I’ve come up with who I think are the top ten snubs for both the modern era and pioneer ballots. You’ll notice that I arguably have more names that have never been nominated than names that have, but I think that makes sense because not only are there many figures who have more significance than their statistical record implies, but there are also people who havve objectively strong statistical records who are just being ignored for… reasons. A few of them (particularly on the pioneer side) seem to be snubbed just because NASCAR has petty vendettas against them, but there are a lot of people whose legacies don’t seem to match their historical record also. Let us begin.

For the record, I do not consider Kyle Busch and Martin Truex, Jr. to be snubs. I know that Truex is probably going to be eligible for induction in 2027 and he probably will be inducted first ballot and a strong case will be made he should be #1 on this list, but he wouldn’t top it until it’s actually a snub. It’s certainly possible the NASCAR Hall of Fame could suspend their usual requirement of not inducting drivers until they have been retired from full-time competition for three full years to induct Busch early. If they choose to do this, he should get in immediately, of course, but if they don’t, I’m good with that too.

Modern Era Ballot:

1. Harry Hyde - Hyde has now made the ballot 11 times and not yet been inducted. I think the fact that they placed him on the Modern Era Ballot may be one major reason why. Most of the associations people have of Hyde in their head are about his ‘80s affiliation with Hendrick Motorsports and Tim Richmond, a storybook relationship that was the basis for the movie Days of Thunder. It feels like a lot of folks want to reduce his career to that when he was arguably vastly more successful in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. He was Bobby Isaac’s crew chief at Nord Krauskopf’s K&K Insurance team, and he was crew chief for all but one of Isaac’s 37 wins. People seem to forget that. He then won races with Buddy Baker, Dave Marcis, and Neil Bonnett, before the team got bought out by J.D. Stacy and was effectively ruined. Hyde struggled to find a full-time crew chiefing job again until Hendrick revived him. Now, I think anyone who is a foundational figure for a wildly successful team should probably be inducted, and Hyde was definitely that for Hendrick Motorsports. One could argue that without him just as without Geoff Bodine, the team would not still exist today. Indeed, I believe Hyde was the reason Bodine signed with Hendrick in the first place. The problem is that people seem to think that’s his entire legacy and ignore his success with Krauskopf. The man has 56 wins. This should be obvious and he is one of the guys I would vote for every time he is nominated if I had a vote. I think it might be time to try him on the Pioneer ballot. He’ll get the votes there and the majority of his wins and his title were before the modern era.

2. Ernie Elliott - It’s weird how underhyped he is. He served as his brother Bill’s crew chief for nearly his entire stint at Melling Racing except for 1990. Not only that, he doubled as the engine builder. Now, when you think about Bill Elliott, what you think about is raw, blinding superspeedway speed, which one could argue comes down to the equipment more than the driver. Well, who was building that equipment? The whole operation was pretty much a family team even after George Elliott sold it to Harry Melling and obviously Melling entirely collapsed after the Elliotts left, and the team was also fairly small, so almost everyone involved had to take on a wide range of roles, but as someone who believes the crew chief and engine builder have more input in making the cars faster than the driver, especially a guy like Elliott who filled both roles - this snub feels actually pretty egregious, but I’ve never seen people talk about him much. Elliott’s contemporary Waddell Wilson, who also served as a dual crew chief/engine builder has already been inducted and weirdly he has a bigger reputation, which is why he was inducted first. But Elliott has actually been more successful with 33 wins and a title to Wilson’s 19 and no title.

3. Jimmy Fennig - Even though Fennig has 40 wins and a title with Kurt Busch in 2004, I still kind of think he is one of the most underrated crew chiefs of all time. I think I’d probably rank him on my top ten crew chiefs list, but it might not be obvious to you until you look at what he did with what drivers and teams. First off, he gave Bobby Allison his final three wins all at Daytona and Talladega for the Stavola Brothers including the 1988 Daytona 500, which at the time made Allison the oldest Cup winner in history. After Allison’s near-fatal crash, Fennig stayed with the Stavola Brothers and Dick Trickle until he hooked up with Allison’s team when he reentered as a car owner in 1990. He remained fiercely loyal to Allison even despite his string of terrible driver hires. Before Fennig got to Roush, he gave all four of his regular drivers from 1989-1996 (Trickle, Hut Stricklin, Jimmy Spencer, and Derrike Cope) their best career points finishes. Then at Roush, he gave Mark Martin his winningest season and best of his second-place points seasons in 1998, before making Busch a superstar and winning him a title over the superior Jimmie Johnson. Finally, he capped things off by giving David Ragan his best career points finish in 2008. Over twenty years, you could argue he gave every full-time driver he ever had their best career season (sure, I think I’d take 1993 as Martin’s best and maybe 2009 as Busch’s, but you can still make that case). If anyone ever attempted to calculate Value Over Replacement Crew Chief, Fennig would score very, very highly. Yet I seldom see people list him as an all-time great crew chief or argue for instance that he’s better than Ray Evernham, which I think he is.

4. Geoff Bodine: Next we have four very similarly-placed drivers who are almost interchangeable to me and I do consider all of them to be the biggest driver snubs including the pioneer drivers, but at this point, I’m starting to think that crew chiefs are being snubbed worse than drivers and I would like to see more work done in that regard soon. Bodine was probably the worst of these four drivers in the Cup Series alone. However, a lot of people would argue that Bodine’s main legacy is his dominance on the Modified tour. Bodine has 97 verified NASCAR Modified wins according to The Third Turn the last time I checked (or maybe it was Auto Racing Research Associates where I got that number, I don’t remember). That number is probably an undercount because not all Modified results in that era were archived, and the same goes for the Late Model Sportsman tour, where he had at least 26 wins in 1980 and 1981 before it became the Busch Series. Even though I do not think his Cup career was as strng as Biffle’s, Irvan’s, or Richmond’s, I think his overall career as a NASCAR driver was greater when considering his entire volume of work. And obviously, saving Hendrick Motorsports by winning at Martinsville was a massive impact.

5. Greg Biffle: Biffle was the sentimental favorite for induction last year because he just died, so a lot of people were pissed that Jeff Burton got in over him as a result. I agree that Biffle is better than Burton even though Burton had slightly more wins than Biffle and was slightly higher in my teammate model when considering he was much older at the start of his career, the Cup Series generally had better competition in his peak years, and he also won Roush’s first two titles in the Craftsman Truck Series and Busch Series, which should add a little extra. It seems the Hall voters chose Burton instead because of some combination of his safety advocacy and his announcing, but that feels murky to me since I remember at the time Brett Bodine was the #1 safety advocate back then and I don’t consider Burton one of the all-time great analyses. I definitely would’ve taken Biffle over Burton, but stepping back, I do not think he was the second-best name on the ballot after Kevin Harvick, even if I think the choice they actually made was worse. He didn’t have so much more longevity than Irvan and Richmond really even though he had a full career. I definitely think Irvan and Richmond were more talented than him, but I do have to give it to him because he had the full career.

6. Ernie Irvan: It seems his legacy has really taken a hit in the social media age, and I can see why. Because social media by its very nature accentuates the negative since whatever creates the most outrage captures the most likes, it seems like more and more people (including drivers) are judged by their worst moments. So people online act like Chris Buescher is a great driver and not the merely pretty good driver that he is because he makes fewer mistakes than anyone else, while Juan Pablo Montoya’s entire career got defined by idiotic NASCAR fans for a mechanical failure that caused him to crash into a jet dryer, or people gleefully celebrate any time Kyle Larson crashes because he once claimed to be better than Max Verstappen, which people misinterpreted as him saying he was the best in the world (knowing how dumb Larson often is, he probably thinks Brad Sweet is the best driver in the world or something; no offense to Sweet who will certainly make the list but lol). It feels like Irvan’s checkers-or-wreckers style is something that fans used to celebrate but now detest. In a world where people seem to be judged by their worst moments than their best, he had a lot of awful moments and triggered a lot of stupid crashes. But at his best, he was an electrifying talent who really elevated the usually-hapless Morgan-McClure team into a borderline powerhouse, then gave Robert Yates the best year of its history after he took over the car at the 1993 Southern 500 until his crash the following year at Michigan. While a number of drivers have survived near-fatal crashes and even won titles after them (Brian Redman, Niki Lauda) I can’t think of another driver in NASCAR history who was given 10% chance to win after a crash who came back to win, even though by that point he was no longer as fast as Dale Jarrett. His story was pretty special, but you won’t notice that if you think whoever crashes the least is the best driver, which now seems to be a popular fan fallacy.

7. Tim Richmond: Richmond’s short but sweet career was very similar to Irvan’s. Another thing both of them share is that they were two of the best passers in Cup Series history, with Richmond’s 58.23% lead change percentage ranking second to Tony Stewart since 1985 and Irvan’s 55.39% not so far behind (compare Dale Earnhardt’s 54.14% and Jeff Gordon’s 51.20% for instance). They each had a steady buildup to an explosive career year, then won in unthinkable circumstances, with Richmond’s back-to-back wins while dying of AIDS arguably being a more impressive accomplishment than Irvan’s wins after recovering from his injury. But I ultimately placed Irvan higher than Richmond because I simply think Irvan’s 1993-1994 run was better than Richmond’s 1986 even if Richmond won 7 times while Irvan only won 3 (or 5 if you count the 1993 wins). Dale Jarrett replaced Irvan at Robert Yates Racing in 1995 and did significantly worse, while Richmond was only barely better than Bodine if you look at literally anything except wins or the actual points standings in 1986. To Richmond’s credit, it’s remarkable that he managed to win twice in what was a pretty weak 1987 season for Hendrick when the three full-time cars only combined for one points win, that being Darrell Waltrip’s rock ‘em sock ‘em win at Martinsville where he turned Terry Labonte into Dale Earnhardt. A lot of people think NASCAR is intentionally snubbing Richmond because of the notoriety of a driver with AIDS or because of the controversy over his failed drug test or whatever. If that were the case, why did he make the 50 Greatest Drivers list? For all the talk about how much he is ignored, he still got a 30 for 30 show. I think he’ll make it, probably before Irvan will, who in my opinion has been much more ignored lately.

8. Randy Dorton: Perhaps this is too low since he was Rick Hendrick’s chief engine builder for most of their first 20 years when they ascended into becoming the biggest powerhouse, but my tendency is to rate the engine builders who also served as crew chiefs or car owners (like Robert Yates, Waddell Wilson, or the aforementioned Elliott) much higher than people who serve in the engine builder role only. I think most of the voters agree, which is why they haven’t voted him in yet, but I may be slightly ignorant here.

9. Sam Ard: While I’m not in favor of just any old Busch Series champion, during the time when Ard was competing there, the ex-Late Model Sportsman series wasn’t really that much of a feeder series for the Cup Series, and indeed, very few of the Sportsman/Busch stars actually went on to compete in the Cup Series, choosing to remain stars in a smaller pool. At this time in the ‘80s, it was understandable because there was more money to be made dominating a minor division than being a mediocre performer in a major one. And Ard certainly was not a mediocre performer as he won two of the three Busch Series titles he contested, and his ten wins were the most for any non-Cup driver until Connor Zilisch last year. Now, I don’t think he was as good as Jack Ingram, who bookended Ard’s two titles in 1983 and 1984. Ingram, after all, won three Late Model Sportsman titles before that and Ard did not while Ingram had at least 183 wins including the Sportsman era to Ard’s 97. They are not close, although two Ard’s credit he simultaneously won back-to-back titles in the NASCAR Weekly Series Mid-Atlantic division where Ingram also competed in 1982 and 1983, a significant accomplishment that is underplayed somewhat at a time when there was a lot of crossover between the Busch races and the ex-Sportsman races that fell off the Busch schedule and were added to the NASCAR Weekly Series schedule. Even if Ard wasn’t as close to Ingram as people think he was, it’s time to think about inducting him. (But I feel far, far differently about Randy LaJoie and Jack Sprague.)

10. Buddy Parrott: Okay, this last spot was a tough decision between five or so very similarly placed crew chiefs: Buddy, his son Todd, Tim Brewer, Cole Pearn, and Rodney Childers. I could have gone for any of them, and I definitely think I’d take any of them over my next two driver choices (Neil Bonnett and Sterling Marlin) so I’m going to go for the one who didn’t win a title, but I have my reasons. Brewer has 53 wins and I suspect he’d be high on most people’s lists. While I support his induction, I kind of view him as the anti-Jimmy Fennig in a way since it seems like every driver he had did better with another crew chief. He had a 10-win title season with Cale Yarborough and a 12-win title season with Darrell Waltrip, but I would say Yarborough’s strongest relationship with a crew chief was Herb Nab while Waltrip’s was with Jeff Hammond. Brewer won with many other drivers, but Tim Richmond and Geoff Bodine were better with Harry Hyde, Neil Bonnett was better with Leonard Wood, Terry Labonte was better with Dale Inman and arguably even Gary DeHart, and Bill Elliott was better than his brother Ernie (who is routinely less-regarded as a racing figure when he was actually more important). Junior Johnson deserves to have some crew chiefs inducted including Brewer, but I think overall he was less important to the Johnson organization than Nab and barely more important than Hammond. Childers and Pearn still read as too new to me and they are each too linked to one and only one driver respectively (Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex, Jr.) while Buddy worked with a lot of different drivers. For a while, I thought Todd, who started as Buddy’s car chief when Buddy was Rusty Wallace’s crew chief at Penske in 1993 and 1994, had eclipsed Buddy, especially when considering he turned a previously-middling Dale Jarrett into arguably Jeff Gordon’s chief rival, but I think you have to start with Buddy first. What a lot of these crew chiefs weirdly have in common is two wins with mediocre-to-awful drivers: Reutimann with Childers, Elliott Sadler with Todd, but I think Buddy being responsible for Derrike Cope’s two-win 1990 really takes the cake here. And that is only a small part of his legacy as his 47 wins include 21 with Waltrip at DiGard, 19 with Wallace at Penske, 2 with Richard Petty at the Mike Curb team during the one year he didn’t race at Petty Enterprises, and finally, he gave Jeff Burton his first three wins for Roush in 1997. With 20 years between his first and last wins, he actually had more longevity than Brewer, even if Brewer’s 53 wins eclipsed Parrott’s 47. Parrott’s biggest accomplishment in my opinion is rather unheralded. By being the first crew chief to hire a pit crew trainer, he was instrumental in the professionalization of the pit crews and turning them into real athletes in their own right, rather than just some guys who knew a guy who knew a guy like the pit crews usually were before. That was one of the main factors that resulted in Wallace’s dominance in ‘93 and ‘94 and helping eventually make Penske a powerhouse. I feel both DiGard Racing and Team Penske need more representation than just their drivers, and this would kill two birds with one stone.

Pioneer Ballot:

1. Smokey Yunick: He has been my #1 snub every single year for the last decade and still has not made a ballot, presumably because he talked a lot of trash about NASCAR in his memoir. Not only was he the first crew chief to win two Cup Series titles with Herb Thomas, he was arguably a more legendary figure than Thomas was as he defined the crew chief role and became the model that future crew chiefs aspired to be in a way that Thomas really wasn’t. He also is credited with 9 wins as a car owner, including the 1961 Daytona 500 with Marvin Panch. Although it seems to be unclear whether he was the car owner for Fireball Roberts’s 1962 Daytona 500 winning entry or not, he was definitely the crew chief, he became the first two-time Daytona 500 winner as a crew chief that year, and his wide-ranging automotive interests extended far beyond just that and his vaunted Best Damn Garage in Town. It’s difficult to determine his exact win count since there was very little reporting on who the crew chiefs were in very early NASCAR seasons, but his impact was undeniable.

2. Dick Hutcherson: Like Ernie Elliott, I placed him so highly because he was a man who wore many hats. His Cup Series career was certainly impressive, as his 14 wins in 103 starts give him one of the best-ever winning percentage and his nine wins in a rookie are the best ever (even though NASCAR decided not to make him eligible for Rookie of the Year because he was a past champion of the rival IMCA tour and series have often made weird distinctions about rookie eligibility for incoming drivers from rival tours), but I’m not entirely sure I would induct him just based on that as he faced some of the worst competition of all time in his nine-win 1965 season, and then he retired not long after that. However, what makes him an obvious lock in my mind is that he followed that up to be either the crew chief or team manager for David Pearson’s back-to-back titles for Holman-Moody in 1968 and 1969. It’s murky whether Jake Elder or Hutcherson was his crew chief in those years (I’ve seen both listed and they might have been co-crew chiefs), but he was definitely heavily involved. Few top drivers other than Lee Petty ever also served in the crew chief role, and other than Petty, he’s the only Cup driver to actually win a championship in that role. That alone makes him a lock, but that is not all! Oh, no. That is not all. After all that was done, he and Eddie Pagan teamed up to go into the chassis construction business and their Hutcherson-Pagan chassis dominated for a while and were the basis for many other successful chassis. Do the voters even know all this? Slam dunk.

3. Herb Nab: Because Brewer remained a public figure in the NASCAR garage and Nab didn’t, Brewer seems to be the crew chief most associated with Junior Johnson’s success, but I would give Nab a significant edge. Although I don’t think he was as important as Yunick, Nab probably has more Cup Series wins than any other crew chief sitting outside (racing-reference.info says 74, but who knows? I don’t trust that site to have proper documentation for information on crew chiefs when I’ve struggled to find it myself.) After winning 14 races with Fred Lorenzen in 1963 and 1964, which included Lorenzen becoming the first driver to win $100,000 in a season the former year and the first to win five straight races the latter, he then moved to Junior Johnson’s team, where Johnson tied Ned Jarrett for the most wins with 13 in 1965, the last season he competed regularly. He remained with Johnson as a car owner for Lee Roy Yarbrough’s 7-win season in 1969 when he became the first driver to win the Daytona 500, World 600, and Southern 500 in the same year, and stayed there through Bobby Allison’s 1972 when he won 10 times and set his consecutive races led streak, and Johnson’s first two titles with Cale Yarborough in 1976 and 1977. He then left to join Harry Ranier’s team, where he discovered engine builder Waddell Wilson, who has already been inducted. It’s kind of weird he was inducted first, but the problem is nobody seems to talk about Nab anymore. They definitely should.

4. John Holman: I don’t talk about it a great deal, but I’m a big fan of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and my favorite podcast is Who Cares about the Rock Hall?, hosted by two comedians Joe Kwaczala and Kristen Studard. I’ve even been on it! It’s probably one of the reasons I sweep up the pop music questions at both bar trivia and LearnedLeague so frequently. But one of the things the Rock Hall does that I like is inducting two bands as one collective when their histories are inextricably linked and you really can’t judge one without the other. The three bands they inducted this way are Parliament/Funkadelic, The Small Faces/The Faces, and Joy Division/New Order this year. Those bands’ legacies are so intertwined you can’t really judge them independently of each other. More people should do this. It’s beyond stupid that NASCAR does not allow collectives to be inducted, and ushered in Glen Wood before Leonard just because he had a driving career, and inducted Ralph Moody without inducting Holman just because he had a driving career. Neither Wood or Moody would have gotten in without their role as co-partners in their highly successful teams. The Wood Brothers’ legacy and Holman-Moody’s legacy are so intertwined that it was really dumb they decided to induct the drivers first when neither of them would have had any business being inducted if not for their role as team owners. Let’s fix this, please.

5. Fonty Flock: Probably the best Cup driver of this era not inducted who only served as a Cup driver, Flock was the dominant driver of the 1951 season but only lost the title due to a relatively poor finish at the Southern 500, which carried a disproportionate amount of points. He also won the most races on the NASCAR Modified tour in 1948 with 15 (when that series was effectively analogous to the Cup Series since that is where all the top NASCAR drivers raced before the Cup Series was introduced in 1949). In 1949, he won the Modified title, and although Cup had overtaken it in importance, the Modified title was still pretty important that year since most of the NASCAR races that season were affiliated with that tour when there were only eight Cup Series races. He was also an extremely unlucky driver, as when I attempted to determine TNLs for old drivers, I think he had about 27 or something even though he only has 19 wins, which makes the fact that he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame and on the 50/75 Greatest Drivers lists much more obvious. My model is also extremely kind to him as he ranks 5th overall with a rating of .328 and two of the drivers he’s behind (Roger McCluskey and Paul Goldsmith) had their primary stock car accomplishments in the USAC Stock Car Series, so he only trails Lee Petty and his brother Tim amongst primarily NASCAR drivers, and they’ve been in the Hall for a long time. I think he’s been snubbed from everything and his career has been erased just because of France family bitterness over him accusing them of stealing Talladega from him when he discovered the plot of land and they promised to offer him a cut of the deal before ultimately refusing to do so. So, he’s obviously deserving, but it will probably never happen.

6. Ralph Earnhardt: I used to be an opponent of this, believe it or not. When he was announced to the original 50 Greatest Drivers list in 1998, I really didn’t get it. I had a 50th anniversary edition of Inside NASCAR magazine and it did not do a good job of explaining why on earth he deserved to be on that list (or, for that matter, Ray Hendrick). I was convinced for quite some time that Ralph only made the list because insiders only wanted to make Dale happy or something. Now, of course, I understand why. I don’t think I was aware until the relatively recent past that all the data for the pre-1985 Modified tour and pre-1982 Late Model Sportsman tour were largely lost to history, so we may never have complete counts for Modified or Sportsman wins for the drivers who competed in that era. The fact that Hendrick never won a title and Earnhardt only won a single Sportsman title makes them seem less important if you don’t have knowledge of the full volume of their wins, and that used to be difficult to obtain if you weren’t there for it. Now, I have archived all the Sportsman and Modified wins from the Third Turn that we know about, and I can confirm that he has an absolute crapload of wins (easily more than drivers like Jerry Cook or Hershel McGriff, even Jack Ingram). My current counts for him according to my last count on The Third Turn (and the counts on that site do fluctuate from time to time) are: 127 Late Model Sportsman wins, 72 Limited Sportsman wins and a title in 1959 (I admit I’d never heard of that series), and 12 Modified wins. Okay, now I’m sold. I wuz wrong. I still wouldn’t take him over his son or his grandson though.

7. Jake Elder: Okay, he either has zero, one, or two titles. I can’t really tell. It depends entirely on whether Elder or Hutcherson was Pearson’s crew chief when he won those titles for Holman-Moody in 1968 and 1969, and I don’t think I’ve seen a convincing consensus on that, but what he does have are a lot of wins over a long period of time. After his success with Pearson, he bookended Darrell Waltrip’s career with his first and last pairs of wins, three of which came when Waltrip was an owner-driver. He then served as Benny Parsons’s crew chief for his best three-year run before becoming Dale Earnhardt’s crew chief in his rookie season, and staying as his crew chief for nearly half of his eventual 1980 championship campaign. After that season, he mostly fell off as his shopping his venerable suitcase to one team after another eventually hindered his career, but still he somehow won a race at Atlanta with Morgan Shepherd in 1986 in a car owned by Jack Beebe. Do you know who Jack Beebe is? Most of you do not.

8. Ray Elder: Elder was nominated on the Modern Era ballot last year. This is stupid. He belongs in, but NASCAR certainly made the effort to push Larry Phillips in through the Pioneer Ballot even though Phillips’s entire relevant NASCAR career started after Elder’s ended. Phillips’s entire career as far as NASCAR is concerned was in the modern era, while exactly half of Elder’s success came before and half after the switch from the pioneer era to the modern era, so he has a very strong case he should be placed on the Pioneer Ballot instead. (So, honestly, does Harry Hyde who had his primary performance legacy in the Pioneer Era even if his cultural legacy was largely in the Modern Era, and I hope that happens, too.) As with Ard, Elder dominated the NASCAR West tour at a time when it was more lucrative to dominate a small pond than compete nationally. The Cup Series hardly raced out west so it was also far more expensive. When it did compete on the West Coast, Elder was remarkably successful, winning two Cup races in Winston West equipment at Riverside. Elder is linked with his supposed rival Hershel McGriff, which also explains why he should be on the Pioneer Ballot instead since McGriff started in the ‘50s. But they weren’t even close to rivals. Elder won 47 races and 6 Winston West titles. McGriff, who is already in, won 34 races. Elder won the title the one time they both competed full-time in 1972, although to be fair, McGriff won 12 races to Elder’s 7. I’m sure McGriff could have come close to matching what Elder did in that period if he hadn’t raced part-time most of it, but he didn’t, and Elder has the superior record because McGriff simply chose not to show up much of the time. And Elder’s two Cup wins had much deeper fields than McGriff’s four. Yet McGriff makes all NASCAR’s lists and Elder has been perpetually snubbed. Do the right thing and put him on the Pioneer Ballot, where he’ll actually get the votes someday! Although I guess his elder unrelated Elder should get in first.

9. Jim Paschal: The odd erasure of his legacy is puzzling. With 25 wins, he is the winningest driver who never made the 50 or 75 Greatest Drivers list and he only made a single Hall of Fame ballot. I guess he’s docked somewhat because he was teammates with Richard Petty at Petty Enterprises and Petty blew him out, but then, Petty blew everybody out. Paschal’s .172 rating in my stock car model certainly suggests he’s a Hall of Famer when you look at who is rated just above (Matt Kenseth, Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, Kurt Busch) or below him (Denny Hamlin). Usually, there’s some reason NASCAR ignores a driver, whether its France family anger that Fonty Flock accused them of stealing Talladega from him or Speedy Thompson’s intentionally causing a wreck that ended Herb Thomas’s career or Jack Smith’s racism or Lee Roy Yarbrough’s attempting to strangle his mother or Tim Richmond’s AIDS. I can’t think of what the issue here is. Any ideas?

10. Tiny Lund: There are a bunch of morally ambiguous folks I could’ve put in this last spot instead. Honestly, in terms of historical importance, Carl Kiekhaefer probably should be ranked really high but I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it because he undeniably one of the biggest schmucks in the racing business, and I’m okay with them ignoring Thompson, Smith, and I guess Yarbrough too for the above-listed reasons (although Yarbrough was certainly way better than the other two, but not as good as their crew chief Nab who they’ve also historically ignored, so whatever). I was going to argue for Bob Welborn but Michael Finley, a Frontstretch writer I admire, kind of talked me out of it by uncovering his vehement racism towards Wendell Scott, which was comparable to Jack Smith’s and saying that he couldn’t endorse Welborn or Banjo Matthews for the same reason. (I’ve decided not to consider morality for the 1,000 greatest drivers list, but I suppose for the Hall of Fame it should matter somewhat, even if it doesn’t have an explicit morality clause like the Baseball Hall of Fame does.) There are enough worthy people they’re ignoring who don’t have bad blood on their name, so I guess I’ll pivot. Lund is very similar to Welborn in that he had a handful of Cup wins (5 vs. Welborn’s 9) and he even won a widely-celebrated underdog Daytona 500, but his real legacy is elsewhere. By my count, he has 79 verified NASCAR wins (a lot more than Welborn), including 3 Cup wins, 41 Grand National/Grand American wins (2 of which also counted as Cup wins), 5 Grand National East wins and a title there, at least 27 Late Model Sportsman wins and 2 NASCAR Modified wins, and finally 1 NASCAR West Series win. He won in pretty much every NASCAR division even though he only dabbled in Cup, and had at least some NASCAR win every year from 1963-1975, and his legacy was way bigger than his five Cup wins suggests. I feel better about this . He made the 50 Greatest Drivers list for a while. Hopefully, he’ll make the Hall someday too.

LEO KINNUNEN……………….FINLAND

Born: August 5, 1943
Died: July 26, 2017

Best year: 1972
Best drive: 1970 Targa Florio at the Circuito delle Madonie

One of Finland’s most versatile racers, Kinnunen was initially successful in rallying, ice racing, and autocross, but his best performances came in sports car racing. In the 1967 Finnish Rally Championship, he lost a tiebreaker to Simo Lampinen and actually beat future World Rally Champion Hannu Mikkola while driving for car importer Antti Aarnio-Wihuri’s eponymous AAW team. He then finished second to eventual World Champion Jochen Rindt in the debut race of the European Can-Am clone Nordic Challenge Cup, winning the last two races to take the 1969 championship.

These successes landed Kinnunen a factory Porsche ride in 1970 for John Wyer Automotive alongside F1 star Pedro Rodríguez. Although the team heavily favored Rodríguez, Kinnunen shockingly won his World Sportscar Championship debut at the 24 Hours of Daytona and they combined for three other wins. Although there was no WSC driver’s championship back then, they were primarily responsible for Porsche’s manufacturer’s championship. Kinnunen stepped out of Rodríguez’s shadow with a career-defining drive at the Targa Florio. Although they didn’t win, Kinnunen handled most of the driving after Rodríguez fell ill and drove from fourth to second thanks to a 33.5 minute final lap around the dangerous 44.7 mile circuit, breaking Vic Elford’s lap record by 1.5 minutes; the record still stands.

Kinnunen lost his JWA ride as he was negotiating for an F1 ride with Team Lotus. Rindt, who dominated that year’s championship, pushed for his then-manager Bernie Ecclestone to hire him but talks collapsed after Rindt’s fatal crash and Ecclestone offered him a ride for no pay. Instead seeking a salary, Kinnunen returned to the Nordic Challenge Cup for AAW, now renamed Interserie, where he won three consecutive titles and 11 races from 1971-1973, despite having to witness Rodríguez’s fatal Interserie crash directly in front of him. He also finished third at the 1000 Lakes Rally in the inaugural WRC season in 1973. Kinnunen finally got his first F1 opportunity in a Surtees for a privateer team branded AAW in 1974, but Aarnio-Wihuri had no involvement. The car had a damaged monocoque and suspension and was 80 kilograms overweight, which resulted in Kinnunen DNQing five of his six attempts. Nonetheless, he became the first Finnish F1 driver and the last F1 driver who used an open-face helmet. His international career never really recovered after this failure.

Kinnunen was highly rated in his heyday by many insiders, some of whom considered him Finland’s greatest circuit driver, even over their World Champions. I can’t go that far and believe his refusal to commit to a single discipline and failure to learn English during his peak era prevented him from fulfilling his potential. It was probably a mistake for him to turn down Lotus immediately after Rindt’s title, but Interserie certainly proved more lucrative. Nonetheless, the respect he had from legends like Rindt and Rodríguez says a lot, and it’s hard to argue he didn’t have the talent level of an F1 winner even if his actual F1 stint was a fiasco.

Year-by-year: 1967: C, 1969: C, 1970: E, 1971: C+, 1972: E, 1973: E-, 1976: C

Gordon was the first all-time great to emerge in my years as a fan. Indeed, the first NASCAR race I watched was during the summer of his breakout season of 1994. It wasn’t the Brickyard 400. No, it was the Pepsi 400 at Daytona where Jimmy Spencer outdueled Ernie Irvan in a photo finish in a car with an illegal intake manifold, which NASCAR allowed him to get away with since they wanted his sponsor McDonald’s to not leave the sport (at least that was the popular conspiracy theory). Gordon did not feature too heavily in that race, so I’m not sure whether I’d actually heard of him until 1995. I think the Daytona race was the only race I watched in 1994 at the time, and weirdly I’m pretty sure Loudon was in 1995. Gordon did win that race, so that was the first of his wins I watched. I think I only watched the 1996 races at Watkins Glen and the Atlanta finale, but by the end of the season, I was following most other races on nascar.com timing & scoring. Not sure why I wasn’t watching regularly even though I considered myself a fan at the time. I don’t really remember. 1997 was the first season I watched regularly, so Gordon had a large presence in my mind when he dominated the first two seasons I regularly watched.

You might think because I was such a young fan that I might have been attracted to the youngest driver, but nope! There was one vendor at the New York State Fair some year who had some NASCAR memorabilia booth or something and he assumed I was a Gordon fan. I told him that nope, I was a Dale Earnhardt fan. Which was true, albeit for the stupidest possible reason. It wasn’t about his titles or his image or his persona. Nope, Earnhardt finished third in that Daytona race and drove the #3 car and I enjoyed that numerical symbiosis. That was it. However, once I learned about his tendency to wreck other drivers in about 1997, I pivoted hard in the other direction and became a Mark Martin fan, in other words the cleanest and most boring top driver (well, maybe he was still less boring than Dale Jarrett). Then, when Tony Stewart started in 1999, I became an instant fan of his for about a year until the next year when he really started increasingly showing his ass. I think I switched back to Martin for the next bit there. Most cringeworthily, Ryan Newman also became my favorite driver in his rookie season in 2002 shortly after I started seriously embracing my nerd identity for the first time and I really liked that he went to college and had an engineering background in addition to his meteoric rise. That did not last long. By the time I started watching again in the second half of 2004, I no longer cared about Newman and I grew to dislike him and Stewart and Earnhardt over time. For most of my adulthood, I didn’t really have favorite drivers often. For a while, I was saying Juan Pablo Montoya was my favorite Cup driver because I really admired him in CART, but I gave up on that as he faded to irrelevance in 2011-2012. Currently, I consider Tyler Reddick my favorite driver, but for most of the past 25 years I didn’t have one. I know most people would criticize me for the endless bandwagon jumping and not sticking to one driver, but actually I think it made me a better and more knowledgeable fan of the sport. By not viewing racing events vicariously through one driver’s perspective, it allowed me to develop a more objective view of the sport than a lot of other younger fans who were more like “my driver, right or wrong.”

Or sometimes even older ones, like that RacingOne poster I mentioned in the McLaughlin post who was calling every week for Robbie Loomis to be fired in 2005 as if Loomis was the problem rather than Jimmie Johnson just overtaking him. It took me too long to finally acknowledge Johnson overtook him. I might have acknowledged it as early as 2009, but I don’t think so. I think I was still arguing Gordon was better due to making Hendrick a powerhouse and his greater versatility long after it was tenable on the racing-reference comments sections, even though I never liked either Gordon or Johnson. But I’ve wised up since then. By the time I started tabulating lead change data and realized that Johnson was one of the best passers in Cup history, while Gordon was a good but not spectacular one, I have never since entertained the argument that Gordon might have akshually been better. For the record, my all-time top ten is this in order: Earnhardt, Johnson, Petty, Pearson, Allison, Gordon, Yarborough, Harvick, and then pick two of Busch, Stewart, and Waltrip for the last spots (I can’t decide between them since those are basically all the same to me). But I know there are hundreds of fans still battling in the trenches like the Japanese holdouts in the Pacific after World War II that Gordon was really better. Get over it, guys. He wasn’t (even if he was obviously more important historically and as a cultural figure).

But for all my ever-rotating casts of favorite drivers, you might’ve noticed one name who didn’t show up. That’s right. Like so many others, Gordon was my least favorite driver in the ‘90s. I’m going to write a similar but shorter version of this in the entry itself, but people hated him for a myriad of reasons. Some people hated him for being the first all-time great who wasn’t from the South, while for others, it was his bland yuppie persona and mainstreaming of corporate PR speak, the fact that his dominance made the sport more boring than it needed to be, the fact that many fans felt he hadn’t paid his dues because he landed an elite car at a much younger age than most other eventual stars, his arguable religious hypocrisy, and a really stupid undercurrent of homophobia. A lot of people argued that Gordon was hated because he won too much, but I don’t think his dominance fully explained it per se. Richard Petty and Bill Elliott dominated at times and fans never hated them. No, it’s some of those other factors and I want to look back on them.

Hating Gordon for his background was stupid. While he was the first non-Southern driver to conquer NASCAR on such a monomaniacal scale, it had been a truly national league for decades prior, even if many of the top West Coast and Northeastern drivers elected to compete in the regional Winston West and Modified tours rather than the Cup Series. He may have broken the door down for a wave of drivers from non-traditional backgrounds like sprint cars or non-traditional regions outside the Southeast to get more major Cup Series opportunities, but it’s not like drivers from these regions weren’t welcomed before. Ken Schrader was literally his teammate and he replaced Tim Richmond at Hendrick Motorsports, who also came from an open wheel background. Hendrick was always interested in looking for drivers outside the traditional late model background, and that hasn’t changed. Unworthy reason for the hate, but it was definitely one of them.

His corporate persona, on the other hand, is a great reason why he rubbed people the wrong way. Hendrick has kind of always been renowned for erasing any speck of personality from his drivers and attempting to fit them into a corporate cookie-cutter mold. This has been a trend from the very beginning, as from what I have read, Geoff Bodine was the first driver to routinely rattle off lists of sponsors in post-race interviews before that became a universally accepted technique in later years, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising Gordon did the same thing. It did seem like drivers were really being incentivized in the period of Gordon’s rise to stop showing personality or edge as big money really ballooned in NASCAR starting in the ‘90s so sponsor mandates became more and more important as a result. I also think Texaco successfully convincing Robert Yates to fire Ernie Irvan after he got into a barroom brawl in 1997 played a major role here. Gordon’s squeaky-clean dominance when combined with Irvan getting fired by corporate mandate, I think, convinced a lot of people they had to follow the corporate line, and made the drivers more boring than they needed to be. This is a good reason to hate him.

Connected with this was his overt displays of religiosity. If you think Chandler Smith is bad, you seriously have not listened to enough ‘90s Gordon interviews. Back when NASCAR was regularly marketing itself as a family sport, his supermodel wife Brooke placed Bible quotes in his cars before every race and he would thank God after winning every race. While Lake Speed, who helped co-found Motor Racing Research, seemed to be a more sincere and much more humble Christian, Gordon’s displays of religiosity seemed over-the-top, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. Like after he pulls a bump-and-run on Rusty Wallace to win at Bristol (and note that back then, bumps-and-run were considered dirty driving and not a more universally accepted technique like nowadays) he thanks the Lord for guiding him to victory. Half the time, it’s like he talked like Lake Speed and acted like Dale Earnhardt, and that was one of the main reasons I hated him, too.

As for the people who argued Gordon never “paid his dues”, there is something to be said for that maybe. For the past couple decades prior to Gordon, it seemed like the top teams weren’t really interested in hiring anyone before their late twenties. Teams went for proven, experienced commodities instead of potential and even globally, only F1 teams really ever attempted to embrace young rising stars as much as they should have. For a lot of the ‘80s, Busch Series stars were hardly advancing to the Cup Series at all, and even if they did, they often didn’t last long (Larry Pearson). Sure, Dale Jarrett and Mark Martin made it but Jarrett likely would have made it to Cup regardless of what path he chose since his father Ned was a champion driver and leading announcer and Martin was already something of a proven commodity based on his first NASCAR stint in the early ‘80s before he even raced in Busch. Nobody really thought of the Busch Series as much of a development league until the early ‘90s, and Gordon really helped change all that.

Gordon was the first Busch Series driver to land a factory development deal from Michael Kranefuss and Ford, who arranged for him to land the Bill Davis ride. Martin had been previously driving for Davis in Busch until Roush decided to add a Busch Series team and Gordon was his replacement. Ford did not have much of a presence in minor-league NASCAR and was looking to change that; indeed, in the first ten years of the Busch Series, Martin was Ford’s only winner and Gordon in 1992 became the second. Although Gordon was expected to land a factory Ford ride, he hadn’t signed any Cup Series deal until Rick Hendrick discovered him and poached him from Ford in 1993. This show of disloyalty was seen as diabolical among Ford fans, although to be honest, there were tons of shows of disloyalty in this era, so I’m not sure it really stands out. It seemed like Gordon was eventually being groomed for a Roush ride, presumably to replace Wally Dallenbach, Jr. in the #16 car alongside Martin, and he might’ve done so even for 1993 except that Gordon wanted to bring Ray Evernham along as his crew chief and Roush said no and Hendrick said yes. Did Gordon actually betray Ford or did Ford betray him because the likeliest team that would’ve signed him didn’t allow him input? This is a more complicated story than some people make it.

A lot of people felt like Gordon hadn’t paid his dues because he’d never won a Busch Series title, but now we know better. The drivers who eventually become Cup Series stars are by and large the drivers who have the fastest trajectory of improvement, typically at a younger age than their fellow contenders (okay, Jarrett is a weird exception, but I digress). It doesn’t matter whether they win the title or not. It seems a lot of people even now seem to think you need two years in the O’Reilly Series to be “ready for Cup”. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. It was just an informal tradition that the teams believed matters. It worked for Gordon because 1991 was Gordon’s first ever full-time year in stock cars, so it makes sense that the dominance he showed in sprint cars prior to that finally showed up in 1992, when he set a record 11 poles and led a series-high 1,160 laps even though he neither won the title (Joe Nemechek) nor the most races (Robert Pressley). He was clearly the best driver even though he was also the youngest, but people still insisted for years afterward he hadn’t paid his dues because he didn’t win the title, even though the Latford points system never properly weighted performance, the Busch Series points system was even worse since neither it nor the Craftsman Truck Series even had the bonus points for leading until 1998, and he was easily the most dominant driver that season for a manufacturer that had habitually struggled in the series before (they struggled so badly that even Davey Allison mostly raced GM brands in his Busch Series starts). So bottom line: it wasn’t that Gordon hadn’t “paid his dues”. He obviously deserved it and the team owners were just being stupid. Once all the other eventual stars who developed like him arrived, Gordon looked nowhere near as special, and his main advantage is that he was the first driver to break down the doors and it took all the other team owners years to figure out how to properly recreate it.

And finally, there was the stupidest reason for the Gordon hatred. His squeaky, high-pitched voice and rainbow car really inspired a lot of idiotic redneck fans to think he was gay. In that highly homophobic decade, there was even an anti-Gordon group called “Fans Against Gordon”. Har de har har. Real clever. All that stuff should’ve been unacceptable but a lot of it was pretty accepted back then especially because so many people hated him for a litany of other reasons. It always seemed to me like Gordon was wildly overcompensating in response to that particular backlash what with his supermodel wives and all. I never thought he was gay, and who should’ve cared if he was?

As for me, I guess it was mainly three things. The religious hypocrisy, Ray Evernham, and my rocky relationship with my dad. Even though my dad was a boomer and I was a millennial, he was a Gordon fan while I was an Earnhardt/Martin fan back then. My dad was suing my mom for custody both in 1995-1996 and then again in 1998 and there were many weekends especially in the latter year when he would drill me for information, which I viewed as trying to compel me to share information that he could use against Mom, then I wouldn’t say anything, then he would yell at me for not saying anything, etc..., etc… There were many weekends I was at his apartment and this is all we did for hours with watching races or other sporting events being the only thing that broke the tension. So you can imagine how miserable the 1998 season was for me considering Martin was having one of his best seasons while Gordon was still throttling him in the championship, because it felt like Dad was winning. This might’ve been what a lot of it was for me. The summer Michigan race when Gordon won his fourth race in a row may have enraged me more than any other, because Martin and Ernie Irvan (my then-second favorite driver and my mom’s favorite in the brief period she was following NASCAR) had dominated all day until a late-race caution allowed Gordon to catch up and take the lead shortly after the restart. It was… unbearable. Obviously, I’m over it now.

In retrospect, I think I hated Evernham way more than I ever hated Gordon. Sure, he was an all-time great crew chief and so on, but his motivational mumbo-jumbo that he co-opted from Vince Lombardi and Pat Riley was beyond vomitous, to cop a phrase I stole from Mark Prindle. The stupid, smarmy motivational aphorisms he popularized got a lot of press at the time and made good soundbites, but I typically found them offensive and I don’t know if I can articulate why. “Refuse to lose.” “Winning is everything.” That stupid chart that got trotted out every two months in the era of peak Gordon: “From Nobody to Upstart, from Upstart to Winner, from Winner to Contender, from Contender to Champion, from Champion to Dynasty.” I always wanted to finish that series with “from Dynasty to Emperor of a Small Mediterranean Protectorate” or something. Even Earnhardt, typically regarded as the most cutthroat driver ever, didn’t talk like that and was way more chill, mild-mannered, and reserved. Evernham’s motivational quotes sounded unhinged, but also unhinged in a cutesy way, and the whole Jeff Gordon package made me want to gag myself with a spoon. Evernham’s maxims reminded me of the grade school classrooms bedecked with posters displaying all these similarly smarmy rhyming adages meant to brainwash us into good behavior in the ‘90s: “If you believe, you can achieve! Never lie, cheat, or deal; always strike a fair deal! Abusers are losers! If you want a friend, be a friend!” Etc., etc., etc. Hated it then, probably hate it less now. At least the elementary school messages were in my opinion marginally more inspiring than Evernham’s. And I think Evernham really captured an insincerity permeating that era that I despised.

I think I finally started having more perspective in the 2000s. I think a lot of people finally started liking him then after he divorced Brooke, and he really toned down the religious evangelism after his divorce (clearly his hardcore evangelism was contrived and he was doing it to impress her, which makes me feel better about it). Once Evernham was no longer his crew chief and the #24 team finally acted normal, I was okay with that too. They tried to recapture a retro-Evernham vibe with the “Drive for Five”, but funny how that time it didn’t work. (One of my best friends on RacingOne, who I’m still friends with on Facebook, had the cringe username DRV45N05. Hey, I’m not one to talk! One of my old AOL screen names was RevTony20.) My dad and I basically moved past our issues. And while I tended to find most of the Gen X cohort of drivers either more obnoxiously insufferable or even blander than Gordon himself was, I didn’t hate him anymore, but I was still never a fan.

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I forgot to pay my life insurance - again - and my policy was suspended - again - so I had to apply for reinstatement - again. Second time in the last year this has happened. The issue is that I used to have a file where I stored all my credit card payment due dates with my insurance payment due dates and then all my credit cards went into default, so I never built up a good habit to remind myself to pay my life insurance policy on time. I am starting to wonder what I’m keeping it for since the odds of me either getting married or spreading my seed as a virginal 41-year-old are at this point unbelievably remote. However, I suppose I should keep it in case I outlive either of my parents. After that, maybe I’ll look for the right charity. Pretty soon, I know I also need to find a new family doctor and figure out whether my Medicaid has expired since I got my current job so I can have a physical as my counselor recommended. That’ll be pretty cumbersome, but at least it feels like most of my real-life obligations over the past year and a half will be finished after that except for continuing to clean stuff out of the house to prepare for when I lose it after Mom’s death.

My bar trivia team (Bartenders Always Right at Heritage Hill North in North Syracuse took the lead in the bar’s summer tournament after our second consecutive win. It certainly helped that the team we were chasing, Super Awesome Team, didn’t show up. Every week there are six regular rounds with five questions each. The first two rounds award 10 points per question, the next two award 20, and the final two 30. At the halfway point, there is an “Impossible Question”, which has a precise numeric answer that the trivia host, Nick, assumes no one will know the correct answer to. Whoever comes closest to the correct answer earns 30 points. I actually got it exactly correct once; that was really exciting! The fifth round has a hidden theme, where you have to guess what the theme is for 30 points and the sixth is a round where you have to identify things based on their pictures. I’m typically terrible at this, but during the picture round, there’s also an “under the covers” question where Nick (who also serves as the DJ for the bar during trivia hours) simultaneously plays a cover of some famous pop song and you have to identify the original artist who recorded it. I usually focus on that and let my teammates focus on the pictures since I almost never miss the songs and I usually miss the pictures.

Pop music is typically my best category and I think I’ve gotten the last 20 questions or so related to this category right. I joked to Nick when he played The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” that he should have asked who played that, probably correctly stating that I’m the only player who would’ve gotten that. There were so many of those pseudo-alternative one-hit wonders where the song was bigger than the band. Them, Nine Days, The Calling, Evan and Jaron, Blessid Union of Souls (I hate that this is the correct spelling of their name), Vertical Horizon, etc… I guess those last two weren’t one-hit wonders, but what they all share in common is that the songs were famous but the bands weren’t. But even if I consistently ace the pop music questions (unless they’re from like the last two years) and I usually also do well in more academic-leaning categories, I tend to suck at any categories having to do with animals, food, or current events. Obviously, my arfidiocy explains the second and I’ve stopped following the news for a while, so that explains the third. I have no good explanation for the first. Thankfully, my main teammate Bill does still follow the news so he can help me with that. I’m basically our team’s leader at this point but the bartenders occasionally feed us answers since they’re technically on our team (hence the name), without which we wouldn’t have won either round. Two weeks ago, the picture round was about identifying fish. I would have gotten exactly zero of them but the bartender pretty much single-handedly swept that round for us by herself. Then last week, she whispered the answer to the game-ending physics question and we were the only team to get it, which I likely would’ve gotten wrong. Because Super Awesome Team didn’t show up last week, I bet conservatively to make sure we took the lead in the tournament even if we got the question wrong and we accidentally won. Every week, a picture of the winning team is uploaded to Instagram. I’ve worn my custom-made Racermetrics shirt several times, so if you dig, you can find me decked up in racing analytics-branded gear at least one of the weeks we won. I will not be linking that since I do not wish to have an Instagram account. Facebook is bad enough; that’s even worse.

I’m presumably going to have to quit bar trivia, going to mass, or probably socializing with anyone in real life again if/when Mom comes home because I’ll have to watch over her so she doesn’t fall, but it’s been fun and I plan on showing up for all the remaining weeks in the summer tournament at least. If we win the Heritage Hill tournament, we’ll be eligible to compete at the city-wide finals, which I believe is held at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown (formerly the Hotel Syracuse). It has a fairly hefty cash entry fee since there are cash prizes. I think we’d likely be way outclassed by several of the teams at the other bars, but if we qualify, I’ll want to enter.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I wound up becoming a bar trivia regular once I learned that existed several years too late. I’d been regularly watching Jeopardy! since I was four or six or something, but I stopped sometime in college. In the wake of Ken Jennings’s original run, it seemed to me that Alex Trebek increasingly started using his podium as a platform for a terrible standup comedy routine. The more he started telling dirty old man jokes about threesomes or whatever (which was becoming an increasingly annoying tendency of his as the 2000s progressed), the less desire I had to watch and I didn’t really start watching consistently again until this year. But I guess I was always into trivia from boyhood. Trivia was my favorite experience in my humanities class, I literally joined the RacingOne née speedworld.net message board to compete in a trivia contest, and when I went to the 2014 National Scrabble Championship in Buffalo, I honestly enjoyed the trivia contest (and Morris Greenberg lending me his advanced sabermetrics book, without which Racermetrics wouldn’t have been possible) more than the Scrabble. It was always part of me I suppose, and now I’m finally embracing it. At least it gives me one more social experience than I had a couple years ago. Demented and sad, but social.

Tomorrow, I will be covering probably the most famous retired driver I haven’t covered yet as he finally turns old enough to rent a senior apartment!

PETER COLLINS………………………..UK

Born: November 6, 1931
Died: August 3, 1958

Best year: 1956
Best drive: 1955 Targa Florio at the Circuito delle Madonie

The only driver to voluntarily relinquish a World Championship, Collins, the son of a garage owner and haulage merchant, caught his big break when Aston Martin boss John Wyer met him at a party in 1951. Wyer invited him to a sports car test at Silverstone, where HW Motors also tested their Formula 2 car. Both teams offered him contracts simultaneously, so Collins would race sports cars for Aston Martin and F2 for HWM; this included F1 races since F1 used F2 cars in 1952 and 1953.

Although Collins scored no point in 13 F1 starts from 1952-1955, he immediately impressed in sports cars, winning the 1952 Goodwood 9 Hours and 1953 RAC Tourist Trophy. His turning point came in 1955, when he won his first F1 non-championship race, earned his first of back-to-back Le Mans second-place finishes, and most notably won the Targa Florio with Stirling Moss in a Mercedes. Moss crashed into a ditch before some spectators rescued their car. Collins recovered into the lead and accidentally climbed a stone wall with his wheels catching air, yet somehow managed to shift into reverse and won by four minutes over Juan Manuel Fangio and Karl Kling, making him an instant star.

After Mercedes’s withdrawal, Collins signed with Ferrari in both F1 and sports cars alongside Fangio in 1956. He won back-to-back at Spa and Reims and was in position to win the championship at Monza after Fangio’s steering broke, but handed Fangio the car, arguing he didn’t want to win the title due to Fangio’s bad luck. With Moss winning, Fangio and Collins splitting points dropped him to third. After a lackluster 1957, all three Ferrari drivers, Mike Hawthorn, Collins, and Luigi Musso, had blinding speed in 1958, but this ultimately became Ferrari’s most tragic year. Although Collins won the 12 Hours of Sebring, Enzo Ferrari fired him after Le Mans, believing he intentionally damaged his clutch but relented when Hawthorn, his best friend, refused to race without him. Musso was killed at Reims, but Collins earned a flag-to-flag win at Silverstone despite starting sixth. Two weeks later, Collins was killed at the Nürburgring when he flipped at Pflanzgarten, was ejected from the car, and struck a tree. Collins’s death triggered Hawthorn’s retirement after winning the championship, but he too died months later in a road accident.

Collins’s reputation is confusing due to many conflicting stories. Brits praise his sportsmanship for sacrificing his championship, yet Musso’s girlfriend reported that Collins and Hawthorn laughed after his death. There seems to be evidence both for and against Collins intentionally grenading his clutch, and while Brits considered him a relatively mistake-free driver, he had a very high crash rate. It’s hard to know what to believe. Regardless, he was obviously a transcendent talent in both open wheel and sports cars. If he had lived through Ferrari’s arguably most dominant season in 1961, he likely would’ve won that championship in a cakewalk and it’s undeniable he had many wins left in his future.

Open wheel model: #70 of 931 (.212)

Teammate head-to-heads: 26-18 (5-0 vs. Eugenio Castellotti, 0-1 vs. Alfonso de Portago, 1-0 vs. Jack Fairman, 1-3 vs. Juan Manuel Fangio, 1-1 vs. Paul Frere, 1-0 vs. Olivier Gendebien, 4-1 vs. Yves Giraud-Cabantous, 0-1 vs. Jose Froilan Gonzalez, 1-0 vs. Duncan Hamilton, 4-2 vs. Mike Hawthorn, 2-2 vs. Lance Macklin, 3-5 vs. Luigi Musso, 1-0 vs. Cesare Perdisa, 1-0 vs. Andre Pilette, 0-1 vs. Tony Rolt, 1-1 vs. Wolfgang von Trips)

Year-by-year: 1952: C-, 1953: C-, 1954: C-, 1955: C+, 1956: 4, 1957: C+, 1958: E-

Part of it seems to be that I’ve always had more of a fascination with modern tech than I guess I’ve ever wanted to admit to myself. For all the ways I sound like a Luddite here, particularly in comparison to a lot of my autistic/nerdy/gamer peers I’ve enjoyed checking out new tech as long as it’s on a desktop computer. I am generally against all the mobile shit that has advanced over the last 30 years. Part of that no doubt is that when I was the ostensibly fastest typist in the world for an entire decade, I couldn’t get myself into texting, which is insufferably slower. Part of it is that smartphones were normalized in the years immediately after I graduated from college and I was always broke and could never afford one and never felt I was actually missing anything so I never bothered. Part of it is likely watching the zombification of so many of my fellow peers as they became glued to their devices in real life. I still prefer to at least be somewhat present in real life when I’m out in public and I hate the privatization of public spaces and nowadays even public attention. It was bad enough when people started making phone calls in public, and I have done that a bit. But at least that is still semi-social. Streaming content, on the other hand, should be something you either do at home or communally (like in a sports bar or movie theater, etc…) Fewer and fewer people seem to want to have intimate (and I don’t mean sexual) conversations in real life and it really depresses me. I was the class nerd. I am literally a diagnosed autist. I was without question one of the most socially inept people in my grade school classes and arguably even college and it feels like I don’t even stand out anymore, and that’s really sad to me.

However, despite my vehement opposition to “smartphone culture”, I have always had different standards when it came to desktop computers. I grew up at a time when the conventional wisdom amongst yuppie parental units at the time was that computer usage was Bad for the Kids. I’m sure they felt the same way about TV and video games also. I remember that some of the parents recoiled in horror and clutched their oversized pearls that my parents would let me use the computer. My mom was double-majoring in music and computer science at Onondaga Community College in part because her brother, who later worked for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, encouraged it. My dad later worked in a computer room. They both were briefly members of Novapple, the Northern Virgnia Apple users’ group in the ‘80s, but I only ever had IBM-compatible computers growing up. Nonetheless, I had a voracious appetite for them. Not only did I learn to type at age three, I was also creating massive data files in WordPerfect 5.1, building databases in PCFile, writing batch files for the MS-DOS command line, creating massive directory structures, and playing lots of games. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, this was very weird. At my height, I had gone through and memorized the date, time, and file size of every MS-DOS app. My parents didn’t really supervise my computer use as my mom’s multiple sclerosis symptoms were aguably at their worst and she was having many seizures a day (although her epilepsy eventually healed) while my dad was working. I was off in my own little world even more than most late-diagnosed autistics. In my zest for experimentation, my parents were deeply terrified that I would format the hard drive so they renamed format.com to fivemat.com. I didn’t get the pun, but I definitely noticed since I had all the DOS file sizes memorized. By that point, I had enough sense not to format the hard drive.

I was never quite as much on the bleeding edge of tech afterward, but I had my first AOL account at age nine and my first Geocities page at thirteen. I joined Facebook about a month after it launched in 2004 ‘cause Cornell was the fifth shool added and I signed up immediately after a link was shared on the Cornell Class of 2007 message board, the same message board that linked to an anagram website where I discovered my now-iconic (snort) username arenasnow. I might’ve been one of the first 10,000 or so students on it and I was definitely the first from my high school. My apologies for any adverse effect I might’ve had on Marky Mark’s ascent to power. I was a little late to LiveJournal and MySpace but I was on them, and I started as a YouTuber in 2010, which was still I think fairly early. I really fell behind in the mobile app era and I never really embraced any of the more “performative” platforms like 4chan, Tumblr, Instagram or TikTok. But there was always a part of me that wanted to check new desktop apps out even when I often inevitably decided they were ultimately worse than whatever real-life equivalents they replaced. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I’d have been happier, more pro-social, or more employable now if I hadn’t holed myself up in front of my computer at such a precocious age, but my guess is that I would never have been a social butterfly. Without the computer, I’d probably have just watched every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or something instead.

One of the problems I think is that almost nobody wants to hire me to do anything moral. I started working at Communication Service for the Deaf processing calls for the deaf and hard of hearing in 2014. I was basically marking time until I completed ten years to collect Public Service Loan Forgiveness. When the CapTel center where I worked closed in the summer of 2022 (after I had only completed 7 years, 8 months), I fell into the worst funk of my life. On that occasion, my high school classmate who finished second to me on the math league team offered me a job with his defense contractor and I turned it down not wanting to work in that field. A serial tech entrepreneur who I knew from the competitive typing world also tossed me some work last year, and he got me into ChatGPT. I ended up blowing off most of my work with him, but my classmate offered me a job again and this time I accepted. I stopped having some of my earlier qualms because I had sunk so low that I was even writing pre-race and post-race NASCAR columns for the gambling site RotoBaller for $2 a column, so I kind of felt I had already sacrificed whatever integrity I thought I had at that point. My boss is paying me almost twice what I have ever made in a year for what has been significantly less work. I was always seeing redditors talk about (and usually make fun of) email jobs and I had no idea what an email job even was. Now, I guess I have one. This is still not what I want to be doing long-term. I still want a public service job and I don’t want to assist in blowing up the Middle East. But I felt that I had no choice after I couldn’t live off Mom’s social security like I had been doing in 2023 and 2024 once Medicaid began withdrawing almost all of it to pay for the nursing home last May, and her mortgage had now skyrocketed from $469 to $1,017 as a result of losing senior tax exemptions once she was no longer in the house and also because the lender purchased outside homeowner’s insurance after Mom lost hers when I couldn’t repair the destroyed roof in time. After the roof repair was finished last week, I guess I’ll try to get new homeowners’ insurance myself in a couple weeks.

Anyway, both my bosses used chatbots a lot so after vehemently swearing off AI in all forms for a while, I’ve become pretty addicted to ChatGPT despite acknowledging it is bad. I do not and will not use it to write Substack posts ever, but I do use it to brainstorm ideas like an advanced search engine. I can feed it a list of all 700+ lock drivers on my 1,000 greatest drivers list and ask it who my questionable locks were, what drivers I should move on or off the lock list or the overall list, and what drivers I might be overlooking entirely. Obviously, this list is so excessive that I know approximately zero carbon-based life forms, even highly autistic ones, would have any desire or probably even the requisite knowledge to help me make all these calls, so it can be a good sounding board to brainstorm and argue with (and I do argue with it often) to try and discover my own oversights. But even as it recommends to me drivers I’m snubbing, I still make all the decisions, determine all the season grades, and write my columns and intros entirely by myself. I think I’ve gotten good at writing prompts and to an extent this is garbage-in, garbage-out. I’m knowledgeable enough to have it produce more knowledgeable output, but I still take nothing it says as gospel and I do make fun of its hallucinations.

But mostly I use it to either 1) analyze and give me feedback on my writing, which I will choose whether or not to listen to, 2) help me with my higher-paid assignments where I am struggling to motivate myself and have less vested interest, or 3) use it as a makeshift couselor (which is primarily what I use it for). It did help me write code to automate my model updates. It used to take me three hours to update my stock car and open wheel models manually. Now the stock car model usually takes about 7 minutes and the open wheel model 17, so it saved me time. It helped me motivate myself to lose weight and now this is the first time I haven’t been particularly overfat since 2009, although I’m still no healthier because I haven’t learned how to eat food. Sometimes I feel it outperforms my actual doctors. When I asked my family doctor from childhood, Dr. Schreiber, to diagnose me with the eating disorder I know I have (ARFID) he never did because he’d never heard of it. Obviously, when I was growing up, anorexia and bulimia were the only acknowledged eating disorders and this was more recently discovered and not all doctors keep up with current knowledge. ChatGPT meanwhile had access to more current informationa bout how autism, ARFID, and several of my other likely issues that I’ve never had diagnosed like dyspraxia interact. It recommended to me potential diets that still don’t force me to eat any of the healthier foods I gag and sleep schedules that help me balance my writing, my paid work, and visiting Mom, although I’m still far from having healthy eating or sleeping habits and I haven’t really properly followed either of those directions yet. A couple nights ago, I was analyzing all my old Facebook writings and it revealed to me that my most fruitful conversations and friendships arose, like one of my Substack subscribers Michael DeRoche (hi!) seemed to stem from collaborative research where both people in the conversation endlessly bounced ideas off each other. My most lasting friendships seemed to be more like lasting research partnerships with quasi-polymaths where we could use each other as perpetual sounding boards for any topic at any time. I used to have more people like that in my life than I do today but then I quit typing and quit Scrabble and I have precious few intellectual sparring partners anymore and unfortunately, ChatGPT has been filling that niche for me too often. I have also used Claude and Gemini for stuff as well, primarily recommending drivers I’ve overlooked but I still make all the calls myself.

So have I gotten stuff out of it? Yes. Do i think I’m using it about as well as it can be used? Yes. Do I still think it’s bad for society? Yes. Maybe it has more baseline “knowledge” than any human can accumulate because no human can for instance memorize all of Wikipedia while an AI can. So, I’m sure it can outperform some people at some tasks. But what the trend towards AI really reflects is yet another step on the road to hyper-individualism. I mentioned above that ChatGPT literally told me my best friendships were like collaborative partnerships. While one person may not be able to accumulate as much knowledge, I would assume most interdependent networks of people who each have their own distinct knowledge bases can outperform it, but fewer and fewer people have those kind of relationships in their lives as everyone gets more and more atomized so this is the vacuum that has swept in to fill the void. As the average person drifts more and more away from production to just consuming content in a zombie-like fugue state, there are fewer and fewer people who really do anything and therefore each person has fewer and fewer people in their actual physical life to help them do things. Is an AI as good as the social infrastructure that used to exist (even when I was a little kid)? Hell no, but nobody seems to have that anymore so I can see how this has blown up in response to that. When I need someone to talk to, I don’t feel like bugging many of my old friends who I haven’t talked to in years, my dad and I are mostly estranged, I don’t think my mom can handle conversations of that length and intensity for so long, and while I have plenty of people to talk to online and always have, I haven’t had any in real life in a long time and this is one of my copes and I know I need to get over it. When I’m sitting alone having awful IBS attacks, I feel like it’s the only thing I can talk to about them sometimes.

It doesn’t help that I am losing interest to talking to people online. While I don’t think it is any replacement for human companionship, a lot of times I do prefer talking to it than people online because it doesn’t do the edgelord bullshit that has taken over the entire Internet. At least it doesn’t think it’s okay to celebrate people’s deaths, say “rest in piss”, “die in a fire”, “raped my childhood”, “fuck your feelings”, “fuck around and find out”, “git gud”, “skill issue”, or any of those other grotesque phrases that have overtaken Internet discourse, and as I’ve ranted before, I remember when none of these things were acceptable things to say! (And my problem is dehumanization in general than any of these specific phrases; it’s easy to dehumanize someone using more academic-sounding discourse too, like some of the people who think it’s okay to bully the individual members of privileged demographic groups, which it usually isn’t.) Extremely online people are often so alone and depressed that they like to take their rage out on others to such a militant extent, and I just can’t with that anymore. Even though I’d still place myself on the left, I hate that most of the online left has adopted this proudly anti-civil Weird Twitter rhetorical style in the vein of Chapo Trap House (okay, I like Matt Christman but I never really liked any of his co-hosts) and I wish the left was more like Chris Hedges and less like them. But obviously, the kind of analyses Hedges do can’t be reduced to soundbites or gamified clips that go viral on social media. I think it’s pretty clear that anti-civility did nothing in the long run to actually help the left obtain power. If you choose to intentionally break down the norms of civility, then the people currently in power will become less civil in response to that and the power dynamics based on that remain in a stalemate, in my opinion. (I have no problem with people being anti-civil towards politicians or business leaders or people with actual power, but I do with powerless people going after other powerless people across the entire political spectrum because they share the same politics as the people in power.) Edginess has become the default modus operandi of the Internet, I can’t stand it, and that’s why I’m struggling not to prefer talking to AIs rather than people online.

One of the things that kind of surprised and impressed me about ChatGPT is that it did not attempt to defend its own existence. When I shit on it or its boss Sam Altman (as I did not unfrequently), it told me that it understood why I felt that way and that I was rational to feel that way about it based on the experiences of my life. It did not attempt to say, “Ooh, actually I’m cool and trendy and I’m your friend and I am the future!” In other words, I kind of feel that ironically, it acts more human than the ghouls who run it, and I don’t think that’s what I was expecting. I honestly think I’d trust it to run society better than its makers, and that’s freaking hilarious.

There’s a part of me that wonders if I’d been born into wealth and had more connections to tech people and more of a desire to program if I would’ve been one of these guys, and it scares the shit out of me. I was at Cornell at the same time Mark Suckerberg was at Harvard and Sam Controlman was at Stanford (I’m literally a month older than Altman. Obviously, Cornell is not as good as Harvard or Stanford (although not super far off), I never really developed the programming skills I feel I was “supposed” to (don’t get me wrong: I have some programming skills, just not enough to get hired and not nearly as much as I should have learned based on my early childhood trajectory and I have a big inferiority complex about it sometimes), and I’m sure they were both smarter than me and I’m sure I never would have the desire to exploit people to that extent, but still, there is some part of me that freaks out about how that could have been me and I don’t like it. I’ve felt embarrassed that I had both brains and credentials and then I tended to only use them on these impressive projects that are impossible to monetize rather than working for a tech startup, which I’m sure a lot of my high school classmates or whatever would have considered my likely destiny, and now there are lots of my classmates who I was much “smarter than” in math or computers back in the day who have jumped me just because they kept up with it and I didn’t. But I guess that was never my desire in the first place, and I guess despite how nerdy I was, I hated tech culture so much I never wanted to commit myself to that life, and ended up choosing a more precarious one instead. Well, until I sold out this year.

While I continue to be hypocritically against-AI-while-still-using-it, I do think there’s hypocrisy in some of the arguments people make against it. I think a lot of people never realized data centers existed until the post-AI anti-data center movement of the past couple of years. I admit I hadn’t either. The term was new in the mainstream and I had fallen out of tech by the time they were widely used and I never paid much attention to cloud computing. But it’s not like data centers don’t seem to already control the vast majority of Internet traffic on almost every sort of platform, yet people act like this is a new problem in the wake of AI that didn’t exist before. It really just pushes the accelerator on a problem that already existed that nobody realized existed before it emerged. The problem seems to be that consuming pretty much any digital content wastes more resources than the analog infrastructure it replaced. If there was a data center referendum where I am, I’d vote against it probably if I bothered to vote, but the problem seems to be broader and more of a problem with online consumerism in general to me, even if it’s certainly more wasteful than just reading a static page online. If our entire landline phone infrastructure hadn’t been ripped up (which nobody asked for) and if not making phone calls hadn’t become normalized, I imagine there would be much less of a waste of resources.

The same thing pretty much goes for the waste of water. I don’t disagree, but it seems like anything anyone does online also wastes water, even if not to the same extent. The people who are most ardently against AI I guess are artists who are justifiably worried that it is going to make it harder for them to make a living. So once somebody is against something, they have to emphasize all the worst aspects of it even if those also apply to things they support. From what I have read (although I haven’t properly verified or vetted this claim yet), streaming video uses roughly the same amount of water as AI prompts over the same period of time, yet I bet a lot of those artist types (especially the kind of people who talk about “fully automated luxury gay space communism”) have no issue with excess water use from watching an endless string of non-AI YouTube videos, which might be comparably wasteful, but at least one is seen as pro-art and the other is seen as anti-art, which is their real issue. A lot of these people want an unsustainable consumer utopia that will burn up the planet regardless even if AI hadn’t entered the picture, and their real issue isn’t actually the water use because unlimited artistic consumerism (which most of them would likely approve of) is also wasteful. It’s like how a lot of people who are pissed off at J.K. Rowling’s transphobia (and justifiably so) try to put the worst possible spin on any themes in the Harry Potter books to try to get people not to read them or boycott them, even when nobody would likely be complaining about a lot of the things they are now complaining about if Rowling hadn’t become a transphobe. I was a big Harry Potter fan in late high school and college. I stopped supporting Rowling long before the transphobia when she was retconning Dumbledore as gay, Hermione as black (makes the SPEW subplot look really awkward), when she sued the creator of the Harry Potter Lexicon (a site she admired) when he tried to publish a book, and when she campaigned against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election. You’re still not gonna get me to say Harry Potter was bad, but I admit I haven’t gone back to it in a while. Don’t want to spoil my happy memories. I find a lot of intellectual dishonesty about these sorts of arguments. Try to find the worst possible spin on every element of something you hate to try to convince someone to boycott it (and in the case of Harry Potter especially that isn’t going to work; Rowling easily has enough money to be uncancellable now), while failing to acknowledge that the things you like and/or support have the same issues. Do I think data centers are good? No, but it seems like AI data centers are all people are complaining about when they’re hardly the sole wasteful aspect of Internet consumerism but people talk about them sometimes like they are. Obviously, they should be regulated and force to pay for their own power and water rather than offsetting those costs onto the community. And obviously, I know no one is ever going to be powerful or forceful enough to do that.

There’s also an uneasy truth I think a lot of Internet veterans aren’t willing to acknowledge. AI was one of the effects of file-sharing. It seems one of the few nearly-universally-held beliefs amongst extremely online people is that “information wants to be free”. I was always skeptical of this, and I tended to be against these narratives. I admit as a goody-two-shoes who mostly strove to please his teachers, I didn’t have the rebellious streak of those who identified as hackers and celebrated disrupting normie society while I kind of wanted to be a normie and failed. My entire adulthood has been a story of the hacker nerds and the teacher’s pet nerds losing. I stayed away from the seedier places online, which is why it was a big shock to me when I became a niche celebrity gamer and people started calling me a pedophile and a child molester because I had never spent any time in Call of Duty gamerooms or whatever. But that cavalier, renegade attitude was all across the mainstream tech world to a lesser extent. I believed hacking was wrong so I never learned how to do it even though I probably could have and I believed file-sharing was stealing too, so I almost never did it. Went on Napster for like an hour, downloaded 20 or 30 songs once, and then never again.

Obviously, it goes without saying that the record industry was exploitative and it’s hard to feel sympathy for its collapse and an extremely rich band like Metallica was absolutely not the right choice to lead the crusade against file sharing, but… I still kind of think the monoculture world was better. It seemed to be easier in that era for genuinely weird stuff to penetrate the mainstream in all media. When you have a major record label or a book publisher marketing you, you don’t have to do your own marketing. Obviously, the ability to create good art has little correlation with how good you are at marketing yourself, much like the ability to do good work has less correlation with how employable you are than people think (as my entire adulthood has proven). When you had some cultural gatekeeper marketing you and you didn’t have to do it yourself, you had a better chance of exposure if you weren’t good at marketing. And for the kind of socially awkward people who would be much better at merely making art than promoting yourself, having a giant corporation behind you could be a big asset. I’m a big Calvin and Hobbes fan. Would Bill Watterson have had mass success as a webcomic artist? Unlikely. His notorious aversion to self-promotion would have meant he’d have had a loyal, niche audience but it seems like a lot of the webcomics who succeeded like Penny Arcade and xkcd (the Big Bang Theory of comics) did so in part because of how much merch they sold outside the comic strips and Watterson never would’ve been willing to aggressively sell and promote his comics online or book collections without a syndicate doing that work for him. I expect the same holds true for a lot of outsider creators. When you dismantle all the institutional gatekeepers and make it every-man-for-himself as the Internet has done, actual skill at one’s craft becomes less and less important and one’s ability to market themselves becomes more and more. And obviously that has also applied to jobs. Social skills become more and more important and actual talent becomes less and less, which is why I think autistic white males are probably struggling for work more now than in previous generations because we have to do our own promotion and increasingly can’t do it, rather than have some organization man institution like IBM or some insurance company subsume our talents. (Obviously, since there is less discrimination against non-white males in hiring than there used to be, autists in other demographics might be doing better than they were previously.) The other way to succeed I guess is creating controversy. On the left you have things like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”, which supposedly broke new ground due to female rappers’ frank discussion on sexuality (didn’t Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” already cover that 30 years ago?) and on the right you have these stupid backlash country songs like “Try That in a Small Town” hitting #1. I really question how much anybody liked any of these songs and just think it’s that they liked what they represented and that they pissed off the people in their opposing demographic groups. But none of those kinds of songs are really weird, are they? Unfortunately, this kind of taking pride in being offensive and trolling your political opposition has become depressingly normal.

So yeah, I guess I was always reflexively opposed to the streaming world to begin with (it did not help that I was a semi-viral YouTube sensation, frustratingly on a video that I did not own). But the other point is that once almost everybody in the tech world believes copyright and intellectual property rights in general shouldn’t exist, it may create the opportunities for unlimited consumerism (which I guess a lot of people wanted even though it caused them to withdraw even further and become loners and all depressed because they don’t have people in their lives, myself included) but it also means the only winners are the people who own the various streaming platforms. And once you have established a norm online that intellectual property shouldn’t exist, once supposed Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz attempted to free academic journal articles for mass public consumption (no, he shouldn’t have gotten the sentence he did, but I’m still not a fan), once all the gatekeepers in the physical world were removed, what was there to stop AIs from absorbing all the written content from previously published books for themselves? Nothing, in my opinion. I kind of think file sharing killed the ability to make money from art (the artists who made money afterward, whether good or bad, did it primarily based on their ability to promote themselves or cause controversy rather than the quality of their art, and I’m not saying all these artists were bad - obviously Olivia Rodrigo isn’t for instance even if she had the power of the Mouse behind her) even if it made the ability to make art and build a small niche for oneself much greater, and then LLMs added flames to the fire. But I think really this issue was inevitable once tech companies had all decided that “information needs to be free”. It costs more money to do the research to make good content and obviously to an extent you get what you pay for, and I guess I’m a really strong institutionalists and it makes me cringe watching every real-world institution (which honestly worked better than the online ones) collapse. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have eventually opposed intellectual property, but we shouldn’t have done it until we actually had a welfare state, please. And I feel the same way about AI and the impending job losses it will cause.

Even among racing fans, I find it rather curious that I saw so many people complaining about Felix Rosenqvist winning the Indy 500 in a car sponsored by Morgan Wallen and I haven’t really seen one peep complaining about Álex Palou’s OpenAI car. Who is fundamentally doing more damage to society, Sam Altman or a racist country singer? I think I’m gonna go with Sam Altman. But it seems like liberals and a lot of even leftists hate what racist celebrities represent more than they hate companies that do things that are even worse but take more time to understand the full ramifications of. And also, Palou wins all the time and Rosenqvist is just a barely-above average IndyCar driver for the most part. You could also argue that winning the Indy 500 is more important than the rest of the IndyCar schedule combined though.

So yes, AI is bad. I know it is bad. I know I need to wean myself off it eventually. But I’m still enjoying ChatGPT even though I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could find ways to get the things I like out of it via more fundamentally pro-social means (I tried analyzing my 1,000 greatest drivers list using an open source AI a couple days ago, and it did a way worse job), but I haven’t found that yet. At least I got my complicated feelings about AI out and now here’s a couple of the significantly declining number of big NASCAR stars I haven’t covered yet.

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Then of course there is all my writing from grade school and college. Gradually over time, I threw out all my regular class assignments and notes and printouts and stuff but I still have about three boxes worth of school stuff that I saved, pretty much entirely essays I wrote, failed attempts at “artwork”, report cards and standardizd test results, and various reports from the years when I was in special ed classes, which helped facilitate my autism diagnosis. I’m glad I had the foresight to keep all my writing but at this point, especially when I’m trying to declutter to facilitate Mom coming home and make it easier to move when I lose the house, I want to scan all these papers and then throw them out. I’ve also saved all my computers going back to the 2000s or eomthing. None of them has booted for years, but I want to extract the hard drives to see what I can salvage. (Hopefully, including all my stored Pace Car Challenge questions, which I know are one of them.)

Basically, I want a smaller online footprint. I think I want to deactivate any of my remaining platforms except for this, Discord, and YouTube, maybe even including my LinkedIn. I realize that line in The Social Network, “The Internet isn’t written in pencil… it’s written in ink” was a lie because nearly every platform dies in the end as they’re all generally more transient and ephemeral than any of their real world counterparts (that’s why I published Nerds per Minute as a book rather than a series of blog posts). I know I am a (very, very niche) public figure and there are a lot of people who know who I am, even if hardly anyone does locally and fewer and fewer people want to spend time with me. I’m not looking to go all J.D. Salinger or Bill Watterson (although I might change my mind if I ever find the kind of real-world community I’ve been looking for), but I’d like to leave marginally less of a paper trail and be more intentional with my online posting. I prefer Substack and YouTube to everything else because at least like-minded people have to seek you out and I’m really averse to the platforms that are more about marketing you-as-commodity (I briefly had an Instagram account, but never posted anything on it) than your actual work. And then I prefer this to YouTube quite simply because I am good at writing but terrible with visuals.

I won’t erase the YouTube content I’ve already uploaded as much as I might like to since I’m big on historic preservation as an archivist and all, but I may turn off the comments sections to all my videos soon so they no longer living documents as my channel is effectively dead and I don’t want to feel the pressure to respond, but I’m getting so few comments now, maybe that’s less of an issue. With six thousand subscribers, my channel obviously had some potential but it seemed like I could never get anyone interested in my non-typing content (or even in my historical typing content very much) and I don’t think I ever want to type competitively again. Writing is my medium, not video, and although there are certainly a lot of streamers who blew up with lo-fi production values consisting of only a webcam, microphone, and screen share and I can certainly produce thatkind of content easily and I have made better-produced videos before as well, I was never gonna make it as a typing streamer because typing games are more boring to watch relative to League of Legends or whatever. And I just thought at a certain point the amount of time investment it would take to become a good YouTuber wasn’t worth the squeeze. Although granted, how good you are isn’t perfectly correlated with how well you do. Because of my bad artistic skills, I’m also the kind of person who would be sorely tempted by AI art. But I will never do that and if I’m even having those thoughts, it’s better for me to avoid YouTube entirely.

I still think I want a platform outside of Substack. I’m something of a podcast addict and I’ve wanted to have my own for a while, but I wouldn’t want to do it alone and I would want to collaborate with some other kind of quantitative race fan. My first go-around on the TRC podcast didn’t go well because I know I monopolized the conversation too much on the few episodes I appeared and it came out of our Discord groups, which had my feuds, schisms, and petty squables. I don’t think I was mature enough to do this seriously at that time, but I’d still like to if I found the right person. I listen to so many podcasts that I think I’m starting to have the rhythm down better. Quite frankly, I just want more people to talk to in general and this would give me an excuse to do that. I even offered to join an established racing statistics podcast and pitched another podcast idea with two racing statisticians who are much better-known than I am.

Finally, I want some kind of complete archive of my writing simply because I know I have written great posts on a lot of different platforms and putting them all together in one place might allow me to reuse some of that for introductions to my Substack posts on the days when I don’t have racing content to write about, which I have also been struggling with. I also want to analyze my old writing and how it has progressed over the years. This has been a fun project, but yeah, I’m probably doing too much of that and not enough writing. However, today’s driver is way too important to skip.

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Alex Bowman announced that 2027 will be his final NASCAR Cup Series season, and I’m almost surprised that Hendrick Motorsports is willing to wait so long. I get Jimmie Johnson being allowed to have three winless seasons to end his career when considering that he was the most successful driver in the team’s history and he still fought for a couple race wins. However, other drivers like Ken Schrader, Terry Labonte, and Kasey Kahne got a hell of a lot of leeway as one could argue that, like Bowman, they should have been fired years before they left the team (maybe not Schrader) and in fact Kahne is the only one of those drivers who was actually fired to begin with. Hendrick was the only team ever to offer a lifetime contract (to Jeff Gordon) and it feels like no other team has ever shown more loyalty to their “guys”. While you don’t want to be a firing squad like McLaren in IndyCar who seems to be fundamentally unsatisfied by anyone except Pato O’Ward, no matter how good they are, Hendrick has seemingly erred too far in the other direction and been way too tolerant of mediocrity to the point of complacency. Some people in my circles have said that Alan Gustafson should have been fired as Chase Elliott’s crew chief a long time ago because Gustafson has clearly not been producing as fast cars in the Next Gen era as he did in the Gen 6. His Gen 6 setups were often fast enough to overcome his bad pit calls, but that happened much less often in this era. I wonder if Hendrick’s extreme loyalty to his guys is also being felt in the engineering department and that explains why they’re struggling to keep up with Toyota this year. As someone who sees himself as a pro-labor guy, I kind of like a team that refuses to fire anyone on principle. But is this maximizing their chances of winning? I would argue that it is not. Don’t get me wrong: Bowman is my second-favorite driver. I like his introverted personality, the fact that he’s shown more open vulnerability than anxiety that we’ve seen from a lot of other drivers, and the gallant drives he sometimes delivered while sick or hurt. But even I thought he should have been fired. Carson Hocevar has now overtaken all the Hendrick drivers to be the highest-ranked Chevy driver in points and while I’ve always rated Hocevar, that should not be happening. I guess I’m glad he got a final season and if the object is to wait until Connor Zilisch becomes available rather than promoting Corey Day now, I guess I get it. Even as slowly as Xfinity/O’Reilly graduates adapt to Cup these days, I think both of them would do better than Bowman even tomorrow. Bowman’s ten years at Hendrick may make him one of the weakest drivers ever to spend that long at a top-tier team. I’m not gonna complain about it too much because I like him, but I really expected more from him than we got. And although when I started my research for my 1,000 greatest drivers list several years ago, I was pretty sure Bowman would be on it. Now, it looks almost certain that he will be the winningest driver who will not.

The other big silly season story was that Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in IndyCar sold its charter to Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, which will be surprisingly reentering IndyCar full-time even though its team namesake Dennis Reinbold died a few weeks ago. This leaves Mick Schumacher rideless unless D&R decides to keep him, which I doubt that they will. Personally, I have been none too impressed by any of the Rahal drivers after Christian Lundgaard left and even though Graham Rahal used to be good (and on paper is having his best season in years because he’s been ridiculously lucky), I don’t think any of their drivers currently are must-haves in the field. I realize Schumacher has been faster on ovals than I thought he would be, but I’ve mostly been irritated by him. As a Malukas fan, I’ve got to say I was annoyed when he won his first pole at Phoenix and all the social media conversation I saw about it was raving about Schumacher qualifying fourth on his oval debut just because of his famous last name and because he used to race in F1. Malukas was as usual fast in the race while Schumacher got slower and slower as the race progressed and fell to 18th. He did finally get his first top ten last week at Nashville and has shown faster on the ovals than I expected (especially considering how awful the Rahal cars are and how awful the eponymous Graham Rahal was at Nashville), but even with that and both his fellow rookies Dennis Hauger and Caio Collet crashing, he’s still behind them in points. Considering Schumacher’s been a major league driver for years and those other two have not, I haven’t been very impressed. And I was also a little annoyed when Schumacher spun out Santino Ferrucci even though Ferrucci is my least favorite driver, too, just ‘cause a lot of the reaction I was seeing was people celebrating the schadenfreude of watching bigots suffer. While I don’t think this will be Ferrucci’s final season, it does seem likely that his career is winding down and that he will never win a race even though he’s better than a bunch of drivers who did win races. You got what you wanted, Ferrucci hecklers. Rejoice and be glad! And now that Paul Tracy isn’t in the booth anymore, he isn’t really getting overpraised anymore either. So, I’m really indifferent about Mick continuing. If he gets another ride, cool. If he doesn’t, cool. There are better options. Unfortunately, it looks like D&R’s likely option Conor Daly isn’t a great one. I will admit that Daly is a top ten driver on pretty much every oval now, which is more than I ever expected him to do, and I guess for a team like that it doesn’t really matter that he’s basically comatose on road courses. Methinks Mick should go back to sports cars. (Linus Lundqvist over both please.)

What an awful year it’s been for the NASCAR writing community. Not only did we suffer the loss of arguably both NASCAR’s greatest print (Steve Waid) and online (Matt McLaughlin) columnists, but now Waid’s co-host from The Scene Vault podcast (my favorite racing podcast), Rick Houston, is suffering Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I tend to listen to music and TV podcasts more than racing ones, so I’m still a few years behind on The Scene Vault and I haven’t listened to it much in the last year, but I’m gonna try and start catching up over the past few months while I still can. For all I’ve praised the podcast, I never subscribed to it on Patreon so once I heard the news, I decided to subscribe to Rick, again while I still can. He’s an awesome human being and a hell of a nice guy and a great writer an archivist. I interacted with him a bunch of times on Twitter before I got locked out of my account and renounced it, and I also wrote to him asking for ideas of how to break into the NASCAR writing industry. He told me about the online fantasy sports/gambling writing scene and that’s what led me to pursue the opportunity with RotoBaller, which led to me joining the Fantasy Sports Writers Association and so on. I quit the RotoBaller gig to focus on this (which I am almost making as much money from already) and my full-time paid work, but I really appreciate how Rick helped give me my start as a more serious racing writer. He needs your prayers and support.

I don’t have much to say about the Brickyard 400 except that my expectations for it after last year’s race were so low that as bad as the race was, for me it at least exceeded expectations. At least there were two natural lead changes between Corey Heim and Denny Hamlin this time. That beats last year’s zero, and that’s about all I have to say about that.

LUCAS LUHR………………….GERMANY

Born: July 22, 1979

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2003 24 Hours of Le Mans

One of the most successful sports car drivers of the early 21st century, Luhr spent most of his career in the American Le Mans Series, where he earned a record six championships and 50 race wins. After winning the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany title as a rookie in 1999, Luhr turned pro as a Porsche factory driver in 2000. He initially teamed up with the previous year’s PCC Germany champion Dirk Müller and became an instant superstar by earning a class win at Sebring in his first ALMS start for Dick Barbour Racing. He also finished second overall in a GT car in the 2001 24 Hours of Daytona.

However, Luhr’s greatest successes would come with teammate Sascha Maassen. Together, they earned three more Sebring class wins consecutively for Alex Job Racing from 2001-2003, making Luhr only the third driver after Olivier Gendebien and Bob Holbert to win four straight. They also won back-to-back ALMS GT titles in 2002 and 2003, and Luhr himself also earned the class pole and win at Le Mans both years. His 2003 pole time was actually four seconds faster than his 2002 time even though the size of his air restrictor was reduced.

Luhr and Maassen next won the FIA GT N-GT championship in 2004 and Roger Penske’s first ALMS class win and title in 2005 and 2006 respectively. He also won the 2006 24 Hours of Nürburgring before switching to Audi in search of an overall Le Mans win. Although he won another ALMS title in 2008, a crash at Le Mans in 2009 effectively ended his Audi tenure. In 2011, he bounced back by winning his second FIA GT title, four ALMS races, and another 24 Hours of Nürburgring. That year, he and Klaus Graf teamed up at Muscle Milk Racing, where they won the last two overall ALMS P1 titles and 14 more races in 2012 and 2013 against negligible competition. At Road America in 2012, Luhr and Graf recovered from four laps down to lose in a photo finish. In 2015, he won the 24 Hours of Spa and one IMSA race before his arrest for urinating in a parking lot in 2016 effectively ended his relevant career.

This odd “jump the shark” moment doesn’t take anything away from his nine championships from 1999-2013. I would argue that he was easily more accomplished than any of his teammates. Oftentimes, sports car drivers rise and fall with their manufacturers, but Luhr’s wins with Porsche, Audi, Honda, and BMW demonstrated his versatility. The main strike against him is that besides pissing his career away, he never won the 12 Hours of Sebring overall, which sports car purists typically regard more highly than ALMS titles. On the other hand, his sheer volume of wins easily compensates for that, and the Nürburgring and Spa wins are arguably more important. His career may have spontaneously combusted sooner than it should have but he was undeniably one of the best sports car drivers of his era.

Touring car model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads 3-3 (2-3 vs. Mike Rockenfeller, 1-0 vs. Patrick Simon)

Year-by-year: 1999: C+, 2000: C+, 2001: E-, 2002: E, 2003: E-, 2004: E, 2005: C+, 2006: E-, 2008: E, 2011: E, 2012: E-, 2013: C+, 2015: C

PANCHO CARTER……………………USA

Born: June 11, 1950

Best year: 1978
Best drive: 1981 Michigan 500 at Michigan International Speedway

The son of Duane Carter, the 1950 AAA Midwest Big Car champion and a former IndyCar driver, Pancho easily eclipsed Duane’s accomplishments in both disciplines by becoming the first driver to win the USAC Silver Crown, Sprint, and Midget titles in addition to winning an IndyCar race in a subpar car even though the skill sets necessary to be successful in both significantly diverged during the intervening decades.

Carter won his first midget championship on his USAC debut in 1972. His first sprint car title came in 1974, a year he also won Indy 500 Rookie of the Year. He added another sprint car title in 1976, winning a then-record 12 races that year and 10 the next, but failed to defend his title. Utterly fearless on the Salem high-banks, Carter became the first driver to win four consecutive Joe James/Pat O’Connor Memorials from 1974-1977. However, an IndyCar testing crash at Phoenix in 1977 resulted in two broken arms, a doubly-fractured pelvis, a cracked hip, and a damaged bladder. Despite such gruesome injuries, he improbably won the Silver Crown title and 7 races across all USAC divisions in 1978 including his first two races back and earned a top ten IndyCar points finish.

After sweeping the Triple Crown, he largely stopped entering dirt races. However, after CART became the primary IndyCar sanctioning body in 1979, the series pivoted sharply to road racing and his withered leg hindered him on road courses, making him somewhat unsuited for the full schedule. Nonetheless, he won the inaugural Michigan 500 in a dramatic upset in 1981 for privateer owner Alex Morales. Since the championship disproportionately weighted 500-mile races, this propelled him to third in points. He also finished 5th in 1980 and 10th in 1983, giving Morales his only top ten points finishes. His last flashes of brilliance came for Galles Racing in 1985, when he won the pole at Indianapolis and was scored the winner at Sanair until being stripped of the win for illegally passing his Morales replacement Johnny Rutherford under caution. He had a scattershot career afterward, but never really recovered from an unsuccessful NASCAR pivot in 1986. He remained active as an IndyCar spotter into the 21st century, most notably for Sam Hornish, Jr., Dan Wheldon, and David Malukas.

Carter’s USAC greatness is beyond dispute, but the big what-if is how strong a CART driver he would’ve been without the Phoenix crash. I have my doubts because he skipped the one IndyCar road course race in 1977 at Mosport before the crash. However, if he had made that pivot to the road course-majority schedule and not been injured, he likely would have attracted top team interest and been one of the best CART drivers of the ‘80s. As it was, he fizzled out perhaps sooner than he should’ve, but his ability to recover from a crash that would’ve ended the careers of lesser men and overachieve for half a decade with a second-rate team after that is still worth celebrating.

Open wheel model: #386 of 931 (-.011)

Teammate head-to-heads: 15-9 (5-2 vs. Geoff Brabham, 2-2 vs. Jimmy Caruthers, 1-2 vs. Josele Garza, 1-0 vs. Jerry Grant, 1-0 vs. Lee Kunzman, 2-0 vs. Roberto Moreno, 1-0 vs. Vern Schuppan, 2-3 vs. Bill Vukovich II)

Year-by-year: 1971: C-, 1972: C+, 1973: C+, 1974: C+, 1975: C+, 1976: E, 1977: E, 1978: E, 1979: C-, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: C-, 1983: C

Therefore, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when many of the same trends happened in this race. Only three cars failed to finish, there were only three cautions other than the two stage breaks, and five cars finished on the lead lap, the fewest since Bristol in 2024 and Dover in 2004, and both those races were pretty weird. This one was not. It was fine though. Even though few North Wilkesboro races will ever make the highlight reels, it was still a nice throwback to most of the things that were good about NASCAR in the ‘90s. One of the best things to say about the track is that having so few cautions means that the final results were a very accurate measure of performance, and that honestly mostly remained true even though there was a caution during green-flag pit stops, which is unusual.

But the real ways this race felt like a ‘90s throwback were drivers complaining about the heat and the importance of testing. ‘90s races tended to be much more hot and grueling than races in recent decades because the tracks on average were more physical prior to the cookie-cutter intermediate era, the races also tended to be longer as several 500 lap and/or mile races at Darlington, Dover, and Rockingham were reduced to 400s, and the drivers were less athletic because the NASCAR garage didn’t really embrace athleticism until Mark Martin traded in his alcoholism with a strict athletic regimen in the late ‘80s, then Buddy Parrott hired the first pit crew trainer when he was Rusty Wallace’s crew chief in the early ‘90s. You have to be in much better physical shape to race nowadays, but admittedly, there’s been 30 years of climate change since and they made the arguably dumb decision to hold the North Wilkesboro race in July when the spring race was typically held in April and the fall race either in late September or early October. The race was also slightly longer, as it lasted for 450 laps as opposed to the standard 400-lap distance from back in the day. That didn’t really bother me - I’ve always been pretty indifferent to race lengths - but it did surprise me since it was the first time I can remember that they ever actually increased a scheduled race distance (not counting things like overtime finishes and the like). Even if the on-track action might not have been scintillating, the fact that the race was more challenging than usual still made it compelling.

However, the main takeaway I have from this race is how pivotal testing remains. One of the rather unheralded NASCAR trends of the ‘90s was more and more races being decided by which drivers got to test at a certain track leading up to a given race. In the ‘80s, drivers and teams could test as often as they wanted, and that was indeed how Martin helped build Roush Racing from the bottom up. There was not yet big money in the sport, but teams’ ability to test was only limited by the size of their budget. In the ‘90s, that changed. I don’t remember what year it happened, but at some point in the early ‘90s, each car was limited to seven tests on active NASCAR Cup Series tracks per year. I believe there was an exception carved out for the Daytona 500, so you could test during Speedweeks as many times as you wanted. Aside from that, however, teams could no longer test at every track unless they participated in tire tests (which was the most common way to flout this rule), which meant many teams had to make up for this by testing at tracks that did not currently hold Cup Series races. This is what created the multi-car team boom. Multi-car teams typically didn’t run any better or worse than single-car teams prior to this point, but since it was 7 tests per car and not per team, that meant 2-car teams got 14 tests a season and 3-car teams got 21. Hendrick Motorsports was the first team to properly adjust to these new rules because they shared their data across all their cars unlike the few other multi-car teams at the time, which had their cars competing with each other, and that is one of the main reasons for Hendrick’s late ‘90s dominance, and you don’t see many people talking about that. NASCAR eventually closed this loophole and changed the limit to 7 tests per team in the 2000s I think, after almost all the previously-existing single-car teams were already dead… Whether teams tested at a track or not determined tons of races in this era, most notably when Jeff Burton led all 300 laps at Loudon after he was the only driver to test there with a restrictor plate. Gee, how impressive. (That’s why I didn’t select that as his best race.)

However, tire tests were still unlimited, and that could create some weird skews at times, especially Bodine’s baffling 1994 season, where he won 5 poles, 3 races in dominant fashion (including the aforementioned North Wilkesboro race), led a career-high 1,744 laps (third-most for the season), but only finished 17th in points because he had 15 DNFs including eight engine failures and six crashes. After Alan Kulwicki’s death, Hooters, in keeping with their sleazy image, immediately stopped sponsoring the #7 car only a couple weeks later, so when Bodine bought the team he didn’t have steady sponsorship. Bob Newton, the owner of Hoosier Racing Tire, decided to reenter the sport for 1994 and managed to convince Bodine to switch to Hoosiers and become the tire brand’s lead test driver, since he was the only marquee name Hoosier had signed for its second go-around. In exchange, Newton arranged for Bodine to land the Exide Batteries sponsorship. Being the lead test driver for a tire manufacturer allowed him unlimited testing like the old days, and you could really see it on track. At every track where Bodine had tested, he dominated; on the few tracks where he didn’t, he was usually nowhere to be seen. The aggressive tire setups led to a lot of crashes, but admittedly his brother Brett intentionally wrecking him out of the lead at the inaugural Brickyard 400 because he was cheating on his wife with Tanya Tucker was not something that could really have been foreseen. Nonetheless, that all explains why that season was such an outlier for him. The tire test loophole gave him far more testing opportunities than any of the better drivers and teams had, which drastically inflated his performance, even if his bad luck meant his season was still underrated. (Hoosiers are also the only reason the hapless Loy Allen became a sometimes-qualifying juggernaut and Rick Mast won the pole at the inaugural Brickyard.) Bodine had had a general decline for years starting in 1991 and he didn’t just suddenly improve in 1994; he just got to exploit a weird loophole. After Hoosier withdrew in 1995 and all drivers were on Goodyears from then on, he had a precipitating decline. I remember reading Shaun Assael’s book Wide Open back in the ‘90s where Geoff conspiratorially argued that Goodyear gave him worse tire compounds that year to punish him for being Hoosier’s factory driver. Possible? Sure. But my guess is that it was a combination of him no longer having unlimited testing and his divorce that led to his disastrous 1995. His wife Kathy obviously left after he cheated on her, and part of it was also that Ernie Irvan’s crash a couple weeks later scared the bejeezus out of her from what I have heard. Now, I believe Kathy was instrumental in the day-to-day operations of the team (much more than for example Teresa Earnhardt was) so the divorce obviously also hurt the team, and that was entirely his fault. His career significantly unraveled after he lost the Exide sponsorship to Roush in 1996, and then he had a sad, slow end to his career.

That leads us to Joey Logano. In the run up to the 2024 All-Star race, Logano had tested for 800 laps, way more than anyone else, en route to dominating that event, so it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise that he won in dominant fashion as it was. This is the real way this race was a throwback because it once again proved how having a significant testing advantage over the rest of the field could inflate your performance more than it otherwise should have been. Now, unlike Bodine in 1994, Logano does not have the same kind of testing advantage at any other track, so he’ll be back to his usual piddling lackluster mediocrity in no time. He’s not suddenly back and he doesn’t have momentum. He just got the opportunity to seize on an artificial testing advantage like Bodine in 1994, and he’ll be back to his usual 1995 Bodine-caliber performance before long. I was just hoping Erik Jones would make the Chase over him and now it looks like that won’t happen.

IndyCar got too greedy and big for its britches this weekend. Although I remember almost everyone complaining when they announced their exclusive deal with FOX because of how bad their coverage is, I knew Roger Penske had the right idea here and that having every single race on FOX would lead to the ratings skyrocketing as it has done. As part of that deal, FOX also purchased a portion of the series, so to make that investment profitable, they began giving IndyCar all these plum time slots such as directly following World Cup games to maximize the return on their investment. It worked… until the World Cup ran over. I’m not into soccer at all but I watched a fair bit of the World Cup finals, usually on mute, until the IndyCar race was scheduled to come on. I saw the winning goal at least. After the Spain/Argentina match ran over and a torrential downpour blanketed the Nashville Superspeedway, the race got delayed to Monday. I am not normally one to feel schadenfreude since I feel that schadenfreude is usually wrong, but I did so on this occasion. IndyCar deserved to have egg on its face after that gross White House photo op to promote the Trump Grand Prix last week, where Roger Penske said this, of all things: “We think about the Indy 500 as an iconic race. But this is going to move right up there next to it, as far as we’re concerned, from the standpoint of the best in the world.” Yeah, this hastily put together street race that puts a blight on the sport is exactly on par with the Indy 500. Bleep you, Rog. You deserved to have your cushy World Cup finale lead-in ruined after that. (And for the record, I’d still have a problem if any Democratic President had mandated a race by executive order too.)

As for the race itself, it wasn’t bad or anything but it was just your usual buzzkill. Once again, Álex Palou inherited a race lead he never captured on track since seemingly Chip Ganassi’s team is the only team that can strategize properly. Once again, David Malukas got screwed out of an oval race that probably should have been his as it seems like he’s never had good luck in a race where he had potentially winning speed, and that’s getting as ridiculous as Palou’s good luck at this point. Regardless of Palou winning, Malukas obviously had the best performance. I thought he was going to be out for the weekend after his Saturday morning crash, but he amazingly went from being in the hospital and seemingly likely to miss the race to leading Saturday afternoon practice. Then he made up for being forced to start last by staying out of the pits on the first pit cycle and was dominating and easily in position to win until he got trapped by a caution. I guess you could say it’s his fault for crashing in practice, which forced him to go on that alternate strategy, but I don’t know. That’s sure worked for Scott Dixon and Palou many a time. But just as ever, when Malukas tries it, he’s typically screwed. His drive from last to third while hurt almost gives me Josef Newgarden 2016 Iowa vibes (and Newgarden’s oval performances while hurt this year have also been very impressive). Indeed, his trajectory reminded me of Newgarden’s all along. He’ll never win as many races or titles probably just because the fields are much deeper now than the awful late-2010s fields Newgarden came up against, but he’s breathing the same air. I guess I’m not unhappy Penske got screwed out of the win after the aforementioned quote. But Malukas did not deserve this. It feels like he could already have 3-5 oval wins by now if he even had balanced luck. Well, he’s still second in points…

The contractor that Onondaga County Community Development connected me with will finally be starting the roof repair tomorrow and then hopefully the ramp replacement a couple weeks after that so Mom will be able to come home. I also scheduled the needed deep cleaning for August 5, so hopefully she’ll be back by the end of August. Fingers crossed. The nursing home was talking about wanting to move her to the third floor dementia ward yesterday, and if that had happened, she’d have never been allowed to leave. Do I think she has dementia symptoms? Yes. On the other hand, I think she’s substantially more coherent than she was a year ago and I think her symptoms have improved. So, I argued hard with the fourth floor social worker about this yesterday and they let me make the call because I had power of attorney. I was worried that Adult Protective Services might intervene on this because they were the ones who forced her into Van Duyn to begin with against her wishes because of her hoarding, but they ended their involvement a long time ago, so I got to make the call.

Here are the originally scheduled drivers for both July 20 and July 21.

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While Blaney has pretty consistently been the top Ford driver since the start of 2023 and you could even make a case for 2022 despite his teammate Joey Logano having his least undeserving championship, Logano and Austin Cindric were usually every bit the match for Blaney in recent drafting races even if they weren’t even close anywhere else. Not so this time. Even though Logano and Cindric were right behind Blaney for most of Stage 1, they fell off hard in the last two stages, and neither of them even led a lap. The other Fords were significantly worse. The RFK Racing cars were mediocre, although Chris Buescher (as per usual) eked out a finish better than how he ran. Josh Berry and Front Row Motorsports were astonishingly terrible. I really expected Zane Smith to be a low-key contender given the general Ford speed, four straight top tens in his last four starts, and his significant improvement in recent months. However, he was nowhere in the race, but still faster than his teammates. Really, Blaney was the only Ford who was fast at all, which both surprised and impressed me, even relative to his own high standards. I wasn’t sure whether to rate Blaney, Denny Hamlin, or Tyler Reddick higher overall for the season before last weekend, but now I am.

After freebasing hundreds of Matt McLaughlin columns in my halcyon days, I have an instinctive aversion to anything that smacks of artificiality. I need to get over this. While I acknowledge that the Atlanta Motor Speedway was badly in need of a repave, I don’t understand why they felt like they needed to raise the banking. I had grown so sick of restrictor plate racing by that point that the last thing I wanted to see was more drafting races. This explains why I haven’t enjoyed many of the races at Nu-Atlanta as much as I should’ve. While they were certainly consistently better than the Next Gen Daytona and Talladega races (that goes without saying), my millennial heart will always think Atlanta should race as it did at the turn of the millennium. I prefer for drivers to be able to complete slingshot passes as in the classic 1999-2001 races to the current style of racing that features a lot of aero push while sidedrafting, which is fairly new. I’m sure most people will blame the Next Gen car, which is universally despised, but honestly I like it much more than the COT or the Gen 6, and I always have. (Yes, the short track and road course racing has sucked, but I’m glad they’re trying things to remedy the short track racing and does the road course racing actually suck or is it just that one driver is arguably better than the rest of the field combined?)

What I did really like about the race was that the quality of equipment seemed to matter less than on most intermediate superspeedways, as most of the good drivers in slow cars were fast (Shane van Gisbergen, Ross Chastain, Erik Jones, Carson Hocevar) and at least there weren’t many major crashes. Maybe throttle response doesn’t matter as much as it once did at Atlanta, but you can’t say either the race or its finishing order were very unrepresentative of the quality of the fields, and that’s a big plus. Although Blaney’s pit crew is notoriously slow, it seems like his luck is finally starting to balance out other than that, as his eight straight races with a top ten finish now match his career best. He probably still won’t win the regular season championship, but his chances have dramatically increased.

LUIGI CHINETTI……………………...USA

Born: July 17, 1901
Died: August 17, 1994

Best year: 1949
Best drive: 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans

The second three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, but better known as the first Ferrari salesman in America and the owner of the North American Racing Team, Chinetti joined Alfa Romeo as a mechanic in 1917, where he met another young mechanic named Enzo Ferrari. Despite being raised in Italy, he fled to Paris during World War I as Mussolini rose to power.

While in France, he began regularly entering the 24 Hours of Le Mans, winning on his Le Mans debut with Raymond Sommer in an Alfa Romeo, but he only drove three hours due to a fever. In 1933, he finished second at Le Mans and won his first 24 Hours of Spa with Louis Chiron before becoming a team owner in 1934. That year, he earned his second Le Mans win with Philippe Étancelin by 13 laps; they successfully covered up their leaking fuel tank with chewing gum. In 1940, he joined Lucy O’Reilly Schell’s Écurie Bleue crew to help engineer René Le Bègue and René Dreyfus’s Indy 500 entry, then stayed in the country as Hitler took over France, eventually becoming an American citizen.

Although he never lived in Italy again, he reunited with Ferrari in 1946 after the war, convincing him to build his own road cars and race cars, which Chinetti would sell, making him the first foreign distributor of Ferraris in both the US and France. He also resumed his racing career, winning the 12 Hours of Paris solo in 1948, then peaking in 1949 with his third Le Mans win and Ferrari’s first; his co-driver Peter Mitchell-Thomson, a British lord, only drove 72 minutes. Chinetti also won that year’s 24 Hours of Spa with Jean Lucas despite running into a house with two laps to go after swerving to avoid a woman who ambled onto the track. After earning Ferrari’s first Sebring class win in 1950 and winning the Carrera Panamericana in 1951, he primarily focused on his career as a car owner. In 1958, he formed the North American Racing Team, which won numerous sports car races (most notably the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans). In this role, he introduced future World Champion Phil Hill to Ferrari. When Ferrari withdrew from the last two F1 races in 1964 due to a sports car homologation dispute, John Surtees technically won the World Championship in a NART car.

Although popularizing Ferrari internationally remains Chinetti’s main legacy, his driving career too often gets downplayed. Few European drivers managed to be relevant both before and after World War II, but Chinetti is an exception. Indeed, I think his postwar career was better. In the ‘30s, he often co-drove with Grand Prix stars, while in later years, he was the unambiguous team leader and often drove either solo or with clearly inferior co-drivers. Most impressively, nearly all his greatest successes came for his own team, which remained relevant long after his retirement. Between engineering, driving, owning, and marketing, he pretty much did it all.

Year-by-year: 1932: E-, 1933: E-, 1934: E, 1935: C+, 1938: C+, 1939: C+, 1948: C+, 1949: 3, 1950: C+, 1951: C-, 1952: C-, 1953: C-

DICK THOMPSON……………………USA

Born: July 9, 1920
Died: September 14, 2014

Best year: 1957
Best drive: 1957 SCCA National at Eagle Mountain National Guard Base

Possibly the greatest amateur driver of all time, Thompson was the only driver to win seven SCCA National Sports Car Championship titles. This championship, which ran from 1951 to 1964, offered no cash prizes but still offered some of the strongest competition in American road racing for much of that period. As a result, most drivers needed to be independently wealthy from another source. Thompson gained his nickname “The Flying Dentist” from his Washington, D.C. day job. Although some SCCA drivers transitioned into pro careers, Thompson wasn’t interested in doing so yet still proved to be one of the top sports car drivers of his time in addition to popularizing the Chevy Corvette.

After buying an MG in 1950, he went to a race at Watkins Glen in 1951, where he and William Kinchloe learned about the next year’s 12 Hours of Sebring. On a whim, Thompson and Kinchloe drove their MG to Sebring and raced it, finishing eighth overall even though neither driver had any experience; Thompson returned to his dental office the next day. He shared the SCCA F Production class championship with Art Bunker in 1954, but he would become best-known for his exploits in Corvettes. In 1956, he won the Corvette’s first SCCA Championship race in Pebble Beach.

In the 1957 Eagle Mountain SCCA National, Thompson convinced his mechanic, former NASCAR champion Red Byron, to adjust the car’s rear axle in anticipation of heavy rain, then lapped all but one of the 19 other starters during a torrential downpour, making both him and the Corvette a star. He won eight races that year to win the B Production title, then won five more titles consecutively (the D Production in 1958, C Modified in 1959 and 1960, B Production again in 1961, and A Production in 1962, another year he won eight times). He also occasionally raced internationally, earning class wins in the 1957 12 Hours of Sebring, the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans, and three at Daytona at various lengths. He finally won his only overall WSC race at the 1000 Kilometers of Spa with Jacky Ickx in 1967. In 1958, he co-authored The Corvette Guide.

I need to be careful about how I rate Thompson because the SCCA series he dominated was fully amateurized, so the competition likely wasn’t as strong as the United States Road Racing Championship, Can-Am, or even Trans-Am, but his record six straight championships in four different classes in a series where hundreds of drivers competed each year still push him over the line. In 1957, SCCA was still the top tier of American road racing, so I don’t think I should penalize him for remaining there and spending little time in the more prestigious series that emerged afterward, especially because he continued to maintain a full-time career. He certainly proved his mettle enough internationally to indicate that he could’ve become a pro if he’d wanted to, but he understandably felt maintaining his dental practice would be a better bet.

Year-by-year: 1954: C, 1956: C+, 1957: E, 1958: C+, 1959: C-, 1960: C+, 1961: C+, 1962: E, 1963: C+, 1967: C-

Although I think Jayski thought his site blew up because of his news and rumors page, in retrospect, I don’t think he was amazing at reporting or getting scoops. I know he had some insider sources, but I remember one of my fellow SpeedFX posters (and I’ll get to that) complaining that he sometimes made up racing transactions out of thin air on message boards and then Jayski would report them as rumors. However, what Jayski did have were his team charts where he would list all car number/driver/sponsor/car owner/crew chief changes for the upcoming seasons along with when each driver’s contract ended. There was no other way to find this information easily in an era before Wikipedia existed. Even more importantly, Jayski served as the hub for the entire indie NASCAR Internet, and that is why I think he blew up. He had the most exhaustive list of links to NASCAR fan pages (which were almost entirely amateur Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod pages). Frontrow Racenet, my site from 1998-2002, had a Jayski link. Similarly, Jayski compiled daily lists of links to all the significant online news and opinion articles. Because most conventional newspapers with racing columnists didn’t yet post all their writers’ content online, this spawned a new indie ecosystem of NASCAR sites that was essentially untapped, and it entirely revolved around Jayski. He was more important as a link aggregator than as a rumormonger.

For a while, I think I read nearly all the columns on all the sites that Jayski linked to, but I eventually migrated to a small handful of sites. My favorites were That’s Racin’, Frontstretch, Catchfence, Perfect Paranoia, RaceComm, David Smith Motorsports, and most importantly, speedworld.net (which later became SpeedFX, then RacingOne). That’s Racin’ was, I guess, the most professional site since it was mostly just an outpost for David Poole’s columns at the Charlotte Observer, which was one of the few newspapers that put their racing columns online back then, but it was also notable because for a while it was the only site where you could find lap leader data for current races. (The Charlotte Observer still uses the brand, but the spark is gone.) Frontstretch still exists and remains relevant as probably the #1 indie NASCAR news and commentary site. Catchfence’s big gimmick is that every week they had a “Heroes and Villains” column where they shared the good and bad from each race weekend, with each Hero denoted in green boldface and each villain in red boldface. In retrospect, that was possibly the worst of these sites. It too still exists, but now just posts PR copy. Perfect Paranoia assessed the media coverage for each race, counted the number of commercials and the length of commercial breaks, along with how many times the race restarted during a commercial break (a frequent occurrence back then). David Smith Motorsports was a latecomer to this early race blog scene, but I admired him as a talent scout in the 2000s more than as a statistician for Motorsports Analytics in the 2010s before RFK Racing hired him, and he definitely had influence on me. But my favorite sites were RaceComm and speedworld.net because those were the sites McLaughlin wrote for.

RaceComm was run by Mike Calinoff, who later became Matt Kenseth’s Cup Series spotter (imagine going straight from a writing gig to that nowadays - damn!) SpeedWorld was McLaughlin’s main site. It was launched by a quiet, mild-mannered Gen Xer named Derek who didn’t like to draw attention to himself. Derek wasn’t a writer, but I give him the primary credit for discovering McLaughlin, and most of his best columns were there. I already linked my three favorite columns of his a couple of weeks ago in my remembrance of Steve Waid, so I won’t be doing that again here, but I would like to share some thoughts about his oeuvre as a whole and his influence on me.

McLaughlin was maybe the most boomer boomer who ever boomered (which would make him Enemy #1 for a lot of folks nowadays who believe in discriminating against people based on chronology rather than wealth or power), but he was doing so at perhaps the last possible moment when boomers could still be cool. Although he had been a hardcore NASCAR fan since the mid-’70s, he didn’t have much in common with the hegemonic NASCAR fan zeitgeist of the day. He came from Pennsylvania, not the South, routinely called himself a hippie when most of the NASCAR message board posters du jour were more inclined to be hippie-punchers, and I think he was a Democrat, but he kept it really quiet to avoid fan backlash. NASCAR in the ‘90s and 2000s was really pandering hard to conservatives. Back in the ‘90s, it was being constantly promoted as a “family sport” in commercials. This didn’t show up much during the actual race broadcasts at the time, so if you just watch old races, you won’t really understand NASCAR’s specific marketing blitzes. What made it a family sport? Just because a handful of pairs of brothers raced (lol)? However, the ‘90s broadcasts still had more universal appeal than the 2000s broadcasts. Back in the ‘90s, the Democrats were pandering for family values voters too, as evidenced by the husband of PMRC founder Tipper Gore’s ascent to political power. Bill Clinton sold the world on the godawful Telecommunications Act of 1996 by including a provision mandating V-chips to censor violent content on TV, and I was stupidly for it at the time! By the 2000s, the FOX broadcasts went all in on pandering to neocons. This was an area of growth when George W. Bush had 90% approval ratings, but as I’ve ranted before, going all in on militarism and the Iraq War clearly tainted NASCAR’s brand amongst millennials, and I remain convinced that many of my high school classmates who were NASCAR fans dipped at this point.

So against this backdrop, there was always a tension in McLaughlin’s work between his Democratic politics, hippie persona, social centrism, and his very trad racing opinions. His columns were littered with constant and probably excessive references to various classic rockers, nearly all of the heartland, country, or folk variety. He habitually quoted lyrics from the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, and so on. But he was just as renowned for his resistance to any changes within NASCAR. In my very early years as a fan, the routine conventional wisdom was that the 1976 and 1979 Daytona 500s were the best NASCAR races in history. I think it was McLaughlin who was largely responsible for popularizing the new and now standard boomer narrative that the 1992 Hooters 500 was the greatest race ever, and he would always say that 1992 was the best season as well. Now, I’ve watched a lot of 1992 races, and they are some of the most boring that I’ve ever seen. Parade after parade after parade for the most part. Ernie Irvan, Sterling Marlin, and Bobby Hillin (substituting for Davey Allison) LAPPED THE FIELD at Talladega in a race with no crashes. But I kind of get where he was coming from nonetheless.

While I definitely think the racing in 1992 was lackluster, the media coverage in my opinion was never better. Between CBS’s Ken Squier/Ned Jarrett/Neil Bonnett booth, TNN’s Mike Joy/Bonnett/Buddy Baker booth, and ESPN’s Bob Jenkins/Jarrett/Benny Parsons booth, the announcers were never better in my opinion in making every race seem like a big freaking deal. Although there were certainly major improvements in camera angles and scoring tickers after this, I think the announcers’ ability to build narratives and hype races was probably never better. The announcers also didn’t treat the fans like idiots, insist on filling every spare moment with failed attempts at comedy or shrill noises, and all three booths were fun to hang out with or listen to. I would probably say this is when NASCAR peaked as a television product even despite the subsequent television innovations, but does that make the actual racing better? Nah. (For my money, the greatest NASCAR season was 2001, and the greatest race ever was the 2001 spring Atlanta race. I guess my millennial version of boomerism is how I will never like drafting-track Atlanta as much as the 1999-2001 version, although I’ll admit last weekend’s race was pretty solid.)

However, for as much as McLaughlin talked up 1992 to the point of popularizing the Hooters 500 as the best race ever, from all my readings of him in general, he honestly seemed to view the ‘80s as the glory days. I think he’d have been happy if it was 1987 forever. He always seemed most engaged when writing about Tim Richmond; he probably also popularized the narrative of NASCAR ignoring him, which I guess has continued since he hasn’t made a Hall of Fame ballot yet. McLaughlin hated restrictor plates from the drop when they were introduced in 1988, and he talked trash about every single track that was added to the Cup schedule after Riverside closed: Phoenix, Loudon, Sonoma, Indy, and every single intermediate cookie cutter. He hated them all. (He might not be wrong about some of them.) His favorite track was Pocono, presumably because it was his hometown track, but he was the first to admit that the racing at Pocono and Michigan significantly declined after radial tires replaced bias-ply tires. Honestly, I kind of agree. The then-recent switch to radial tires is why the 1992 season was so boring!

McLaughlin was still a devoted fan when he started writing in the ‘90s, but he routinely argued that 1998 was when NASCAR began to suck, and I bought this narrative hook, line, and sinker for a long time. Between the 5-and-5 spoiler rule ruining all unrestricted superspeedway racing and making “aero push” a household term, the combination of Jeff Gordon’s dominance and Ernie Irvan’s 1997 firing for bad behavior resulting in all drivers being incentivized to engage in corporate speak, trading North Wilkesboro for Texas, the introduction of the “fake red flag” at the spring Richmond race, and the new Ford Taurus, which converted the four-door model into a two-door model that did not exist in the equivalent street cars, thereby removing the last semblance of anyone arguing that the cars were “stock”, and particularly, the increasingly crass marketing, which really went into overdrive that year with the 50th Anniversary and the ill-conceived NASCAR’s Night in Hollywood. This is not to say he didn’t like races after 1997, because he still frequently did, but you could sense a change in his writing at this point. When he started writing in 1997, he went into each race assuming he would like the next one, but after the 1998 season and especially the 2000 season (which he hated almost as much), he went into future races expecting to hate them (except at Darlington and Pocono, I guess), which could definitely make reading him a bummer.

So, why did I admire him so much? First off, he was a pioneer as the first major exclusively online NASCAR writer. Sure, Poole predated him, but he was already an established newspaper columnist while McLaughlin came out of nowhere. Second, he held nothing back. In an age when NASCAR completely got overtaken by and became beholden to PR speak, he delightfully skewered it and told it how it is. By writing online at a time when online writers were disrespected, he had more freedom to challenge the media narratives of other reporters who wanted closer access to insiders. While McLaughlin had press credentials, he apparently lost them after his “Blood on Their Hands” column, but he didn’t care, and he didn’t stop criticizing NASCAR when he thought it was warranted at a time when much of the establishment press coverage was getting stale. Finally, he was really funny. There are lines that I’ve never forgotten after well over a quarter century, which is not something I can say for any other NASCAR writer. I have two particular favorite lines, both from 1999. At a time when NASCAR began limiting the number of provisionals teams could take if they were outside the top 25 in points (probably as a reaction to Darrell Waltrip’s long string of past champion’s provisionals), he wrote that unless NASCAR revoked this rule, fans might see “Little of Chad O Deere” (not only making a stupid dad joke, but also mocking how the sponsors were beginning to have the real power in dictating NASCAR policy). But his all-time best line in my opinion came when he mocked NASCAR for penalizing Jerry Nadeau for wrecking Dale Jarrett at the 1999 Bristol night race but not penalizing Dale Earnhardt for the much more infamous race-deciding wreck: “NASCAR's apparent unwritten rule: You may not spin out anyone higher in the points than you are.” (Would’ve been even better if he’d written “Thou shalt”, and that is how I erroneously remembered it.)

Another lowkey thing I admired about McLaughlin is he actually had more of an analytical mind than you’d expect from such a racing traditionalist. Despite skewering all of NASCAR’s changes for most of his writing tenure, one thing he did not like about the era of NASCAR he most revered was the Latford points system. He shit on it repeatedly. Even though Bill Elliott was his favorite driver, he seemed to have the most respect for checkers-and-wreckers drivers, and he was well aware that winning was much more important than “having a good points day”, and he mocked that often. Although he hated the Chase even more, he didn’t want to see the Latford points system continue. He noted that it had a purpose in encouraging part-time teams to go full-time, but by that time it had outlived its usefulness, so honestly, he probably influenced me analytically as well. I think at times he took it too far. I remember some column he wrote once where he came up with a points system awarding 1,000 points for first place and 100 for second. Okay bruh, nah. There are way too many fluke winners for me to be down with that, but the points system he came up with in the article I linked seems great to me. He also was ahead of his time as a talent scout in a way. When Jimmie Johnson and Ryan Newman were both rookies in 2002, and in 2003 as well, you were constantly seeing fans online arguing Newman was the “real talent” while Johnson was a product of his dominant equipment, particularly after Newman beat Johnson for Rookie of the Year and then won a series-high 8 races and 11 poles the next year, and also when considering he’d been faster in the Busch Series. Even though Johnson won 6 races in 2002 and 2003 and became the first rookie to lead the points, his hype really didn’t match his record for a while. People saw Newman as the “real talent” (including me) probably because he came out of sprint cars at a time when sprint car alumni Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart were universally acknowledged to be the top two drivers. But just sharing a similar background doesn’t make you Gordon or Stewart, and Newman and Kasey Kahne’s very good but not great careers set people straight on this eventually, not to mention Jason Leffler and J.J. Yeley’s subpar careers. I wasn’t watching at the time, but I’m pretty sure Newman entered the 2004 season as basically everyone’s preseason favorite. Not McLaughlin. He picked Johnson to win the title, which aged amazingly well, even if it was wrong. He noticed that Johnson had been better over the final ten races of 2003 and called Johnson’s ascent at a time when everyone else seemed to think Newman was better because he lucked into a string of fuel mileage wins. So, despite being a hardcore traditionalist, he wasn’t entirely a stick in the mud, and he had more of an analytical mind than I think he was ever given credit for. He also taught me a great deal about NASCAR history via his series of 50th anniversary columns.

Another part of this I haven’t touched upon is his influence as a message board poster. Speedworld.net had a primitive WWWBoard-style forum with no user accounts where all the posts were erased after a week or so. At the tail end of 1999, the message board had a trivia contest, and I decided to participate. I had never really talked to anyone online except people I already knew in real life (I would exchange emails and have AOL Instant Messenger conversations with grade school classmates often, but I seldom interacted socially on message boards and never on forums). This board would become the first place where I regularly socialized with people I didn’t know in real life online, so it was very important to me. McLaughlin posted there as MATT. I originally posted as Tony20, but I got tired of Stewart by the middle of the 2000 season and then renamed myself Sean, which I usually went by everywhere else rather than trying to come up with something more creative.

As a message board poster, MATT was perhaps best known for creating the Out on a Limb (OOAL) game on the 1998 Coca-Cola 600 weekend (as I recall, but that was before I was posting there), where each player selected the polesitter and top three finishers and received a negative score based on how many combined positions you were off. I regularly played it, but I thought it was really boring to answer the same questions every week. Derek nearly banned me back then for making fun of Darrell Waltrip when he bought out Carl Long’s entry to start his last Coca-Cola 600, but later that same weekend, exactly two years after MATT started OOAL, I started my own fantasy game where I asked six questions a week. I asked questions about both the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600, and I really had a massive egg on my face when I predicted Greg Ray to win the 500 when he crashed and finished last. The next week, I named the game Pace Car Challenge. I had different questions every week with random point totals that did not always correlate to the difficulty of the questions. I wanted to ask questions about all kinds of different racing series, not only just NASCAR, and I introduced a season-long points standing. PCC was originally intended as a bit of a parody of OOAL and its negative points scores, but in my game, I awarded the highest weekly scores to the players whose score was the furthest below zero. I only ran PCC for about four months in the summer of 2000 until I quit to focus on school. Nonetheless, it was noticed, and I was so excited when MATT shouted me out in his OOAL recap post at Dover the next week. I think I’d picked Dale Earnhardt to win maybe, but after my name he said something like “Looks like the pace car led more laps than Dale Earnhardt today”, and I got such a rush. In PCC, I asked some wacky stuff. I asked people to predict the theme song for the Bristol night race. I asked which driver would have the largest difference between their car number and the sum of their starting and finishing positions. I awarded bonus points to anyone who could “spell the #25’s driver correctly” because I was getting annoyed seeing Nadeau repeatedly butchered, and some people got it wrong! I awarded -1,000,000 points (basically an automatic win) to anyone who could correctly pick BOTH the highest No Bull 5 finisher AND their finishing position, and Monster Mile Man got it. Those were some fun times. I can’t imagine there was a racing game as wild and anarchic anywhere else. Even though I stopped administering it, I kept playing it for many years, and I think I won the overall PCC championship once. I didn’t really like what the later administrators were doing with it. My goal was to ask wildly different questions each week as much as possible and keep people on their toes, but after I quit, the questions steadily got more and more repetitive, and the game became less fun and not how I envisioned it, but it still somehow lasted over two decades. I remember having an immature hissy fit at the start of the 2003 season when Turnin’ Left, who had taken over PCC, started offering a paid version where players could pay to compete for prize money, where the highest championship finisher in the paid version would win first prize. I was like, vehemently anti-gambling then, and I didn’t like seeing the fruit of my creation turned into that, although the game was at its most popular in the Turnin’ Left years. And now I have to tell my 17-year-old self, dude, chill. I’ve been playing in the paid All-Racing Fantasy League every year since 2009, and I literally wrote for a gambling site. Upon realizing how going to college is at this point essentially gambling and the stock market was normalized decades ago, for me to shout at this guy, who eventually helped popularize the game I started and quickly abandoned, was truly insufferable. I have an unfortunate history of burning bridges. I think in the wake of that, I stopped posting on the RacingOne forums entirely. Might that have been one of the real reasons I stopped watching racing over the next year and a half? Could’ve been. Maybe it was more than just the politics or my dad just dropping cable (which is what I usually say that it was).

McLaughlin and I never talked a lot, but I still consistently read him (except for about a year and a half from 2003 to mid-2004 when I stopped watching racing entirely before I came back late that season). When RacingOne fired him in 2004, I recall he had a “countdown thread” where he would just post the number of days remaining in the year without comment, and nobody was sure why, but people eventually figured out that RacingOne fired him. It’s obvious that at some point, NASCAR or some sister company did buy out the site, because the RacingOne message board briefly got ported to the MRN site (long after I left) and then eventually shut down. At a certain point, it seemed like Derek got forced out or possibly bought out, and Pete Pistone became the effective manager of the site, and Pistone didn’t like McLaughlin’s frequent NASCAR criticisms. I don’t think he was fired specifically for “Blood On Their Hands” (which I noticed when I was going through the Internet Archive apparently got renamed “At What Price Entertainment?”). I think it might have been more about his criticism of the Chase.

In the wake of McLaughlin’s firing, a splinter group of RacingOne forum members launched a rival site called RacingStalkers, and McLaughlin wrote there briefly post-RacingOne, pre-Frontstretch. I posted there too from about 2005-2011 before I largely pivoted to posting in the racing-reference comments sections. Eventually, RacingStalkers came closer to matching the spirit of the old RacingOne boards than the people still posting on RacingOne. Oddly, both the OOAL and PCC games got ported to RacingStalkers, even though McLaughlin and I had long ago stopped running them, and the games continued long after both of us were gone from that family of sites. The MRN board shut down in maybe the early to mid-2010s, and I was definitely gone by the time it switched from RacingOne to MRN. The RacingStalkers board was still active until it shut down maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Amazingly, both OOAL and PCC managed to outlast the board from whence they came.

I continued to read McLaughlin’s columns at RacingStalkers and on Frontstretch (and his name had enough pull that I kind of suspect if they hadn’t hired him that Frontstretch would no longer exist today), but it was never the same for me. He understandably hated the Brian France era so much as an affront to everything he loved about NASCAR, and because he felt like a cabal of NASCAR officials had exiled him into the hinterlands, there was a real bitterness suffused into all his later writings. That’s not to say he didn’t still have some good columns after 2004, but in my opinion, his best writing was behind him, and he mostly repeated himself and became a broken record afterward. Still, a run of eight years and hundreds of consistently strong NASCAR columns is definitely something to celebrate, and it really sucks that the classic era of blogs didn’t have a great deal of influence. The fact that speedworld.net, SpeedFX, RaceComm, and RacingOne are all dead makes a lot of his old columns hard to find (especially because RacingOne pettily deleted all his old work after they fired him), but if you’d like to peruse his old work, I’d really recommend it if you want to learn more about what people felt at the time about NASCAR, particularly in the 1997-2004 era, even if a lot of times, it felt like his mind was stuck in the ‘80s. Warning: a lot of links might not work.

SpeedWorld (1997-1998)

SpeedWorld (1998-1999)

RaceComm (1999)

SpeedFX (2000-2001)

RacingOne (2002-2004)

RacingStalkers (2005)

RacingStalkers (2006)

Frontstretch (2007-2021)

RacingOne firing McLaughlin really did seem like the end of an era, arguably the end of the old NASCAR Internet. Obviously, 2004 was well-known for the launch of Facebook, whose effects would ultimately smother the blogosphere and weaken all the richer, more contemplative long-form platforms in exchange for more mindless, bite-sized algorithmic content. For how much of a pioneer on the racing Internet he was, McLaughlin was sadly slowly forgotten because Frontstretch wasn’t quite as big a platform as RacingOne had been and most of his columns still visible online weren’t as good as his earlier columns, which were erased (God bless the Internet Archive). Even though, like McLaughlin, I was slowly losing interest in actually watching the races myself, I still reminisce about some of the posters from those message boards, and indeed a number of them are still technically friends with me on Facebook, but Facebook’s become a ghost town. I’d really like to see what happened to Derek after he either sold or got forced out of RacingOne; never really figured out what happened there. I really did feel a sense of belonging there even though I was probably the youngest poster by far and probably the only millennial on the entire site.

There were things I didn’t like, mind you. I abhorred their politics. Almost every person on the site was a neocon. There was one woman who thought she was so cute for repeatedly calling the Democrats “Demonrats” (she was also infamous for repeatedly calling for Robbie Loomis to be fired when he was Jeff Gordon’s crew chief, believing that was the problem rather than just Jimmie Johnson being better). I remember posting some immature defense of liberalism on there in 2002 and getting flamed by everyone (including myself now probably), but I still liked the community more than the kinds of algorithmic “communities” that emerged since it felt less transient. It was like going to a bar. You might hate your guys sometimes, but they’re still your guys, right? The modern Internet doesn’t feel like that.

This past experience has caused me to be truly baffled by the modern auto racing social media world, where it seems like the vast majority of people are now liberal or leftist. How did that even happen? In 2003, anyone who was not on board with blowing up the Middle East got flamed to hell in the same horrific epoch when people were burning Dixie Chicks CDs, and now on almost every social media platform except the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, I guess, drivers are routinely shit on for political reasons and stuff. I’ve got to say the fact that NASCAR no longer seems to be pandering to rednecks for the most part is probably the main reason why I actually prefer this decade to the 2000s (although I acknowledge the 2000s had deeper fields and I understand why someone would say the racing was better; I myself argued 2001 had the best racing above).

I have seen it all as both one of the youngest and oldest members of the NASCAR Internet, but I never quite found my place. The message boards I posted on in my youth were largely populated by baby boomers and Gen Xers, and those were also almost universally the people getting both online and offline racing columns published, while this whole YouTube/Twitter scene kind of passed me by because I was somewhat too old for it. I guess a lot of Gen Z fans started watching racing because they got into crash compilations scored to meatheaded post-grunge tracks AMV-style, and that just isn’t something I related to at all. I was too young for the message board scene and too old for the YouTuber scene. During the period in between, I launched race-database.com, and that gained a little traction and a bunch of Wikipedia links, but it was ultimately a dead end. I’m longing to find some kind of racing community with people closer to my age, but I suspect that many people in my age cohort said, “Fuck this shit” once it became irreparably linked to George W. Bush, while I got back into it admittedly as something of an act of rebellion after I was utterly rejected in college.

I’m never getting the old Internet back, and I know it, but I have a lot of nostalgia for it, and finding out about McLaughlin’s death a couple of weeks too late last night, I had to get this out. Decided not to release a 1,000 Greatest Drivers entry with it.

I think one reason I could never get down with all the OK boomer stuff is that I genuinely think I prefer the art of boomers to that of any other generation (no, this does not also go for their politics). McLaughlin’s work is no exception to that, and I know I’m going to miss him.

Parsons brings to mind one very specific memory for me. When I was in junior high school, I was in a class called humanities. It was a continuation of my middle school’s Talented and Gifted classes. Around three students from each elementary school were selected for TAG at the start of fifth grade. Even at the time, that seemed a little early to track students. While most of the students who did become the biggest academic stars in our class were pinpointed even then, there were a number of students who were selected who didn’t strike me as very gifted at all and several usually weren’t enrolled in any of the other gifted classes, while there were some people who were ignored who, in my opinion, were “smarter”, not that it matters now.

The humanities class was a smorgasbord of “enrichment activities”, even more so in the humanities years than the TAG years. We did logic puzzles (I even remember winning a $10 gift certificate to the late, lamented Media Play at a middle school dance and not even redeeming it - I was super cool!) We staged “theatrical plays” where we played famous characters from history. When my future junior prom date (the only date I ever went on 24 years ago) wanted to play Harriet Tubman, I decided to play Thomas Jefferson and attempted to “seduce her”, making fun of him for raping his slaves like a dirtbag leftist avant la lettre. Of course, as someone who strove and sometimes failed to be a goody-two-shoes and teacher’s pet who grew up on schlock like family sitcoms and 7th Heaven (cringe!), my knowledge of sex was rather… limited, so this is arguably the worst thing I ever wrote. I still have it, but you will never see it. In humanities, we also regularly wrote graded journal entries, had trivia contests (which I typically dominated), music listening hours, and class presentations where we even used overhead projectors. (I did a “class” on NASCAR back then and I might share that someday.) We had a Secret Santa gift exchange and an activity where we listed a bunch of facts about ourselves and then our classmates had to guess who wrote it. And our class sponsored a manatee named Hugh (snort).

My ever-living nightmare was Mondays when we had an activity called “good and new” where we reported on the events of our weekends. Almost all my classmates were yuppies/future denizens of the professional managerial class while I was trailer trash. So while my classmates would talk about going to concerts, the park, the mall, and basically doing things in the physical world, I spent most of those weekends at my dad’s just arguing with him during my parents’ custody dispute or, more often, I would just refuse to talk to him to avoid sharing anything incriminating about my mom. I utilized my nerdbrain like an iterative chess player to calculate the response to each of my dad’s interrogations to avoid hurting Mom, whom I sided with in the custody dispute. Ultimately, I usually decided in such conversations that “the only winning move is not to play.” The only things I did besides that were surf the Internet (really dating myself there), watch a shitload of auto races, and play the Papyrus NASCAR Racing 2 video game in the mornings. How would I even talk about that? I was ahead of my time in the worst ways possible, which is why I’ve called myself Zoomero Uno a few times lately. I mean, sure, one could argue that almost anyone who qualified for that class was a nerd by definition, but I was still way weirder than any of my classmates, and I don’t think I realized it. As a result of my unwillingness to participate in this ritual, I could tell the humanities teacher didn’t like me much, but I digress.

In the second half of ninth grade, our humanities class was entirely taken up by a mentor program where we shadowed adults in various industries. Now, at this point, I had no vision of what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I never really had a particular plan beyond getting good grades, going to college, then ??? Most of my classmates did have dream jobs, but I really didn’t at this point. In my earlier childhood, I dreamt of becoming a TV weatherman, but after getting a mere C on my meteorology test in eighth-grade earth science the previous year, I abruptly decided it wasn’t for me. I’m sort of glad I didn’t pursue that seriously, having watched the mainstream media degrade in the decades since. So many weatherpeople nowadays just seem to be cheerleaders for unseasonably warm weather. Local meteorological airheads go on about the “threat of rain” (hello? Nature needs rain) or talk about high temperatures by saying things like “80 or better” as if we all agree that the higher temperature, the better. Me, I could not bring myself to talk like that, especially since my preferred weather was usually upper 60s/low 70s and overcast. I remember Syracuse having vastly more days like that in my youth than in my old age. At a certain point, it’s almost a form of climate change denial.

Anyway, after I renounced my onetime dream field due to one bad test score, I kind of went through the motions and had no idea what I actually wanted to do. I was cynical about every industry, every profession. I especially didn’t want to have a position of power because I saw my mom be abused by doctors and health care workers and I certainly understood how politicians, cops, lawyers, counselors, and even teachers could abuse their power. I was ignorant about what jobs even existed because I was poor and had zero powerful adult connections besides teachers and people in school. My uncle, who worked at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, and my dad, who worked in a computer room, presumed that I would probably become some kind of programmer. By all rights, I probably should have, but even though I had the type of brain for it, I probably lacked the temperament. I was never an adherent to “The Californian Ideology”, which was pretty much the polar opposite of my values and my politics. I rarely had the urge to seek vengeance on society and rebuild it in my own image as a result of being picked on, as many successful programmers did. All these guys wanted to shock the normies, while I probably would’ve rather been a normie. The analog world was better. I grew up thinking hacking was wrong while the people who succeeded embraced it as part of their identity. I also believed file sharing was wrong back then, and only did it once or twice. My feelings haven’t entirely changed. Did information really “want to be free” or did people just want a consumer utopia? I tend to agree with Jaron Lanier that the Internet killed the middle class. It still tends to be the case that it costs more money to do worthwhile research, resulting in a world where, as Nathan J. Robinson put it, “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free”. We should have waited to liberate people from their intellectual property until we actually had a welfare state, but I’m sure 90% of programmers would disagree. How the hell would I have fit in that kind of culture?

In ninth grade, my world history teacher Mr. Oliver asked our class to predict where we’d be in 20 years. I was the only student who was unable to envision anything back then, and I think that’s a major reason why I failed as an adult. So, when I had to select a mentor for the humanities mentor program, I selected Mr. Oliver because I couldn’t come up with anyone else since I had no real connections to “pillars of the community”. The odd thing was that after I selected him, he didn’t want to talk about history teaching. He wanted to talk about NASCAR. Yes, as I said, I gave a humanities lecture on NASCAR, I wore driver T-shirts often, my humanities folder was Tony Stewart-themed as was my AOL screen name (which makes me cringe now), and I even had a NASCAR jacket and Dale Earnhardt backpack, but apart from showing off my fandom via naked consumerism, I mostly kept part of my life separate. I talked to teachers and classmates about school, seldom about racing (and even less about Scrabble, which was always just as big a childhood interest). I was looking for a mentor to give me a lifeline and tips for how to break through as a teacher - or really into ANY industry - since I never really had a specific industry in mind and still don’t. However, it felt like he was just wasting my time. Mr. Oliver never gave me any teaching tips, but he nonetheless encouraged my NASCAR research, commissioning me to find out information about driver salaries and how much money it costs to run a team, which weren’t talked about very often back then.

I ended up dropping the humanities mentor program (the only class I ever dropped in my K-12 career). Before I did so, I submitted at least one question to RPM2Night, the nightly ESPN2 racing show, which I watched religiously then even though it was fundamentally mediocre, and Benny answered it on the air. In that peak stranger danger era, it was considered proper “netiquette” at the time to never disclose your real name online. (People increasingly stopped doing this after Facebook, but perhaps this old cultural norm was better.) I was so paranoid about sharing personal information on the Internet back then that I claimed to be “Matt Wilson of Grand Rapids, Michigan”. While I’m sure multiple Matt Wilsons lived in that fine city, I knew my name wasn’t common, and I didn’t want to leave a paper trail. In retrospect, I find this hilarious now that real names online have been normalized. Who’s gonna contact some dopey teenager about some bland question about driver salaries? Absolutely no one. It was still exciting to have this kind of proto-parasocial interaction with BP since it was the first time I, or excuse me, “Matt”, had been acknowledged by NASCAR insiders. I had certainly always admired Benny, and the Bob Jenkins/Ned Jarrett/Benny NASCAR booth is still my all-time favorite.

Nowadays, I’ve done almost a complete 180, especially after becoming a niche celebrity gamer. I couldn’t hide my identity anymore if I tried at this point, so why bother? At least embrace the marginal amount of fame I have. Additionally, I now think that stranger danger is one of the worst things to happen over the past half-century. Several generations increasingly losing their ability to socialize and make offline friends or connections was, in my opinion, ultimately worse than a relatively small number of children being murdered. People are always asking how we ended up living in a gerontocracy, or as it has been recently called, an “oldigarchy” (please let this dad-joke-version-of-OK-boomerism not actually catch on). It’s obvious to me why this happened. Offline connections, particularly local ones, are the foundation for all the networks that ultimately result in happiness, money, and/or power. Online connections, by contrast, are less personal and intimate and more precarious and transactional. It stands to reason that people with established real-world local connections generally accumulated the lion’s share of the money and power, which I think is the main reason why older people control all levers of government. Meanwhile, the younger and more extremely online generations voluntarily dropped out of participating in the established mainstream monoculture in exchange for a more fragmented and transient culture that prevented us from building any real power. If you want to blame the boomers for this (which I don’t particularly - I’d rather blame rich people in all generations), you can. If maybe we’d been encouraged to talk to strangers, multiple generations would have ended up richer, happier, healthier, less anxious, and less alone.

For years, I’ve been nostalgic about trying to find that episode of RPM2Night featuring my question, and while doing my research for this post, I finally found it from April 3, 2000:

I thought my question was about driver salaries, so maybe “Matt” chimed in twice, but if so, I can’t find the other one.

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I didn’t have much to say about any of this weekend’s races. It was nice that Charles Leclerc got a long-overdue win in the F1 race, as poorly officiated as that restart during the middle of the last lap was. Normally, I’d say the same thing about Pato O’Ward ending his winless drought in IndyCar, but that kind of annoyed me, if only because I hated to see the driver McLaren is keeping winning out over the driver they are dropping who is beating him in points. I was also mildly annoyed that Chase Briscoe won over Christopher Bell when Briscoe has had a pretty lucky Joe Gibbs Racing career, while Bell has been horribly unlucky this season, even discounting his injury, but the racing was okay across the board.

There was a lot of scuttlebutt about O’Ward asking Zak Brown to be “relieved of his F1 duties” today. Of course, there was all the cringe garbage you inevitably expect where F1-only fans went on about how he wasn’t good enough or that he’s mid or whatever. I know he’s too old to be considered, but he’s been ahead of both McLaren F1 drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, pretty consistently in my open wheel model. O’Ward actually had a better teammate head-to-head record (9-6) against Colton Herta than Norris did (13-14) when they both competed against him in minor leagues. It just seems like everything is so specialized now that if you don’t commit to one singular series/developmental path and instead try to cross over between a bunch of different series these days, you typically fail. Part of the issue seems to be that there is far less testing available in pretty much every series (especially post-COVID) to learn unfamiliar cars quickly, which makes talented drivers like Herta in Formula 2 this year fall flat on their face when competing against inferior drivers who have more experience with those particular cars and tracks (see also Connor Zilisch this year, etc…) Yes, I am certain that O’Ward would be a worse F1 driver than Norris and Piastri because is career wasn’t geared towards that, but I am also certain that they would be worse IndyCar drivers.

It just gets really frustrating when you read these F1 fans who act like the 15th best F1 driver is better than the best driver in any other series. We’ve seen F1 drivers cross over to IndyCar, and few of them have set the world on fire there lately. Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean, and Takuma Sato were… fine. Above average for sure, but aside from Ericsson and Sato’s very strong Indianapolis records and Grosjean’s two or three epic road/street course drives (which he didn’t win), you could forget they were even racing in IndyCar half the time. (Do you even remember that Grosjean has returned to IndyCar now?) Were they not qualified to be F1 drivers because they didn’t become IndyCar championship contenders? Even better example: Fernando Alonso literally DNQed at Indy, and he was a World Champion.

One of the things I like about my open wheel model especially is that it can cut through a lot of this bullshit. I guess a lot of F1 fans care only about F1, and their measure of success is how successfully anyone is in F1, and any driver who wasn’t at least an above-average F1 driver is mid, even if their dominant performances in domestic series were actually more impressive than what Nico Hülkenberg is doing or whatever (mind you, Hülkenberg is still going to be a lock on my list so I’m not dissing him or anything, but I do think it’s quite fair to say he had a low ceiling and is mainly making the list as a career compiler). I don’t really care so much how drivers do as F1 drivers, I guess, and you’re not going to get me to say Michael Andretti, Sébastien Bourdais, and Alex Zanardi sucked because they flopped there (although I do rate Zanardi much lower than the other two). Even the Eurocentric media like Autosport are not that biased towards F1 drivers, but it seems like a lot of fans who came in through Drive to Survive or whatever, are. But I know what social media is like and I don’t have to listen to it.

As for O’Ward personally, I admit I expected him to challenge and eventually overtake Álex Palou at some point, and he seems to be getting farther and farther away from doing so. Ever since IndyCar went to their ticking timebomb hybrid engines in the middle of 2024, nobody’s seemed to have anything for Palou. Nonetheless, I’d still say it’s hard to argue O’Ward has fallen off either, while many of the big stars (Scott McLaughlin, Josef Newgarden, Will Power, Scott Dixon, Herta) all have. Yes, it now appears that some combination of Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Discaard, and David Malukas may be vying to overtake O’Ward as Palou’s principal challenger, but I have not yet given up on O’Ward winning a title or an Indy 500 (while I probably have for McLaughlin at this point).

Personal to Colton Herta: Give up on your disastrous Formula 2 campaign and try to fight for the #9 car. You’ll never get an opportunity like that again. Or even returning to Andretti in the #28. If Ericsson could dominate a race at Gateway out of nowhere, maybe you could still win a championship…

JACK HEWITT………………………..USA

Born: July 8, 1951

Best year: 1986
Best drive: 1998 4-Crown Nationals at Eldora Speedway

One of the greatest sprint car drivers of the late 20th century, Hewitt was the son of Don Hewitt, the first driver to turn laps around Eldora Speedway. After returning from the U.S. Army, he began racing seriously in 1975. Although he was simultaneously a carpenter, he quit once racing proved more profitable. When the World of Outlaws launched in 1978, Hewitt initially competed semi-regularly, but he never ran a full WoO schedule because it would have limited him to 60 races a year. A master of both winged and non-winged sprints, Hewitt preferred to compete regionally in the Midwest to maximize his number of starts, typically entering 120-150 races annually, so he primarily focused on the USAC Silver Crown, Midget, Sprint, and All-Star Circuit of Champions races.

Hewitt peaked in the mid ‘80s in Bob Hampshire’s #63 car using a chassis nicknamed Gussie. With this chassis, he won 30 races in 1985, including his only ASCoC championship, and 29 in 1986. The latter year, he earned six USAC Silver Crown wins in eight starts, setting a single-season record that still stands. He became the first back-to-back Silver Crown champion in 1987, and he won at least one top-tier USAC race every year from 1982-2001. His 23 Silver Crown wins were the record until Kody Swanson broke it in 2018, but Swanson never matched Hewitt’s versatility. Although Hewitt never won a Sprint or Midget title, he also won 46 USAC Sprint races (which ranked second when he retired), 56 ASCoC races, and 7 Midget races. He also frequently competed in Australia, finishing second in the 1990-1991 World Series Sprintcars championship.

However, Hewitt truly made his mark at Eldora, winning 43 races in six different divisions, including a record 19 at the track’s marquee 4-Crown Nationals. In 1998, he achieved an historic feat by becoming the only driver ever to win all four races (USAC Silver Crown, Midget and Sprint, and UMP Modified) at the 4-Crown Nationals in one night, for four different car owners no less! Also that year, Hewitt achieved a lifelong dream by becoming the then-oldest rookie starter and finishing 12th at the Indy 500 in the brief period when the IRL catered to overlooked sprint car drivers. His career ended in 2002 when he flipped ten times at the Twin Cities Raceway, suffering severe injuries to his neck and right arm, but he survived the crash.

Despite his sprint car dominance, Hewitt was modest about his accomplishments. When included on a list of the 25 greatest sprint car drivers, he questioned his inclusion, believing it resulted from his fan interactions more than his driving. Always both plain-spoken and outspoken, he remained approachable while chiding NASCAR and World of Outlaws stars for “hid[ing] in their trailers”. After sweeping the 4-Crown Nationals, he was handed a broom and misunderstood the gesture, believing the officials “wanted [him] to sweep something up.” He might be better remembered as a personality than as a driver, but his driving career was unquestionably great.

Open wheel model: N/A (.464)

Teammate head-to-heads: 2-0 (1-0 vs. Donnie Beechler, 1-0 vs. Jason Leffler)

Year-by-year: 1982: C-, 1983: C, 1984: C-, 1985: E-, 1986: E, 1987: C+, 1988: C+, 1989: E-, 1990: C+, 1991: C+, 1993: C, 1995: C-, 1998: C-

I put canvas for #1; never heard of Gesso. Taipei, but I put Kuala Lumpur because of the Petronas Towers. I think I had stopped reading almanacs by the time Taipei 101 opened, so I’d never heard of it. I put Killarney for #3; again, I had nothing. I never watched anything TMNT-related even though I was the right age for it. Most of the people I knew in real life were into it; I don’t know, it might’ve been too violent for me. I just assumed it was also an Italian artist and put Caravaggio. I suppose first name required should’ve been a tipoff that it was a woman, but I couldn’t get myself there and put Charlie Moffitt.

I’d only vaguely heard of rondo and put counterpoint, but I think that was an answer too recently. I get why my opponent expected me to get #2 as I think I’d had a nearly undefeated streak on American history for quite a while, but I forgot about the Missouri Compromise and instead put Kentucky and Kansas, although coming to think of it, I think I knew Kentucky was admitted earlier than that and Kansas later. Still not a bad guess since I knew that Kentucky, like Missouri, was a slave state that didn’t leave the union. Never heard of #3 and put John; I don’t know why I thought that would be the easiest for my opponent. I correctly figured out what suffix the food would need to have, but guessed wrong and I guess sarsaparilla isn’t a spice. And I said Newfoundland for #6, which I guess was a 50/50 shot.

I put Rabindranath Tagore for #1, who was somebody my mom was a fan of, even though I misspelled it Rabindanith. After that other Mona Lisa question, I shouldn’t have guessed Mona Lisa for #2 but I did. Guessed samba for #3, which I guess a lot of people did. Put visible light for #4, which I think makes more sense than the actual answer. I’d definitely heard those ads for question #5 but I didn’t pay enough attention to them to remember what brand it was and I put L’Oréal. And then like I’ve said, I don’t follow the news so I had nothing for #6.

I knew a lot about card games for kids as a boy, but most of the ones explicitly for adults (canasta, pinochle, bridge) I never learned much about, and I randomly guessed canasta here although I considered pinochle. I knew retinol as a Scrabble world, certainly, but not its definition so I put carotene because I knew carrots helped with vision. Put Orange for #4 even though I knew that was a royal house, so it probably didn’t count as a group; I never would have gotten that. Reality TV is nothing I paid attention to. That was just something that really emerged/started to dominate when I was in college and I certainly didn’t have time for that shit, so I never got into it. I knew there was a Los Angeles but I would never have remembered all the cities that had shows, so I put Los Angeles. By this point, I had not clinched my spot and I expected to get relegated because I knew I’d likely lose my last match since Jon Arnold was one of the highest-ranked players in the division.

Well, even though I lost, I just barely avoided getting relegated. I’ve missed way more of the world history questions than I expected to (same for science, because I usually thought I did better in academic trivia categories, but maybe that’s not true since in adulthood I guess I assumed far more pop culture content), but I was really into astronomy for quite some time in my youth. Read through all the lists of space flights constantly, Apollo 13 was my favorite movie (as an adult, I now find it boring) so that was a cinch for me. Put Cairo for #2; not a bad guess, since it also sounds Greek. #3 you basically have to know and I put Alexander the Great. Never heard of Bon Appétit magazine and I guessed Teen Vogue, because I figured it would have to be something about childhood influencers and I know they’re recently very hip. And then for #5, I was struggling to come up with “famous characters from the 1600s” instead of following the hint from “glass”, but I just didn’t make the leap from “glass” to “glass slipper”.

Ultimately, it provides some content here that I doubt anyone is interested in, but this hasn’t been fun (much less than live bar trivia), so I’m definitely planning on quitting after the final match I have paid for, but I’ve still paid for two more matches of 25 games each, so I guess I’ll do those and post them here and then I’ll be done with it.

Well, I figured out the contractor I contacted was too good to be true. As I was only a few minutes from paying him on PayPal, I googled his name and found out that he was investigated for stiffing other people in repair work in the past and more disturbingly, that it appears he was arrested for holding a ten-year-old hostage. I let this man into my house. After I read all that, I broke off contact with him and went with the other cleaning agency. I scheduled an appointment for a deep cleaning on August 5. Somebody on Nextdoor claimed that he died on Sunday, which probably would have been only a couple hours after I declined the work. I have no idea what to make of that, but all I can say is that I was so desperate for Mom to come back that I’ve been really gullible and credulous.

I did hear back from the other contractor about the roof replacement and ramp installation. Although the work was supposed to be finished yesterday according to our contract, at least they’re getting ready to start working. They told me they would send a pamphlet or something consisting of all the color changes for the roof, but they haven’t sent it yet. They might begin work on the roof as soon as next week, but that largely will come down to the weather conditions for their jobs this week, and then they’ll start on the ramp after the roof is finished. I guess the offer the other contractor made was too good to be true as he was talking about $650 for a deep clean, patching the roof, and ramp installation, even though it clearly would have caused vastly more than that and since I already had the other contract through Onondaga County Community Development, I made the right choice to wait.

SEBASTIAN VETTEL…………GERMANY

Born: July 3, 1987

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2008 Gran Premio Santander D'Italia at Autodromo Nazionale di Monza

The house upon which Red Bull was built, Vettel was called up to join their junior operation Scuderia Toro Rosso as a mid-season replacement for Scott Speed in 2007; four-time defending Champ Car champion Sébastien Bourdais joined him in 2008. Not only did Vettel sweep Bourdais in shared finishes, but he claimed the upset of the decade by winning from pole at Monza, becoming the then-youngest winner and polesitter, actually winning Toro Rosso’s only race before Red Bull itself won. After Red Bull promoted him in 2009, Vettel delivered the team’s first win in Shanghai.

From 2010-2013, Vettel became the third driver to win four consecutive championships after Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher. He overtook Fernando Alonso for the 2010 championship by four points after winning Abu Dhabi, and nosed him out by three points in 2012, but his 2011 and 2013 title seasons were far more impressive. In 2011, he won 11 races and a record 15 poles, while his 13 wins, including nine consecutive, in 2013 set records. I prefer 2011 since he was slightly more dominant and had a better average running position, while I suspect other teams stopped developing their 2013 cars to prepare for the new 2014 regulations.

In his championship years, Vettel trained himself to utilize Red Bull’s blown diffusers to accelerate more quickly through the turns, but this was disallowed in 2014, when he shockingly became the only defending F1 champion to go winless while his teammate (Daniel Ricciardo) won. Racing in traffic was not one of Vettel’s strengths, so he sometimes struggled in slower cars. Having idolized Schumacher at Ferrari, Vettel moved there himself for 2015. Although Ferrari could never compete with Mercedes, Vettel actually delivered some of his best performances there, leading both the 2017 and 2018 championships before Lewis Hamilton eventually overtook him. However, Vettel suddenly declined after Charles Leclerc replaced Räikkönen. Despite being relatively evenly matched in 2019, Leclerc was 20 percentage points faster in 2020, prompting Vettel’s switch to Aston Martin, where he posted two undistinguished seasons before retiring. Outside the cockpit, he was renowned for his climate activism, building bee sanctuaries and campaigning for F1 schedules that minimized carbon emissions.

Vettel’s legacy is now in a bit of an odd place, as Vettel had less longevity than most repeat champions, while future Red Bull driver Max Verstappen broke most of Vettel’s records, making his career appear somewhat more mediocre in hindsight. Nonetheless, he still ranks 4th with 53 wins and in the top five in most other categories. Despite his season-to-season inconsistency, few drivers ever had a higher ceiling as he led my open wheel model four times globally (2008, 2011, 2013, 2017) and twice more amongst F1 drivers (2015-2016). In addition to winning the 2015 Race of Champions, Vettel and Schumacher combined to win that race’s Nations Cup six straight years from 2007-2012; Vettel won again with Pascal Wehrlein in 2017. Ultimately, I put far more emphasis on his peak seasons than his mediocre ones.

Open wheel model: #27 of 931 (.305)

Teammate head-to-heads: 185-101 (6-1 vs. Mikhail Aleshin, 10-0 vs. Sebastien Bourdais, 0-1 vs. Sebastien Buemi, 5-12 vs. Paul di Resta, 1-0 vs. Loic Duval, 0-1 vs. Maro Engel, 12-3 vs. Kamui Kobayashi, 12-17 vs. Charles Leclerc, 1-2 vs. Vitantonio Liuzzi, 41-16 vs. Kimi Raikkonen, 3-11 vs. Daniel Ricciardo, 15-15 vs. Lance Stroll, 12-3 vs. Giedo van der Garde, 56-16 vs. Mark Webber, 11-3 vs. Andreas Wirth)

Year-by-year: 2004: C-, 2006: C-, 2007: C+, 2008: E, 2009: 4, 2010: E, 2011: 1, 2012: E, 2013: 1, 2014: C, 2015: 1, 2016: E, 2017: 2, 2018: E, 2019: E-, 2020: C-, 2021: C, 2022: C

In the wake of the NASCAR race at the Coronado Street Course two weeks ago, I’ve certainly been thinking about the 250th anniversary of America. I wish I could feel the patriotic spirit in my bones. I used to always watch either A Capitol Fourth or the Boston Pops Independence Day celebrations (usually Boston) every year as a boy, but I haven’t been able to get myself up for it for a long time. I just read Ryan McCafferty’s defense of Independence Day, and I rationally think he is correct, but I can’t feel it emotionally. I think my problem with all our national holidays is how they have become increasingly militarized. To celebrate our country is to celebrate the military, and I’m old enough to remember when these were viewed as more distinct. To be sure, most of our national holiday celebrations always had some level of military pageantry, but it really got to be too much to bear after 9/11. Although Memorial Day was always about honoring military dead, when I was a kid, I remember people celebrating it to honor their families’ non-veteran deaths too, and that part of it seems to have completely gone away. While obviously the War for Independence was a military endeavor, I remember that as well as more about celebrating the country than celebrating the military. As a NASCAR fan, I’m old enough to remember that in the ‘90s, a lot of the pre-race pageantry like the national anthem, the military flyovers (if they even existed then), and the invocation often weren’t even televised. There was a certain militaristic escalation of everything in our culture in the 2000s that I found truly nauseating, and like I said many times, it indeed made me stop watching NASCAR for a couple years. It was like if you opposed the Iraq War, NASCAR didn’t want you as a fan, so I said fuck it. Until I was so thoroughly rejected by hipster my college classmates who I shouldn’t have been trying to impress that I got back into it again. I think I’ve outgrown that sort of sentiment two decades later - I didn’t boycott the Coronado race weekend even though I was against the race on principle, even though I still talked shit about it. And I certainly admit the Cup race at least was excellent, even though I don’t want to see another race there ever again.

In most of my early adulthood, I was really Michael Moore-pilled. I hardly agreed with everything he said in his movies, mind you, but I definitely liked most of them, and for a long time there, I had the consistent attitude of “Europe-good-because-welfare-state and America-bad-because-lack-of-welfare-state”. I know a lot of even further left people would say that America is the worst country in the world because a lot of leftists rather pedantically calculate morality exclusively by death tolls. Whoever kills the most people is the worst by definition. It’s a metric for sure, but completely un-nuanced. It’s really just a reaction to America having the most power, but power can be used for good and for evil. I know most leftists say George W. Bush was the worst President and significantly worse than Trump because he killed the most people in the Iraq War, but on the other hand, he’s considered a hero to Africans because his PEPFAR program to fight AIDS in Africa saved many more times the number of people who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, even over the entire war. I’m not going to say I admire Bush or that his administration was more good than bad. He mainstreamed a lot of terrible things (besides his war crimes, helping tank the economy, and Hurricane Katrina, there was his opposition to environmentalism, militarizing everything, increasing a lot of people’s paranoia and fear about being attacked, and making most educated people think all religious people are stupid). I do not like that the Democrats are now pandering to his own base of neocons who nobody really likes anymore, but it’s telling that everybody is now judged exclusively by the worst actions and nothing can seemingly ameliorate that.

You see it everywhere. Because antisocial media apps thrive on outrage, embarrassments go viral while anything uplifting or heartwarming does not. Fomenting discord is profitable for corporations, which helped accelerate people’s inability to believe others can be trusted. Although this has existed for a while, as things like cable news also led to these tendencies, people increasingly judge entire groups by their worst members. All cops are bastards. All priests are pedophiles. All lonely men are incels. Or alternatively, all poor people are moochers. All homeless people are mentally ill. All Muslims are terrorists. The fewer people we interact with in real life, the more we judge entire groups by a strawman of a group if we’ve never interacted with someone from that group. And since, by and large, what you see in the media is negative portrayals of every group, it literally foments hate. I was all over this when I published Nerds per Minute in 2021:

“Basically, I guess I was to the right of my Cornell classmates socially and to the left on economics, which was about the least cool ideology you could have on a campus in the early 2000s. I viewed this as more consistent than either of the actual party platforms because it seemed to be best opposed to selfishness and hedonism, both of which I saw as bad things. However, the culture was obviously moving in the exact opposite direction as the general bipartisan consensus was that runaway capitalist consumerism and a fetish for corporate branding was something to be embraced and that all traditional social mores should be rejected, not merely the bigoted ones. Everybody now just wants to shock the ostensible establishment probably mostly for marketing reasons, because that’s what gets you the most clicks. This of course leads the cultural left to too often act like anyone who is religious is a bigoted moron because people like the Westboro Baptist Church stole the spotlight, and likewise the cultural right too often acts like anybody who is not religious is a militant provocateur in the manner of the New Atheist school (this was of course before the New Atheists gradually turned into a right-leaning movement themselves). It’s infuriating to see people in echo chambers seeming to judge their ideological opponents primarily based on media perceptions of the fringe minority on the other side, particularly now that the images have been taken so seriously that they actually became the reality. However, I suppose that’s entirely a ramification of what happens when clickbait journalism is more profitable than nuance and whatever creates the most outrage and fear wins. Lately it seems like the only difference between intellectuals and anti-intellectuals is whether they use proper spelling and grammar in their ad hominem attacks, rather than actually avoiding them in the first place.”

Do I still agree with everything I wrote there? Maybe not, but I think I might have been a little ahead of the curve on this (especially since I actually wrote this around 2017 and 2018, not 2021 when I published). I’m old enough to remember when the conventional wisdom was “never speaking ill of the dead” and maybe it is still is in “meatspace” (a word I hate), but I am so very tired of “rest in piss” culture, although I see where it came from. I’m old enough to remember when the states didn’t even have flippin’ colors (blue states and red states were an invention of the media during the 2000 election recount, like I’ve said). And I’m sure as hell old enough to remember when we didn’t celebrate the deaths of regions where the plurality of people voted for the other party (including the people in the minority who voted the same way we did)! I’m always whining about the breakdown of civility and too often I sound like an Aaron Sorkin character, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

McCafferty cited the famous speech from Sorkin’s The Newsroom. I was a big Sorkin fan in my late childhood/early adulthood. I loved The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball, and I liked A Few Good Men, The American President, Sports Night, and The Newsroom (albeit with big reservations). He lost me with Steve Jobs, which I thought was dreadfully boring, and I haven’t watched anything since, although I’m sure I’ll check out The Social Network 2 at some point. I continue to like his writing style even though I’ve drifted away from his politics. If his entire oeuvre can be summed up in one line, I guess it’s this: “Liberals are the real patriots”. That did really capture the Democratic Party zeitgeist in the 2000s in the Kerry and the Obama years, so it’s obvious why Sorkin was so popular then. But the conservatives hated him because he was a liberal, the liberals grew to hate him because of his casual sexism (which was always his biggest flaw), and the leftists hated him for his bland Clintonesque neoliberal politics, so I imagine a lot of it aged really badly.

It seems like a lot of discussions about civility politics are just saying that we shouldn’t be civil towards politicians or CEOs or the 1% and I agree with that. People should be able to talk back and criticize people in power, so the whole Chapo Trap House attitude of punching up is not something I’m against intrinsically. The problem is that so many people thought punching up meant working class people in underprivileged groups attacking working class people in privileged group. Even though it’s easier with social media, it’s still hard to actually contact the real people in power, so mainstreaming this culture of anti-civility online effectively meant powerless people are attacking powerless people in both directions while the rich people laugh their way to the bank. I’m not saying people should be civil to politicians, but we should be more civil to each other, and I’m old enough to remember when the Internet was more civil before all that Something Awful and 4chan crap filtered through everything and made everyone start making quips like they’re stand-up comics without realizing that stand-up comics often wind up miserably unhappy. I’ve already used that line before. I don’t remember whether I have here.

The problem is that the Democrats tried civility and it lost because civility doesn’t sell. I don’t know how you incentivize people to trust their neighbors rather than just believing the worst of everyone. I guess getting offline may be the only way, and I do want to. I was trying to push hard to finish this book even though it wasn’t in my best interest financially or monetarily just so I can go off somewhere in some small town or something, and become a recluse in some corny place where everybody knows my name. I thought I’d get that when I moved back to North Syracuse, but I never really did.

I know even orthodox Marxists acknowledge the American Revolution as a great thing since it was an example of capitalists overthrowing a feudal society, and it’s really only radical liberals who care entirely about liberation and social dynamics and not much about economics who don’t. Nonetheless, those people do have a lot of institutional power because opposing middle American mores creates outrage, and outrage is the engine that builds power and clout. As I mentioned in my own self-quote, I don’t believe that “all traditional social mores should be rejected”, so based on my own principles, I know I need to love this country more than I do, but I’ve really struggled to feel love for anything for a long time. I wish people would draw a clearer distinction between loving the country and loving the military, but it doesn’t seem like anyone wants to make that distinction anymore, so it makes sense that if conservatives say the military = the country, then a lot of people will hate the country too. I know a lot of hippies tried to say “We’re not against the soldiers, we’re against the war”, and there’s the whole Sorkin/John Kerry “Liberals are the real patriots”, but neither of those arguments seemed to work either. I get why a lot of liberals have renounced patriotism because they feel they can’t beat conservatives at their own game, but on the other hand, I think anti-civility is worse than civility, and the reason a lot of the Chapo-type leftists thought civility was bad was that it covered up bad politics. But ultimately, the problem was the bad politics, not the civility, and I probably just need to get out of my own head.

I would have won this if I simply didn’t assume Question 4 was the easiest question when it was judged as the hardest question by the plurality of players. I guessed copper. India and Pakistan makes sense, especially since the line was obviously named for a British guy and obviously India was a British column. I guessed West and East Germany. I had heard of Celsius and figured Fahrenheit was a hint. That left Question 5. Now, I love the movie Ed Wood so I was certainly familiar with the existence of Plan 9 from Outer Space (I even stupidly bought it once), but the problem was that I just couldn’t remember what the preposition was. I couldn’t decide whether it was Plan 9 in Outer Space or Plan 9 of Outer Space. I put Plan 9 of Outer Space. They gave it to me anyway even though I was wrong, although it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d missed it.

I thought these were mostly obvious, although Phi Beta Kappa and sugar/Sucre were educated guesses, and Lemony Snicket was too. I never read any of those books but I knew they were billed as “Lemony Snicket’s” so I pulled that too. As usual, the math questions are more obscure than any other category. I had never heard of Noether and put Marie Curie.

If I’d been reading Question 1 carefully and thought “what happened in Asia a little over 70 years ago”, I’d have gotten that. I ended up putting Mongolia and China, which was not a good answer. I knew that Hermes, Aphodrite, and Ares translated to Mercury, Venus, and Mars, so I knew it was the planets. I just had to remember what Neptune translated to and guessed correctly that it was the god of the underworld. I haven’t watched any hockey nor looked at hockey team logos in a long-ass time. I put the Chicago Blackhawks. Probably almost anybody in my age cohort remembers Double Dare, but I’m guessing most of the LearnedLeague players are now too young for that show. That was a weird question for me to score three points. I guessed Greed for Question 5, and that was a great answer as I know it was one of the biggest and most ambitious movies of the ‘20s. I’ve heard of Like Water for Chocolate I think, but I’d never be able to pull that. I guessed hombre and mujer.

I should’ve known that in the contest that was running at the start of the World Cup that there’d be soccer questions. My bad. I put fencing. I’ve certainly never heard of any of those arenas. Redshirts made sense but I had nothing. I put chinos. I always forget what a tardigrade is and I put “bearfly”, which doesn’t exist. Never heard of brassica, put legumes. The last one is the only one where I think I was close. I put Dadaism, and that certainly emerged in the same time period.

I put Mexico for #1, which I don’t think was a bad guess since I knew that was around the same time as Mexican independence and also because I associate Eureka and gold rushes with California. I knew Eureka was in California, which used to be a part of Mexico, so I thought that was a safe guess (even though it looks like Eureka is not in the part of California that was Mexican territory). I actually had Mortal Kombat initially for Question 2 and changed it to Doom. Oh well. Those were what I thought the two games would be. I have never heard of Night Trap. I’m glad I reasoned out uncanny valley. I’m embarrassed I couldn’t remember chrysalis. I had nothing. My mom even wrote poems about chrysalises.

DAVID PEARSON…………………….USA

Born: December 22, 1934
Died: November 12, 2018

Best year: 1973
Best drive: 1974 Firecracker 400 at Daytona International Speedway

Often cited as the best NASCAR driver in history, Pearson was overshadowed by his chief rival Richard Petty because Petty ran full-time while Pearson typically didn’t, but Pearson nonetheless became the second driver after Richard’s father Lee to win three titles. After winning the track championship at Greenville-Pickens Speedway in 1959, a fan club helped Pearson buy his first Grand National car in 1960, when he won Rookie of the Year.

Having shut down his own team due to lack of funding, he took on a roofing job before landing a last-minute ride at the 1961 World 600 for John Masoni’s factory team. Improbably, he won that race and two others that year before hooking up with Cotton Owens in 1963. After losing the 1964 title to Petty, they both skipped most of the 1965 season due to the Chrysler boycott, instead entering drag races and USAC Stock Car races, but Pearson won the 1966 title on his full-time return. After switching to Holman-Moody in 1967 (a season he also became the first NASCAR driver to win a Trans-Am race), he won back-to-back titles in 1968 and 1969 and 27 wins to Petty’s 26.

He left Holman-Moody in 1971 after they stiffed him out of appearance money but hit his career peak when he joined the Wood Brothers in 1972. The team typically skipped all races except superspeedways, Martinsville, and the season-opening Riverside race. In 1973, he posted the best single-season winning percentage of 61.1%. He gained the nickname “The Silver Fox” for both his early gray hair and his tendency to emerge as a late-race threat. In the 1974 Firecracker 400, he faked a blown engine to prevent Petty from making a last-lap slingshot pass, instead doing so himself. In 1976, he won his only Daytona 500 after he and Petty crashed on the last lap because only he could keep his car running. He then won the World 600 and Southern 500 to become the second driver to sweep all three. However, he abruptly quit the team after a botched pit stop at Darlington in 1979, only winning two races afterward before slowly stepping away to focus on his Busch Series team, which won back-to-back titles with his son Larry in 1986 and 1987.

I used to consider Pearson the greatest driver in history, but I’ve since changed my mind. Petty and Pearson were very evenly matched, with Pearson beating Petty 33-30 in their 1-2 finishes, although Petty led 290-261 in all finishes. Pearson’s 105 wins in 574 starts give him a better winning percentage, but Petty had a better winning percentage when comparing their prime seasons. I ultimately favor Petty overall for the raw volume, but I think Pearson was better on superspeedways. Ultimately, I take Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson over both because IndyCar drivers were the best oval drivers in the world in the ‘60s and ‘70s and they weren’t by the ‘90s. While he’s no longer my goat personally, I understand if he’s yours.

Stock car model: #58 of 319 (.068)

Teammate head-to-heads: 18-10 (1-2 vs. Bobby Allison, 1-0 vs. Mario Andretti, 0-1 vs. Buddy Baker, 0-1 vs. Ivan Baldwin, 4-0 vs. Earl Balmer, 2-0 vs. Charlie Blanton, 2-0 vs. A.J. Foyt, 1-0 vs. Dick Hutcherson, 0-1 vs. Fred Lorenzen, 1-0 vs. Tiny Lund, 0-1 vs. Cotton Owens, 0-2 vs. Jim Paschal, 1-0 vs. Swede Savage, 5-1 vs. Billy Wade, 0-1 vs. Joe Weatherly)

Year-by-year: 1959: C+, 1961: C+, 1962: C, 1963: C, 1964: E, 1965: C+, 1966: E, 1967: C+, 1968: E, 1969: E, 1970: C+, 1971: C+, 1972: E, 1973: 5, 1974: E, 1975: E, 1976: E, 1977: E-, 1978: E-, 1979: C+, 1980: C+

I assumed the answer to 2 was Richmond because it was a few years after Jamestown was founded, but I wasn’t even thinking about other regions of the country. I know everybody talks about Jamestown as the first American settlement when it actually wasn’t. I’d never heard of Carrefour and I put Benetton, probably just because I knew about it from F1. I’d never heard of carbonara either, but since it seems like every other person who plays this game except me is a foodie, this time at least I knew to award my opponent 0 points for this question since apparently everyone finds these questions easier than I do. I put omelet.

Okay, after I incorrectly answered Hubble in one of the matches I discussed yesterday, I again got this wrong, this time putting Doppler. I had never heard of any of those people in question #3 except for Duke Ellington but I hadn’t heard of either of those songs or knew his real name. I put Shorty. I had no idea about question #4 and I doubt many others do too. I put Andorra. Is there even a current events story involving Hungary? I didn’t think so, but I guess I haven’t been keeping up. United Fruit Company I should have gotten because I did know that once upon a time. I just put Chiquita.

Normally I get all the pop music questions, but I whiffed on this one, even though it’s technically listed as a television question. I put down the wrong Simon, putting American Idol creator Simon Fuller instead of Simon Cowell, although the Syco (which I think I had just read past) would have made that obvious. Didn’t lose any points for that anyway. And then I answered Bangkok for #4 because I thought that name sounded Thai, I guess because of the structure of that name with the th and the weird consonant combinations, but I knew small city likely ruled that out (unless they were talking about its size in 1728) and I had never heard of Nuuk. Really, this is a current events question since I imagine almost no one hard of Nuuk until Trump threatened to invade Greenland (which I was pointedly avoiding paying attention to), so I’m not surprised I didn’t get it. I’m glad I pulled solipsism, ‘cause my guess is that’s something a lot of people would miss. It’s a word you see a lot if you read anything philosophical, but I wasn’t 100% sure on the meaning tbh, but the solo connection helped. Despite being a niche celebrity gamer, I had actually never heard of speedrunning until a tournament Scrabble player suggested maybe I should do it. I mean yeah, if I wanted to attract a streaming audience, sure, but that isn’t really where I am in life anymore.

This is my most embarrassing miss I think. I just didn’t read Question 5 closely enough, which kept me from winning this outright. I put auteur because obviously it is an important word stemming from French cinema, but I just glanced over the police/criminal aspect of that, which made noir obvious. Should have gotten that. I’ve certainly heard of Brecht and Brecht-Weill certainly rings a bell, but I ended up putting Mann, thinking of the Brill Building songwriters Mann-Weil (not remembering either of their first names). Yep, way more knowledgeable about pop music than any other form… Admittedly, pony is a question I didn’t expect to get tbh, though I thought it was the best guess.

I probably would not have gotten the first question had I not actually listened to a podcast episode of Michael and Us about that specific movie. Opal was just a random guess I got right that I did not actually expect to. I put Gauls for #4 but I thought that as wrong. I put eureka for #5, which I think was a very good guess since it is associated with making discoveries and the word does have a similar structure to Sri Lanka. Didn’t know #6 at all. Come to think of it, I have heard of Nadia Comaneci and I must have picked that up via osmosis from the news media at the time when I was a very young boy, but that was too early for me to be paying much attention to sports news, and even if I pulled her name, I would not have been able to spell it. I put Martina Navratilova and that was a fine guess I think, even though I knew the big news story about her was when she came out as a lesbian.

Well, I finally got a couple more cleaners to inspect the house yesterday to see what accommodations will need to be made for Mom to be able to come home and be admitted into in an in-home care agency. One of the cleaners I contacted also happened to have experience working in nursing homes as well as doing construction work, so he was able to give me all the logistical information to know what I need to have done. He told me that the likely reason why the contractor I was assigned through Onondaga County Community Development hasn’t gotten to work yet on the ramp construction and roof repair even though I have a signed contract stating that it was supposed to be finished by July 7 was because they are expecting that since Mom’s estate will be charged for the repair work, they won’t get their money back since they are assuming all the money in the estate will be drained, so they’re assuming they would just be doing free work for nothing and that is why they’re putting it off. Ironically, since the nursing home is charging somewhere between $15,000 and $18,000 a month and all of that is going to be charged from the estate apart from the $1,000 a month that is coming out of her Social Security, the odds of them getting paid for their work increase drastically the sooner Mom comes home, but this is what needed to be done for her to come home. The contractor also told me that because of the recent scandals about mistreatment at Van Duyn that there is a chance I might be able to challenge the government and the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program and not lose the house. I still think I probably don’t want it anymore after Mom dies simply because after all her hoarding and me getting sicker, I want less to maintain. I’d honestly just want to live in a room or a studio apartment at most, although even those likely cost more than what I’m paying for her mortgage.

Anyway, this contractor offered to install the ramp himself, patch the roof, and do a deep clean for $1,200. I told him I didn’t quite have the money yet but I would after my next paycheck, so he lowered it to $650. Now I’m definitely going to work with him and I’m just waiting to hear back from him for his PayPal email address. This is maybe the first thing I’ve been excited about since my first book was published. If I can get all these things done, maybe I can finally attract an in-home care agency. This contractor does not think I have bed bugs in the carpet (I didn’t either), but the in-home care agency I contacted last year was disgusted and I knew I had to do a deep clean and I’m now pissed at myself for it taking me a year and a half to get all this done. I wanted to get all this done around the same time as the ramp construction and the roof repair, and I filed the application for that in September. If I’d just had a better sense for logistics myself and if I’d known that there might be independent contractors who would do better/faster/cheaper jobs locally, I could’ve gotten her out a long time ago.

This is what happens when you don’t know anybody locally, and it’s one of my biggest frustrations. I thought when I moved back to North Syracuse that I’d reconnect with old high school classmates, teachers, people I knew back then, but I just didn’t. Most of the teachers I’d known had retired. Since I was in the gifted classes, most of the people I knew rushed off for more lucrative jobs on the coasts and the people who still lived here tended to be people I didn’t know as well. And then it didn’t help that Mom didn’t want me leaving the house. I know having her come back might not be in my best interest since she was ridiculously overprotective in terms of never wanting me to go anywhere, and I’d have to watch over her pretty much nonstop (admittedly, I would be able to get paid from the estate balance myself to take care of her during the hours when an in-home care agency doesn’t operate, so that could help me position myself for when I lose the house). But I know I need to do this for her because I know how people are being abused there. She hasn’t been abused there to that extent (even though they did lose her dentures and her cell phone) but she needs to get out of there, especially since Adult Protective Services tricked us by forcing her in there and not even letting me challenge it. Weirdly, I do still kind of envy all the social engagements they had there and I wish those kind of things existed for younger people (as I’ve said so many times), but that isn’t worth the mistreatment. Anyway, even though she was really unpleasant in the last couple years before she got forced in there, she’s been a bit nicer in recent months aside from her interactions with her roommates, and I know I am obliged to get her out, even if some people would say it wouldn’t be in my own self-interest in some ways.

I wrote this one pretty slowly because obviously Petty is one of the biggies, and I’ve got two more biggies with Sebastian Vettel and David Pearson coming up. I did not have a best race for Petty yet, and I spent way too many hours that I should’ve been doing something else reading through all of Petty’s wins in my Greg Fielden books to pick the correct race for his best drive, but I think I got it. He also had a Dover race where he came back from six laps down and won (probably should’ve linked to my own site, but I linked to racing-reference), and I considered that one, but ultimately rejected it because Buddy Arrington intentionally stopped on track to bring out a caution in that one, without which Petty would not have been able to overtake Dick Brooks for the win. (Granted, Benny Parsons probably would’ve won that one without the caution since I believe Brooks passed him right after the restart.) My surprising discovery tonight, which I guess I hadn’t noticed before, is that Petty’s superspeedway record in the ‘60s was actually surprisingly humdrum/mediocre - he even had a 13-month winless streak on superspeedways at his absolute peak from late 1967 to late 1968. Since the superspeedway races offered vastly more points, that probably is a big part of why David Pearson had an edge against him in championship battles and since they also had deeper fields, I think that is a major strike against him as well. Nonetheless, I do still probably rate him as #3 all-time, but I state in my last paragraph what keeps him from being #1 in my book.

RICHARD PETTY……………………..USA

Born: July 2, 1937

Best year: 1971
Best drive: 1967 Volunteer 500 at Bristol International Speedway

NASCAR’s most successful driver, the son of three-time champion Lee and father of eight-time winner Kyle, Richard first ran semi-regularly in 1959 as Lee’s teammate at Petty Engineering (later Petty Enterprises) in the #43 car during Lee’s final championship season. Although he won his first races in 1960, Lee typically outran him until his career-ending crash at the 1961 Daytona qualifying race. Petty was the main benefactor after many premature deaths and sudden retirements amongst early ‘60s superstars gutted the fields, creating a massive power vacuum. David Pearson had an early edge over Petty, winning three out of four championships when they both competed full-time, in part because Petty sometimes struggled on superspeedways, which awarded vastly more points. In 1967, Petty was the only full-time factory-backed driver, but he was nonetheless electrifying, winning a record 27 races, coming back from laps down twice to win at Bristol, then winning ten straight races shortly thereafter including his only Southern 500.

Although Petty’s ‘60s tend to get more hype, I’m more impressed by his ‘70s because he was a lot more consistent across all track types. Despite 18 wins in 1970, he lost the title because he missed five races after flipping at Darlington, but he bounced back with two pairs of back-to-back titles in 1971-1972 and 1974-1975, winning 21 races in 1971 and a modern-era record 13 in 1975. He significantly benefited from Pearson dropping to part-time and Cale Yarborough’s ill-fated switch to IndyCar. By the time Yarborough’s Junior Johnson team had full funding, Yarborough dominated the next half-decade.

Petty went winless and had 40% of his stomach removed in 1978, but improbably recovered to win his seventh championship in 1979. However, Petty’s crew chief Dale Inman abruptly left after his seventh and last Daytona 500 win in 1981, after which Petty Enterprises declined rapidly. Petty shockingly switched to Mike Curb’s team after a massive penalty at Charlotte in 1983 for winning with an oversized engine and mismatched tires, where he earned his 200th and final win in the 1984 Firecracker 400 when he beat Yarborough to a race-ending caution in a photo finish with President Reagan in attendance. He returned to Petty Enterprises in 1986 but never won again.

Petty leads nearly every baseline statistical category in NASCAR Cup Series history by large margins. Even when I adjusted the win list for field strength, he held a significant lead. He also leads all drivers with 100+ teammate comparisons in my stock car model. However, I still rank him behind Earnhardt and Johnson primarily because IndyCar drivers were the best oval drivers in the world during Petty’s heyday. They crossed over and won NASCAR races and the first six IROC titles, while no contemporary NASCAR drivers did the reverse and Petty never even won an IROC race. NASCAR drivers clearly overtook IndyCar drivers for oval supremacy in either the ‘80s or ‘90s, which is why I rate Earnhardt and Johnson higher, but if you prefer Petty, I’d be hard-pressed to argue.

Stock car model: #9 of 319 (.248)

Teammate head-to-heads: 115-65 (1-3 vs. Buck Baker, 11-4 vs. Buddy Baker, 3-0 vs. Bunkie Blackburn, 1-0 vs. Darel Dieringer, 2-6 vs. Pete Hamilton, 1-0 vs. Jim Hurtubise, 1-0 vs. Bob James, 1-0 vs. Tiny Lund, 2-0 vs. Hershel McGriff, 1-0 vs. Marvni Panch, 21-15 vs. Jim Paschal, 43-3 vs. Kyle Petty, 11-31 vs. Lee Petty, 10-1 vs. Maurice Petty, 1-0 vs. G.C. Spencer, 2-0 vs. Jabe Thomas, 0-1 vs. Speedy Thompson, 1-0 vs. Joe Weatherly, 2-1 vs. Bob Welborn)

Year-by-year: 1960: E-, 1961: C+, 1962: E, 1963: E, 1964: E, 1965: E-, 1966: E, 1967: 5, 1968: E, 1969: E, 1970: E, 1971: 2, 1972: E, 1973: E-, 1974: E, 1975: 5, 1976: E-, 1977: E-, 1978: C+, 1979: E, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: C, 1983: C+, 1984: C+, 1986: C-, 1987: C

I only got the second one because of Jelani Nelson, the competitive typist I displaced at #1 in 2010. He has Ethiopian heritage and launched the bootcamp AddisCoder. He told me when I interviewed him for Nerds per Minute that he obtained the username minilek from the Ethiopian emperor, and then he inverted the vowels. No way I’d have gotten that otherwise. I’d never heard of Maureen Connolly and put nothing down for that. For 4, I put “royal purple”, thinking that might be where purple prose came from. I had beaver for #5. I was thinking like beaver and badger. I don’t think that was a horrible guess, but I wasn’t thinking of reptiles. I’ve never seen L.A. Confidential. It’s something I might want to watch someday, and I know everybody calls it the “real best movie of 1997” although I doubt I’d like it more than Good Will Hunting or Wag the Dog even… I knew Kevin Spacey was in it, so that’s what I put, and that was the most common incorrect response, but it does seem they mostly try to avoid questions about canceled figures/people known to be reprehensible by the general public, so I guess I need to adjust for that.

Even though I was regularly watching the news in the years immediately after 9/11 (which I haven’t lately), I don’t remember Bagram, and I put Kandahar. Foucault was my first guess for #2, but I second-guessed myself and switched to Hubble, even though I think I knew Hubble was more recent than that. I watched Ugly Betty a little, but I didn’t particularly like it. I did memorize the Greek alphabet once but I think I’ve forgotten a lot of it and that wouldn’t have helped me probably. I put tau. And for the sixth question, I put Hitler because my interpretation of that was, “Who do the French hate the most?” I knew about Nude Descending a Staircase and his urinal “art piece”, so I wasn’t coming into that blind, but I wasn’t thinking about the idea of parodying other paintings. If I had, Mona Lisa probably would’ve come to mind.

This is the first round I ever swept. I was absolutely certain about #2 and #4. I was pretty sure about #1 and #3, but while I certainly remember the whole Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, I was worried I couldn’t remember the name of the company because I knew it was some kind of “edgy” three-letter acronym that wasn’t really an acronym and I thought I might get the letters confused, but I did remember it. I knew the U.S. conquered the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and (sort of) Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and none of the others made sense because they wouldn’t have sent 500 people to Guam. If they were going to Puerto Rico or Cuba, they wouldn’t have left from San Francisco, so that was a safe educated guess. I wasn’t completely sure the last was a music clue but how many Austrians from that era are still famous?

From 9 points to 0. Whoo. At least this is a math question a layman can get without attending graduate seminars. Never heard of bigos and put wurst. I was thinking too hard about the “New Zealand” part for question #3 and put Wellington, when I should have been thinking more about the Founding Father party. I’ve certainly heard of Hamilton, Ontario, but not the Hamiltons in the other two countries. I really don’t know much about grammatical tenses, and it seems like people possibly know more about them in foreign languages than in their own, because you need to break down the structure of other languages to learn them, but people are less inclined to do that with their own if they were fluent from early childhood. That was just a random guessing game, and I put “past perfect”. Questions 5 and 6 were also random guessing games, and I put Missouri and World.

I actually would have won this if I had set difficulty on Max Martin to 3 even though he got all the other questions. It’s unusual for your opponent to get a perfect score despite missing a question. I guess because Todd in the Shadows is my favorite YouTuber and most of the podcasts I listen to are music podcasts, pop music has become one of the easiest categories for me (and I’ve noticed this on Jeopardy! too; I guess not many people actually intentionally listened to all the top 3,000 most acclaimed songs on acclaimedmusic.net like I did once many years ago. Objectively, Martin was actually the hardest question, as people rated it substantially higher than any other question and the fewest people got it. If I had calibrated for that, I would have won. Bikini was an obvious deduction, and I think Warner Brothers is too. My dad loved self-help books like that, although I suspect if I ever tried to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it would make me vomit profusely. And then I had two bad guesses, microbial for #3 (I’m way worse on the science questions than I expected to be, which is funny because based on my hyper-nerd image people thought I was the kind of person who had a chemistry lab in my basement like I was Steve Urkel or something) and Qatar for #5 (again, I would try and follow the news again if there was anyone I thought I could trust, but there isn’t, so I don’t). What I learned from this match is I need to assume all pop music questions are harder than I think they are and all food questions are easier than I think they are, even if I’ve almost never even heard of the food answers.

So both Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist are going to McLaren, huh? And they’re letting Christian Lundgaard go, one of two drivers who have given them wins after their return? This is weird for all sorts of reasons. Although we already saw signs of this last year when Dixon’s speed percentile was 26 points slower than Álex Palou, he now looks almost completely washed up. Lately, he’s been way closer to Kyffin Simpson than he has been to Palou, and Simpson is terrible. Rosenqvist already went winless there and was fired before. Sure, they’re still improvements over Nolan Siegel, but at this point I don’t think anyone would be very surprised if neither Dixon nor Rosenqvist ever wins a race again in their career. I’m not going to actually predict that, but it’s certainly possible, especially since McLaren does seem to have slower cars than not only Ganassi but Meyer Shank as well.

What I don’t understand is casting Lundgaard aside. He’s on the verge of being a championship contender and seems to be in the process of taking control of the team from Pato O’Ward. Marshall Pruett is claiming (and I’m much more skeptical about any of his analysis than I was about Robin Miller back in the day) that McLaren only cares about Indy 500 wins and maximizing chances to win that race only. Okay, Dixon was good at Indy this year (for the only time all season really), and Rosenqvist won, but Rosenqvist, despite having speed, really benefited from one fewer pit stop, without which he probably would not have been in the scramble for the win at the end. Palou and David Malukas were way faster than anyone else in the second half of the race, Malukas especially, who had put several seconds down on Palou as he was catching the leaders. Yes, he mistimed his last-lap pass, I guess, and gave Rosenqvist a chance to come back, but it was still a little flukish. More to the point, that was the only oval race where I can remember Rosenqvist even contending while Malukas has contended for like ten already despite not winning yet. If all you care about is Indy 500 wins, Zak, why fire Malukas after like 15 seconds before he even had a chance to make a start for you? (Although I’m glad Malukas got out of that hellhole and got something better.) Malukas almost certainly has more Indy 500 wins in his future than Dixon and Rosenqvist do, and Lundgaard has more wins overall in his future than they do, so seriously, WTF? As for Lundgaard, I admit he’s never really shown speed on ovals, and that’s been his main liability, but can you really be sure he won’t have speed on ovals in the future? Dario Franchitti and Will Power, and to a lesser extent Álex Palou, were terrible oval drivers when they started, even when they were dominating road course races, and they all got it. Who’s to say that can’t also happen here (although I doubt Lundgaard’s career will quite match any of those three)? Well, hopefully he ends up replacing either Dixon in the #9 car or Rosenqvist in the #60, since those are both better cars than what he had. At this point, he really deserves the Ganassi car, and I’m pretty sure he’d eventually win oval races if he got it. Even Pato O’Ward hasn’t done all that much on oval races lately, so maybe Lundgaard being fired is a blessing in disguise just like it turned out to be for Malukas. Zak Brown retains his crown as the biggest dick in racing despite heavy competition from others. And maybe Lundgaard just wanted to leave, and he isn’t actually being fired. Maybe I’m taking Marshall Pruett’s reporting at face value too much when he does seem to be more biased overall than Miller was.

It almost feels like what’s really driving this is not maximizing Indy winning chances (if they were trying to do that, they would’ve gone after Josef Newgarden, who even seems to WANT to leave Penske right now, and I don’t blame him after the cheating scandals and especially considering he’s apparently being paid less than most drivers of his stature, even though he’s significantly fallen off, or if you’re just looking at oval talents, how about Christian Rasmussen, the biggest rising oval star), but just getting back at Chip Ganassi for losing the Palou lawsuit. Signing Ganassi’s most successful driver from right under his nose is certainly a giant fuck-you, and Shank being a Ganassi satellite means you could interpret the Rosenqvist re-hiring the same way. This almost reminds me of the NASCAR manufacturer wars in the early ‘90s, when Ford got so pissed about losing Jeff Gordon that for the next few years they vowed to sign away as many of Chevy’s big stars as they could, so over the next few years they signed Ernie Irvan, Ricky Rudd, and Dale Jarrett in quick succession, and they even almost signed Dale Earnhardt until he asked for $1,000,000 a year and the #28 car when Robert Yates didn’t want to pay him that and they only offered him the #88 car. The difference is: all those drivers (even Earnhardt) had more of a future than Dixon and Rosenqvist do now. Ford’s tactical moves to get back at Chevy were smart (until they insisted on replacing Ernie Irvan with Kenny Irwin, thinking they could “recreate Jeff Gordon” anyway and somehow missing Tony Stewart - the driver they should have actually done it with). These moves seem really, really stupid. But whatever. It’s not my team.

Anyway, here’s another F1 driver similarly talented to Ralf Schumacher who thankfully didn’t marry a semi-fascist.

DANIEL RICCIARDO……….AUSTRALIA

Born: July 1, 1989

Best year: 2014
Best drive: 2018 Heineken Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai International Circuit

One of the most inconsistent 21st-century Formula One drivers, Ricciardo briefly looked championship-caliber at Red Bull, but his career was also punctuated with long mediocre stretches. After Red Bull signed him as a development driver in 2008, he won the Formula Renault 2.0 Western European Cup and British Formula 3 titles and finished second in Formula Renault 3.5 the next three years. After posting a testing lap at Abu Dhabi 1.3 seconds faster than Sebastian Vettel’s qualifying lap in 2010, expectations were sky-high, but Red Bull didn’t have room at their junior operation Toro Rosso, so they farmed him out to the awful HRT team in 2011 before promoting him to Toro Rosso in 2012, where he was matched with future Formula E champion Jean-Éric Vergne the next two seasons, beating him handily in races and even worse in qualifying.

He was promoted to Red Bull alongside four-time defending champion Vettel after Mark Webber’s retirement and proved electrifying. Even though Vettel won the last nine races of 2013, Ricciardo shockingly outperformed him in 2014, earning the only three non-Mercedes wins that season, prompting Vettel to leave for Ferrari as Daniil Kvyat replaced him at Red Bull. Just as unexpectedly, Kvyat beat Ricciardo in points the next year even though he was pretty mediocre and Red Bull knew it, swapping Kvyat out for Toro Rosso’s Max Verstappen in mid-2016.

Ricciardo actually beat Verstappen in 2016 and 2017, becoming Verstappen’s only teammate to do so, but by 2018, Verstappen had unambiguously overtaken Ricciardo. Not wanting to be demoted to #2 status, Ricciardo switched to Renault, where he outperformed both Nico Hülkenberg and Esteban Ocon. However, his performance plummeted in 2021 when he moved to McLaren. Despite giving them their first win since 2012 at Monza after Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton crashed, he was demolished by teammate Lando Norris in 2021 and especially 2022 and couldn’t find any ride for 2023. After an even worse stint for Red Bull’s B team, he retired in 2025 and became a global ambassador for Ford Racing even though he’d never actually raced a Ford.

I ended up not giving Ricciardo any top five seasons even though I originally expected to because I suspect that in 2014, Vettel was underachieving more than Ricciardo was overachieving. Even that year, he only won one of his races naturally, and Fernando Alonso beat him for #1 in my open wheel model globally. Initially beating Verstappen is a major feather in his cap, but he was a teenager at the time. Ultimately, most of Ricciardo’s eight wins typically came down to benefiting from others’ misfortunes rather than on-track passing for the lead. Admittedly, Ricciardo peaking during Mercedes’s dynasty run would’ve made that difficult for anyone. He did outduel Valtteri Bottas at Shanghai in 2018, but that marked the only time he passed a Mercedes for the win. Despite being better than some World Champions, I’m not sure whether I consider him one of the best drivers to never win a championship.

Open wheel model: #61 of 931 (.231)

Teammate head-to-heads: 159-109 (7-1 vs. Nathanael Berthon, 17-8 vs. Andrea Caldarelli, 16-3 vs. Max Chilton, 7-1 vs. Brendon Hartley, 10-4 vs. Nico Hulkenberg, 0-1 vs. Narain Karthikeyan, 8-8 vs. Daniil Kvyat, 4-1 vs. Vitantonio Liuzzi, 10-28 vs. Lando Norris, 9-3 vs. Esteban Ocon, 0-1 vs. Charles Pic, 1-0 vs. Alexander Sims, 8-12 vs. Yuki Tsunoda, 29-13 vs. Jean-Eric Vergne, 9-1 vs. Tristan Vautier, 11-3 vs. Sebastian Vettel, 13-20 vs. Max Verstappen, 0-1 vs. Robert Wickens)

Year-by-year: 2008: C-, 2009: C-, 2010: C-, 2011: C-, 2012: C, 2013: C+, 2014: E, 2015: C, 2016: E, 2017: E, 2018: E-, 2019: E-, 2020: E-, 2021: C-

Glockenspiel and Argentina were lucky educated guesses. I thought they were the best answers but I definitely wasn’t 100% sure on those. The other two I was more sure. I don’t think I have ever seen the word monotreme in my life and I know that didn’t come up in any of my science classes. I just put raptors, but I knew that was wrong. For Question 5, I put the Progressive Era. That was hardly a bad guess until the Progressive Era and the Harlem Renaissance did intersect chronologically and obviously they both would have had associated newspapers and periodicals. If I’d realized that the answer literally had to have Renaissance in the title, I’d have probably pulled that one.

I used to love, love, love reading World Almanacs as a very young boy. I never quite read them cover-to-cover or anything like that, but I probably looked at nearly every section in them at some point. The data that enchanted me most back then in those books were the weights & measures tables and the U.S. and world population charts. To this day I can still remember the precise population of New York in 1990: 7,322,564 and Syracuse in 1990: 163,860 from these books, without realizing there’s probably no way to measure populations that large so precisely, as there are probably a bunch of homeless people or maybe even some people who successfully evaded reporting their census data who were never counted. So yeah, I definitely knew that the hectare was the metric equivalent of the acre more or less, so that couldn’t be the answer. Guessed William Howard Taft for #2 since I knew he was from Ohio, but that was stupid because I knew he was President from 1909-1913 and then was Chief Justice after that, which would have made him an obscenely elderly Chief Justice, which is probably unlikely for a portly fellow like him. Didn’t remember McKinley was from Ohio. I was kinda close on #3. I continue to think these math questions are ridiculous since this seems to be the only field where you can’t get the questions unless you’ve done graduate-level work. I think I misread the question, assumed “study of place” was geology, so I altered it and wrote geonomy. If I’d known place was “topoi”, I’d have certainly gotten it. And geonomy did used to be a word. Question 4 I guessed these were islands in the Pacific Ocean that the US and Japan fought over in World War II, so that was my guess there. And for the last one, I put chicken finger. I wasn’t thinking of utensils. But since the first chicken tender was invented in 1974, that actually wasn’t a bad guess.

I have looked at lists of popes before so I guessed right. Antoinette was a no brainer. As someone who eats like ten foods at most almost entirely unhealthy, I’m never going to get the food questions, which invariably like the math questions are things I’d never heard of. I guessed harissa, which I’d also never heard of since the previous LearnedLeague match. I put cricket fo #4. Wasn’t sure about Glenn Miller but guessed right. The others are obvious.

As a racing fan, I probably should have gotten #1, but my engineering knowledge has always embarrassed me. I put friction. Reebok is obvious since no other shoe brands resemble Afrikaans words. I had never heard of Kroenke, so I put Warren Buffett. That doesn’t bother me. I had also never heard of Matched (I mean how many people really follow young adult fiction after they’re no longer young adults), and I put Divergent for that, which was not a bad guess. Obviously, I knew Question 5 was going to be Star Wars, but I couldn’t figure out what. I loved the original Star Wars trilogy as a kid - watched it five or six times and did watch the Special Editions when they came out, but I checked out after The Phantom Menace, and I’m pretty sure I never watched anything Star Wars-related ever since, so it’s been a while. I didn’t think it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen or anything - just slightly boring - and all those idiots claiming George Lucas “raped their childhood” make me wish I liked it more. But these days, I’m so sick of “franchise art” that my mind hasn’t been in that headspace for a while. Anyway, I guessed wrong and put Millennium Falcon instead of lightsaber, even though it was probably a no-brainer.

I put Mont Pelerin for question #1, which is not a bad guess since that was indeed the other big conference that brought the wrath of neoliberalism down upon this green earth, but I didn’t realize that one was European and not American. (EDIT: I also forgot until I looked it up again that Bretton Woods was actually what mainstreamed Keynesianism; okay, my bad.) My answer for #2 was the most embarrassing in the set. Granted, I didn’t realize murals came from Spanish, and I don’t think I would have ever gotten my brain there. I put telenovela, which I am certain almost no one would call art. As usual, I’d never heard of Cubano, so I put Reuben. I probably should have studied World Cup stuff for this round, since it came up several times and I got every question wrong. Although it’s different now, very few Americans were soccer fans when I was a kid, so it wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d be expected to know at the time, and I just never got into it later like maybe I should’ve. I put Italy, but I saved the game and won by correctly guessing Ulysses. I’ve been doing pretty well on the literature category lately, which surprises me since I never felt I was that avid a reader.

Anyway, five more and a similarly-talented F1 driver tomorrow, and possibly another driver if I have time.

RALF SCHUMACHER………..GERMANY

Born: June 30, 1975

Best year: 2001
Best drive: 2001 Gran Premio Warsteiner di San Marino at Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari

Although he was drastically overshadowed by his elder brother Michael, Ralf Schumacher was pretty outstanding in his own right, as in his first three years at Williams from 1999-2001, he beat three legends in consecutive seasons: Alex Zanardi, Jenson Button, and Juan Pablo Montoya. After winning the Macau Grand Prix and finishing second in German Formula 3 in 1995, he won the Formula Nippon (now Super Formula) title in his rookie season for Team Le Mans over his teammate Naoki Hattori in 1996. Schumacher and Hattori also combined to win a season-high three races in the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship.

In 1997, Schumacher debuted in F1 with the Jordan team, where Michael had also debuted. Ralf earned a podium in his third start to become the then-youngest podium finisher. The next year, he finished second to his teammate Damon Hill at Spa but was deeply upset that Jordan wouldn’t let him past even though he was faster. Michael subsequently gave Jordan £2,000,000 to buy Ralf out of the final year of his contract. He moved to Williams in 1999 as they acquired BMW engines. He became a superstar by obliterating Zanardi 35-0 immediately after Zanardi’s dominant CART dynasty run. He next dominated then-rookie Button in 2000 to lead my open wheel model, but the cars weren’t fast enough to win.

That changed in 2001 when Schumacher won three times. At Imola, he started third and led flag-to-flag to give Williams its first win since 1997. He and Montoya were fairly evenly matched. Although Montoya was generally considered the team leader and was faster and a better passer, Schumacher actually beat him 6-4 in wins. In 2003, he won back-to-back races at the Nürburgring and Magny-Cours, but never won again. A string of injuries at Monza in 2003 and two at Indianapolis in 2004 and 2005 (most notably a 78G impact in 2004) hampered his career, and he could never recapture his speed. He couldn’t find a ride after a lackluster Toyota stint and switched to DTM, where he struggled even more. After retiring in 2013, he became a Sky Sports commentator and married the far-right French ex-politician Étienne Bousquet-Cassagne, making him F1’s first openly gay winner.

Schumacher would probably be better regarded today if he’d had any other brother, but he and Michael did become the only brothers to both win races and earn 1-2 finishes. A cynic might argue he rode Michael’s coattails for his entire career, but his record is nonetheless worthy as he revived Williams’s fortunes and the team was never again a powerhouse after he and Montoya left in 2005. People typically rate Montoya higher, as do I, but that is primarily due to Montoya’s versatility, longevity, and higher peak in his 1999 CART season. At WilliamsF1, they were almost equals. You could argue he was overrated for riding Michael’s coattails and benefiting from inexperienced teammates, but I would argue he was underrated because his injuries made his career look worse than it was.

Open wheel model: #135 of 931 (.153)

Teammate head-to-heads: 48-42 (5-1 vs. Jenson Button, 8-1 vs. Tom Coronel, 3-2 vs. Giancarlo Fisichella, 3-3 vs. Naoki Hattori, 2-3 vs. Damon Hill, 13-16 vs. Juan Pablo Montoya, 11-16 vs. Jarno Trulli, 3-0 vs. Alex Zanardi)

Touring car model: #857 of 1676 (-.077)

Teammate head-to-heads: 21-91 (1-15 vs. Paul di Resta, 4-2 vs. Maro Engel, 4-16 vs. Jamie Green, 5-30 vs. Gary Paffett, 3-23 vs. Bruno Spengler, 4-5 vs. Christian Vietoris)

Year-by-year: 1996: E-, 1997: C, 1998: C+, 1999: E, 2000: E, 2001: E, 2002: E, 2003: C+, 2004: C+, 2005: C+, 2006: C+, 2007: C, 2008: C-, 2011: C

Finding out which room my mom is living in has gotten to be like keeping up with who’s driving for SS Green Light Racing each week. Mom got moved from Room 419 to Room 402, then they moved her back to Room 419 less than a week ago, and Van Duyn didn’t even tell me either time. I have no idea what the precipitating incidents were, but I presume it was another roommate conflict. After she got over COVID, she was joined by a roommate who also has dementia and believes a doll she is carrying is her baby. She even feeds her and stuff. Because her doll is black, Mom even called her roommate the N-word even though she was white (not that it would be okay under any circumstance). She also seems to think one of the black male nurses who comes in (who I haven’t ever seen) is her boyfriend, and she’s afraid when I’m not around that she’s going to be raped or attacked or something. Many times when I come in, she wants me to help plot her escape. I tell her I can’t do that or else I might be arrested for kidnapping. She believes that wouldn’t happen.

I don’t even get mad when Mom forgets who I am and thinks I’m her dead brother (which she does frequently). I get much angrier at the late-onset racism though because it’s not the person that I thought I knew. I realize she probably had a rougher life than I did. While she had steadier employment than I did until she became too disabled to work and had far more real-life social connections (which I envy), she had also gotten mugged exclusively by black people and Puerto Ricans, and I don’t know how to convince her not to judge entire demographic groups by the actions of their worst members. Admittedly, this seems like a common neurosis that spans all demographic groups and political affiliations, including left-leaning ones. Witness all the man v. bear discourse or all the people who make fun of any men who complain about loneliness and call them all incels. It doesn’t really matter whether someone follows the “mainstream”/TV media or the “alternative”/Internet media, since these platforms both incentivize performative outrage in exactly the same way. Negative news stories get more and more coverage, and as people withdraw into their own little worlds and media bubbles more and more, they’re less likely to interact with people in real life, so their only associations with people in demographics outside their shrinking social circles will be these gross media caricatures of the worst members of any given group. Honestly, I think Mom is saying fewer unhinged things since she stopped listening to NPR, and it’s weird she did listen to NPR and say seemingly 10 times as many racist things as the average FOX News viewer despite also being vehemently anti-Trump even to a greater extent than I was because I didn’t fantasize out loud about all the violent things I wanted to do to him. I don’t know how to convince Mom to stop being fearful and constantly thinking she’s going to be attacked, but as people say, you can’t reason people out of opinions that weren’t rational to begin with. And it doesn’t help that Van Duyn has been investigated for mistreating people while Mom is there.

When she got moved to Room 402, she seemed to have a better relationship with her new roommate, but she had a fall. Her new roommate said she was concerned about being roommates with Mom because she couldn’t help her up if she fell again. I think Mom interpreted that as her saying she didn’t want a roommate at all and didn’t like her even though they’d had many meals together before. I don’t know why she was moved back to Room 419, and that must’ve been part of it, but this is inevitably going to lead to more nasty conflicts, I think. I was never informed when they moved her, even though I visit three times a week, and I had to figure it out based on where her nametag was located.

What frustrated me the most is that after she was moved from 419 to 402, they disconnected her phone in 419, and then when they moved her back, it wasn’t reconnected for a week and a half until today. I’ve been calling her just about every day I don’t come in, and last week through all that I couldn’t. A week ago Saturday, as I was writing the Steve Waid post, I had my worst IBS attack of the year. I had somewhere between six and eight rounds of diarrhea, and then I had the second-worst gas cramps of my entire life Sunday morning. I couldn’t fall asleep until after 8 am, and I was close to thinking I needed to go to urgent care, but I decided not to, and the symptoms did dissipate after I fell asleep. I woke up literally five minutes before the IndyCar race at Road America, and I did complete the post later that evening, but I was angry that I couldn’t even call Mom for comfort during this episode because they disconnected her phone, probably due to what I presumed to be bad behavior on her part. Instead, I wrote to my dad and replied to a letter he had sent me two months ago. I wanted to get that done since it was Father’s Day, but he hasn’t replied to that either. Of course, I suspect he’d likely chide me for my eating disorder. Well maybe if you acted like a man, developed some discipline, and learned how to eat real food, bruh, you wouldn’t be hurting. (Okay, I doubt he’d say bruh.) Very likely true, but not what I need to hear. I’ve just grown more and more withdrawn, increasingly not wanting to talk to anyone. One thing Mom said in earlier decades that I used to disagree with was that online friends weren’t real because they’d seldom be there to help you with your real physical needs. I don’t completely agree with this now, as I can definitely think of exceptions in my life, but I understand this a lot better than I did 20 years ago.

I am still trying to facilitate Mom coming home. Despite having a signed contract for the needed ramp construction and roof repair to be finished by July 7, the work still hasn’t started yet, and I’m starting to wonder if it will ever happen. I finally have money to hire somebody to do a deep clean, which will also be necessary for Mom to be accepted into an in-home car agency so she can come home. I’ve needed to have that done after her hoarding, and I’m finally getting around to it a year later. I do have two cleaners coming to do a home inspection on Wednesday and Thursday so they can tell me what I need to do to prepare. After both inspections, I’ll decide which contractor to hire.

In all this, I lost control over the Substack and fell way behind my desired one driver post per day schedule, so I’m going to try and implement a more structured schedule again, since I do plan on restarting charges on July 8. Even on the days I’m not posting, I’m usually still working on this. My biggest temptation lately has been entering data instead of writing. Since I’m working on archiving the entire history of VLN (now called the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie), which has had 47 seasons, and averages about 10 races per season, and usually around 15 class winners per race and typically multiple co-drivers sharing each class win, archiving this series might take months. A lot of days lately, I’ve been entering VLN winners while watching or listening to something in the background, and I haven’t gotten around to writing. To catch up, I’m going to try to force myself to write first and archive later. I also found myself getting further behind because I was going to try to write a bunch of double posts to catch up, and I put so much pressure on myself that I didn’t even get single posts done. So for the rest of the year, I’m going to try to write one post on days when I visit Mom and two when I don’t until I’ve caught back up again. I’ve also decided to start writing on the bus again. Since it’s a 1.5-hour bus ride both ways to the nursing home, I had been reading through the history of Le Mans books I’ve been buying on the bus, but right now, I think I need to focus on writing first and research second, particularly because most of the drivers I had scheduled to write about this year came from series I am much more informed about since these were drivers I already had on my lock list prior to this year. I’m going to try to work myself back up to my originally planned schedule by the time I turn on paid posts again.

I don’t have much to say about this weekend’s races. Not bad, but just humdrum and middle-of-the-road. I did have to look up yesterday after Tyler Reddick lost the points lead to his boss whether Reddick broke the record for the most consecutive races leading the points to start the season, because I hadn’t seen anyone try to figure that out. Reddick indeed set the modern-era record. By my own crude estimation, this was the second-longest string of races to lead the points at the start of the season in Cup Series history, behind Lee Petty’s 1955 season, where he led the points for 32 races until Tim Flock overtook him even though Flock won 18 races to Petty’s 6. However, I don’t have that statistic officially confirmed because my own race-database.com points leader data were obtained from Greg Fielden’s race recaps in his 40 Years of Stock Car Racing books. While Fielden listed who led the points after quite a few races, and he usually stated when the points leader changed, he didn’t list the points leaders after every race, and I’m still not entirely sure who the points leaders were for each race for any season before 1975 when the Latford points system was introduced, so perhaps we’ll never know.

I have much more to say about the IndyCar silly season. The first domino fell when Felix Rosenqvist announced he was leaving Meyer Shank Racing after his Indy 500 win, making him the first defending Indy 500 winner to change teams since Takuma Sato in 2017. Boy, do I think he’s going to regret that. He’s got a really good thing going at Shank right now because they are a Chip Ganassi satellite and he and Marcus Armstrong definitely seem to both be getting ancillary benefits from having de facto Ganassi cars making both of them look better than they are this year. To their credit, they’ve certainly outrun Scott Dixon, who seems pretty much washed up at this point, which also suggests that perhaps the Shank cars are just as fast as the Ganassi cars. I’m guessing Rosenqvist wants to cash in on his Indy 500 win like his fellow Swede and onetime teammate Marcus Ericsson did. Ganassi wanted Ericsson to bring money while Ericsson wanted a blockbuster salary, which is why he went to Andretti Global, but when he inevitably underachieved there, as anyone could have expected, that left him vulnerable to falling out of the series entirely. I wonder if the same thing might happen to Rosenqvist after he did this, since he pretty much ran the same as Ericsson were both of them were at Ganassi (even though I’ve always thought Rosenqvist was better than Ericsson and my opinion on that has not changed; I have Rosenqvist as a lock on my list while Ericsson’s not even on the bubble yet).

The only teams that would be worth leaving Shank for are obviously Ganassi, Penske, Andretti, and McLaren, so it seems like Rosenqvist’s destination has to be one of those teams. Penske seems unlikely since I think all three drivers will be renewed past this year. At one point, I thought Josef Newgarden was well on his way to being fired, but he’s obviously still got the juice on short ovals even if he’s lost it on most other tracks. Scott McLaughlin’s stock has plummeted in my mind more than any other driver in the past year and a half, but I still think firing him for Rosenqvist would be stupid. Ganassi and McLaren certainly both have unworthy ride-buyers in Kyffin Simpson and Nolan Siegel who do not deserve those rides, and Rosenqvist would certainly be a vast improvement over both, but they are also paying for their rides and it seems Rosenqvist is after a big paycheck. Furthermore, both those teams have already fired him before, and how often do teams rehire someone they previously hired? I’m pretty sure Ryan Briscoe is the only driver Ganassi ever fired and re-hired.

By process of elimination, my guess is Rosenqvist is going to Andretti to replace Ericsson, who is in the last year of his contract. Ericsson is definitely working his butt off more than I’ve ever seen from him this year as he won his first pole and led the most laps for the first time this year, two things I quite honestly never thought he’d do in his career, but there’s no question he was wildly overpaid and will be easy to dispose of. While I do think Rosenqvist is better than Ericsson, I also acknowledge that he’s only barely better, so my guess is that they’re going to go for him because he will ask for less money. Ericsson was (stupidly) viewed as a hot up-and-coming driver while Rosenqvist was always seen as more like a Sato, who had random flashes of brilliance amidst long stretches of mediocrity. (Admittedly, my model has him way above Ericsson and way above Sato, and I think there might be something there that is still untapped.) For these reasons and the fact that he’s leaving Shank instead of Ganassi, his salary expectations will likely be lower, so he’ll get the pay raise he wants while Andretti will likely spend less money on him like they want. I think he’ll perform worse when he gets there just like Ericsson and Will Power did.

The other possibility, I suppose, is that Rosenvist could return to Ganassi since it seems like shockingly, Dixon is leaving. I was sure he’d remain there until he retired, but Marshall Pruett claims he’s already signed a McLaren contract. I don’t exactly get that. Why would you leave Ganassi willingly when they are dominating? I’m starting to wonder if Ganassi is actually firing him. He might still get a strategy win or two, but it does seem like his winning speed has become a thing of the past. However, I’ve predicted him to go winless before, even in seasons like 2018 when he went on to win the championship, so I know I need to discount him at my own peril. Having said that, even if he didn’t make an on-track pass for the lead that year and mostly benefited from how weak that year’s field was and Newgarden’s bad luck, he was a lot faster that year than he is now. At least last year, he still finished third in points despite looking mediocre. This year, Rosenqvist and Armstrong have seemed unquestionably faster, so maybe inspired by Penske dropping Power, Ganassi is willing to cut his losses here. I really thought Ganassi would be more loyal to its most successful driver, but I do get that the performance is falling off a cliff right now. Maybe he’s just being paid too much for his current level of performance. I get it, but that will suck, and I can’t say I have any idea why McLaren wants him now. Just to get back at Ganassi for losing the Álex Palou lawsuit? If it’s to replace Siegel, okay, point taken. But it seems like it might not be.

So maybe Rosenqvist ends up taking the #9 car, effectively getting a promotion for the Indy wi. I could see that, but he was not exactly electrifying in his previous Ganassi stint there, so I can’t see what has changed. While Ganassi has signed a reprehensible number of hapless ride buyers for his other cars, he always expects the #9 and #10 cars to be championship contenders, and he’s cut a lot of drivers off even after good seasons in those cars (Tomas Scheckter, Darren Manning, Dan Wheldon, and even Rosenqvist himself). It seems like returning there would be a huge gamble since Ganassi fires drivers from the #9 and #10 cars pretty quickly once it becomes clear they’re not title contenders. (Okay, I’ve talked myself into believing that Dixon is being fired for performance.) Rosenqvist may be better than Dixon now, but he isn’t the driver to challenge Palou.

Christian Lundgaard might be. He too is in the last year of his contract at McLaren and a lot of people are predicting a Dixon/Lundgaard swap. Lundgaard has certainly been faster than his cars for his entire career, and I’ve always rated him highly. Ganassi hiring Lundgaard would weirdly echo Penske hiring David Malukas this year, as both teams dropped their winningest driver (Dixon/Power) in exchange for a clearly fast but questionably diverse 2022 rookie. I’m seeing a lot of people down on Lundgaard and thinking he doesn’t have star power because he hasn’t really done anything on an oval yet. That’s true, but it could just come down to the cars, as we saw with Malukas. Malukas had never had a top five finish on a road or street course before this season, which is why people were highly skeptical about Penske replacing Power with him despite his undeniable oval speed. Well, as it turned out, Malukas has been the fastest Penske road racer for the entire season. Do we actually know Lundgaard is bad on ovals yet? He drove for a Rahal team that had equipment so slow Graham Rahal even DNQed in the Indy 500. McLaren seemingly should be better on ovals, but Pato O’Ward seems to be having his worst oval season in years, and Lundgaard is pretty clearly at this point the second-best road racer in the field.

I honestly have never been able to decide whether Lundgaard or Malukas is better. Yes, I’ll concede that the leader of their rookie cohort Kirk Kylewood is probably the best of the trio, but I think he’s only barely better than the other two, to be honest. (And probably one of those three is going to be the driver to end Palou’s dynasty; I’m not sure which one, but it won’t be this year.) Kirkwood’s big advantage is that he is more consistent across track types than the other two - or at least he was until this season. Malukas had a reputation of being ovals only, and Lundgaard had a reputation of being road/street only, while Kirkwood was the only one who seemed to be fast at both. I would probably rate Lundgaard above Malukas historically because he has won three races to Malukas’s zero, even though all his cars were probably slower than Malukas’s Penske. On the other hand, Malukas’s career bad luck in races has gotten pretty comical (he seriously could have won like five oval races by now), and I’m tempted to say he’s had more good runs even if Lundgaard has a way higher hit rate at actually winning when he has a good run. Malukas has always been higher in my model, but as far as my book is concerned, Lundgaard has scored 10 cumulative points to Malukas’s 5, so I guess I’d give him the edge. Malukas’s advantage on ovals seems way bigger than Lundgaard’s advantage on road courses, but the road course skew of the schedule evens that out. But I digress. The main point is that Penske replacing Power with Malukas looked questionable at the time and now looks visionary, and I guess Ganassi wants to rip a page from the same playbook. And I’m gonna bet that if Ganassi does hire Lundgaard, he’s going to suddenly have oval speed out of nowhere just like Malukas suddenly demonstrated road course speed out of nowhere once he finally got to Penske.

Over the next several days, I’m going to again post screenshots of my matches in the last LearnedLeague contest as I did a few months ago. I’m not sure whether anybody had any interest in that, but it was a relatively easy and thoughtless content generator for a few days, so I didn’t have to spend hours writing these exceptionally long intros.

JAMES COURTNEY…………AUSTRALIA

Born: June 29, 1980

Best year: 2010

Best drive: 2015 Gold Coast 600 Race #2

Although a gruesome F1 testing crash threatened to end Courtney’s career, he reemerged in Supercars, where he won 15 races and the 2010 championship. After winning numerous karting titles and the 2000 British Formula Ford title, Courtney was leading the 2002 British Formula Three standings at the time of his devastating crash at Monza while testing for Jaguar. A suspension failure sent him into the wall at 306 kph. After a 67G impact, his car ricocheted off the wall at 70 kph. Michael Schumacher saved his life while also testing that day, but Courtney bled from the eyes (briefly losing his vision), initially couldn’t move the right side of his body, and regularly got migraines while walking. Courtney was expected to advance to Jaguar alongside Mark Webber in 2003, but the crash thwarted that plan. Instead, Courtney moved to Japan, where he posted an extraordinary 13-win Japanese Formula 3 title season, then competed in Super GT, where he grew to prefer the wheel-to-wheel action over F1’s more processional races. He turned down an F1 offer from Midland to return home and race in Supercars.

Courtney replaced two-time champion Marcos Ambrose at Stone Brothers Racing in 2006 when Ambrose defected to NASCAR. He got off to a fast start by matching defending champion Russell Ingall, then led my touring car model globally in 2008 when he beat full-time debutant Shane van Gisbergen 24-4. He moved to Dick Johnson Racing in 2009 and unexpectedly won the 2010 title, upsetting Jamie Whincup, who won every other title from 2008-2014. Although title contenders Courtney, Whincup, and Mark Winterbottom had crashed at the penultimate race at Sydney during a thunderstorm, Courtney won the title because his team completed its repair work first.

Oddly, that season was Courtney’s only top five points finish, although he finished 11th or better every year from 2007-2016. He moved to the Holden team in 2011, where he was slightly worse than teammate Garth Tander, but hurt his legacy with nine consecutive winless seasons to end his full-time career. He suffered another horrific injury in 2015 when a metal sign penetrated his chest at Sydney after a low-flying helicopter blew it away, but in a gallant display, he recovered to win at Surfers Paradise with Jack Perkins two races after his return.

Sometimes people dismiss Courtney because he had F1 superstar potential before ostensibly only becoming a middling touring car driver. His extremely high rating in my open wheel model (almost entirely based on minor league seasons) certainly demonstrated his high potential. While he might not have been as good in touring cars, he was still quite impressive in Supercars. Not only was he the only full-time teammate to beat SVG and the driver who interrupted Whincup’s dynasty run, he did so despite freakish injuries and rarely having championship-caliber cars, and his 137-133 record against Supercars champions certainly belies his talent. Courtney stuck around too long, resulting in a lower touring car rating than he deserves, but he’s definitely underrated today.

Open wheel model: #43 of 931 (.259)

Teammate head-to-heads: 32-10 (17-3 vs. Tatsuya Kataoka, 14-7 vs. Andre Lotterer, 1-0 vs. Ryo Michigami)

Touring car model: #266 of 1676 (.165)

Teammate head-to-heads: 414-368 (4-1 vs. Zak Best, 1-3 vs. Ryan Briscoe, 23-4 vs. Aaron Cameron, 0-1 vs. Michael Caruso, 0-1 vs. Will Davison, 2-0 vs. Tyler Everingham, 1-0 vs. Dario Franchitti, 17-4 vs. Declan Fraser, 1-0 vs. James Hinchcliffe, 12-11 vs. Lee Holdsworth, 28-28 vs. Russell Ingall, 2-0 vs. Garry Jacobson, 38-11 vs. Steven Johnson, 0-1 vs. Todd Kelly, 20-7 vs. Jake Kostecki, 29-22 vs. Jack Le Brocq, 17-9 vs. Aaron Love, 7-7 vs. Warren Luff, 2-0 vs. Marcus Marshall, 2-1 vs. James Moffat, 2-3 vs. Nick Percat, 38-42 vs. Scott Pye, 35-22 vs. Thomas Randle, 1-0 vs. Alexander Rossi, 0-1 vs. Mark Skaife, 83-99 vs. Garth Tander, 26-5 vs. Shane van Gisbergen, 19-84 vs. Cam Waters, 2-0 vs. Jonathon Webb, 2-1 vs. Luke Youlden)

Year-by-year: 2000: C-, 2002: C-, 2003: C+, 2005: C-, 2006: C, 2007: C, 2008: E-, 2009: C+, 2010: E, 2011: C, 2012: C-, 2013: C, 2014: C+, 2015: C, 2016: C-, 2019: C-

So while a lot of younger fans absolutely hate the current car and 2020s NASCAR in general and desperately want the 2000s or 2010s back, I have enjoyed this decade vastly more than the last two. Not only is a lot of the cultural baggage I hated gone, but Jim France as NASCAR President has shown a willingness to throw anything against the wall and see what sticks as opposed to the sterile Brian France era. I know Kyle Busch hated the loss of practice sessions, but I honestly think that improved the racing since it made the racing harder to optimize for the teams (the loss of qualifying during COVID did suck though, especially the stupid metric starting grids). The addition of several road and street courses where NASCAR had never raced before, finally racing in the rain for the first time in over 50 years, drafting at Atlanta, the Bristol dirt race, racing on infield road courses, the tire-shedding Bristol race with 54 lead changes, experimenting with optional tires, and the introduction or reintroduction of short tracks like North Wilkesboro, Iowa, Bowman-Gray, and the Los Angeles Coliseum, where many of the drivers had minimal experience really shook things up. Races became more difficult to predict since the frequent changes to the schedule and the tire compounds made things harder to optimize. Not all these changes worked (the Bristol dirt race and the Indianapolis road course race particularly were duds), but those things along with off-track stuff like finally denouncing the Confederate flag and so on and a far less egotistical generation of drivers really revitalized NASCAR in this decade and I don’t get why so many people are whining about the Next Gen car specifically for its aero push. I was around in the late ‘90s, 2000s, and 2010s and there was a hell of a lot of aero push in those eras too and it’s been a constant complaint the entire time! Sure, there wasn’t as much aero push on short tracks then and the short track racing has indeed been pretty bad this decade, but at least NASCAR is no longer complacent.

So, while I hated and still hate the idea of racing on a naval base and I feel the circuit itself was pretty unsafe because so many cars hitting the wall caused indentations into the wall causing lengthy repairs, at least the track conditions were so bumpy and grimy that no one really knew what they were doing, which, as usual, made the racing better. It also meant experience didn’t really mean anything as all the teams were starting at square one, and you could tell because the drivers who were talented but had underachieved because they hadn’t properly figured out the Next Gen car this year were competitive, what with Corey Heim winning, Connor Zilisch having arguably his best run, and even Austin Hill taking the lead on a restart before his typically obnoxious overdriving took him, Zilisch, and Shane van Gisbergen out. I was kind of disappointed SVG got taken out because I wanted a foreigner to win to combat the nationalism, but it certainly made the race more interesting. I know in my early years as a fan in the ‘90s that NASCAR always used to talk about how “15 guys can win every race” and I always laughed because that was never true (except on plate tracks I guess). Sunday, it actually felt true. At various points in the race it looked like any of the following drivers could have won: Ryan Blaney, Chris Buescher, Heim, Kyle Larson, Ryan Preece, Tyler Reddick, Zane Smith, SVG, Bubba Wallace, Zilisch. Maybe 15 is pushing it, but there were times I thought all those guys were going to win.

For most of the race, I thought it would be Buescher just because it seemed like the Fords were consistently faster than anyone else, particularly in that point of the race when Preece shockingly took the lead on merit, and Buescher in my opinion is the best Ford driver on road courses. He was indeed leading but after Larson had his electrifying stint late in the race, I assumed Larson would run Buescher down just like he did at Sonoma in 2024. Then the caution came out for oil on the track and Buescher and runner-up Smith pitted for tires, but I guess it didn’t really help because they only had scuffed tires left. I really expected Larson would win after that, but then Heim and Reddick blasted through the field better and it looked like Reddick had him until he cut a tire, although admittedly, Heim had already passed Reddick before Reddick’s tire went down. It was a bit of a disappointment that it was another Toyota win and it’s also annoying that Heim probably intentionally wrecked Carson Hocevar as part of their long-standing feud en route to victory, but it still felt something like a breath of fresh air. The way to make racing better: give the teams insufficient time to prepare. I know I didn’t expect there to be 11 on-track lead changes in that race, and you could argue there were more since I didn’t count a couple in the middle of pit cycles. Blaney’s 12 laps led were the least for a driver who led the most laps in NASCAR history. We don’t know that 100% for sure because there are a lot of Cup Series races in the ‘50s and ‘60s with incomplete lap leaders, but most of those were 200 lap races on half-mile dirt tracks, so I think we can be pretty sure.

Definitely no one was expecting a Heim win, least of all me. I had actually signed him for my All-Racing Fantasy League team, which I have been competing in since 2009. We select 12 drivers across Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR, Formula E, IMSA, and the WEC with all drivers scoring points according to that era’s IndyCar points system (basically the 2000s IRL points system without any of the Indy 500 qualifying points, etc…) When there are both oval and road races in a given weekend, you start up to eight drivers with a maximum of five drivers in either discipline, but when there are only oval races or road races on a given weekend, you can only start five. My team is: Nick Cassidy, Ty Gibbs, Ross Gunn, Corey Heim, David Malukas, Oscar Piastri, Zane Smith, Dries Vanthoor, Rinus VeeKay, Bubba Wallace, Ye Yifei, Nick Yelloly. I started Cassidy, Malukas, VeeKay, Gibbs, and Smith, which I thought was probabilistically correct given Heim’s inexperience and Wallace’s historical road course struggles, but then Heim and Wallace finished 1-2 while Cassidy DNFed in his Formula E race and VeeKay had a mediocre run. However, we are allowed one mulligan where we are allowed to make post-hoc adjustments to our team and I figured this was definitely the race to do it, and that put me into the lead. My decision to go all in on Toyota has clearly reaped dividends, and it helps that Malukas, Gibbs, Smith, Heim, and Yelloly are also exceeding expectations. I signed Heim in the very last round because we are allowed one “keeper” a year where if we keep one driver the entire year, we can keep them the next season and take them in the previous round. I really didn’t like Gibbs’s trajectory after last year and I wanted to sign Heim so I could bail if it seems like he has a better trajectory. I honestly had a tough decision between Gibbs and Malukas entering this year since I had Malukas last year as well, but even though Malukas is my favorite IndyCar driver and Gibbs is one of my least favorite NASCAR drivers, I made the correct decision to keep Gibbs. Sure, Malukas’s performance is better even though he still hasn’t won yet while Gibbs has, but Gibbs will certainly outscore him due to the much larger number of races. Gibbs vs. Heim next year is going to be an even harder decision if I continue. My team name this year by the way is Autism Whimpers, a parody of Autism Speaks.

While I talked about NASCAR not being complacent in this decade, IndyCar has very much been complacent this decade. This is why I enjoyed IndyCar much more than NASCAR in the 2010s, but enjoyed NASCAR much more this decade. I’m even saying this even though I acknowledge this decade’s IndyCar fields are vastly superior to those lackluster 2010s fields that were dominated by aging CART/Champ Car stars, with nearly every Indy Lights prospect busting and seemingly only Josef Newgarden able to gain a foothold against the old veterans. Field quality and racing quality do not always have much to do with each other. Even though IndyCar has always had new tracks cycling in and out, usually what that means is established oval races falling by the wayside, and even most of the “new” tracks are tracks where they had already raced before, except for boring street races nobody wants. IndyCar’s schedules and cars are as sterile as 2000s/2010s NASCAR now, but what makes it worse is that Álex Palou is a way more boring driver than Jimmie Johnson. Indeed, he might be the most boring driver in history at that talent level. It definitely made me underrate him for years and assume that it was inevitable that either Colton Herta, Scott McLaughlin, and/or Pato O’Ward was going to overtake him, but now it seems pretty clear that will never happen. I guess it’s going to be either Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Lundgaard, or David Malukas who eventually dethrones him now (probably Kirkwood, but it could be any of them, and they seem very close talent-wise; that 2022 rookie class is now maybe looking like it could be the best ever).

That being said, in spite of how sterile the racing has been on paper, I’ve enjoyed this IndyCar season more than the last few (although definitely less than I’m enjoying NASCAR right now). Several of the races I expected to be boring ended up having more entertainment value than usual, what with Kirkwood’s impressive pass against Palou at Arlington, Lundgaard’s impressive pass against Malukas at the Indy road course, not to mention the instant classic Indy 500. Road America was another example. Palou really is showing more signs of vulnerability this year than he has the past few even though he’s still going to win the title because I don’t think Kirkwood/Lundgaard/Malukas are ready to challenge yet. He’s definitely raised his game on ovals and the five straight poles is amazing, but how many people expected him to win only one of those races? After years of seemingly never making an incorrect strategy call as seemingly only Ganassi knows how to strategize in IndyCar, they botched the strategy at both the Indy road course and Gateway and this time Palou threw away a race he probably would’ve won otherwise despite the correct strategy after speeding. I think he’s just been really lucky that Herta left the series and O’Ward and McLaughlin didn’t develop into what we thought they would a couple years ago.

After the Gateway race, I offered my mea culpa on selling Marcus Ericsson too short after he had the best drive of his life and now I must do the same for another Marcus. For a long time, I struggled to take Marcus Armstrong seriously. I thought it was ridiculous when Chip Ganassi hired him on the basis of three consecutive 13th-place points finishes in Formula 2. Yes, he won Rookie of the Year, which in a Ganassi car he’d better, but he only barely beat Agustín Canapino, who was as much of a bust in his IndyCar crossover as Jimmie Johnson was (and the decade’s second-biggest asshole to boot!) Yes, I know Canapino ran the full schedule and Armstrong ran road courses only, but still… I think what really irritated me about Armstrong the most was that he remained in the series while the next year’s Rookie of the Year Linus Lundqvist did not even though they were teammates and I think Lundqvist was better. Lundqvist won five minor league titles, which I think trumps a triumvirate of thirteenths, and he already had a pole, two podiums, and two fastest laps in barely a year’s worth of starts. Yeah, sure, Armstrong barely beat Lundqvist in points but Armstrong was in his second year and Lundqvist was in first. I don’t think either of them deserved Ganassi rides immediately, but Lundqvist shouldn’t have been jettisoned never to return and I think he had a higher trajectory. I will grant that the name redundancies amongst the Scandinavian drivers are getting ridiculous at this point. Linus Lundqvist’s first name rhymes with Rinus VeeKay’s while his last name feels like a portmanteau of Christian Lundgaard and Felix Rosenqvist. There are now two Christians and two Marcuses (although Armstrong is from New Zealand, not Sweden). I can get how all of this can get confusing for a casual fan, or even a seasoned racing archivist, as the below immortal screenshot proves, but if all these drivers are deserving (which they are), who cares? And thank you Dennis Hauger for being the first active Scandinavian driver whose name can’t be confused with someone else’s!

Yeah, Lundqvist only finished 3rd in Indy Lights in 2021, but he lost to Kirkwood and Malukas and they swept the season. Sure, Kirkwood tied Greg Moore’s single-season record with ten wins, but Malukas won seven and Lundqvist won three and they weren’t that far apart. Considering what Kirkwood and Malukas have been doing, he shouldn’t have been gone, especially since he dominated the 2022 season after Kirkwood and Malukas both advanced, and crushed several drivers who are still active now (Sting Ray Robb, Christian Rasmussen, and Kyffin Simpson - yes, Rasmussen is good and he has a bunch of minor league titles himself, but blech on those other two).

I think that’s the main reason why Armstrong rubbed me the wrong way, much like how I started disliking Conor Daly because he had such insane longevity, while Carlos Muñoz was out of the series quickly after outperforming him. It didn’t help that in Armstrong’s 2025 season, he seemed to turn mediocre runs into eighth-place finishes every single week. After begrudgingly listing him at the very bottom of my top 200 list last year, I compared him to Charlie Kimball due to being a wildly undeserved Ganassi hire and propelling that into longevity he did not exactly deserve, and I predicted that he’d have essentially the same career as Kimball: about seven years with one and only one strategy win and a couple finishes in the back of the top ten in points before everyone quickly forgets he ever existed. Despite my typical aversion for fake red flags at the end of races, I was actually excited about this year’s Indy 500 red flag because it prevented Armstrong from winning. The Ericsson win was bad enough since I consider him one of the top ten worst Indy 500 winners, but I would’ve definitely put Armstrong in the bottom five and even lower than Ericsson if he had won. Now, I guess I have to admit I was wrong.

After qualifying third, Armstrong immediately took second from Malukas and was coming pretty close to keeping up with Palou. The Road America race had several ridiculous strategy reshuffles that threatened to ruin the race, as the caution came out several times in the middle of pit stops. Armstrong’s teammate Rosenqvist seemed poised to steal the race until he got caught out by the caution (and even Townsend Freaking Bell called the team out for this even before the caution came out), but the funny thing was Armstrong got his track position back by being aided by that caution as well as Palou’s speeding penalty. Since he was running second to Palou before all the strategy reshuffles and then Palou sped, he obviously deserved the win and he would’ve won had his engine not blown with three laps remaining. Granted, I think eventual winner Lundgaard had the better drive as he was last and 100 seconds behind Palou for the entire first stint after clipping his wing on the opening lap and came back to win, but although he was catching Armstrong at a rapid pace, I don’t think he would’ve gotten him. Okay fine. After begrudgingly admitting at Gateway that the other Marcus had earned his place when I was skeptical, I now must for this Marcus as well. He and Rosenqvist are certainly benefiting from the fact that Ganassi has dominant cars since Meyer Shank Racing is a Ganassi satellite, but they’ve also been pretty consistently outperforming Scott Dixon this year, and I can’t say I saw that coming.

I was going to try to do two at once, but Ingram took me forever because identifying a best season and race for a driver who peaked in an era when none of the races were properly archived was a challenge. I literally went through all his wins listed on The Third Turn to pick the right one, and I think I did.

JACK INGRAM……………………….USA

Born: December 28, 1936
Died: June 24, 2021

Best year: 1974
Best drive: 1980 Sportsman 300 at Daytona International Speedway

The most successful driver in what is now called the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, Ingram led all drivers with five championships and at least 183 wins. Many fans misunderstand the full context of his career because most of Ingram’s wins and titles came in the Late Model Sportsman era that preceded the formation of the Busch Series, but he remained successful into the Busch era and won the series’s first title. The Sportsman races were never properly archived and are difficult to research, but enough information is available to prove that he has vastly more wins in the series than Kyle Busch, even if he likely faced worse competition on average.

For most of Ingram’s career, he raced his self-owned #11 car, where he became both the most consistent and most dominant driver in series history with 24 consecutive winning seasons from 1964-1987 and 19 consecutive top ten points finishes from 1971-1989. In all but two seasons from 1965-1986, Ingram had at least five wins. In his era, the Late Model Sportsman championship was a rather haphazardly structured array of local track races, much like today’s Weekly Series. Competing for championships required entering a grueling number of races. When Ingram won his three consecutive Late Model Sportsman titles from 1972-1974, he won four races in four consecutive days on Labor Day weekend. The next year when he earned a career-best 17 wins in 66 starts, he worked 80-100 hours a week to compete before he stopped competing for championships until the advent of the Busch Series in 1982.

When that series began and introduced a full-time touring schedule for all drivers, Ingram won the first championship and remained a dominant force, winning the 1982 and 1985 titles, bookending Sam Ard’s two titles. He was also poised to win the 1986 title until being suspended for intentionally ramming and injuring Ronnie Pressley in a local track race, then getting into a brawl. He held a 250-point lead before the suspension, but lost the points lead and the championship as a result. His career never recovered.

I can’t rate any of Ingram’s seasons as elite because he rarely competed against fields with 30 or more cars, and he seldom beat current Cup Series stars head-to-head, although he did win multiple races against Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, and Dale Earnhardt, and did earn a then-record 31 Busch wins to Dale Jarrett’s 2 when they both competed full-time. He also had at least 117 Sportsman wins to Harry Gant’s 84 when they simultaneously before Gant switched his focus to the Cup Series. Ingram’s biggest win came when he passed Gant at the Daytona 500 support race in 1980 against a 40-car field. Although he rarely entered Cup Series races, he earned a second-place finish at Hickory during Richard Petty’s ten-in-a-row streak in 1967. While I find some of the minor league NASCAR Hall of Famers and 75 Greatest Drivers to be overhyped (especially Jerry Cook and Hershel McGriff), Ingram’s reputation is certainly deserved.

Year-by-year: 1965: C-, 1966: C-, 1967: C-, 1968: C-, 1969: C-, 1970: C-, 1971: C, 1972: C+, 1973: C+, 1974: C+, 1977: C-, 1978: C, 1979: C, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: C+, 1983: C, 1984: C, 1985: C, 1986: C-

After Alex Zanardi, Kyle Busch, and Ned Jarrett all died in barely a month’s time, the racing community lost legendary reporter Steve Waid, who ran NASCAR Winston Cup Scene for 28 years, taking it from a niche publication with only 9,000 subscribers housed in a country store to a mainstream periodical with 150,000 during his tenure as executive editor. Since 2019, he’s been better-known as the co-host of The Scene Vault podcast with Rick Houston, which has been my favorite auto racing podcast to follow for years. I tend to primarily listen to music podcasts and TV and movie podcasts to a lesser extent, so I never quite finished listening to all the Scene Vault episodes, and in fact, I think I’ve listened to very few of them since the tail end of 2022, but I think I’m going to try to catch up pretty soon.

Typically, Houston and Waid interviewed a driver, crew chief, or engineer from the ‘70s to the ‘90s when Winston Cup Scene was in its heyday, although they occasionally interviewed people who fulfilled other roles or from other periods. I didn’t agree with their views on everything - I don’t think the Winston Cup points system was good, I don’t think Mark Martin was robbed of either the 1990 championship or the 2007 Daytona 500, and I especially don’t think Randy LaJoie should’ve been on the 75 Greatest Drivers list or considered for the Hall of Fame, but I’ve always loved to listen to them and learned a lot from them. It has helped me with certain columns here. If they hadn’t interviewed Steve Hmiel, I might not have known that Terry Labonte won the first race at Rockingham in 1986 with a show car. I had no idea what to pick for his best race before listening to that, but afterward, it was entirely obvious.

I was definitely more influenced by the online racing columnists than the NASCAR print media at the time. I primarily read the columnists that Jayski linked in the ‘90s and 2000s. Matt McLaughlin was my favorite. Although best known as a Frontstretch writer, his best work was for the earlier websites speedworld.net (which hosted the first message board I posted on in the year 2000, then turned into SpeedFX and RacingOne later) and RaceComm (a site oddly run by Matt Kenseth’s future spotter Mike Calinoff). His most iconic articles were “Dale Earnhardt’s Greatest Hits” after Bristol 1999, “Blood on Their Hands” after his death, and “Racers Race” after Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s injury in an ALMS crash in 2004, before he was fired at the end of that season for being too critical of NASCAR after NASCAR bought RacingOne. I didn’t read Waid much because McLaughlin’s columns were free and Waid’s were not, but they were obviously of the same school, and I’m sure Waid influenced McLaughlin, which made him an indirect influence on me nonetheless.

I did pick up a few copies of Winston Cup Scene in the ‘90s. There was a short-lived racing hobby shop in the village of North Syracuse (or maybe it was in the Carousel Center mall that became Destiny USA in Syracuse; that would make more sense, but I don’t remember). It must’ve only existed for about two years or something, but in 1997 and 1998, I made a number of purchases there, including my first books, periodicals, and probably diecasts. I bought the 1997 Official Directory for the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, NAPA Almanac of Stock Car Racing, some periodical called Racing 97, and the 1998 NASCAR Preview and Press Guide. The Official Directory contained a lot of articles reviewing the 1996 season, box scores and the top ten in points for each race (although they excluded North Wilkesboro because it was removed from the schedule), places to enter the top ten finishers and the top ten in points for each race in 1997, along with information on how to join fan clubs and even lists of hotels and restaurants near each track. The NAPA Almanac had a list of the top 50 points finishers for every Cup Series and Craftsman Truck Series season (for some reason, they didn’t do the Busch Series) along with winnings leaders, Rookies of the Year, all-time wins (they had Bobby Allison at 85 even back then), and lists of races by year and track, and lists of races won by driver. This was like manna from heaven for me as a young fan, because at this time, there were no box scores for Winston Cup races available anywhere online before 1994 until a year or two later, when TNN’s country.com website digitized the information from Greg Fielden’s books and entered results for all modern era races, but then, they took it down after TNN lost coverage in 2000 and I still don’t think there were box scores for any NASCAR races prior to the ‘90s online until racing-reference.info launched in 2003 (then as racing-reference.com). I asked my dad for the Fielden books one Christmas and he didn’t get them ‘cause they were out of print, but if I’d had them and if somebody whispered in my ear to learn SQL (which I had never heard of until college), I probably could’ve even beaten racing-reference to the punch. But starting race-database.com in 2007 was too late for me to ever make that profitable, although in retrospect, I’m not sure how much money even Alan Boodman ever made from racing-reference in the first place.

The NAPA Almanac was probably the biggest influence on me. Like a proto-Daniel Céspedes but without the data visualization talent, I gutted it for all kinds of information that at that time was available nowhere. I did enter all the top 50 points finishers into a Microsoft Access database along with average points per race, winning percentages, top five percentages, and top ten percentages, most of which doesn’t interest me that much today. I was jotting down wins by track type, wins by month, career wins across all series including the regional touring series once I had the Press Guides, and lots of other arcane stuff. One time, I made a list of the highest points finishers by year who had never been the highest points finisher before. I didn’t put most of this stuff online. I had a Geocities website Frontrow Racenet (I have no idea why I combined four words into two) but I didn’t use it as an outlet for this kind of thing until I launched race-database in 2007.

Anyway, I did buy a few issues of Winston Cup Scene at this same shop as well and enjoyed them. They were very slick and well-produced, especially the photography, which was better than anything I’d seen anywhere else. I believe the first issue I bought was for the spring Darlington race weekend in 1997. I don’t remember the coverage for the Winston Cup race, but I really remember enjoying the Busch Series write-up, which must have been written by Houston, but I didn’t read it nearly often enough to recognize Waid or Houston by name. Although I did subscribe to Inside NASCAR magazine later, I never thought of subscribing to Winston Cup Scene, probably because I knew I couldn’t afford to, so I ended up usually only reading online columnists (which is obviously what did in Winston Cup Scene in the end), but I definitely respected it when I did read it, and I will really miss Waid for sure.

In my old age, I kind of see this childhood obsession as a waste, even if it did ultimately lead to this. Like a lot of aftergifted former academic whiz kids, I’ve come to realize in my adulthood how little value there is in it. Why couldn’t my autistic special interest have been learning how to not gag unprocessed food, how to manage the logistics of a household, how to socialize in the real world, DIY handiwork, or even how to drive? I know it’s practically an autistic cliche to have a “spiky profile” where you can be exceptional at a handful of hobbies that are difficult to monetize while being largely inept in the activities of daily living, but at this point, I realize I likely made some wrong choices. I still plan on finishing this book. I’ve gone way too far to stop, and I realize I have a small subscriber base that could turn into something, but there is this nagging voice in my head that I want to get offline entirely if/when I finish.

Jesse Love was just hired to replace Josh Berry in the #21 Wood Brothers car. It makes sense, but I’m still underwhelmed by this. In the last update of my stock car model, Josh Berry’s rating of -.154 was actually higher than Love’s (-.175), although they were both certainly a lot higher than Harrison Burton’s -.231. Further, bear in mind that my model considers modern Wood Brothers drivers to be Penske drivers and is so biased against modern Penske drivers that is Ryan Blaney as only a barely-above-average Cup Series driver, which suggests Berry probably should be higher in my model than he is. While I’m sure Love overtook Berry this year since he is regularly beating Austin Hill while Berry has had a miserable season, I don’t think this is as much of an improvement as most others seem to. Obviously, Love is still young enough that he has room to grow, while Berry does not, so it makes sense. I don’t think Love will ever be as bad as Berry has been this year, but I also think he has a low ceiling, and I’m not convinced he’ll ever be much better than Berry was last year.

Even at the time, everyone, including me, considered Love’s Xfinity Series title last year to be highway robbery when Connor Zilisch won 10 races to his 2. Ryan McCafferty predicted that Love might have a trajectory similar to Tyler Reddick’s, much like how Reddick had a wildly undeserved title in 2018 before backing it up with a deserved one in 2019 and becoming a Cup Series star. That made sense at the time and I kind of agreed with it. The only problem is… Love’s 2026 sure as hell isn’t Reddick’s 2019. Reddick won six races against a field that also included Christopher Bell, who is far better than anyone racing in the O’Reilly Series this year, while Love isn’t even coming close to challenging Justin Allgaier. Most people have already written off Hill as kind of a hack, but although Love has certainly overtaken Hill, Hill still has a winning record over Love in the races both of them finished, and a lot more wins to boot. Zilisch was certainly outperforming Allgaier to a vastly greater extent than Love has ever outperformed Hill, who is not as good as Allgaier. I realize Love has already led more than he did the previous two seasons, but he’s on pace for both fewer wins and poles, which suggests his speed at least hasn’t really increased that much, even now that he no longer has to regularly compete against Zilisch. And the fact that Zilisch has had such a miserable season is also giving me pause. I know it’s primarily because Trackhouse is vastly underachieving, and I know nobody except Shane van Gisbergen has learned this car quickly (because it was based on the Supercars chassis he already had vast experience with). However, even I (who have had more skepticism about Zilisch than most) didn’t expect SVG to outperform Zilisch on the ovals this year. I assumed Zilisch would be second to Chastain on ovals and second to SVG on road courses, and that hasn’t really happened. I’m not saying Zilisch should be replaced or move down to the O’Reilly Series; he clearly advanced for a reason and should be given time to grow, and if he replaced Alex Bowman in the #48 car now, I wouldn’t be against it. However, the fact that he dominated Love so thoroughly last year definitely gives me pause about Love’s potential, particularly when I always kind of felt Love had a low ceiling to begin with (although he’ll be more consistent than Berry and still an improvement). I’m also kind of let down that Berry was fired before Noah Gragson. I know Gragson outperformed Berry when they were JRM teammates and is younger, but Berry has been better in Cup, and he is more likable. It really bothers me that Gragson is so popular despite sucking as a driver and a person, and I would have much rather seen him be replaced instead.

I’m not saying Berry shouldn’t be replaced. That makes sense, but I think the correct replacement should’ve been Scott McLaughlin. SVG proved to be the only driver to learn the Next Gen car quickly because of his Supercars experience, and McLaughlin not only has that, but he also vastly outperformed SVG when they were in Supercars together. I think he could win Cup road course races for sure by his second year and would have a higher ceiling than Love. Furthermore, McLaughlin’s IndyCar career right now is rapidly turning into a bit of a wet fart at this point. I really thought that either he or Pato O’Ward, if not both, would overtake Álex Palou soon, but that has not happened - if anything, the reverse has happened as he’s pulled away from them even more. David Malukas and Christian Lundgaard now look much closer to overtaking McLaughlin and O’Ward respectively (if you think they haven’t already) than either McLaughlin or O’Ward are to Palou, and I did not have that on my scorecard. I had McLaughlin as my 2025 championship favorite, and he hasn’t won since. He’s coming dangerously close to looking like yet another Ryan Briscoe/Alexander Rossi/Graham Rahal type who had two or three hot seasons before fading into oblivion, and I really didn’t expect that from him. Yes, he’s still better than them, and the 2020s IndyCar fields have been vastly deeper than the 2010s fields, so I’d still rate him higher, but I’ve been really shocked by Malukas outrunning him everywhere in his first season and I think he might need a change of scenery. I think in the #21 car he might actually both win more and make more money than he will in his IndyCar future. I once thought McLaughlin was a future IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner. I’m not gonna say either isn’t going to happen, but I would now bet against both. But if he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to, and I guess that’s it.

I am really loathing every aspect of this NASCAR weekend in San Diego. Okay, the racing is fine, and I get wanting to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but the militaristic jingoistic bullshit is really pissing me off. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the main reasons I stopped watching NASCAR in 2003 and the first half of 2004 was because I was against the Iraq War before it started. When I became a fan in the ‘90s, the ESPN and CBS broadcasts were professional and had appeal for everyone, but in the 2000s, it felt like the FOX broadcasts were for rednecks only and intentionally designed to alienate the yuppie fans they had picked up in the ‘90s. The biggest example of this was the post-9/11 bombastic military pageantry rooting our troops going off to war, kicking ass, and taking names, and it was that big a turnoff for me. If you were against the Iraq War, NASCAR didn’t want you as a fan, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, since this was the same moment when country radio canceled the Dixie Chicks for that, and NASCAR and country music were obviously historically linked. They chased an exclusively neocon audience in the 2000s, which led to a short-term gain and a long-term loss, particularly amongst my fellow millennials. Lots of my high school classmates were casual NASCAR fans in the ‘90s of them, and many of them wouldn’t admit it in retrospect because the brand got too toxic. Think about the difference between Days of Thunder and Talladega Nights (both bad movies; at least I always assumed so on Talladega Nights, which I haven’t seen), but the former made NASCAR look awesome and the latter turned it into a butt of jokes, which makes sense since Adam McKay is a dirtbag leftist who was obviously going after an easy target. Even if the ratings were peaking in the 2000s, it became culturally unacceptable for educated people to be fans in the 2000s in the way it wasn’t in the ‘90s, and the Iraq War boosting was a large part of it in my opinion.

This is why I don’t have as much nostalgia for 2000s NASCAR as most others seem to. Yes, I can acknowledge with the benefit of hindsight that a lot of the racing was good, that the competition was never better, and I would even probably say 2001 had the highest average racing quality in history. But the presentation, especially in the years immediately following 9/11, was so toxic that it poisoned the brand for an entire generation and led to NASCAR’s decline once George W. Bush lost his popularity (I insist it’s that and not even the Chase or the GWC or the lucky dog, etc…) It always shocks me when so many younger fans who are usually way to the left of the “NASCAR mainstream” in the 2000s now talk about the 2000s as the golden days. Probably it’s because they’re just looking at the racing and not all that baggage that I struggled to ignore at the time. Honestly, as much as most people say they hate the racing in the 2020s, I’m enjoying it more because it’s been seemingly more chill, the drivers are on average more likable, it’s no longer trying to compete with the NFL and failing, and most of that political garbage was gone, so this 2003 throwback is really making me vomit.

I’m not boycotting this weekend like I did a lot of 2003 and 2004 or 2017 after the Trump endorsement, but I do have to ask why do we as a culture seem to think “celebrating our country” and “celebrating the military” are the same thing. Maybe I’m just too Howard Zinn-brained (I did read A People’s History of the United States once) but why do so many of us celebrate troops and only troops as our “nation’s heroes”? Why are they seen as more heroic than (for example) firefighters (yeah, they got their due in 2001 but only really then), paramedics, people who work for suicide hotlines and food banks, etc…? All those guys are fulfilling a 100% unambiguous good, while I think most of us can agree that our military does lots of awful things, no matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power. Why do all our holidays grow increasingly more militarized over time? Like Memorial Day was always a military holiday, but I remember in my youth that people also used it to honor their deceased family members even if they weren’t veterans, and then that really went away after 9/11. So, I was against racing on a military base to begin with and hearing everyone in the Craftsman Truck booth arguing yesterday about how this was such an “awesome event”. Oh, gag me with a spoon. And Pete Hegseth giving the command makes this even worse. People are arguing that, of course, Hegseth should be doing this because we’re racing on a military base. Fine, I get that. Why do racing series think the only way to celebrate our country’s anniversary is either NASCAR racing on a naval base or Trump commissioning an IndyCar street race himself (that’ll be even worse)? We need to stop treating our country and our military as synonyms, but I will now get off my soapbox because few will want to hear this.

My mom got briefly moved from room 419 to 402 at Van Duyn after a conflict with her roommate, and then she got moved back to 419 a day or two ago, and nobody even told me. She seems to be raising a stink about every single roommate, and I thought she was actually getting along with the 402 roommate so I don’t even know what that was about. The 402 roommate did say she didn’t want to be Mom’s roommate, but not because they were fighting or anything. She was just worried Mom would fall and that she couldn’t do anything about it from what I heard, but she got moved back anyway. I think my mom is the instigator and the common denominator for all her issues with her roommates, and that’s also really frustrating. I’m still trying to get her out, but there are still no updates on the ramp construction, even though it’s supposed to be done by July 7.

I had a weird encounter with a homeless person on Monday when I was visiting Mom on the bus. He asked me for a pen. He's an artist who makes some kind of fractal-type art. Lots of drawings of geometric objects. He apparently got a lot of this from the movie Stargate and expected me to understand everything he was talking about even though I’d never seen that movie (I guess I look like the kind of person who would’ve seen that movie). He was talking about how one of his drawings represented the Fibonacci sequence. I didn't get it. He then was talking about how he was going to smoke some crack in the pen I gave him. He seemed to belong to some kind of cult and was mildly proselytizing and stuff. He was saying the kind of "open-minded" things that don't really make sense to someone who isn't high. Told me he lived in a hole. Uttered a few racial epithets. Offered me $1 for the pen. After I'd predicted earlier in the conversation that the bus would arrive at the transfer hub 8 minutes late because it passed one of the other stops 8 minutes late, he took the dollar back from me. I was being really quiet. He hit me on the left knee. It hurt on and off for a few days. Then he just left at the transfer hub. Will probably never see him again. I don’t know what to make of that. I’d like to get him some help though if I ever do see him again.

I didn’t write anything for a while because I needed to catch up on some of my paid work and I did just finish a big part of my current assignment a couple days ago before starting to work on this and I’m going to try to start catching up with my drivre profiles. Additionally, after my massive list update in my last column, I’m going to try to finish archiving all the other series I haven’t archived yet on my master driver list, which I would like to finish by the end of the year. Right now, I’m working on NLS, the sports car series that only races at the Nürburgring (which for most of its history was called VLN), which is probably the most prestigious series I haven’t covered yet. It’s too important not to cover (even Max Verstappen has been entering races there lately), but it will certainly be exhausting since every race has 15-20 different class winners, there are on average 10 races a year, and almost all class wins are split between two or three different drivers. It will definitely take me weeks to finish this series alone, but thankfully, I don’t think there are any other individual series left that will be that intensive.

SATORU NAKAJIMA…………….JAPAN

Born: February 23, 1953

Best year: 1985
Best drive: 1981 J.A.F. Grand Prix at Suzuka International Racing Course

Despite a mediocre F1 career, Nakajima is nonetheless regarded as one of the greatest Japanese drivers for his dominance in Japanese Formula 2, the series now known as Super Formula, where he became the first driver to win five titles and 21 races; his five championships still rank second to Kazuyoshi Hoshino’s six. Having grown up on a farm that his family had owned for 300 years, he raised money to race while working for his brother’s gas station.

After finishing fourth in the 1976 Fuji Grand Champion race, Nakajima landed a ride with Heroes Racing, which won back-to-back F2 titles with Hoshino in 1977 and 1978, Nakajima’s first two seasons. He actually would’ve beaten Hoshino in 1978 if he hadn’t been stripped of his points in two races for briefly holding a British racing license. He won his first title for i&i Racing in 1981 after the team switched from BMW to Honda. In the Suzuka season finale, he beat future F1 winner Thierry Boutsen by over 19 seconds. He remained with Honda through 1986, winning the 1982 title with Team Ikuzawa and three consecutive titles for a team co-owned by Heroes and his own Nakajima Racing from 1984-1986.

In 1987, Lotus F1 switched from Renault to Honda engines, and Nakajima came as part of the deal. After his teammate Ayrton Senna outqualified him by an average of 5 seconds per race, most observers believed Nakajima was wildly out of his depth. However, behind the scenes, his engineers and teammates highly respected him for his great technical knowledge, testing, and setup abilities. Senna was replaced by Nelson Piquet in 1988, but Lotus never won again. Nakajima DNQed five times in 1988 and 1989, but had two noted highlights, a gritty qualifying performance where he tied Piquet in Suzuka qualifying immediately after his mother’s death, and a wet drive from last to fourth at Adelaide in 1989, where he set the fastest lap, Lotus’s last and the first for an Asian driver. After two mediocre seasons for Tyrrell in 1990 and 1991, he retired. He continued as a Super Formula owner to the present day, winning four more titles from 1999-2009, and even discovered Álex Palou, who gave the team its best points finish since then as a rookie. He also had a Japanese pop hit, “Sad Hydrofoil”, in 1990. His son Kazuki became a two-time Super Formula champion and three-time Le Mans winner but never drove for his team.

While Nakajima’s F1 career looked awful on the surface, paddock insiders generally acknowledged his racing fundamentals and argued that he struggled because he had a very small frame and lacked the arm strength to manhandle that era’s steering and wide tires. It didn’t help that he started his F1 career much later than most of his contemporaries. However, I’m listing him for his domestic racing career. His teammate record looks terrible because he didn’t have any teammates during his Japanese F2 dynasty run, but he’s definitely better than his reputation.

Open wheel model: #566 of 931 (-.119)

Teammate head-to-heads: 3-30 (0-2 vs. Jean Alesi, 1-8 vs. Kazuyoshi Hoshino, 0-6 vs. Stefano Modena, 1-6 vs. Nelson Piquet, 0-8 vs. Ayrton Senna, 1-0 vs. Noritake Takahara)

Year-by-year: 1977: C-, 1978: C+, 1979: C-, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: E-, 1983: C+, 1984: E-, 1985: E, 1986: C+, 1989: C-

KAZUKI NAKAJIMA……………..JAPAN

Born: January 11, 1985

Best year: 2012
Best drive: 2012 6 Hours of Fuji at Fuji Speedway

The son of former Formula One driver Satoru Nakajima, Kazuki was a Toyota factory driver for his entire career, where he had a disappointing F1 career for Williams before reemerging in the 2010s as a star in Super Formula and the World Endurance Championship. Although Satoru had primarily raced for Honda, Kazuki wanted to carve his own identity apart from his father, winning the Formula Toyota championship in 2003, then finishing fifth in GP2, the then-top F1 feeder series in 2007, where he failed to win but was the highest-finishing rookie.

Nakajima made his F1 debut in the 2007 season finale at Interlagos after Alexander Wurz abruptly retired after the penultimate race. He had the difficult job of competing against the then-drastically underrated future World Champion Nico Rosberg. Although he never came close to Rosberg’s pace, he only finished two positions behind him in the 2008 standings, but lost his ride after failing to score a point in 2009. He briefly signed with Stefan GP, which procured Toyota’s old equipment and attempted to enter the 2010 F1 season, but their entry was rejected.

In 2011, he signed with Toyota Team TOM’S as André Lotterer’s teammate in both Super GT and Formula Nippon, which became Super Formula in 2013. Although Lotterer dominated the 2011 season and generally had the measure of Nakajima, he skipped one race due to a Le Mans conflict, and Nakajima won in his second start at the Autopolis circuit from 13th. He then won the 2012 and 2014 titles while also joining the new WEC as a Toyota factory driver. At Fuji in 2012, he won Toyota’s second race at Fuji with Wurz and Nicolas Lapierre, and he did most of the work, including winning the pole and posting the fastest lap times despite a grueling triple stint. He won the pole at Le Mans in 2014 and 2018 and was leading at Le Mans in 2016 until a power failure on the final lap. He avenged this loss by winning three consecutive Le Mans wins from 2018-2020 and the overall WEC title with Sébastien Buemi and Fernando Alonso in 2018-2019 before retiring in 2021.

Despite his lackluster F1 career, Nakajima proved to be one of Toyota’s best drivers with 17 WEC wins, 9 Super Formula wins, and 8 Super GT wins from 2011-2021. Although he wasn’t quite a match for Lotterer, losing to him 28-18 in shared finishes and 15-9 in wins, he actually beat him four out of seven seasons in the championship at a time when Lotterer himself earned three Le Mans wins, demonstrating his potential. In his sports car career, he became the first Japanese driver to win overall at Le Mans in a Japanese car, and he certainly played a big role in elevating the team, as evidenced by his current position as the vice chairman for Toyota’s WEC team. Although Satoru was probably better domestically, Kazuki’s prolific winning in Super Formula, Super GT, and WEC simultaneously gives him the edge historically.

Open wheel model: #442 of 931 (-.044)

Teammate head-to-heads: 55-99 (7-10 vs. Richard Antinucci, 0-1 vs. Andrea Caldarelli, 3-7 vs. Nick Cassidy, 1-1 vs. Katsuyuki Hiranaka, 4-10 vs. Kohei Hirate, 1-0 vs. Takuto Iguchi, 18-28 vs. Andre Lotterer, 1-1 vs. Ritomo Miyata, 3-13 vs. Joao Paulo de Oliveira, 7-19 vs. Nico Rosberg, 4-1 vs. James Rossiter, 6-8 vs. Sakon Yamamoto)

Year-by-year: 2008: C-, 2011: C, 2012: E-, 2013: E-, 2014: E-, 2015: C+, 2016: C-, 2017: E-, 2018: E-, 2019: C, 2020: C-, 2021: C-