007: C, 2008: E-, 2009: C+, 2010: C+, 2011: E-, 2012: C, 2013: C-, 2015: C, 2017: C-, 2018: C+