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-

I have decided all drivers who earn a cumulative total of 25 career points are locks while the bubble is currently set at 14 points. My near-miss tier consists of all drivers with 10-13 career points. There is still definitely a lot of wiggle room here because ideally, I only want to have at most 200 drivers on my annual lists, and I have a lot of individual tier groups that are currently overfilled, which means many drivers will eventually go down in career points, especially drivers from the last 20 years. The most overfilled year right now is probably 2012, where I have 29 Es, 23 E-s, 69 C+s, 73 Cs, and 103 C-s. This means I’m going to have to drop at least 97 drivers from that year to meet my quotas (not counting later drivers I end up adding for that year and there will likely be still more), and a lot of other seasons are close to that too. The actual bubble right now (the 1,000th-highest rated driver) is at 17 points, but that might end up dropping once I “un-stuff” those seasons (which are mostly modern ones), so don’t be surprised if some of the shakier/more precarious locks move down to bubble or some of the shakier/more precarious bubble drivers move down to near miss eventually. (Indeed, I’ve already decided a number of the bubble drivers I intend to drop, but I won’t do that now.)

On the flip side, there are a lot of earlier seasons that are not filled. Obviously, there aren’t as many data available for a lot of series the further you go back in time. If you go all the way back to 1946, for instance, I only have 8 Es, 6 E-s, 9 C+s, 7 Cs, and 15 C-s because there quite honestly weren’t all that many racing series in operation yet. Grand Prix racing was only just beginning to reemerge after Europe was devastated in World War II. NASCAR didn’t exist yet, although its predecessor, the National Championship Stock Car Circuit did, but obviously didn’t have the same prestige (even if many of the drivers who eventually dominated the later Cup seasons competed there; this is why Red Byron is a lock by the way - his career did not start in 1949 and he had 22 career wins from 1946-1948 in both the NCSCC and the first NASCAR Modified season against pretty much the exact same competition he faced in his Cup title year). Most of the world’s racing strength was in IndyCar that year because the US obviously recovered faster from the war, but that IndyCar season was the weirdest in history because there were six full-length championship races and 71 sprint car races that were randomly added to the schedule for that year only; thankfully, Ted Horn would have won the title with or without the sprint car races, making him an obvious #1 for that year. Argentina’s Turismo Carretera series was actually one of the most prestigious in the world at the time, as Juan Manuel Fangio came from there before eventually winning five F1 titles, and honestly, you can make a strong case that both Juan and Oscar Gálvez were better than Fangio when they were all competing against each other in the ‘40s. Quite frankly, I don’t think there will be 200 drivers worth rating that year, so I don’t think I’m going to try to force it. I’m not going to inflate a season and give it a grade it doesn’t deserve just to make sure all my tiers are filled. 200 is my maximum, but plenty of early years likely won’t fill all my tiers and that’s okay.

It gets a little murkier with the pre-World War II years. Since there were substantially fewer series competing in those seasons, I know I absolutely need to award those seasons fewer points. While I definitely want to make sure I include all the true legends from this era, I would vastly rather list second-tier guys from the post-World War II period, while I think I will snub most of those types of drivers from the prewar era. At the moment, I have essentially moved the scale down two tiers from 1905-1941, awarding 50 points for a #1 season, 30 for #2, 20 for #3, 10 for #4, 5 for #5, 3 for E, 2 for E-, and 1 for C+. I remove the C and C- categories for those years, although typically if I would give a season a C- in the post-World War II era, I’ll give it a C+ in the prewar era so it still scores 1 point. This applies to a lot of Le Mans class winners. While I don’t rate every major sports car class winner or even every overall winner in modern years, I will usually rate all Le Mans class winners in earlier, less competitive years, as long as they finished in the top ten overall in the race or something. Those drivers would typically score 1 point in either era if they didn’t win the race overall. I started this period in 1905 because 1905 was the first official IndyCar season and 1906 was the first French Grand Prix (aka the first race we would consider an official Grand Prix by today’s standards). For the first 11 years auto racing existed from 1894-1904, I only rate the top five drivers, giving them 10, 5, 3, 2, and 1 points. I think a couple drivers from this era need to be recognized, but probably only a handful or maybe two.

I do think I need to tweak this and maybe award more points for the 1930s since one of the things I have noticed is that a lot of ‘30s drivers feel underrated to me. I already wrote a column for Billy Winn a long time ago. He’s a driver I have regarded highly for a long time because he won 4 of his 14 IndyCar starts before dying in a crash shortly before his 29th birthday. As I already discussed when I rated him the 53rd best IndyCar driver of all time, all ten of his other starts were won by different drivers, meaning within the context of the races he dominated he was supremely dominant, but he doesn’t get the credit he deserves because his Indy 500 record was bad. He also has 51 confirmed AAA sprint car wins (although 11 of them came before there was an official points championship). Winn feels like a driver who needs to be a lock, but because of how few points I awarded to this era, he isn’t. I also think other ‘30s drivers like Tony Willman should be locks, and guys like Ernie Triplett and Bob Swanson should probably be on the right side of the bubble. If Chris Economaki really claimed Swanson was the best driver he’d ever seen, I think I need him but I currently have Triplett and Swanson in my near-miss category. I think some of the sports car drivers from this era that I currently have out like Tim Birkin probably need to be in too. This suggests to me I am underrating the ‘30s specifically and need to make an adjustment here. I don’t really think I’m underrating any of the previous decades though.

I consider performances in every discipline of motorsport: open wheel, rally, rallycross, stock cars, touring cars, sports cars, sprints, midgets, modifieds, drag racing, world land speed record holders (very important in my opinion through the ‘60s, not so much afterward), grassroots series. You name it, I’m covering it. I do have several blind spots. I know a lot of people are down on drag racing because they think it is 100% engineering skill and the driver doesn’t play a role. I get it and I disagree. In the pre-World War II era, so many of the world’s best drivers were chasing - and setting - world land speed records, including great Grand Prix drivers like Victor Hémery, Henry Segrave, and Malcolm Campbell (Campbell was a reprehensible human being though and I will absolutely be talking shit about his fascism when I get to him) and IndyCar stars like René Thomas and Ray Keech. Several top drivers died while trying to set land speed records like Frank Lockhart and Marshall Teague, and setting speed records was inextricably linked to the greater motorsports world in this era, and I consider drag racing to be the direct descendant of that and therefore these drivers should be included also. Granted, I do acknowledge that it probably takes less skill than circuit racing and those drivers will be docked in the circuit versatility category especially when I complete the ranking.

I have several important blind spots right now. The biggest one is probably desert truck racing. While I have all the Baja 1000 and Baja 500 winners noted on my master driver list, it really seems more disconnected to the greater motorsport world than any other discipline I can think of, even drag racing. Yes, there are drivers who made successful crossovers to (Parnelli Jones) or from (Rick Mears, Jimmie Johnson, Robby Gordon) the world of desert truck racing, but it feels like it’s a footnote for all those guys except maybe Gordon (only because he significantly underachieved his talent level in both his CART and NASCAR careers). I also am not impressed by the fact that it seems like there is so little competition that drivers can still be competitive into their 50s and 60s. Rob MacCachren won six of his seven Baja 1000s after the age of 49. I suspect most people would tell me MacCachren belongs on the list, but that fact makes me cringe and makes me think that the competition must have been some of the worst in the world anywhere. On the other hand, I’ve decided drag racing is important enough to list and senior citizens winning is also common there. I probably need to give more respect to desert truck racers, especially because I know MacCachren and Ivan Stewart and guys like that won a lot of titles. Mickey Thompson should probably be on too since I know the NHRA rated him one of its top 15 drag racers and then he also became a legendary desert truck racing driver and promoter. All these series are just so poorly documented I can’t even begin to wrap my head around them, and I guess I didn’t do my due diligence here. I probably need to do better with this scene.

My other lesser issues are with grassroots drivers, sports car drivers, and rally racers. I didn’t know all that much about grassroots racing (dirt and paved late model, sprint, and modified racing) until really recently (namely, the last few months). When I joined Auto Racing Research Associates recently, I went through every single one of the drivers they had archived and counted how many wins they had per season. Almost all the drivers they cover are late model, sprint, or modified drivers with minimal participation in national racing series. I decided to award an E grade to any driver with 50 or more grassroots wins a season, E- for 35-49, C+ for 25-34, C for 20-24, and C- for 15-19, but this might need tweaking. (I have significantly lower thresholds for drivers who compete in recognized regional tours though like all of Dick Trickle’s ASA/ARTGO seasons, which obviously had a lot deeper competition; these evaluations are really intended primarily for drivers who mostly just compete at local tracks or whatever.) There are a ton of drivers most people have never heard of with 100+ wins, especially if you get down to the grassroots level. At this level, it seems whether a driver gets properly recognized comes down to how much reporting there was in a given regional scene since a lot of these drivers’ wins were never properly recorded or archived, particularly if a track where they dominated went out of business.

For the record, the winningest grassroots driver that ARRA covered was Steve Kinser with 926 wins. That isn’t really a surprise. I was a bit surprised that Brett Hearn was second with 913. I actually knew who Hearn was, but literally because I grew up in Syracuse, no other reason. When I read the racing coverage in the local newspapers, the bustling northeastern dirt modified scene and its legends like Hearn, Bob McCreadie, Alan and Danny Johnson got a hell of a lot of press coverage locally, and all those guys have hundreds and hundreds of wins, but somehow it never occurred to me that they might belong on the list. Well, mea culpa. Dick Trickle’s supposed 1200 wins definitely seems to be incorrect because ARRA only came up with 741 - that’s still massive though. The winningest grassroots driver overall however is Shane Sabraski who has 1,019 confirmed wins and I bet if you don’t post on The Third Turn Discord you’ve never heard of him (although I have mentioned him here before). When I brought up Sabraski to the ARRA folks, they’d actually never heard of him. His region is the Upper Midwest while the ARRA guys mostly tracked drivers on the East Coast. If even elite-tier racing archivists haven’t heard of the guy who might be the winningest driver ever, I’ve got to imagine there are drivers I’ve never heard of who need to be on the list, and that will always get at me. My latest discovery was Dick Gaines just a couple weeks ago. I knew he was a Knoxville Nationals winner from the era before the World of Outlaws existed, but that was literally the only win I had for him on my master driver list. Then I started doing research for my recent Steve Kinser post and discovered “shit, Gaines needs to be on here.” He has an estimated 800 wins or something and seems to be valued by sprint car historians almost as highly as Kinser is, so I bumped him up and also Jan Opperman, another Knoxville Nationals winner who Gaines passed for his 1974 win there. Finally, if you’re wondering why Stewart Friesen and Jimmy Horton (who I know are considered to be jokes by ignorant NASCAR fans, and people in my circles really mocked Friesen a lot without understanding the full scope of his career) are tentatively on the list while say, Ron Hornaday, Jr. isn’t, Horton has 466 wins and Friesen 435 at last check, not far off Richie Evans’s 518. I know, I was shocked too. Granted, I do think grassroots drivers in the current era should be valued much less than grassroots drivers prior to the ‘90s. I do consider Trickle’s decision to race in the NASCAR Cup Series in 1989 a major turning point. He made his NASCAR move at that moment (just as he was beginning to fade) because that was the first moment that just competing in the Cup Series made you more money than barnstorming and rough-riding over a litany of regional series. As a result, I am super hesitant to include any minor league drivers who started in the ‘90s or later if they were not eventually Cup Series stars. I consider Mike Stefanik to be borderline and Doug Coby to be not even close. (This is also why, for instance, I consider Butch Lindley a lock and Randy LaJoie to be totally unworthy in this context.) Even their career win counts aren’t even close to Friesen, but I guess Friesen’s 400+ wins have to be acknowledged, even if he is a pretty mediocre truck driver.

I was able to pinpoint a lot of the grassroots drivers I missed through my participation on the Third Turn Discord in recent months. I asked Third Turn creator Timmy Quievryn to make me a list of all the drivers who had 100 or more confirmed wins on his site. Even that wasn’t complete as Timmy’s list seemed to be missing all the drivers who primarily competed in weekly series-type racing (Larry Phillips, etc…) because he simply did not have the individual races entered for all those series. Nonetheless, I already had entered all the weekly series drivers with 10+ wins in a season, so I’m good there. Two drivers who get a lot of press that I’m shocked to be snubbing are Jerry Cook and Hershel McGriff. If Cook really has the 342 wins he supposedly has, then I will make him a lock. I’ve been entirely unable to confirm that number though. According to the counts I obtained from The Third Turn at last count, Cook has 84 modified wins and 11 Late Model Sportsman wins. That’s all I was able to come up with, and he barely comes out to 100 overall. Then I started doing newspaper research and found that he really did only seem to win 3, 0, and 2 races in his first three title seasons. In his winless 1972 title season, a completely forgotten driver named Bugsy Stevens won 23 times and finished third in points; Stevens also won three consecutive titles with at least 54 wins, over twice the confirmed number of wins as Cook’s 23 across all six of his title seasons. It appears from what I have read in newspaper archives that Cook won his titles primarily because he entered far more races than any of his contemporaries, and as we know, all of NASCAR’s points systems have always been participation trophies that awarded way more for even a mid-pack finish than not showing up at all. I expected to make him a lock, but this convinced me he doesn’t deserve it. The only reasons he made the NASCAR Hall of Fame in my opinion are because of his service as a NASCAR official after his retirement and his supposed “rivalry” with Richie Evans. Saying 518-time winner Evans had a “rivalry” with Cook is like saying Jimmie Johnson had a rivalry with Clint Bowyer. Yeah, they were there at the same time, but no. As for McGriff, it’s a stronger case but the problem here is that he had a couple decade-long hiatuses where he hardly raced at all. While his longevity was impressive, he spent a lot of what should have been his best seasons either not racing or hardly racing at all. While it’s kind of amazing that he won the Winston West title at the age of 58, he was not exactly competing against the likes of Ray Elder and Jack McCoy, who had far more impressive West Series records in their heyday. In McGriff’s 1986 championship season, his competition was the juggernaut that was Chad Little. Cook and McGriff are the two most overrated drivers in NASCAR history.

Sports car drivers remain a big issue for me, because it can be really hard to tell which driver is doing the work on a multi-driver sports car team. Particularly in the years where two drivers have a successful partnership, it’s not hard for an elite driver to carry a more mediocre talent, as we saw for instance with Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas’s string of Grand-Am titles. Does Rojas deserve it? I honestly couldn’t tell you yet. It’s easy with the sports car drivers who at least had major wins in open wheel or touring car or single-driver sports car series like Can-Am or Trans-Am or Porsche Supercup. If somebody was a prolific winner in any of those kind of series and in multi-driver endurance sports car racing, obviously they were great. But it gets murkier and more nebulous for drivers if they only competed in multi-driver series. Starting in the early-to-mid 2010s it’s doable, since lap time and leader data are available for all post-merger IMSA seasons and all WEC seasons, but finding out which drivers were doing the work and which were along for the ride becomes way, way harder in earlier decades. I’ve started buying all the books recapping the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The 2010-2019 book hasn’t been released yet, but I finished reading the 2000-2009 book and just started the 1990-1999 book. These will probably help me in some ways and give me the narrative detail I need to decide who to advance among the sports car bubble drivers and who to drop, but I’m not even close to finished with that process yet, and I’m sure I’ll pick up things along the way. After reading about how Mark Blundell became the then-youngest Le Mans polesitter ever in 1990 and won the pole by six seconds, that could be enough to swing him from the near miss category to the bubble. I’m sure I’ll make plenty of revisions like that as I continue to go through these books.

As for rally drivers, this is difficult because many of the top rally drivers prior to the 2000s competed in a lot of domestic/national championships and didn’t compete in the World Rally Championship much. Even the WRC championship contenders rarely ran the full schedule until the ‘90s and cherrypicked races. Deciding which drivers to include will depend largely on evaluating the strength of competition, which varied from rally to rally as certain rallies attracted much larger fields and much more of the top competitors than others, and I suspect a lot more needs to be calculated here, particularly in terms of determining which of the minor league rally drivers with long strings of titles in their national championships are worth including and which are not (and there are a lot). I do intend to make a rally drivers’ model and I started work on this maybe a year or two ago and went through all the champions and all the drivers with last names starting with A and some of the B’s, but I wasn’t even close. That will probably be one of the last parts of this project. Hopefully, if I complete a rally model to go along with my already existing open wheel, stock car, and touring car models, I’ll begin to have this nailed down.

Based on my current research, I have 755 locks, 451 bubble drivers, and 252 near miss drivers. As I’ve said, a number of drivers will likely drop once I remove the excess drivers in typically modern years, while I suspect I should award more points to the ‘30s, which will cause drivers from that era to rise. I think 1,206 is a good number of drivers to start with. This obviously excludes current drivers and rising stars unless I think they have already done enough to make the bubble (like Kyle Kirkwood for instance). I have a separate list of modern drivers who have 221 modern drivers who have not yet scored 14 points. I have not gone through all of them yet, and I probably should soon. This list is only considering races through the 2025 season, nothing this year yet. That’s why for instance Kimi Antonelli is nowhere to be seen. I know he’s dominating the current F1 season, but he only had five career points through last year. If I rank him 4th or higher globally this year (which seems likely as of now, but if he tanks like Oscar Piastri did last year, I might not), he will score 20 points and become a lock. The other guy you could argue probably should be a lock already is Tyler Reddick. He had 19 points through last year so he was clearly already safe since 1,000th place even now is 17 points. Reddick will become a lock if I rate him in the top 25 and give him an E this season. “If season grades were awarded now”, I absolutely would. But they are not and he could still tank. But the odds of him not being a lock by the time I’m done are obviously infinitesimal. Obviously guys like Christian Lundgaard, David Malukas, Chris Buescher, Chase Briscoe, Carson Hocevar, Connor Zilisch, Corey Heim, Oliver Bearman, Isack Hadjar, Liam Lawson, Taylor Barnard, Laurin Heinrich, Matt Payne, Ryan Wood, etc… will likely work their way into contention by the time I finish and many of them should make the list, but they all need to do more for sure. Alex Bowman looks like he’s not gonna make it and he’ll probably be the winningest Cup Series driver I snub, which is understandable considering he’s driving for Hendrick.

Generally, I prefer to rate for dominance over consistency and/or longevity. I think a lot of other historians overrate drivers who entered a lot of races. It seems like older historians especially think of racing careers like military service, where drivers should be somehow rewarded just for putting in a lot of time. I notice this most with bad IndyCar historians. Drivers who made a lot of starts in the Indy 500 but hardly did anything in them like Cliff Bergere, Ralph Hepburn, and Chet Miller somehow got inducted to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame just for being likable guys who were around a long time I guess. All those guys also made it on to the original list of 100 from which the Indy 500’s Greatest 33 were selected while somehow Kenny Bräck didn’t. Get real if you think any of those drivers were better than Bräck. (Similarly, Dave Marcis will be one of my easiest cuts from the bubble…)

Here are the lists as they stand right now. Please let me know if there are any historic drivers (excluding active ones) who you feel should be moved up or down or any drivers who I have overlooked entirely who should be on the list. I suspect a lot of people would say Wendell Scott, but I would argue he is easily top 1,000 in importance but not in talent; I think NASCAR made the correct decision to induct him into the Hall of Fame as a rebuke to their history of institutional racism, but they also were correct to leave him off the 75 Greatest Drivers list, since I don’t think the numbers were there even relative to the other independents of that period like James Hylton and Elmo Langley, and I don’t think Langley is close either. I am also choosing to ignore morality here. I know on one of my previous Discords, a lot of people were pushing to rank Scott over Jack Smith (the driver most infamous for being racist towards Scott) and Speedy Thompson (who intentionally caused Herb Thomas’s near-fatal crash by team orders), and I get it. But I’m a “separate the artist from the art” person and I think that applies here too. Smith and Thompson were clearly better drivers than Scott, albeit substantially worse people. I mean Smith was hardly the only racist driver of his time and plenty of top drivers have wrecked people intentionally, even if it doesn’t usually result in injuries. Jacques Villeneuve was a Jeffrey Epstein contact and lots of people online argue Ayrton Senna was a pedophile. Where do I draw the line here? I’ve decided not to, although I will still talk shit about drivers who I include if I feel they deserve it, as I already did for Thompson and Al Unser, Jr. I feel that is the correct compromise.

Lock:

Rauno Aaltonen, Laurent Aiello, Johnny Aitken, Nasser Al-Attiyah, Michele Alboreto, Filipe Albuquerque, Markku Alen, Olimpio Alencar, Jr., Jean Alesi, Bobby Allison, Davey Allison, Donnie Allison, Fernando Alonso, Uwe Alzen, Joe Amato, Marcos Ambrose, Michael Ammermuller, Chris Amon, Greg Anderson, Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti, Paolo Andreucci, Jean-Claude Andruet, Max Angelelli, Billy Arnold, Alberto Ascari, Antonio Ascari, Roland Asch, Bill Auberlen, Didier Auriol, Diego Aventin, Mikel Azcona

Brady Bacon, Craig Baird, Buck Baker, Buddy Baker, Mauro Baldi, Renato Balestrero, Earl Bamber, Joao Barbosa, Woolf Barnato, Rubens Barrichello, Michael Bartels, Johnny Beauchamp, Gary Beck, Jean Behra, Christopher Bell, Derek Bell, Stefan Bellof, Jean-Pierre Beltoise, Robert Benoist, Olivier Beretta, Gerhard Berger, Jorg Bergmeister, Timo Bernhard, Kenny Bernstein, Andrea Bertolini, Ernesto Bessone II, Gary Bettenhausen, Tony Bettenhausen, Miki Biasion, Frank Biela, Greg Biffle, Tom Bigelow, Clemente Biondetti, Sam Bird, Thed Bjork, Ryan Blaney, Jeroen Bleekemolen, Stig Blomqvist, Scott Bloomquist, Geoff Bodine, Raul Boesel, Georges Boillot, Colin Bond, Neil Bonnett, Jo Bonnier, Terry Borcheller, Pietro Bordino, Mirko Bortolotti, Valtteri Bottas, Christophe Bouchut, Sebastien Bourdais, Thierry Boutsen, John Bowe, Jack Bowsher, David Brabham, Geoff Brabham, Jack Brabham, Kenny Brack, Don Branson, Craig Breedlove, Jason Bright, Gastone Brilli-Peri, Ryan Briscoe, Peter Brock, Tony Brooks, Antron Brown, David Bruce-Brown, Martin Brundle, Gianmaria Bruni, Jimmy Bryan, Sebastien Buemi, Caca Bueno, Richard Burns, Jeff Burton, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Jenson Button, Red Byron, William Byron

Will Cagle, Alessandro Cagno, James Calado, Andrea Caldarelli, Thiago Camilo, Dan Cammish, Giuseppe Campari, Malcolm Campbell, Matt Campbell, Agustin Canapino, Rinaldo Capello, Ron Capps, Rudolf Caracciola, Bob Carey, Erik Carlsson, Pancho Carter, Gabriel Casagrande, Nick Cassidy, Helio Castroneves, Johnny Cecotto, Eddie Cheever, Gaston Chevrolet, Louis Chevrolet, Tom Chilton, Luigi Chinetti, Louis Chiron, Marcos Ciani, Jim Clark, John Cleland, Price Cobb, Emmanuel Collard, Emory Collins, Peter Collins, Erik Comas, Mike Conway, Josh Cook, Earl Cooper, Tom Coronel, Jeg Coughlin, Jr., David Coulthard, James Courtney, Tyler Courtney, Alain Cudini, Bill Cummings

Antonio Felix da Costa, Cristiano da Matta, Robert Dahlgren, Yannick Dalmas, Ryan Dalziel, Dave Darland, Bernard Darniche, Jimmy Davies, Will Davison, Elio de Angelis, Gil de Ferran, Joao Paulo de Oliveira, Jake Dennis, Patrick Depailler, Ralph DePalma, Pete DePaolo, Ernie Derr, Lucas di Grassi, Luis Ruben di Palma, Paul di Resta, Albert Divo, Larry Dixon, Scott Dixon, Mark Donohue, Marc Duez, Romain Dumas, Dominique Dupuy, Loic Duval

Dale Earnhardt, Ralph Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Carl Edwards, Sean Edwards, Yann Ehrlacher, Fredrik Ekblom, Mattias Ekstrom, Vic Elford, Bill Elliott, Chase Elliott, Dante Emiliozzi, Erica Enders, Philipp Eng, Maro Engel, Christian Engelhart, Kenneth Eriksson, Kevin Estre, Philippe Etancelin, Elfyn Evans, Mitch Evans, Richie Evans

Teo Fabi, Luigi Fagioli, Juan Manuel Fangio, Augusto Farfus, Nino Farina, Red Farmer, Marcel Fassler, Broc Feeney, Ron Fellows, Ralph Firman, Giancarlo Fisichella, John Fitch, Christian Fittipaldi, Emerson Fittipaldi, John Fitzpatrick, Fonty Flock, Tim Flock, Jon Fogarty, George Follmer, Elliott Forbes-Robinson, John Force, A.J. Foyt, Felipe Fraga, Dario Franchitti, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, Guy Frequelin, Stewart Friesen, Robin Frijns, Antonio Fuoco, George Fury

Dick Gaines, Juan Galvez, Oscar Galvez, Harry Gant, Antonio Garcia, Frank Gardner, Don Garlits, Pierre Gasly, Oliver Gavin, Olivier Gendebien, Ian Geoghegan, Fabrizio Giovanardi, Dieter Glemser, Bob Glidden, Timo Glock, Paul Goldsmith, Marcos Gomes, Paulo Gomes, Jose Froilan Gonzalez, Richard Goransson, Jeff Gordon, Robby Gordon, Jules Goux, Hector Luis Gradassi, Stuart Graham, Harry Grant, Jamie Green, Peter Gregg, Allan Grice, Bobby Grim, Harald Grohs, Marcus Gronholm, William Grover-Williams, Esteban Guerrieri, Kenelm Lee Guinness, Dan Gurney

Armin Hahne, Mika Hakkinen, Jim Hall, Pete Halsmer, Lewis Hamilton, Denny Hamlin, Sam Hanks, Junior Hanley, Kenneth Hansen, Ray Harroun, Brendon Hartley, Butch Hartman, Harry Hartz, Tim Harvey, Kevin Harvick, Masahiro Hasemi, Mike Hawthorn, Hurley Haywood, Brett Hearn, Altfrid Heger, Nick Heidfeld, Victor Hemery, Ray Hendrick, Wolf Henzler, Johnny Herbert, Hans Herrmann, Colton Herta, Jack Hewitt, Hans Heyer, Toine Hezemans, Robert Hight, Damon Hill, Graham Hill, Jake Hill, Phil Hill, Tommy Hinnershitz, Mikko Hirvonen, David Hobbs, Chris Hodgetts, Doug Hoffman, Ingo Hoffmann, Al Holbert, Bob Holbert, Bill Holland, Fred Horey, Ted Horn, Sam Hornish, Jr., Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Rob Huff, Patrick Huisman, Nico Hulkenberg, Denny Hulme, James Hunt, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Jim Hurtubise, Dick Hutcherson, Sonny Hutchins

Jacky Ickx, Russell Ingall, Jack Ingram, Tom Ingram, Innes Ireland, Ernie Irvan, Bobby Isaac

Mat Jackson, Mathieu Jaminet, Bob Jane, Jean-Pierre Jarier, Dale Jarrett, Ned Jarrett, Stefan Johansson, Gordon Johncock, Alan Johnson, Danny Johnson, Dick Johnson, Jimmie Johnson, Junior Johnson, Kurt Johnson, Warren Johnson, Alan Jones, Brad Jones, Parnelli Jones, Mats Jonsson, Andrew Jordan

Kasey Kahne, Doug Kalitta, Tony Kanaan, Juha Kankkunen, Helmut Kelleners, Rick Kelly, Tommy Kendall, Matt Kenseth, Mel Kenyon, Brad Keselowski, Leo Kinnunen, Mark Kinser, Steve Kinser, Kamui Kobayashi, Bud Koehler, Tom Kristensen, Johan Kristoffersson, Robert Kubica, Alan Kulwicki

Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte, Jacques Laffite, Jan Lammers, Pedro Lamy, Hermann Lang, Xavier Lapeyre, Nicolas Lapierre, Nicola Larini, Oscar Larrauri, Gerard Larrousse, Kyle Larson, Jari-Matti Latvala, Niki Lauda, Christian Lautenschlager, Charles Leclerc, JJ Lehto, Butch Leitzinger, Joe Leonard, David Leslie, Marc Lieb, Richard Lietz, Butch Lindley, Richard Lloyd, Frank Lockhart, Sebastien Loeb, Joey Logano, Patrick Long, Tony Longhurst, Richard Longman, Jose Maria Lopez, Fred Lorenzen, Giuliano Losacco, Andre Lotterer, John Love, Craig Lowndes, Klaus Ludwig, Lucas Luhr, Frank Luptow, Arie Luyendyk

Sascha Maassen, Umberto Maglioli, Jan Magnussen, Timo Makinen, Tommi Makinen, Frederic Makowiecki, Jean-Pierre Malcher, Nigel Mansell, Raffaele Marciello, Eusebio Marcilla, Sterling Marlin, Jean-Michel Martin, Mark Martin, Maxime Martin, Omar Martinez, Jochen Mass, Felipe Massa, Ricardo Mauricio, Fabio Sotto Mayor, Rex Mays, Cory McClenathan, Roger McCluskey, Jack McCoy, Bob McCreadie, Bill McGovern, Jack McGrath, Bruce McLaren, Scott McLaughlin, Allan McNish, Colin McRae, Rick Mears, Alain Menu, Rene Metge, Louis Meyer, Norbert Micheliz, Hannu Mikkola, Ken Miles, Tommy Milton, Ferdinando Minoia, Gerhard Mitter, Stefano Modena, Allan Moffat, Juan Pablo Montoya, Greg Moore, Gianni Morbidelli, Paul Morris, Edoardo Mortara, Mike Mosley, Stirling Moss, Chaz Mostert, Satoshi Motoyama, Roberto Mouras, Billy Moyer, Brian Muir, Shirley Muldowney, Ralph Mulford, Dirk Muller, Jorg Muller, Nico Muller, Sven Muller, Yvan Muller, Sandro Munari, Frank Mundy, Greg Murphy, Jimmy Murphy

Kazuki Nakajima, Satoru Nakajima, Alessandro Nannini, Emanuele Naspetti, Felipe Nasr, Felice Nazzaro, Matt Neal, Xandy Negrao, Norm Nelson, Thierry Neuville, Josef Newgarden, Ryan Newman, Klaus Niedzwiedz, John Nielsen, Lando Norris, Tazio Nuvolari, Denny Nyari

Johnny O’Connell, Pato O’Ward, Sebastien Ogier, Barney Oldfield, Danny Ongais, Guillermo Ortelli, Stephane Ortelli

Gary Paffett, Simon Pagenaud, Alex Palou, Marvin Panch, Olivier Panis, Mike Parkes, Benny Parsons, Jim Paschal, Riccardo Patrese, Billy Pauch, David Pearson, Cruz Pedregon, Tony Pedregon, Win Percy, Sergio Perez, Larry Perkins, Leonel Pernia, Henri Pescarolo, Stephane Peterhansel, Ronnie Peterson, Lee Petty, Richard Petty, Oscar Piastri, Alessandro Pier Guidi, Roy Pierpoint, Nelson Piquet, Emanuele Pirro, Jason Plato, Al Pombo, Will Power, Thomas Preining, Andy Priaulx, Alain Prost, Don Prudhomme, Scott Pruett, Eddie Pullen

Dieter Quester

Paul Radisich, Jean Ragnotti, Bobby Rahal, Graham Rahal, Fred Rahmer, Kimi Raikkonen, Rene Rast, Jim Rathmann, Roberto Ravaglia, Brian Redman, Jim Reed, Clay Regazzoni, Anthony Reid, Dario Resta, Carlos Reutemann, Manuel Reuter, Peter Revson, Daniel Ricciardo, Jim Richards, Steven Richards, Tim Richmond, Jochen Rindt, Fireball Roberts, George Robertson, Mike Rockenfeller, Pedro Rodriguez, Walter Rohrl, Keke Rosberg, Nico Rosberg, Mauri Rose, Bernd Rosemeyer, Felix Rosenqvist, Louis Rosier, Alexander Rossi, Matias Rossi, Andy Rouse, Kalle Rovanpera, Oliver Rowland, Lloyd Ruby, Ricky Rudd, George Russell, Johnny Rutherford, Troy Ruttman, Rickard Rydell

Shane Sabraski, Carlos Sainz, Carlos Sainz, Jr., Mika Salo, Timo Salonen, Roy Salvadori, Stephane Sarrazin, Ludovico Scarfiotti, Gary Scelzi, Martin Schanche, Donny Schatz, Jody Scheckter, Timo Scheider, Bill Schindler, Jean-Louis Schlesser, Bernd Schneider, Frankie Schneider, Gus Schrader, Ken Schrader, Michael Schumacher, Ralf Schumacher, Tony Schumacher, Jack Sears, Logan Seavey, Henry Segrave, Alain Semoulin, Ayrton Senna, Bob Senneker, Chico Serra, Daniel Serra, Glenn Seton, Scott Sharp, Wilbur Shaw, Gordon Shedden, Carroll Shelby, Lee Shepherd, Morgan Shepherd, Matt Sheppard, Jo Siffert, Juan Manuel Silva, Mark Skaife, Tom Sneva, Dany Snobeck, Jimmy Snyder, Petter Solberg, Raymond Sommer, Steve Soper, Bruno Spengler, Gordon Spice, Jackie Stewart, Tony Stewart, Frank Stippler, Rolf Stommelen, Ramo Stott, Volker Strycek, Hans Stuck, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Danny Sullivan, John Surtees, Ashley Sutton, Toshio Suzuki, Kody Swanson, Bob Sweikert, Sammy Swindell, Ferenc Szisz

Noritake Takahara, Patrick Tambay, Ott Tanak, Garth Tander, Nick Tandy, Gabriele Tarquini, Al Tasnady, Thierry Tassin, Jordan Taylor, Ricky Taylor, Marshall Teague, Larry ten Voorde, Teddy Tetzlaff, Leon Thery, Kurt Thiim, Nicki Thiim, Herb Thomas, Rene Thomas, Dick Thompson, James Thompson, Speedy Thompson, Johnny Thomson, Marcel Tiemann, Martin Tomczyk, Steve Torrence, Paul Tracy, Tom Trana, Juan Maria Traverso, Benoit Treluyer, Dick Trickle, Maurice Trintignant, Sleepy Tripp, Martin Truex, Jr., Jarno Trulli, Sho Tsuboi, Colin Turkington, Curtis Turner, Darren Turner

Bernard Unett, Al Unser, Bobby Unser, Al Unser, Jr.

Eric van de Poele, Kelvin van der Linde, Shane van Gisbergen, Dries Vanthoor, Laurens Vanthoor, Achille Varzi, Ari Vatanen, Jean-Eric Vergne, Jean-Karl Vernay, Max Verstappen, Sebastian Vettel, Toni Vilander, Gilles Villeneuve, Jacques Villeneuve, Luigi Villoresi, Rich Vogler, Wolfgang von Trips, Bill Vukovich

Louis Wagner, Juichi Wakisaka, Bjorn Waldegard, Tom Walkinshaw, Andy Wallace, Rusty Wallace, Phil Walters, Darrell Waltrip, Rodger Ward, Derek Warwick, Cameron Waters, John Watson, Joe Weatherly, James Weaver, Mark Webber, Pascal Wehrlein, Bob Welborn, Karl Wendlinger, Bob Wente, Marco Werner, Mariano Werner, Richard Westbrook, Dan Wheldon, Jamie Whincup, Don White, Rex White, John Whitmore, Howdy Wilcox, Justin Wilson, Jean-Pierre Wimille, Joachim Winkelhock, Manfred Winkelhock, Markus Winkelhock, Mark Winterbottom, Marco Wittmann, Doug Wolfgang, Bob Wollek, Del Worsham, Gary Wright

Jean Xhenceval

Naoki Yamamoto, Cale Yarborough, LeeRoy Yarbrough

Peter Zakowski, Alex Zanardi, Richard Zonta

Bubble:

Atila Abreu, Rico Abreu, Christian Abt, Jonny Adam, Jack Aitken, Alex Albon, Darrell Alderman, A.J. Allmendinger, George Amick, Gunnar Andersson, Ove Andersson, Emil Andres, John Andretti, Tommy Archer, Sam Ard, Facundo Ardusso, Art Arfons, Rene Arnoux, Richard Attwood, Lucas Auer, Oscar Raul Aventin, Soheil Ayari

Julian Bailey, Andreas Bakkerud, Jack Baldwin, Claude Ballot-Lena, Alessandro Balzan, Lorenzo Bandini, Warwick Banks, Jason Bargwanna, Edgar Barth, Kevin Bartlett, Marc Basseng, Whit Bazemore, Raymond Beadle, Jack Beckman, Norm Beechey, Bernard Beguin, Lucien Bianchi, Prince Bira, Dale Blaney, Dave Blaney, Tom Blomqvist, Eugen Bohringer, Andre Boillot, Bob Bondurant, Juan Manuel Bordeu, Clint Bowyer, Darin Brassfield, Colin Braun, Kenny Brightbill, Antonio Brivio, Dick Brooks, Perk Brown, Warwick Brown, Will Brown, Ivor Bueb, John Buffum, Maximilian Buhk, Doc Bundy, Harold Bunting, Bob Burman, Steve Butler

Dane Cameron, Wally Campbell, Jamie Campbell-Walter, Ivan Capelli, Patrick Carpentier, Duane Carter, Oscar Castellano, Eugenio Castellotti, Nicky Catsburg, Leo Cella, Dario Cerrato, Francois Cevert, Ross Chastain, Ross Cheever, Joie Chitwood, Michael Christensen, Ted Christopher, Bryan Clauson, John Cobb, Roberto Colciago, Rob Collard, Stefano Comini, Jerry Coons, Jr., Eduardo Copello, Fabian Coulthard, Johnny Coy, Chris Craft, Gianfranco Cunico, Jorge Cupeiro

Wally Dallenbach, Wally Dallenbach, Jr., Jonathan Davenport, Jean-Philippe Dayraut, Andrea de Adamich, Jorge de Bagration, Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, Anton de Pasquale, Giniel de Villiers, Nyck de Vries, Jorge Omar del Rio, Francois Delecour, Pipo Derani, Don Devendorf, Larry Dickson, Darel Dieringer, Louis Disbrow, Jon Dooley, Rene Dreyfus, Tony Dron, Robert Droogmans, Len Duncan, Arthur Duray

Mike Eddy, Mike Edwards, Per Eklund, Ray Elder, Casper Elgaard, Tommie Elliott, Tomas Enge, Harald Ertl, Nasif Estefano

Juan Manuel Fangio II, Damien Faulkner, Jacques Feret, Adrian Fernandez, Esteban Fernandino II, Martino Finotto, Ed Flemke, Bob Flock, Pete Folse, George Fonder, Norberto Fontana, Brittany Force, Drew Fornoro, Nokie Fornoro, Giorgio Francia

Damion Gardner, Mario Gayraud, Peter Gethin, Felipe Giaffone, Zeca Giaffone, Kuba Giermaziak, Richie Ginther, Franco Girolami, Nestor Girolami, Scott Goodyear, Klaus Graf, Justin Grant, David Gravel, Henri Greder, Masten Gregory, Romain Grosjean, Bob Grossman, Mauricio Gugelmin, Jean Guichet, Alex Gurney, Ray Guss, Jr., Ayhancan Guven

Christopher Haase, Matt Hagan, Hubert Hahne, Pete Hamilton, Joey Hand, Jerry Hansen, Timmy Hansen, Walt Hansgen, Gene Hartley, Sig Haugdahl, Eddie Hearne, Eric Helary, Walter Hernandez, Eddie Hill, Tracy Hines, Ryo Hirakawa, Matt Hirschman, Dutch Hoag, Irv Hoerr, Bill Holmes, Jimmy Horton, Pappy Hough, Will Hoy, James Hylton

Eddie Irvine

Jean-Pierre Jabouille, Neel Jani, Adalberto Jardim, Frank Jelinski, Bill Jenkins, Bruce Jennings, Mikkel Jensen, Reinhold Joest, Amos Johnson, Jack Johnson, Shrwood Johnston, Davy Jones, Levi Jones, Bruno Junqueira

Brent Kaeding, Howard Kaeding, Pierre Kaffer, Reds Kagle, Scott Kalitta, Iggy Katona, Ray Keech, Ralf Kelleners, Al Keller, Todd Kelly, Sheldon Kinser, Kyle Kirkwood, Mike Klapak, Takashi Kogure, Brodie Kostecki, Heikki Kovalainen, Peter Kox, Michael Krumm

Andre Lagache, Dick LaHaie, Andy Lally, Simo Lampinen, Shawn Langdon, Jud Larson, Pierre Lartigue, Danny Lasoski, Buddy Lazier, Lou Lazzaro, Christian Ledesma, Geoff Lees, Jason Leffler, Piero Liatti, Robin Liddell, Jason Line, Herbert Linge, Mike Little, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Alberto Logulo, Osvaldo Lopez, Tiny Lund, Richard Lyons

Willy Mairesse, Darren Manning, Olaf Manthey, Johnny Mantz, Dave Marcis, Attilio Marinoni, Henry Martin, Markko Martin, Pierluigi Martini, Hiroshi Masuoka, Emilio Materassi, Frank Matich, Tsugio Matsuda, Keiji Matsumoto, Banjo Matthews, Cmaeron McConville, Ed McCulloch, Jim McElreath, Mike McGreevy, Jamie McMurray, Graham McRae, Jimmy McRae, Shekhar Mehta, Vitor Meira, Jaime Melo, Christian Menzel, Harald Menzel, Arturo Merzario, Christopher Mies, Andreas Mikkelsen, Rod Millen, Steve Millen, Butch Miller, Tommy Milner, Nicolas Minassian, Ritomo Miyata, Guy Moll, Franck Montagny, Tiago Monteiro, Andrea Montermini, Roberto Moreno, Adam Morgan, Bob Morris, John Morton, Michele Mouton, Stefan Mucke, Herbert Muller, Luigi Musso, Billy Myers

Osamu Nakako, Duke Nalon, Mike Nazaruk, Jean-Pierre Nicolas, Nicklas Nielsen, Jan Nilsson, Tomoki Nojiri, Michel Nykjaer

Pat O’Connor, Jorg Obermoser, Esteban Ocon, Jackie Oliver, Anders Olofsson, Dennis Olsen, Jan Opperman, Mads Ostberg, Mark Oswald, Cotton Owens, Jimmy Owens

Steve Paine, Carlos Pairetti, Gilles Panizzi, Max Papis, Alvaro Parente, Reg Parnell, Johnnie Parsons, John Paul, Jr., Alain Peltier, Roger Penske, Rod Perry, Kelly Petillo, Kyle Petty, Larry Phillips, Terry Phillips, Bobby Pierce, Patrick Pilet, Nelson Piquet, Jr., Didier Pironi, Randy Pobst, Gabriel Ponce de Leon, Ralph Pratt, Bob Pressley, Austin Prock, Jesus Puras

Ronnie Quintarelli

Dick Rathmann, Jorge Recalde, Tyler Reddick, David Reynolds, John Rhodes, Willy T. Ribbs, George Rice, Josh Richards, Jerry Richert, Eddie Rickenbacker, Davide Rigon, Johnny Roberts, Chip Robinson, Keith Rocco, Alessio Rovera, Romain Rusinov, Paul Russo, Tommy Rustad, Joe Ruttman

Bruno Saby, Eddie Sachs, Joey Saldana, Bob Sall, Julian Santero, Marshall Sargent, Roscoe Sarles, Takuma Sato, Emilio Satriano, Dutch Schaefer, Tomas Scheckter, Tim Schenken, Walter Schock, Dorsey Schroeder, Vern Schuppan, Peter Seikel, Masanori Sekiya, Hap Sharp, Joe Shear, Brandon Sheppard, Buddy Shuman, Ron Shuman, Jimmy Sills, Carl-Magnus Skogh, Jack Smith, Patrick Snijers, Les Snow, Deb Snyder, Dani Sordo, Marco Sorensen, Marc Sourd, Ronnie Sox, Emiliano Spataro, Bill Spear, Nelson Stacy, Dave Steele, Mike Stefanik, Reinhardt Stenzel, Bugsy Stevens, Chuck Stevenson, Luca Stolz, Marc Surer, Len Sutton, Ed Swart, Brad Sweet, Frank Sytner

Yuji Tachikawa, Tora Takagi, Kunimitsu Takahashi, Piero Taruffi, Bob Tattersall, Shorty Templeman, Jean-Luc Therier, Didier Theys, Jerry Titus, Henri Toivonen, Pauli Toivonen, Renato Travaglia, Carlo Felice Trossi, Maynard Troyer, Bob Tullius, Brian Tyler

Louis Unser

Nino Vaccarella, Sheldon van der Linde, Sarel van der Merwe, Renger van der Zande, Gijs van Lennep, Jorg van Ommen, Stoffel Vandoorne, Jimmy Vasser, Rafael Verna, Frederic Vervisch, Winfried Vogt, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Bill Vukovich II

Hans-Joachim Walter, Kenny Weld, Peter Whitehead, Robert Wickens, Dink Widenhouse, Charlie Wiggins, Jimmy Wilburn, Mat Williamson, Tony Willman, Max Wilson, Bill Wimble, Chris Windom, Billy Winn, Franz Wittmann, Glen Wood, Vince Woodman, Alexander Wurz

Jim Yates, J.J. Yeley

Antonio Zanini, Sobieslaw Zasada

Near Miss:

Andrea Aghini, Christijan Albers, Jeff Allam, Mariano Altuna, Jurgen Alzen, Gil Andersen, Gunnar Andersson, Marco Andretti, Bobby Archer, Nicolas Armindo, Antonio Juan Aventin, Manuel Ayulo

Dieter Basche, Rollie Beale, Anthony Beltoise, Julius Beutler, Thomas Biagi, Jules Bianchi, Pete Bicknell, Henry Birkin, Bill Blair, Mike Bliss, Mark Blundell, Walt Bohren, Tony Bonadies, Baconin Borzacchini, Ron Bouchard, Jean-Christophe Boullion, Joe Boyer, Vittorio Brambilla, Bob Burdick, Kelvin Burt, Ward Burton, Rory Butcher

Enzo Calderari, Julio Campos, Danny Caruthers, Jimmy Caruthres, Eduardo Alfredo Casa, Ernesto Ceirano, Gerald Chamberlain, Fernand Charron, Jean Chassagne, Francois Chatroit, Daniel Cingolani, Paul Coltelloni, Bernard Consten, Pete Corey, lf Costanzo, Briggs Cunningham, Peter Cunningham

Jerome d’Ambrosio, Jeremy Dale, Bobby Davis, Jr., Lex Davison, Juan Bautista de Benedictis, Jules-Albert de Dion, Pedro de la Rosa, Fred DeSarro, Jorge Descotte, Julio Devoto, Pierre Dieudonne, David Donohue, Edgar Doren, Phil Dowsett, Bobby Dragon, Jay Drake, John Duff

Bob Earl, Bobby East, Tony Edmondson, Bruno Eichmann, Tommy Ellis, Franz Engstler, George Eyston

Carlo Facetti, Enzo Ferrari, Alain Ferte, Clint Field, Anton Fischhaber, Ron Flockhart, Myron Fohr, Jean-Pierre Fontenay, Henri Fournier, Fred Frame, Brad Frisselle, Freddie Fryar, Ernst Furtmayr

Marc Gene, Paul Gentilozzi, Leo Geoghegan, Bruno Giacomelli, Affonso Giaffone, Jr., Jean-Marc Gounon, Danny Graves, Robb Gravett, Andy Green, Roberto Guerrero, Pablo Gulle, Chuck Gurney

Mike Hailwood, Ted Hairfield, Claude Haldi, Roy Hall, Bobby Hamilton, John Handley, Mel Hansen, Runt Harris, John Harvey, Friday Hassler, Paul Hawkins, George Heath, Rick Henderson, Bryan Herta, Mike Hezemans, James Hinchcliffe, Greg Hodnett, Rickey Hood, Paddy Hopkirk, Ron Hornaday, Jr., Dave Humphrey

Paul Jamin, Jean-Pierre Jausssaud, Camille Jenatzy, Jason Johnson, Alton Jones

Bud Kaeding, Masami Kageyama, Harry Kallstrom, Willi Kauhsen, Dave Kelly, George Kent, Jr., Arno Klasen, Franz Konrad, Horst Kwech

Darrell Lanigan, Walter Lechner, Rene Leonard, John Lepp, Emile Levassor, Dave Lewis, Hakan Lindberg, Dick Linder

Guillermo Maldonado, Roger Mandeville, Ken Marriott, Bobby Marshman, Oliver Mathai, Emil Mayade, Jeremy Mayfield, Bernd Maylander, Hershel McGriff, Jackie McLaughlin, Kris Meeke, Charlie Miller, Milt Minter, John Moore-Brabazon, Donnie Moran, Emanuel Moriatis, Hermann Paul Muller

James Nash, Jurgen Neuhaus, Chuck Nicholson, Kris Nissen, Peter Nocker

Kieth O’Dor, Markus Oestreich, Hideki Okada, Pepe Oriola, Kazuya Oshima, L.D. Ottinger

Carlos Pace, Jonathan Palmer, John Paul, Sr., Nick Percat, Christian Pescatori, Philipp Peter, Teddy Pilette, Andy Pilgrim, Carlo Maria Pintacuda, Raffaele Pinto, Tom Pistone, Olivier Pla, Helmut Polensky, Lennie Pond, Sam Posey, Alexandre Premat, Spencer Pumpelly

Paul Radford, Giovanni Battista Raggio, Marcel Renault, Buddy Rice, Larry Rice, Ulli Richter, George Robson, Jean Rolland, Tony Rolt, Andre Rossignol, Henri Rougier, Erick Rudolph, Reggie Ruggiero

Boris Said, Harry Schell, Manfred Schurti, Bill Scott, Freddy Semoulin, Bruno Senna, Oriol Servia, Doc Shepherd, Kenjiro Shinozuka, Ken Shoemaker, Mike Skinner, Stevie Smith, Bengt Soderstrom, Tommy Sopwith, Lake Speed, Gilbert Staepelaere, Max Stewart, Bib Stillwell, Paul-Ernest Strahle, Gary Stuhler, Tim Sugden, Aguri Suzuki, Bob Swanson

Fabrizio Tabaton, Alex Tagliani, Kenji Takahashi, Nobuteru Taniguchi, Wayne Taylor, Harry Tincknell, Toby Tobias, Rene Trautmann, Kenny Tremont, Jr., Jean Trevoux, Ernie Triplett

Alfred Velghe, Jos Verstappen, Jean Vinatier, Jurgen von Gartzen, Adartico Vudafieri

Achim Warmbold, Rocky Warner, Volker Weidler, Greg Weld, Heribert Werginz, Dirk Werner, Ken Wharton, Bill Whittington, Bill Wuesthoff

Don Yenko

Rene Zanatta, Patrick Zaniroli

I think what ultimately prompted me to slow down happened last Friday. I visited mom at Van Duyn as usual and brought her a stuffed bear from home. She’s been upset that all the Van Duyn-branded teddy bears she kept winning at bingo were either being lost or stolen, so I decided to bring one of ours. It’s a lot larger and softer than the Van Duyn bears, it’s made a nice pillow for her, and it’s large enough that I think it won’t get lost. I had to leave early to pick up the $50 from her Social Security that she is allowed to keep and deposit it in her bank account to cover her life insurance policies that are being automatically deducted. Then, I walked to the bus stop at Salina St. and Willow St. to wait for the bus there, but it didn’t show up within ten minutes of the scheduled arrival time. The Taste of Syracuse festival was going on, but it was clear that it was interfering with the traffic patterns. I went to the first one 30 years ago, but I didn’t enjoy it as befitting a dude with an eating disorder. There were two cover bands on different stages as I walked past. One was covering hair metal songs (Poison, Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses) and the other went from Miley Cyrus to Eddie Money (I’m almost surprised anyone who would cover Cyrus even knows who Money is).

So, after the first bus didn’t show up, I walked to the other bus stop I frequently used to return home without being informed that there was a detour. That was the last bus back home to North Syracuse for the day, so I then had to walk down to the downtown transit hub to get back. I had already accidentally walked into the bottom of a stairwell jutting out from a building on James St. and hurt my head briefly. It was also really hot. I guess it was only 84°F or something, but usually that’s too hot for me. So when I got to the transit hub, I decided to lie down on the concrete sidewalk because it was the only place that was cool. I was not lying on the road, just a pedestrian walkway and there were no buses coming at that moment. I didn’t fall asleep, but I was admittedly startled when a couple people rolled in there on their bikes (or maybe motorcycles; I don’t remember) and came less than a foot from running into me. I WAS lying right in front of a ramp to walk onto the sidewalk, but I had never seen anyone cycling on the sidewalks ever from what I remember and I’d used that transit hub hundreds of times. So, I sat up for a moment before lying back down again, after which one of the cyclists mocked me and said I was “fucking special”.

♪ But I’m a creep ♪

After that, I got up and walked away then the cyclists just left. Well, I now have one of those stories about “roughing it” to tell my imaginary children! At least I wasn’t hurt in the long run, although six miles of walking did trigger a bad IBS attack the next day and I felt barely functional. Imagine being an absent-minded professor without the professor job. I know a lot of people don’t even consider 84°F very hot. One of the things that bothered me was when a lot of local weatherpeople always seemed to argue on air that higher temperatures always meant nicer weather, even using “hotter” and “better” ass synonyms, particularly in an age of climate change. The temperature might be approaching the boiling point of water, but isn’t it SO LOVELY out? Maybe it’s an autistic/sensory thing but I never liked heat or sun the way so many others seem to. Give me 65-70°F, overcast, and a light breeze all day. Syracuse used to have a lot more days like that in the ‘90s than it does now, which is another minor reason why I want to leave.

Anyway, that whole thing served as a wake-up call for me to slow down and take it easy for a bit, which is probably the main reason I turned off Substack charges. I still plan on making some posts, and I guess since I already promised the Satoru/Kazuki Nakajima one, that will still be next. (I also will need to retract my factual error in the Rick Mears post last week when I wrote that he was the first driver to win an IndyCar race with a Chevy engine at Pocono in 1987; whoops, not true - it was Mario Andretti earlier that year; weirdly, it wasn’t either Louis or Gaston Chevrolet, so I’m going to have to edit that slightly and pick a different best race for him. I’ll probably change his best race to the 1991 Indy 500.)

One thing I want to do during the pause is finally finish going through all the remaining “near miss” drivers on my 1,000 greatest drivers list spreadsheet and scoring their careers. There are 101 left. I currently have 749 locks (although I’m still willing to be talked out of a few of them) and 435 bubble drivers right now, so once I finish this, I should know what the bottom of the bubble looks like and how many cumulative “career points” it will take to make the list. Granted, I already have a lot of these categories over-filled, and I do not want to list more than 200 drivers in a given year with the top five, 20 Es, 25 E-s, 50 C+s, 50 Cs, and 50 C-s, so I’m going to have to remove the excess drivers and fill in some of the other slots like a jigsaw puzzle eventually, but I don’t think I’m going to get to that part of it until at least I’ve finally finished my universal driver list, which I would like to try to complete by the end of the year. Once I’ve gone through all my near-miss drivers (likely ensuring all but maybe a handful or two historic drivers who will make the list besides current drivers are already in consideration), I’ll likely do a post for it.

Like probably a lot of NASCAR fans of my generation, Bob Jenkins, Ned Jarrett, and Benny Parsons were my favorite NASCAR booth of all time, so it sucks that with Jarrett’s death all three of them have now died, but at least he got to live a long life and didn’t die prematurely.

I enjoyed both of the NASCAR and IndyCar races this weekend with reservations. Like a lot of Michigan races (even before the Next Gen car) there seemed to be a lot of passing for the lead compared to other races but a lot of aero push through the rest of the field, which was a bit frustrating. I don’t tend to like crashfests much either, but it certainly provided opportunities for drivers who don’t run up front as much like Erik Jones to have strong runs. I was never as high on Jones as most of the rest of the analytics community, but I was still rooting for him hard while knowing he would ultimately have nothing for Denny Hamlin in the end. I was kind of hoping that Hamlin’s car would be found illegal so we could have had a cool reversal of the obnoxious finish to Martinsville in 2020. Don’t pass him, Jones! But alas, it was not to be.

As usual, everybody was pissed at Carson Hocevar for causing the biggest wreck of the race. I’m not gonna say that wasn’t justified, because he does do things like that a lot in contrast to his aw-shucks image. But the fact that the leader of Hocevar’s opposition ended up being Austin Dillon of all people led me to end up on Hocevar’s side in the end. Not only was Dillon always way more obnoxiously aggressive than Hocevar was and he frequently caused intentional wrecks while Hocevar’s wrecks were usually driving over his head, at least Hocevar has talent, you know? It’s like if Jimmy Spencer started ranting about Ernie Irvan being too aggressive. Pot, kettle, etc… I do think Mike Joy’s frequent comparisons of Hocevar to Dale Earnhardt were wildly over the top, but Hocevar is pretty much Irvan exactly at this point.

It was a bit of a letdown that Hamlin ended up winning by 11 seconds. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, Chase Elliott, and Ty Gibbs hadn’t all wrecked out, but it was certainly fair and extremely impressive that he drove from last to first. I would probably take Hamlin’s season over Reddick’s at this point, but it’s close. I fully expect at this point that Reddick will become the first driver to lead the full-season points standings for the entire season but Hamlin will win the title.

I really thought the IndyCar Gateway race was going to (finally) be David Malukas’s day. Everything seemed to be pointing in that direction after he finished third at Phoenix and second at Indy. Since he’s been faster pretty much everywhere than he ever has been before (which is totally understandable now that he’s in a Penske car), he really seemed to enter Gateway as the favorite, considering he got well-fought podiums his first two years for Dale Coyne (becoming the only driver in Coyne’s 40-year history to earn multiple oval podiums still to this day), then was battling Will Power for what would have eventually become the lead in 2024 before Power wrecked him. When you consider that usual Gateway dominator Josef Newgarden was injured in the Indy 500 and looked very slow at Detroit, I was kind of counting Newgarden out. While he was fast enough to win hurt in his storybook Iowa win in 2016, I was just not convinced he was good enough to overcome his injuries anymore considering how hard he has fallen off since 2022, Indy 500 wins aside.

Okay, I wuz wrong. That whole race defied expectations, which I guess means it was good. While Newgarden winning again was kind of a buzzkill, it’s still impressive that he won hurt yet again at a time when many (and I don’t think it was just me) were ready to write him off. I guess he’s just as good on short ovals as he ever was even though he looks like a kind of bad road/street course driver these days. I really thought Penske was going to drop Newgarden pretty soon, no joke. He has dumped SO MANY drivers in recent years seemingly RIGHT as all those drivers’ primes were ending (Juan Pablo Montoya, Hélio Castroneves, Simon Pagenaud, Will Power - okay, maybe Pagenaud was a year too late) and I thought the same might happen here, but I guess Newgarden ensured his vitality again. He now kind of reminds me of Rick Mears in that he was equally fast everywhere for years at the start of his career and then he lost his road course mojo at a certain point, possibly due to an injury. Obviously, we know Mears lost his road course speed after his Sanair crash in 1984 and I’m starting to wonder if Newgarden’s Iowa crash in 2022 is what triggered his decline in road course speed. It could have just been Álex Palou’s rise though. Now I guess the question is what’s going on with Scott McLaughlin? While Newgarden is still faster than Malukas on short ovals (even though I thought Malukas was overtake him), Malukas still seems faster than McLaughlin everywhere, and how the hell did that happen?

The other way that race defied expectations was Marcus Ericsson’s inexplicably dominant run. I had never rated Ericsson highly even despite his four IndyCar wins including an Indy 500 win. I mean I never thought he sucked or anything - I always viewed him as a slightly above average but pretty generic driver, like I suspect Santino Ferrucci would be in a top car if he ever got one, which he won’t. But every single one of his wins was a deus ex machina win for Ganassi when they were dominating with Palou, so while I could’ve seen him pulling off another fluke win someday, I would’ve probably bet money that he would never lead the most laps in a race in his career. And from 12th, no less? Where did that come from? I mean I know rumors have been hot and heavy that Dennis Hauger would replace Ericsson at Andretti before Hauger’s IndyCar career even started, and I was really kind of shocked Ericsson wasn’t replaced after last year since I know Andretti is paying him much more than Ganassi was (the reason he left Ganassi was because he wanted to cash in and get a big payday after his Indy 500 win, but that obviously also made him a much stronger candidate to be replaced, especially after such a bad season last year). I guess he’s now working harder than he ever has before (his pole earlier this season also shocked me) to try to remain in the series. And with that drive, he finally convinced me he deserved to stay around as more than just an Indy 500 one-off guy. I honestly thought Andretti replacing Romain Grosjean with Ericsson was a downgrade, but I guess I was wrong. He’s still the worst Indy 500 winner since at least Pat Flaherty in 1956 though.

There were a few other surprises worth noting as well. Palou finally had bad luck for once! I’ve been getting annoyed by how many races both Scott Dixon and Palou have backed into over the years on pit strategy because it seems like Ganassi is the only IndyCar team that knows how to strategize at all. It looked like it was going to happen again at Gateway when they were leading when the caution for rain came out until they both ran out of fuel under the caution. Palou surprised me as I’d never expected him to have that much speed on a short oval ever. The two laps he lost for running out of fuel certainly won’t significantly affect him though. He probably wasn’t going to win anyway and it’s hard to imagine that Kyle Kirkwood, Malukas, and Christian Lundgaard could run him down. If Pato O’Ward and Scott McLaughlin were sitting in those points positions maybe, but both of them seemed weirdly slow as well as Lundgaard seems on the verge of overtaking O’Ward much like Malukas is on the verge of overtaking McLaughlin (if you think he hasn’t already).

I didn’t watch Monaco and I don’t think I really missed anything but I’ll get to it eventually. What I have been watching lately is Murphy Brown. I know that is possibly the least cool show I could be watching since it may be the most boomer show ever to exist in this anti-boomer epoch. However, I’ve always been into sitcoms from the ‘70s through the ‘90s and I liked most of the other shows from that feminist wave: Roseanne (while acknowledging she’s always been a loathsome human being and I have no defense for her as a person), The Golden Girls, Grace Under Fire, etc… Except Designing Women. I think that sucks. Shrill soapboxing without any humor. All those other shows are funny.

As for Murphy Brown, I already watched and liked the first 2.5 seasons or so, but it was always hard to find because all the Motown songs that opened each episode made it too expensive to ever formally release. Much like Malcolm in the Middle, I’d wanted to watch it for a while but I just couldn’t find most of it. Well, I did just find it on the Internet Archive and I’ve been enjoying it as a weird relic of a time when people still took the news media seriously - even most conservatives in the pre-Rush Limbaugh/FOX News era did. I’m old enough to remember this. In the ‘90s, I really enjoyed TV news and I felt way more informed watching Peter Jennings back then than I ever did in my adulthood. But after the stolen 2000 election, 9/11, the media lying us into Iraq, and Jennings’s death in quick succession, I’ve been unable to find anyone in the media to trust of any political persuasion really, either online or offline. I ended up mostly stopping following the news and it’s telling that the Current Events category on LearnedLeague is the only category where I’ve missed every single question. I have a lot of nostalgia for the mass media monoculture, which I probably shouldn’t, but it still seemed more communal and less atomizing than the siloed-off Algorithmic Culture that replaced it. If I finish Murphy Brown months from now, I’ll probably review it just like I did Malcolm. (And obviously, every time I watch anything or listen to a podcast, I’m always simultaneously evaluating drivers’ cases for the list as well.)

This has been a really bad irritable bowel syndrome week for me so I’ve been struggling with motivation overall, although I did complete an assignment for my counselor that I’ve been working on about a month. He asked me for a timeline of the traumatic events of my life and I know he was kind of flabbergasted that I ended up writing for 29 pages. Granted, I included a lot of incidents that were not traumatic for context as I wanted to cover all the major events of my life whether they were traumatic or not. I have no idea whether I’m going to publish any of that here, but I’m thinking probably not. I did really hit it off with a guy at the Unique PeerSpectives men’s group so that was good.

I don’t think I’m ever going to try to become a voracious trivia fiend at this level, but I read a good article for the Baffler written by Jeopardy!/Survivor contestant Drew Basile called “The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer” that I recommend. At least I know enough to know what he is referencing in that title.

Next column will be either Satoru and/or Kazuki Nakajima, but I don’t think I’m going to post a full schedule until I feel like I’m on schedule again. That should be easier now that I finished writing my life history and since I also finished reading the last book in Quentin Spurring and John Brooks’s series on the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. From what I can tell, they haven’t released one for the 2010-2019 decade yet, but I did just finish the 2000-2009 book and I just bought the 1990-1999 book a few days ago on eBay, but it probably won’t arrive until next week, so the next few times I visit Mom I’m probably going to try to largely write some of my upcoming columns on the bus. I’m not sure how much the Brooks book helped me. I was hoping maybe it would provide lap times or lap leaders or even how many laps each driver was in each car, but there’s none of that, and I would have taken that over the numerous glossy pictures of cars at speed, although many of the pictures are certainly cool. The book does contain running positions for every hour at Le Mans, so I could construct a crude average running position I guess, but it wouldn’t help me as much for my main task, which is deermining which of the drivers on multi-driver sports car teams are really doing the work and which are just along for the ride. The one thing I will say is that I did become convinced that Tomáš Enge should probably be on the list despite his mediocre F1 and IRL careers after I saw he was the only driver in that decade to win a class pole five years in a row, so that’s one thing I guess…

STEVE KINSER………………………..USA

Born: June 2, 1954

Best year: 1987
Best drive: 1994 IROC Race #3 at Talladega Superspeedway

Kinser was inextricably linked with the World of Outlaws, where his 20 championships and 690 feature wins both set records for any driver in any series. According to Auto Racing Research Associates, Kinser has 926 career wins, the second-most verified wins behind only Shane Sabraski’s 1,018, but Kinser had a lot better competition. He hailed from a multigeneral racing family as his father Bob worked as a bricklayer four days a week and raced on the weekends, his distant cousin Sheldon won three USAC Sprint Car titles, and his third cousin Karl dominated as a car owner with Dick Gaines until he was critically injured in an effectively career-ending crash in Champaign, Illinois in 1977. Although many were skeptical, Karl hired Steve to replace Gaines even though he had only two years of racing experience and was previously better known as an Indiana wrestling champion.

Steve initially followed Bob into the bricklayer trade, believing he’d be unlikely to make a living from racing. However, when Ted Johnson formed the World of Outlaws in 1978, outlaw sprint racing, a previously disrespected form consisting of unpolished drivers competing at ramshackle tracks for minimal money or media attention, would eventually overtake the then-more prestigious USAC Sprints in popularity; it helped that the USAC/CART split diminished USAC’s prestige. From 1978-1994, Kinser won every championship except for 1981 and 1982 when his closest rival Sammy Swindell won, and 1989 when all the top WoO drivers instead raced in the United Sprint Association.

Kinser peaked in 1987 with an astonishing 51 wins and earned even more respect when he outdueled Dale Earnhardt to win a 1994 IROC race at Talladega the day before the Cup Series race in a field that also included Al Unser, Jr. at his peak. That led to an opportunity to drive NHRA champion Kenny Bernstein’s Cup Series entry in 1995, but he had too much of a learning curve and was fired after seven races. He returned to the WoO shortly thereafter while his cousin Mark replaced him at Karl’s team. Although Mark actually outperformed Steve at first, Steve ultimately showed who was boss with four consecutive titles from 2002-2005. Later on, Steve replaced himself with his son Kraig and instead drove for three-time NASCAR champion Tony Stewart.

Although Kinser spent most of his time in WoO, he won numerous other sprint car races in other tours as well, including 14 United Sprint Association races and back-to-back titles in 1988 and 1989, 35 All Star Circuit of Champions races, three USAC Silver Crown races, four USAC Midget races, and the 1986 Australian Speedcar Grand Prix, a prestigious midget race. What stands out most about Kinser beyond carrying outlaw racing almost entirely on his back is both his modesty (he seldom touted his own accomplishments and usually gave his engineers more of the credit) and the fact that in most other disciplines of motorsports, you can at least debate who the greatest driver was. In sprint car racing, there is no debate.

Open wheel model: #334 of 931 (.024)

Teammate head-to-heads: 18-12 (18-12 vs. Tony Stewart)

Year-by-year: 1978: E-, 1979: E-, 1980: E-, 1981: E-, 1982: C+, 1983: E-, 1984: E-, 1985: C+, 1986: E-, 1987: 5, 1988: E-, 1989: C+, 1990: E, 1991: E, 1992: E-, 1993: C+, 1994: E-, 1995: C, 1996: C, 1998: C+, 1999: C, 2000: C+, 2001: C-, 2002: C+, 2003: C+, 2004: C+, 2005: C+, 2007: C-, 2010: C-, 2011: C-

MARK KINSER………………………USA

Born: May 5, 1964

Best year: 1996
Best drive: April 30, 1988 World of Outlaws race at Knoxville Raceway

The son of Karl Kinser, the most successful car owner in the history of sprint car racing, Mark will always be the “other Kinser” to most fans since his third cousin Steve was the best sprint car driver ever, which makes Mark significantly underrated since his 203 career wins rank fourth behind only Steve, Sammy Swindell, and Donny Schatz, he is one of only three drivers besides them to win multiple titles, and Mark’s 35-win 1996 was the winningest WoO season for any driver other than Steve. As a ten-year-old, Mark sold copies of the National Speed Sport News at local tracks before playing keyboards for the short-lived Indiana band Country Expressions as a teen.

Initially, Karl would not even let Mark touch the cars because his world-class engineers were so good, Mark had little to contribute until he began racing himself. He debuted in the World of Outlaws in 1984 driving Steve’s backup car for Karl, but Mark left the team in the middle of the 1986 season after Steve started racing Mark’s cars. This decision to branch out on his own apart from his family team ultimately reaped dividends and made him a better driver. He began proving his cred in 1988 when he won six races for car owner Jim Reid including outdueling Steve for the win at Knoxville. In this period, his career highlight was probably saving Doug Wolfgang’s life from a burning car in a WoO race at Lakeside Speedway, but as a driver, he was still typically regarded as merely good until he caught the break of a lifetime when Steve left the WoO after the 1994 season to pursue an unsuccessful NASCAR career.

Mark took over Karl’s car, while Steve started his own WoO team after his NASCAR career flopped. After Steve poached engineer Scott Gerkin from Karl’s team, there was bad blood across family lines. Nonetheless, Mark actually outperformed Steve in this period. While both cousins won two titles from 1995-2001 with Mark’s coming in 1996 and 1999, Mark won 157 races to Steve’s 87 in this period, although Steve eventually overtook Mark again starting in 2002 before he abruptly retired after the 2005 season to seek a more modest career as a bus driver.

Mark’s career arguably ultimately proved Steve’s argument that the car played a significantly greater role in success than the driver, as Steve likely would have continued to outperform Mark for his entire career if he had not vacated Karl’s car during his ill-fated NASCAR stint, but Mark had already outdueled Steve in slower cars before, suggesting that Mark was not much worse than Steve at his peak, even if he didn’t sustain it nearly as long. One thing Mark lacks compared to Steve is success in other types of cars. Mark’s NASCAR crossover in the Craftsman Truck Series was even less successful than Steve’s as he DNQed in all four of his attempts, but he nonetheless had a high enough peak to justify placement on this list.

Year-by-year: 1995: C, 1996: E, 1997: E-, 1998: C+, 1999: E-, 2000: C+, 2001: E-

The NASCAR race was better of course, but I have a feeling people are going to erroneously remember that as an all-time classic when it was annoying that the aero push was so bad that in Stage 2 it seemed like none of the faster cars could catch up to the guys who backed into top positions on strategy and there were so many stupid crashes. Again, I blame most of these crashes on the stupid double-file restarts, which I’ve despised since they were introduced in 2009, but now I’m getting to be the millennial version of boomer writers like Matt McLaughlin who felt NASCAR was all fine and dandy until Loudon was added to the schedule or whatever and I recognize that. It was mildly surprising for me to see Shane van Gisbergen legitimately battling Kyle Larson for the lead if only because the Trackhouse Racing cars seem to be truly terrible if Ross Chastain wasn’t even running well at one of his worst tracks and Connor Zilisch looks awful, not to mention his lack of oval experience. I realize every driver with the Next Gen chassis looks awful for about 50 starts so it’s not like I’m writing off Zilisch yet, but I have been skeptical of him for a while if only because Noah Gragson won eight races with the same Xfinity Series team Connor Zilisch won ten with last year and Gragson still looks awful. Sure, Gragson was in his fourth year while Zilisch was a rookie and Zilisch was injured twice and still won more races at a much younger age, so I’m not saying he’s not better or that he’s not going to win races. What I think bothers me is his stan army and that it feels like he’s one of the only NASCAR drivers you’re not allowed to criticize these days. Criticize him at all and you’ll get pushback in much the same way that you’ll get pushback if you even try to write the slightest defense of Corey LaJoie. (Okay, he’s bad now, but you’ll never convince me he was always bad.) People act like he’s better than Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney already when he isn’t. So I’m vindicated to see that he has had a learning curve and I acknowledge he’s been unlucky, but even I didn’t think SVG would be regularly outrunning him on ovals. Marcos Ambrose sure never showed anything like that on ovals; granted, this Cup car is based on the Supercars chassis SVG is dominated with while Ambrose’s Cup car was entirely different, so that could have been it.

Having said that, I think I was more pleasantly surprised by Zane than Shane. Zane Smith is somebody I’ve always thought was pretty good but I also always thought he had a low ceiling, which is why I have not (yet) listed him on an annual top 200 list (although I’m gettin’ ready to this time). I liked his Hail Mary attempt to win the race on fuel mileage, but apparently the faster teams have gotten better on fuel mileage. Instead of everybody waiting to pit until they run out of fuel, nowadays teams have better optimized their strategies to pit early enough to be able to catch the leader on track, which is not something the teams used to do. That allowed Christopher Bell to snatch the lead from Smith before Denny Hamlin passed Bell on the last lap, but I was still really impressed by Smith regardless and he’s now had in my opinion the two best drives of his career back-to-back (that 2024 Nashville race the booth kept hyping where he finished 2nd he had a terrible run and just got extremely lucky). I thought it was really funny and a sign of Tyler Reddick’s absurd luck this year that he crashed seconds after crossing the finish line, thereby extending his streak of completing every lap this year despite crashing.

Because I crossed off my own signature and signed my mom’s name on our previous title, I had to buy another one so I still have some paperwork to complete the transfer of the car to Habitat for Humanity, but at least it’s out of the garage. Although I did not quite finish these last three columns by the end of May, at least I’ve finally done them because I had had Unser and Mears planned for last year and didn’t get around to them then as I also had a tight schedule of Indy 500 winners I didn’t complete at that time.

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BILL VUKOVICH……………………..USA

Born: December 13, 1918
Died: May 30, 1955

Best year: 1954
Best drive: 1954 Indianapolis 500

Arguably the greatest Indy 500 driver in history, Vukovich was the son of Serbian immigrants. His father was originally a police officer and carpenter, but eventually became a sharecropper and bought a vineyard after Vukovich’s birth. When a weak harvest resulted in the family’s property being foreclosed, his father committed suicide two days before Vukovich’s 14th birthday. Bill eventually dropped out of high school once he had to become a breadwinner. He caught the racing bug at age seven when he attended IndyCar races at the short-lived Fresno, California wooden board track.

After begging numerous car owners for driving opportunities, future IndyCar constructor Fred Gerhardt agreed and Vukovich won his fourth start in 1936 before switching to midgets in 1938. When racing resumed after World War II, he won back-to-back United Racing Association titles in 1945 and 1946, the 1948 Turkey Night Grand Prix, and the 1950 AAA National Midget Championship. He first became an IndyCar regular in 1951 before emerging as a star in 1952 after he replaced Mauri Rose at Howard Keck’s team and stopped racing midgets.

In the 1952 Indy 500, Vukovich led 150 laps until his steering arm broke with nine laps remaining, triggering a crash that handed Troy Ruttman the win. Vukovich also won two dirt races at Detroit and Denver for J.C. Agajanian that year, but he rarely raced outside Indianapolis afterward. In 1953, he won from the pole and led 195 laps in staggering heat, but I’m more impressed with his 1954 win because he started 19th. Vukovich entered the 1955 race as the overwhelming favorite and was leading on Lap 57 when Rodger Ward broke an axle and flipped. While trying to avoid him, Al Keller spun into Johnny Boyd, who collected Vukovich, vaulting his car over the catchfence and into a terrifying series of barrelrolls before it landed upside down and on fire atop some spectators’ cars parked at the Speedway. He died of a basilar skull fracture, becoming the second defending champion after Floyd Roberts to die in the subsequent race. The Vukovich name continued as Bill Vukovich II was an IndyCar winner, while Billy Vukovich III became the first third-generation Indy 500 starter before a fatal sprint car crash at Bakersfield.

Despite only making five starts, Vukovich’s 485 Indy 500 laps led rank ninth all time, and no other driver led the most laps three times in a row or been the TNL four times in a row. While many consider Vukovich the best IndyCar driver ever, I can’t agree. Too many IndyCar fans seem to believe that only Indy 500 performances matter and the other races don’t count. I disagree so I tend to rate Indy specialists lower than drivers who dominated the entire schedule like Jimmy Bryan. Additionally, Europe had stronger competition than the US in the ‘50s, which explains why I gave him no top five seasons. Even if he might have been something of a one-trick pony, arguably no one was better at that trick.

Year-by-year: 1946: C-, 1948: C-, 1950: C, 1952: E, 1953: E, 1954: E, 1955: C+

GORDON JOHNCOCK……………….USA

Born: August 5, 1936

Best year: 1976
Best drive: 1968 Langhorne 150 at Langhorne Speedway

Johncock won two Indy 500s and one IndyCar title during the period when the balance of power in IndyCar racing shifted from USAC to CART. Initially a supermodified driver, he became an IndyCar regular in 1965, winning his first race at Milwaukee that year for the Weinberger & Weiseck team. After a winless 1966, Johncock launched his own team, joining A.J. Foyt as the only active owner-driver. Despite this risky move, he won twice every year from 1967-1969. I’m most impressed by his win at Langhorne in 1968 because it was the most dangerous track on the schedule and he outdueled that year’s dominant driver Bobby Unser. However, after losing his sponsorship from Gilmore Broadcasting in 1970, he was forced to shut down his team.

After a couple disastrous seasons, a bankruptcy, and a divorce, Johncock reemerged with Patrick Racing in 1973. He earned the team’s first win in what many consider the worst Indy 500 as his teammate Swede Savage was badly injured in a fiery crash while his other teammate Graham McRae’s crewman attempted to rescue Savage before being struck and killed by a fire truck coming to Savage’s aid. Johncock dominated but didn’t celebrate while Savage died 33 days later. Nonetheless, this launched Patrick’s run as one of the top IndyCar teams. Johncock and Savage’s replacement Wally Dallenbach both won three races in 1973, but Johncock ultimately proved far superior, beating Dallenbach 21-9 in finishes, 12-5 in wins, and 1857-677 in laps led as teammates. He won the 1976 USAC title while Dallenbach went winless, and arguably was even more dominant in 1977 in most statistics relating to leading and on-track passing. In 1979, he won the first CART race at Phoenix.

Although the 1982 Indy 500 started tragically as Gordon Smiley, another former Johncock teammate, was killed in qualifying, race day proved to be a happier one as Johncock held off a substantially faster Rick Mears by .16 second in the then-closest Indy 500 finish. After an injury at Michigan in 1983, Johncock had a lackluster 1984 season before only making sporadic 500-mile race appearances afterward. Upon retiring in 1992, Johncock focused on farming and the timber business after purchasing Quimby Lumber, activities he claimed to enjoy more than racing.

Johncock is now underrated primarily because he eschewed the limelight but also because he receives too little credit for making Patrick a powerhouse. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Pat Patrick’s team was seen as Roger Penske’s chief rival, but Penske won Indy 500s and championships with numerous drivers while Patrick typically struggled without Johncock or Emerson Fittipaldi, and Johncock vastly outperformed his predecessor, eventual three-time Indy 500 winner Johnny Rutherford. Johncock is also sneakily versatile for a driver who peaked in an era exclusively consisting of superspeedways, having won on both road courses and dirt tracks. He also occasionally competed in stock cars, winning two USAC Stock Car races and one IROC race. He really isn’t hyped enough, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Open wheel model: #464 of 931 (-.058)

Teammate head-to-heads: 42-20 (2-6 vs. Mario Andretti, 2-0 vs. Tom Bagley, 1-0 vs. Scott Brayton, 21-9 vs. Wally Dallenbach, 0-1 vs. Emerson Fittipaldi, 1-0 vs. Stan Fox, 2-1 vs. Chip Ganassi, 10-1 vs. Steve Krisiloff, 0-1 vs. John Paul, Jr., 0-1 vs. Johnny Rutherford, 1-0 vs. Swede Savage, 1-0 vs. Dick Simon, 1-0 vs. Gordon Smiley)

Stock car model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 1-3 (0-1 vs. Darel Dieringer, 1-2 vs. Bobby Unser)

Year-by-year: 1964: C-, 1965: C+, 1966: C+, 1967: E, 1968: E-, 1969: E, 1970: C, 1972: C, 1973: E, 1974: E, 1975: E, 1976: E, 1977: E, 1978: E-, 1979: E, 1980: C, 1981: C, 1982: E-, 1983: C-

LOUIS MEYER………………………...USA

Born: July 21, 1904
Died: October 7, 1995

Best year: 1928
Best drive: 1928 Indianapolis 500

The son of a bicycle racer who emigrated from France, Meyer was born in Yonkers but moved to California in his early childhood. Initially, his elder brother Eddie Meyer, Jr. was regarded more highly after winning the 1926 AAA Pacific Big Car Championship while Louis was seen as more of an engineer than a driver, but Louis went on to far eclipse his brother. Nonetheless, Eddie’s connections aided him and Frank Elliott hired him as an engineer for the 1926 Indy 500. The next year, Meyer served as Wilbur Shaw’s chief mechanic and relief-drove his car for 53 laps, but he wasn’t yet highly regarded as a driver.

All that changed when out of the blue despite minimal driving experience, Meyer became the third consecutive rookie Indy 500 winner in 1928 after Frank Lockhart and George Souders. Meyer led only the last 19 laps after Tony Gulotta’s fuel line clogged. He was leading in 1929 until his car stalled for seven minutes on his final pit stop, handing the win to Ray Keech. However, Keech was killed two weeks later in a crash at Altoona. Although Keech was leading when the race was stopped, Meyer was handed the win since Keech didn’t finish, which effectively handed Meyer the title. The new “Junk Formula” of 1930 adversely affected Meyer’s trajectory, but he won at Indy again in 1933 by five laps, which also made him the first three-time champion.

His record-setting third Indy win in 1936 came from 28th (tying Ray Harroun for the worst starting position for a winner). That race introduced several traditions as starting with Meyer, all winners would receive milk, the Borg-Warner Trophy, and the pace car. He retired after being ejected from the car in a crash in the 1939 Indy 500 with three laps remaining. However, he remained heavily active as an engineer. He and Dale Drake purchased the Offenhauser engine program after World War II, which had a near-monopoly on the field for the next two decades and won every Indy 500 from 1946-1964 until rear-engine formula cars eventually made it obsolete. Meyer sold his interest in the business at that point and instead began developing the Ford engine that overtook the Offy before Ford withdrew its factory involvement.

The main thing that stands out about Meyer’s driving career is his good fortune. Several of Meyer’s contemporaries like Keech, Billy Arnold, Bob Carey, and Bill Cummings seemed more naturally talented, but Meyer reaped the benefits primarily because he was the only big star to survive the era. I honestly am more impressed by his engineering, because typically he inherited the lead after other drivers dropped out (he had only 2 TNL despite 8 wins) so he primarily won because of his cars’ reliability, but since he did design the engines, he still deserves credit. However, I prefer to rate the more dominant drivers over plodding, methodical drivers who primarily benefit from others’ misfortune, which is why I’ve rated him lower than you might think.

Year-by-year: 1928: 4, 1929: E, 1930: C+, 1931: E-, 1933: E, 1935: C+, 1936: E, 1937: C+, 1939: E-

Only a few minutes later, a guy came out to pick up Mom’s car to take it to Habitat for Humanity after I decided I would donate it there, which is something I’ve been struggling with for months. I finally had a contractor one of my high school friends knew drag it out of the garage last week, but I couldn’t find the title until the weekend, but I finally had that taken away also. They did manage to start it again, but I know Mom won’t be driving again and at this point probably neither will I. I wanted to clear the space in the garage to move things Mom had hoarded from other rooms into the garage, so I can order a deep clean before she comes home so hopefully one of the in-home care agencies will agree to take her on because last time I invited one in, they claimed there were bed bugs in the carpet. I don’t believe there were bed bugs in the carpet (it was dirty, but at that point I couldn’t even afford a working vacuum cleaner), but at least now I feel like I have the capacity and wherewithal to do a deep clean to try to impress one of the in-home care agencies.

A month or two ago, I also received an offer for a $300 bonus if I signed up for an M&T Bank account by May 30, so I decided to walk down there and do that after I had both those things taken care of today, and I did. While I was walking to the bank to set up my account, I got a phone call from one of the people at Access CNY (the disability agency that Unique Peerspectives, the peer group I’ve been attending a lot lately, is affiliated with) and she’s going to try to get me set up with a new primary care physician. I’d been seeing the same doctor on and off since I was a little boy in the ‘80s, but he retired a few years ago, his replacement left after a year, and their office (which was walking distance from my house) was shut down and they moved to an office 3 miles away that’s kind of a dangerous walk. I’ve made it before but I’d rather not, so I think I’m going to switch to a doctor’s office that is more accessible by bus downtown. After I expressed that I wanted to have something done about my IBS and ARFID symptoms, my therapist told me I should get a physical and I probably haven’t had one for years, and hopefully getting a new family doctor will allow me to find someone to help me with my ARFID. I also just noticed this week that I had finally reduced my waist from 37” to less than 34” at the navel since December, marking probably the first time my waist has been less than half my height/I haven’t been overfat since 2009 or something. I don’t really think I’m any healthy since I still eat almost exclusively IBS-triggering processed glop, but at least I was eating less of it.

Finally, I have gone on a run at trivia the past couple days out of nowhere. My team won bar trivia last night and doubled nearly everyone else’s score because only I got the final answer right. It was about board games so maybe my past Scrabble interest indirectly helped me there even though the answer was chess. I’m still doing LearnedLeague, which restarted last week, and today, I think I got all six questions right for the first time. Then while watching Jeopardy! tonight, I got my all-time highest Coryat score of $25,000, which was the first time I broke $20,000 since I started tracking that. I don’t really know where all that came from all at once.

And yet, despite all that, I’m still deeply unhappy overall. Obviously, there’s the fact that if/when Mom comes home again, I’m going to basically be trapped in the house again for the rest of my life both because she’s constantly afraid I’m going to be attacked whenever I leave and also because I obviously have to keep her under something close to 24/7 supervision at this point. I’m willing to make that sacrifice since she had told me numerous times she’d rather be dead than in a nursing home and I feel that Adult Protective Services tricked us by forcing her in there for hoarding. I’ve always taken that very seriously and I want her back home even if it might not be in my own best interest. Granted, I probably would also be able to be paid for some of the hours I’m watching over her on whatever nights/weekends the in-home care agencies don’t operate if/when she returns home. Yes, all the in-home care will be charged to the estate and I will certainly lose it after she dies. At this point, I just don’t really care and I need to get my credit up enough after I stopped paying my bills a couple years ago (yes, I have started repaying them) so someone will rent to me after I am evicted from the house after Mom’s death. What I don’t want is for Mom to get addicted to listening to news radio and screaming racist tirades, but I think being in the nursing home caused her to break that habit and she’s been more pleasant in the last year or so than she has the years before. She also had started writing an opera in the ‘80s based on the fantasy book The Green Kingdom but never finished. The last year before she was institutionalized, she asked me to help with that and I really didn’t and I felt tremendous guilt about it. Granted, I had no musical training except six years of chorus growing up (unless you think playing the computer keyboard is at all analogous with playing the piano keyboard), but if she has any energy left for that, I’d like to see if I can help her see that to its conclusion. My ultimate dream is to hopefully learn enough about in-home care so I can land some other kind of helping position based on this to complete my final 2 years, 4 months of Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

I’m also still really, really lonely but I’m trying to work on that: visiting Mom, calling her all the days I don’t visit, going to the peer support groups and counseling and bar trivia, but none of it is really making me feel as fulfilled as I want to. Nonetheless, I’m probably in a better place now than I was one year ago and definitely in a better place than two years ago…

I know I’m behind on my Indy 500 driver entries, and I’m going to try to finish all of them by the month of May, which will require three today and then two on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I probably won’t get them all done, but I’m going to try. In this post, I discuss one driver I believe to be overrated (Sneva), one driver I believe to be vastly underrated (Bräck) and one driver who used to be overrated before he kind of fell into obscurity in recent years (Rossi). Granted, these are all still obvious locks, mind you, but I personally think Bräck’s 2001 knocks me out more than any season the other two ever had, although I guess Sneva probably takes it on longevity. I really do not understand why Bräck failed to make the list of 100 used to determine The Greatest 33 Indy 500 drivers. He had no business making the 33, but he and Buddy Rice were the only winners after 1946 that did not make the 100, and that seems flatly ridiculous. Of course everybody made fun of Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick making the list of 100 at the time and I get it, but frankly, those weren’t even the worst selections. There are several drivers on there who make even less sense than Marco and Danica and I would start with these: Fred Agabashian, Cliff Bergere, Johnny Boyd, Art Cross, and Chet Miller. All the drivers I just listed there didn’t win and led a grand total of 96 laps, and I don’t see how any of them had the historical importance to be listed in lieu of stats like Janet Guthrie and Danica were (yes, I know Agabashian, Boyd, and Cross were great midget drivers, but not great enough I think for even my list). One of those should’ve been dropped for Bräck. Indy historians seem to think just starting the Indy 500 is something akin to military service where the more races you start, the more you’ve contributed even if you don’t actually do anything in the races you start. (Granted, at least you’re usually not committing war crimes in racing.) This kind of attitude is definitely radicalizing me against listing a NASCAR driver like Dave Marcis for example.

TOM SNEVA………………………….USA

Born: June 1, 1948

Best year: 1983
Best drive: 1983 Indianapolis 500

The first driver to break the 200 mph barrier at Indianapolis, Sneva began racing go-karts at age 14. A multi-sport athlete, he played college basketball at Eastern Washington State College, where he earned an education degree. He then served as a math teacher, physical education teacher, and bus driver at Sprague High School, where he worked during the school year while racing during the summer. Six USAC sprint car wins in 1973 made him the last major IndyCar driver before Tony Stewart to cross over from sprint cars before USAC’s 1974 ban on rear-engine sprint cars made them no longer compatible with modern IndyCars.

In 1974, Sneva quit teaching to pursue a full-time IndyCar career. After being the fastest rookie Indy 500 qualifier that year, Roger Penske hired him in 1975. 15% of his body was burnt after he crashed into the catchfence at Indy, but he only missed one race and won his first race at Michigan later that year. In 1977 and 1978, he gave Penske his first two IndyCar titles in the last seasons before CART broke off from USAC. Sneva’s record-setting qualifying lap came in 1977 en route to a second-place finish; he again finished second from pole in 1978. However, Penske shockingly fired him after the latter season. While some speculated this was because he went winless, Penske stated it was actually because they differed over the team’s direction.

Sneva spent a couple seasons at Jerry O’Connell’s mediocre Sugaripe Prune team, becoming the first last-place starter to lead laps and finish second at Indy in 1980 and earning the team’s last win at Phoenix. However, his true heyday started when he joined George Bignotti and Dan Cotter’s operation in mid-1981. Sneva won twice every year through 1983 and avenged Penske in the 1983 Indy 500 by running down Al Unser’s Penske to win despite Unser’s son blocking for him. In 1984, he moved to former McLaren manager Teddy Mayer’s team, winning his final Indy 500 pole and his last three races including his only street course win at Caesar’s Palace, giving him 13 wins in total. However, CART’s increasingly road-course-heavy schedule and the introduction of radial tires significantly hurt Sneva, who crashed in five of his seven last Indy 500s. After retiring, he served as an IRL color commentator and co-founded the 500 Club, a Glendale, Arizona golf course.

Relative to most other USAC and CART champions, Sneva’s legacy seems rather middling. He largely lacked the ability to be both consistent and dominant at the same time, as evidenced by his surprisingly low teammate rating. Additionally, his performances wildly oscillated between seasons and despite a top ten in the 1983 Daytona 500, he wasn’t as versatile as many of his contemporary IndyCar stars either. He was probably fortunate to be the youngest driver to successfully transition from sprint cars as the previous generation’s stars aged. While he might not be an all-time great, his affable personality and outspoken interviews nonetheless made him a fan favorite.

Open wheel model: #434 of 931 (-.040)

Teammate head-to-heads: 16-12 (4-2 vs. Mario Andretti, 1-0 vs. Geoff Brabham, 2-1 vs. Kevin Cogan, 4-1 vs. Howdy Holmes, 1-0 vs. Jan Lammers, 0-5 vs. Rick Mears, 0-1 vs. Mike Mosley, 0-1 vs. Johnny Parsons, 4-1 vs. Ed Pimm)

Year-by-year: 1973: C-, 1975: C, 1976: C-, 1977: E-, 1978: C+, 1979: C+, 1980: E-, 1981: E, 1982: C+, 1983: E, 1984: E, 1985: C, 1986: C

KENNY BRÄCK…………………SWEDEN

Born: March 21, 1966

Best year: 2001
Best drive: 2001 Miller Lite 225 at the Milwaukee Mile

The first driver to win both the Indy Racing League title and the Indy 500, Bräck competed in Formula 3000, the then-most prestigious F1 feeder series and won the 1996 season finale at Hockenheim on track to win the championship before a controversial post-race disqualification for dangerous driving handed Jörg Müller the title. After Bräck attracted no F1 interest for 1997, he made an unusual switch to the all-oval IRL, where he replaced the injured Davy Jones at Galles Racing. Despite an infamous pace lap crash at the 1997 Indy 500, he was fast enough that A.J. Foyt hired him for 1998. That year, he became the first IRL driver to win three consecutive races, overcoming a 73-point deficit to Scott Sharp to win the title.

After winning the 1999 Indy 500, he had nothing left to prove in the IRL and switched to Bobby Rahal’s CART team. In 2001, he led all drivers with 4 wins, 621 laps led, and 7.16 lead shares (the fourth-most in CART history). He led the championship for most of the season against what I consider the best IndyCar field ever. At Milwaukee, he passed Michael Andretti for the lead twice at a track where Andretti won five times. After winning the first race after 9/11 at the Lausitzring, he made a gallant outside pass on Gil de Ferran on the penultimate lap at Rockingham before de Ferran reprised Bräck’s move on the last lap. Although Bräck still technically held the points lead, he was clearly demoralized and de Ferran eliminated Bräck from the championship three races later.

After de Ferran defected to the IRL in 2002, Bräck became the prohibitive championship favorite at Chip Ganassi Racing but bad luck and stupid crashes resulted in a disappointing season. He next reunited with Rahal in the IRL in 2003, but his season was overshadowed by a devastating crash at Texas, where contact with Tomas Scheckter sent him into the catchfence then back onto the track. Despite countless injuries, his 214g impact set a Guinness world record for the largest g-force a human survived. Amazingly, he returned for one final race in the 2005 Indy 500 and even set the fastest qualifying speed before retiring after the race. Afterward, Bräck occasionally entered historic races and rally races, even winning gold at the 2009 X Games against Travis Pastrana.

For all Bräck’s success, he seems weirdly disrespected. When the Indianapolis Motor Speedway announced its 100 drivers to determine “The Greatest 33” in 2011, Bräck was one of only two post-1946 Indy 500 winners to be snubbed. Not only are his advanced numbers in 2001 truly electrifying, few other drivers have ever matched Bräck’s balls of steel. He arguably fought the hardest in CART’s Handford Device races at Michigan and Fontana, won the pole at Texas in the 2001 race that was canceled due to too high g-forces, then survived one of the worst crashes ever. He might be the most underrated driver of the entire split period.

Open wheel model: #155 of 931 (.138)

Teammate head-to-heads: 31-15 (6-2 vs. Billy Boat, 1-0 vs. Robbie Buhl, 4-4 vs. Scott Dixon, 1-0 vs. Marco Greco, 4-3 vs. Bruno Junqueira, 15-5 vs. Max Papis, 0-1 vs. Jeff Ward)

Year-by-year: 1996: C, 1998: C+, 1999: C+, 2000: C+, 2001: E, 2002: C+, 2003: C-

ALEXANDER ROSSI………………….USA

Born: September 25, 1991

Best year: 2019
Best drive: 2019 Rev Group Grand Prix at Road America

The first true rookie to win the Indy 500 in 88 years and the first American F1 starter since Scott Speed in 2007, Rossi initially looked like a perennial IndyCar championship contender before fading into obscurity in the 2020s. As Marussia’s reserve driver, he was initially tapped to replace the comatose Jules Bianchi at the 2014 Russian Grand Prix, but his F1 debut wouldn’t come until 2015, when he made five late-season starts for the team. That year, his second-place points finish and three wins in GP2 tied Eddie Cheever’s all-time records for American drivers in F1’s top feeder series until Jak Crawford won four races in 2025. With no full-time F1 ride for 2016, he switched to IndyCar in a team co-owned by fellow ex-American F1 driver Michael Andretti and Bryan Herta. Unexpectedly, he won the Indy 500 on fuel mileage, becoming the first driver to win the race in his first full-time major league season since Louis Meyer in 1928.

In 2017, Rossi unambiguously overtook Ryan Hunter-Reay as Andretti team leader, winning from the pole at Watkins Glen before emerging as a championship contender the next two seasons. He won a career-high three races in 2018, but his longshot championship challenge ended when he clipped his teammate Marco Andretti’s wing on the opening lap at the Sonoma season finale. Although he finished second in points in 2018 and third in 2019, his 2019 was much better primarily because he barely lost any speed from 2018 while all three of his teammates were over 10 percentage points slower in speed percentile; Hunter-Reay was even 26 percentage points slower! Despite Andretti’s slower cars, Rossi delivered his most dominant performances ever, winning Long Beach by 20 seconds and Road America by 28 seconds.

At this point, Rossi seemed to be an inevitable future champion but starting in 2020, he seldom even had enough speed to lead races. Colton Herta overtook Rossi as Andretti team leader and Rossi never really recovered. His only real highlights were winning the 2021 24 Hours of Daytona and an Indy road course race in 2022, but he never finished better than 9th in the championship after 2019. Since switching to McLaren in 2023 and Ed Carpenter Racing in 2025, he has largely faded to journeyman status.

Rossi’s sudden decline is somewhat perplexing. The only real explanation I have is that IndyCar in the 2010s didn’t have very strong competitive depth as the decade was mostly dominated by aging split-era ex-CART and Champ Car drivers. In this period, Josef Newgarden was the only emerging driver who seemed to pose a long-term significant challenge to the veterans while most Indy Lights drivers busted. It appears that the weak 2010s fields made Rossi look better than he was and he simply couldn’t compete with younger drivers like Álex Palou, Pato O’Ward, or Herta. I still think his 2018 and 2019 seasons were great, but in hindsight, I better understand how he ended up becoming a flash in the pan.

Open wheel model: #202 of 931 (.107)

Teammate head-to-heads: 249-153 (50-19 vs. Marco Andretti, 1-0 vs. Townsend Bell, 1-0 vs. William Buller, 2-0 vs. Conor Daly, 10-3 vs. Devlin DeFrancesco, 2-8 vs. Antonio Felix da Costa, 2-1 vs. Luca Filippi, 6-7 vs. Romain Grosjean, 6-5 vs. Esteban Gutierrez, 3-4 vs. Rio Haryanto, 14-18 vs. Colton Herta, 11-4 vs. James Hinchcliffe, 42-33 vs. Ryan Hunter-Reay, 2-0 vs. Callum Ilott, 1-0 vs. Tony Kanaan, 12-5 vs. Jordan King, 1-0 vs. Kyle Larson, 1-0 vs. Fabio Leimer, 8-7 vs. Carlos Munoz, 6-20 vs. Pato O’Ward, 3-1 vs. Theo Pourchaire, 7-4 vs. Christian Rasmussen, 7-4 vs. Felix Rosenqvist, 8-4 vs. Takuma Sato, 6-0 vs. Nolan Siegel, 3-1 vs. Will Stevens, 33-5 vs. Zach Veach, 1-0 vs. Stefan Wilson)

Touring car model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 0-4 (0-1 vs. James Courtney, 0-1 vs. Warren Luff, 0-1 vs. Jack Perkins, 0-1 vs. Scott Pye)

Year-by-year: 2015: C-, 2016: C-, 2017: C+, 2018: E, 2019: E, 2020: C, 2022: C, 2024: C-

But I wanted to finally talk about the NASCAR Hall of Fame. I knew it wouldn’t be appropriate to do so for my first post after Busch’s death or the Indy 500, but now that some time has passed, I thought I’d do it now. Most people I saw talking about this last week were complaining about Jeff Burton’s induction, especially because Burton’s ex-teammate Greg Biffle was not inducted the year after his death. Ryan McCafferty for instance said that he’d easily take Biffle over Burton because he had "[o]nly two fewer Cup wins while starting at a much older age and facing better competition at his peak, plus the lower series championships." While I do agree with that, even though my model actually has Burton slightly ahead (.120-.112) and I have both drivers tied with 39 cumulative points, it seems like performance isn’t why Burton was inducted ahead of him.

Most of the insiders seemed to be rushing to induct Burton primarily due to his intangibles, specifically his role as a safety advocate in the garage. It makes sense that a lot of stats guys like most of the people who talk about Hall of Fame inductions don’t understand how to talk about things that aren’t quantifiable. So, the question is how much of his induction came down to raising awareness for safety among the drivers and how much of it was simply media glad-handing because media members vote on this and he’s been a NASCAR color commentator for a decade. The answer I think is a little of both. There is no doubt that being media-friendly will always help your case in any Hall of Fame induction, which explains why he is in while irascible but superior drivers like Tim Richmond, Ernie Irvan, and Geoff Bodine have yet to be even nominated. I also question how much Burton himself is single-handedly responsible for raising safety awareness amongst the other drivers. I realize he played a role, but I mean I was watching NASCAR at the time in the wake of Dale Earnhardt’s death, and from what I remember at the time, the leading safety advocate amongst the drivers was Brett Bodine because he was the first to wear the Head and Neck Support device that eventually became standard. Obviously, Brett doesn’t deserve induction, but it seems like giving Burton credit for making all the other drivers care about safety is revisionist history, and honestly, I feel if anyone gets credit for safety innovations, it should be the inventors of safety equipment, not drivers.

I’m not against Burton’s induction, mind you. While there seem to be a lot of NASCAR fans who think any Hall of Fame inductee who’s worse than Bill Elliott or something is “lowering the bar”, I’ve already stated what I think about “Hall of Very Good” arguments, which deeply irritate me. I honestly think Burton was a better driver than Bobby Labonte, who was quickly rushed in. I know Labonte won a Cup Series and Busch Series title and Burton didn’t, but Labonte seemed to be mostly a specialist on four tracks (Atlanta, Charlotte, Michigan, Pocono), while Burton seemed a lot more consistent from track-to-track. He also had more longevity with 11 competitive seasons to Labonte’s 8 and he managed to win for two teams while Labonte only won with one. In my opinion, that should put Burton ahead of someone who’s already inducted. I do think Burton was the best driver of 2000, just like I think Labonte was the best driver of 1999. Labonte was the best Joe Gibbs Racing driver when it was a multi-car team arguably only twice (1999 and 2000, arguably because you can say Tony Stewart was better in 2000) while Burton was at Roush three times (1999-2001, although you can make a slight case Mark Martin was better in 1999). So am I for Burton’s induction? Yes. I still would have only ranked him eighth on the Modern Era Ballot though, and apart from the obvious first-ballot lock Kevin Harvick and Biffle, I would have taken Richmond, Irvan, and Bodine over any driver who made the ballot and I think the drivers who did make the ballot overall were a little weird. I would definitely take Burton over Randy LaJoie and Jack Sprague who I don’t think deserve it (Busch and truck titles do not equal 20+ Cup wins).

Harvick was obviously a lock so there’s nothing to talk about there. I’m glad Larry Phillips got in on the Pioneer ballot since he is someone NASCAR hadn’t properly acknowledged until recently, but I must admit one small gripe here. While I’ve always supported both of their inductions, I don’t understand why Ray Elder was placed on the Modern Era ballot and Phillips was placed on the Pioneer ballot. Elder had almost exactly half his success (3 Winston West titles, 24 Winston West wins, and 1 Cup Series win) before the modern era started in 1972, and half after (3 Winston West titles, 23 Winston West wins, and 1 Cup win) which means you can easily debate whether he should count as Pioneer or Modern. (And there’s no question Elder was better than Hershel McGriff, who he easily bested in West Coast championships in the ‘70s, and who was inducted a while ago.) Phillips, there’s no debate. He is undeniably modern era. I know he must have had grassroots wins in the ‘60s, but those didn’t come in NASCAR-sanctioned series and there is hardly any online record of wins for him prior to 1972. All of Phillips’s NASCAR Weekly Series titles came in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, so he is unquestionably modern. The people deciding these things just decided to stuff Phillips on the Pioneer ballot because they knew he’d be more likely to get the votes there while he could not get the votes on the Modern ballot. I’m not intrinsically against them doing this for drivers who for the most part didn’t compete in Cup, but if they’re doing that, they should be consistent about it and if they nominate Elder again (which they should since he does deserve it), they need to put him on the Pioneer ballot (which he has a much better case of deserving than Phillips does) because I think he can get the votes there and he absolutely can’t on the Modern ballot.

Again, none of that matters now in the wake of Busch’s death, but I promised several times that I wanted to discuss the Hall of Fame in the last week so I felt I needed to get that out there before I left to visit Mom again in a few minutes.

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I guess the Daly thing is a me problem but he just rubbed me the wrong way over and over for years. He first got big buzz when his father, former F1 and IndyCar driver/announcer Derek Daly started whining about the lack of American drivers in IndyCar (meaning his son) even though Derek himself was an American IndyCar driver from freakin’ Ireland. I wasn’t actively annoyed until 2017 when Carlos Muñoz had lost his IndyCar ride at Andretti even though he’d been the highest points finisher there, and then he consistently outran Daly at A.J. Foyt in 2018 as well and he never had a full-season ride ever again and was only given one more Indy 500 start even though he was one of the best Indy 500 drivers of his time. From then on, it just seemed like Daly was failing upward solely because he was a nepo baby * 2 thanks to his connections obtained through his father Derek and his stepfather, Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Doug Boles. He also talked a lot of trash about other drivers on various podcasts and seemed to share a similar sense of entitlement to a lot of people who hung out in those circles like Graham Rahal and Marco Andretti and it just really put me off, and it feels like I’ve been alone on this. I acknowledge he’s become a pretty good oval driver in the 2020s and he’s earned his spot as an Indy one-off guy for sure, but there are so many people who I think were better than him (Muñoz, Spencer Pigot, J.R. Hildebrand, Sage Karam, Oliver Askew, Linus Lundqvist, Robert Shwartzman, Callum Ilott) who would’ve eventually achieved more if they had been given the many, many, many chances he’s had. It doesn’t bother me at this point that he’s still around, but it does bother me that people were hyping him up as a pre-race favorite despite his long, long history of losing and also that he’s the most popular driver in the field. I don’t get it. I’ve never gotten it. Maybe I’d get it if I was an Indiana native. He did have a good race.

I suppose I shouldn’t be one to talk since my favorite driver is the other nepo baby David Malukas, but Malukas is actually talented and is at this point long overdue for a win. I had predicted for pretty much the entire month that this year’s Indy 500 was going to be a duel between Álex Palou and Malukas and I pretty much got what I expected after those brief interludes with Alexander Rossi and Scott Dixon (but I didn’t think either of them would have really had staying power). Even though this race had the most lead changes in Indy 500 history with 70 and the smallest margin of victory, I don’t think it was the best race ever because I thought several portions of the first two thirds were pretty much just boring fuel-saving like we’ve seen so often since 2019 and a lot of those passes seemed very artificial. It didn’t feel like the quality you would expect from a 70-lead change race, but the last third made up for it in spades.

I’ve about had it with Ryan Over-Reayted. He needs to retire at this point just as his teammate Marco Andretti (whose advanced stats are closer to RHR than you might think) recently did. And sadly, a lot of people are going to look at Katherine Legge crashing even though it wasn’t her fault and blame her for it. At least Kyle Larson ruined his double himself, but Legge didn’t. The Josef Newgarden and Caio Collet crashes were scary. I don’t care for Newgarden anymore, but I certainly hope his foot heals. I do think Newgarden might be on thin ice with Roger Penske at this point because it is a contract year for him and he’s already the slowest of the three Penske drivers and most mistake-prone on road and street courses. What kept him viable is that he was the best oval driver and most likely to win the Indy 500, but lately it seems like Malukas has been faster and less mistake prone than both Newgarden and McLaughlin everywhere this season at an age that’s still barely older than Newgarden was when he won his first race. Newgarden suddenly looks dispensable in a way he wasn’t before, and the only thing that might save him is there’s no obvious replacement since I don’t think Penske can get Pato O’Ward, Kyle Kirkwood, or Christian Lundgaard.

As I pretty much expected, Palou and Malukas almost entirely dominated the second half of the race, but then that pit strategy kind of mucked things up for both of them. After Malukas started pulling away from Palou, I pretty much assumed he was going to win once the caution and red flag for Caio Collet’s crash came out. Although the fake red flags to ensure a green flag normally bother me, that one I think I was okay with because that was a scary-looking wreck. However, the draft ended up being too strong once Malukas did take the lead on the final lap, and it looks like all the leaders’ attempts to dive to the bottom in Turn 2 to break the draft ends up causing all these drivers to lose because they scrub off too much speed, and Felix Rosenqvist ended up getting past by the narrowest of margins, winning by the smallest-ever margin of victory (0.0233 seconds).

Even though Malukas is my favorite driver personally at the moment and even though I think he has been comically unlucky to have not won at this point since he could’ve pretty easily won like five oval races by now, I can’t complain about Rosenqvist’s win. Not only has Rosenqvist had even worse luck in his career, I also feel he is a driver who never really got his due. Rosenqvist had a very strong minor league career in Europe, winning thirteen races in European Formula 3 in 2015 against a field that included Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Formula E champion Jake Dennis, Le Mns winner Antonio Giovinazzi, prolific Formula E winner Maximilian Günther, Santino Ferrucci, and Callum Ilott. That’s a lot of good drivers he beat. I was also really impressed by his 2017 when he finished 3rd in points in both Formula E and Super Formula simultaneously, which caused him to be ranked top ten in my open wheel model for that year. He also won three races in Formula E while his teammate Nick Heidfeld (who I know was always held in high regard) went winless. I felt the talent was always there, but it seemed like every one of his previous IndyCar seasons he was underachieving his talent. He’s ranked very highly in my open wheel model at .133 (surrounded by drivers like A.J. Foyt, Simon Pagenaud, Niki Lauda, and Juan Pablo Montoya, no less). He’s obviously had speed for years as evidenced by his seven poles and literally being TNL on his IndyCar debut in 2019, but he never seemed to sustain his speed in a race and it looked like that was going to happen at Indy today too. But he finally got it done, and I’m glad for him because he might have been the most unlucky driver of the past decade until now. Much like how Erik Jones’s win in the 2022 Southern 500 was a feel-good win after Christopher Bell replaced him as Joe Gibbs Racing, the same thing happened when Palou replaced Felix Rosenqvist the same year (2021). Palou’s string of titles seemed to lead to everyone writing Rosenqvist off much like Bell’s success seemed to lead to everyone writing Jones off. I kind of felt people were wrong to write Rosenqvist off and I was worried he’d lose his ride during his injury, but I’m glad he managed to bounce back. I realize Malukas will have other chances and will almost certainly be an Indy 500 winner in the future. This might’ve been Rosenqvist’s only shot, so I guess I’m glad he won this one.

I have always regarded Rosenqvist highly and I had him as a lock for my 1,000 greatest drivers list, but admittedly I felt like that one was pretty dubious based on how mediocre his IndyCar results were (even if I feel his performance was better than his results). Now, my decision to make him a lock on my list looks a lot less sketchy…

BOB SWEIKERT………………………USA

Born: May 20, 1926
Died: June 17, 1956

Best year: 1955
Best drive: 1953 Hoosier Hundred at the Indiana State Fairgrounds

The only driver to win the Indy 500, IndyCar championship, and sprint car championship in one year, Sweikert began working in a local Ford dealership in Hayward, California at age 16. Two years later, he led a strike of students at his high school protesting the vice principal being demoted to a dean for boys and was expelled. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, he opened Sweikert Automotive in his parents’ garage, where he built a roadster and started racing in 1947. After several titles in roadsters and midgets in 1948 and 1949, Sweikert switched to the AAA and began racing sprint cars on the West Coast. After moving to Indianapolis in 1952, he won his first AAA national midget race and qualified for his first Indy 500 before a meteoric ascent in subsequent years.

In 1953, Sweikert won the inaugural Hoosier Hundred in a well-fought barnburner against Manny Ayulo, giving eventual powerhouse car owner Al Dean his first win. After another IndyCar win in 1954, Sweikert hit the jackpot in 1955. When two-time defending Indy 500 winner Bill Vukovich suffered a fatal crash while leading, Sweikert was there to pick up the pieces and won with an engine he’d built himself. Angered at fans who thought he had backed into the win, he went on an absolute tear, leading all drivers with 368 laps led and four poles and upsetting Jimmy Bryan for the title who had won every other title from 1954-1957 even though Bryan won 6 races to Sweikert’s 2. Sweikert’s AAA Midwest Big Car title completed his unusual trifecta.

In the 1956 12 Hours of Sebring, Sweikert co-drove a Jaguar with his car owner Jack Ensley, a mediocre amateur driver. After Ensley dropped back to 23rd, Sweikert recovered to second, and they eventually finished third in a race featured F1 drivers including winner Juan Manuel Fangio. This drive piqued European interest and he began exploring international opportunities, but it was not to be. Three months later in a Father’s Day sprint car race at Salem, he attempted an outside pass on Ed Elisian but his car rode the wall, left the track, fell 100 feet, crashed into a tree, and caught on fire. Although Sweikert was ejected from the car before being burned, he didn’t survive his head injuries.

Despite Sweikert’s short career peak, his contemporaries regarded him very highly as Chris Economaki called him the best driver he’d seen. He was particularly noted for being utterly fearless. His favorite tracks were the high-banked, high-speed Winchester, Dayton, and Salem, where he lost his life, tracks so dangerous that Bryan refused to race on any of them. In an era of increasing specialization, Sweikert also did more engineering himself than many of his peers and always improved his teams. As the last champion before the AAA withdrew from motorsports in the wake of the Le Mans crash and Vukovich’s death, Sweikert’s brief run marked an important turning point in motorsports history.

Open wheel model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 0-1 (0-1 vs. Mike Nazaruk)

Year-by-year: 1949: C-, 1953: C+, 1954: C+, 1955: 4, 1956: C-

JIM RATHMANN…………………….USA

Born: July 16, 1928
Died: November 23, 2011

Best year: 1957
Best drive: 1958 Race of Two Worlds at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza

Arguably the greatest superspeedway driver of the late roadster period, Rathmann seldom contended for IndyCar championships because he struggled on dirt, but in his heyday, no man was faster on large paved ovals. Born Royal Richard Rathmann, he swapped names with his older brother James to flout a minimum age limit for racing roadsters and the names stuck. “Dick” eventually won 13 NASCAR Cup Series races and the pole for the 1958 Indy 500. Initially a Southern California street racer who received 48 traffic tickets by age 18, Rathmann moved to Chicago after World War II, winning three consecutive Hurricane Hot Rod championships from 1949-1951. He made his Indy 500 debut in 1949 at age 20, pretending to be 24 to violate another age limit and became a star in 1952 when he finished second to the even younger Troy Ruttman in the Indy 500.

From 1954-1956, Rathmann was more successful in stock cars than in open wheel cars, winning one race in both the 1954 and 1955 AAA Stock Car seasons and another in 1956 after USAC replaced AAA as the sanctioning body. After another second-place finish at Indy in 1957, Rathmann won his first race at Milwaukee after it had been recently paved, resulting in a career-best second-place points finish. He then earned international renown by sweeping all three heats of the 1958 500 Race of Two Worlds at Monza, where IndyCar drivers competed against major international stars, including Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn, and Phil Hill.

In 1959, Rathmann won the IndyCar season opener at Daytona, but IndyCar never attempted to race at Daytona again after George Amick was killed on the last lap. Rathmann also finished second at Indy before finally winning in 1960 in what was often cited as the greatest Indy 500 ever. The race featured 29 lead changes, the most until 2012, and Rathmann exchanged the lead with defending champion Rodger Ward 14 times in the last 78 laps. Rathmann eventually came on top as Ward let him pass with three laps left because his tires were worn. However, Rathmann fell off almost immediately afterward.

Rathmann has been overshadowed by his contemporaries because he didn’t survive into the rear-engine era, dirt specialists seemed to be more respected than pavement specialists, and he had a mild-mannered, awshucks public image. That image was something of a facade as in private, he was an inveterate practical joker, once placing an alligator in a fellow driver’s hotel bathtub. After retiring, he opened a Chevrolet-Cadillac dealership in Melbourne, Florida, near Cape Canaveral, where he befriended many astronauts and provided them with heavily-discounted sports cars. It is rumored that the Apollo astronauts placed a decal for his dealership on the lunar rover. Although Rathmann’s skills didn’t line up neatly with ‘50s expectations, it’s hard to argue he wasn’t ahead of his time. Since IndyCar racing would consist almost entirely of superspeedway races in the ‘70s, he probably would’ve had far more success if he’d been born only a decade later.

Open wheel model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 2-2 (2-2 vs. George Amick)

Year-by-year: 1949: C-, 1950: C-, 1951: C-, 1952: C, 1954: C, 1955: C+, 1956: C-, 1957: E-, 1958: C+, 1959: E-, 1960: E

While for many fans, Busch was a love-him-or-hate-him kind of driver, I was never really in either camp. He was certainly an exciting driver to watch. In an era when too many drivers were following the corporate blandness paradigm of Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, Busch was probably a necessary corrective to that. I can get why people compared him to Dale Earnhardt since no other driver after Earnhardt really embraced the villain role as Busch to the same extent with the possible exception of Tony Stewart. The funny thing is that I never really bought into Busch’s supposed villain schtick. Yes, he caused a lot of obnoxious on-track intentional crashes, but he was not exactly alone in that category when considering his contemporaries included drivers like Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, his brother Kurt, Brad Keselowski, and Joey Logano, who were without question equally obnoxious hotheads on-track (or sometimes worse). I thought a lot of the hate Busch got was over the top because I really didn’t see how he stood out head-and-shoulders above any of those other drivers in that regard. On the other hand, that whole era of NASCAR Busch dominated in the 2010s grew very tiring as it seemed like all the Gen X and early millennial drivers were either bland corporate spokesmen or raging egotists with nothing in between (I guess part of the reason Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was so popular is he came closer than anyone else to fitting neither camp). I know boomer racing writers like Robin Miller always used to say things like “hate is good” and it probably is good for ratings, but I find it frustrating that civility has gone the way of the dinosaur simply because it is difficult to monetize. So, while I found myself disgusted by Busch’s antics sometimes, I found myself disgusted by the antics of all those other drivers I listed many times as well and I wound up weirdly defending Busch a lot even when others were hating on him because I still thought the hate he got was disproportionate relative to other drivers who were just as aggressive. And I will admit after he became a father, he mellowed out and became easier to like.

One thing I did admire about Busch was his willingness to acknowledge his own flaws to a greater extent than I saw from most other drivers. As opposed to the stereotypical driver from the ‘90s who would predict they’d win every race in interviews on RPM2Night even if they consistently ran 20th, Busch was deeply open about his weaknesses in a way I seldom saw from his peers, admitting when he thought he sucked and allowing himself to be more vulnerable than many of his peers. As someone who always struggled with my own self-loathing, it was nice to see that wasn’t necessarily a hindrance to having great success. His decision to run so many Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity races and Craftsman/Camping World Truck races mostly just irritated me, as it did when any Cup drivers entered those races. I never thought Busch’s 234 career wins put him on a level with Richard Petty’s 200 Cup Series wins, and I always downplayed any Cup driver’s wins in the other series, whether it was Earnhardt, Mark Martin, Busch, Harvick, whoever. That did kind of make me stop watching the other two series for quite some time, but at least NASCAR mostly legislated the Cup drivers out of the other divisions after that. And admittedly to Busch’s credit, in many of the Nationwide races he won, there were numerous other Cup stars entered, so I will admit probably a lot of those fields were, in fact, deeper than some of the fields Petty competed against on the dirt tracks in the ‘60s.

I suspect Busch has been dealing with a lot of chronic health shit for a very long time. Everything about his sudden decline after 2019 seemed inexplicable to me. David Smith used to always talk about how drivers typically peaked at age 39 and most of the drivers Busch competed against didn’t miss a beat at that age and continued winning. Busch seemed more down on himself in interviews, especially that time when he and Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. crashed in the all-star race and Busch shouted, “I suck just as bad as you!” He had stopped winning in the Cup Series, increasingly stopped leading often, and was making more and more rookie-type mistakes. I think this puts his last few years in a different perspective as I suspect he’s been racing through the pain and silently suffering for a long time, and it gives me a lot more respect for his later seasons than I had at the time. I know that drivers like Earnhardt, Jr. and Kasey Kahne refused to disclose their fairly obvious concussions to the media and they can’t have been the only ones. It seems Busch’s health issues were something scarier and harder to explain than a concussion, so it makes sense that we didn’t hear much about them but I have to believe they were hindering his performance over his last seasons. I pretty much shut every race off at the end, so I never even heard that Busch had gotten injected with a shot at Watkins Glen until after he had died. His interview after his final Craftsman Truck Series win last weekend where he said “you never know when the last one [win] is” now seems creepy and ominous in hindsight, although he definitely wasn’t the first driver I’d heard say that. Even though I wasn’t a fan of his Buschwhacking, which younger fans might think was named after him, I’m glad in retrospect he got that one. And I’m even more pissed at the stupid, stupid ways he lost the 2009 and 2023 Daytona 500s. Above all, I really feel sorry for his kids Brexton and Lennix to lose their father at such a young age.

Since this was the most shocking thing to happen in NASCAR since Earnhardt’s death a quarter century ago, I had to address it. I was going to discuss the Hall of Fame inductions, but it would be wrong to do so here so I guess I’ll do that in the next column. I also didn’t realize when I published the last column that Alexander Rossi had been injured in Monday’s Indy 500 practice because I haven’t been paying much attention to the practice sessions (I’m not sure I even knew there was a Monday practice session, so my registering surprise at Rossi’s front row start was not intended as a sign of disrespect since I published that after his injury). Unfortunately, I ended up falling further behind on my Indy 500 columns due to several IBS attacks and then I didn’t want to publish anything until I had something worthy to say.

Here’s my 1,000 greatest drivers entry on Kyle Busch from 2024. I don’t think these early columns are as good as the ones I’m writing now, so I will definitely have to rewrite this at some point.

Finally, here’s a driver who won an Indy 500 74 years ago whose brother actually competed against Busch in the Craftsman Truck Series, which weirdly brings this full circle.

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I also have a lot going on home. One of my high school classmates found a contractor she knew who was willing to help me drag my mom’s car out of our garage so I could eventually clean it out and hopefully move some clutter from other rooms into it so I can order a deep clean as I intend to do over the next month or something. Now I can donate it to Habitat for Humanity and create more space for Mom to come home. Speaking of that, I finally received the contract for the ramp installation and roof replacement that is necessary for my mom’s discharge from the nursing home. I still need to find a notary for when Mom signs the form and that might take a week, and Mom even signing the form is going to be a struggle since she has lost her vision, probably has cataracts, and doesn’t want surgery. She’s still struggling. A couple days ago when I called her she told me she thought she was on a spaceship, but I want her to come home.

I don’t have much to say about the NASCAR all-star race or Indy 500 qualifying. I did think the format for the NASCAR all-star race was stupid with all the drivers competing together rather than having a qualifying race as before, and I thought that it was way too long for a race that was intended to be a made-for-TV event, but despite all the crashing, it was nowhere ner as bad as I thought it would be. As for Indy, I’m really starting to feel bad for Felix Rosenqvist. Álex Palou is becoming his worst nightmare. He replaces him, he inherits the lead on a pit stop after Rosenqvist had dominated all day at Long Beach, and now he snatches the pole from him after Rosenqvist had dominated qualifying all day. He really deserves more than he’s gotten in his career to date. Hell, I’ve always thought he is better than Marcus Ericsson and yet one of them got to occupy a Ganassi seat much longer and got an Indy 500 and a string of deus ex machina wins out of it while the superior driver gets shat upon again and again and again. The Palou v. David Malukas battle I pretty much figured this month was going to be looks like it’s going to come to fruition, but I must say I was surprised by Conor Daly and Alexander Rossi’s speed. I have thoughts on the NASCAR Hall of Fame too, but that’ll be for tomorrow.

One of my subscribers who unsubscribed to me suggested I should separate my personal content from my racing content and potentially start a second Substack for the former. How do y’all feel about that? Do you have any strong opinions as far as that goes? Let me know in the comments. I realize a lot of you were likely fans of me or my typing or my other writing first and weren’t entirely here for racing content in the first place. The reason I decided I wanted to discuss a wider range of topics is because I want to give myself the opportunity to pivot to something else when I finish this book project, but if people aren’t interested in the personal topics, I can try to pivot away from that.

BILLY ARNOLD……………………….USA

Born: December 16, 1905
Died: November 10, 1976

Best year: 1930
Best drive: 1930 Indianapolis 500

Arguably the most dominant IndyCar driver of the ‘30s, Arnold’s brief but electrifying career was a relatively short blip in a fascinating life’s journey. Despite a rough upbringing in a Chicago ghetto where he served as his family’s sole breadwinner from age ten, he earned a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Illinois, then subsequently embarked on a racing career. After his first win in 1927, he made his Indy 500 debut in 1928, finishing seventh that year and eighth in 1929.

1930 marked a fundamental transition. After former driver and World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he instituted a new formula that outlawed European-style performance racing cars in favor of cars that more closely resembled American passenger cars. He also removed the 33-car limit and mandated a return to riding mechanics. Detractors called this the “Junk Formula”. This new package nonetheless created a major opportunity for younger drivers like Arnold. Although initially unable to find an Indy 500 ride, Arnold unexpectedly served as a last-minute replacement in 1926 AAA champion Harry Hartz’s entry when Hartz decided he was still too hurt to race.

Arnold won the pole, but Louis Meyer passed him on Lap 1 before Arnold repassed Meyer on Lap 3. He led the rest of the race, winning by seven minutes over Shorty Cantlon. Not only did Arnold become the then-youngest 500 winner, his 198 laps led and consecutive laps led will likely never be broken. Arnold then won twice at Altoona en route to the championship. In 1931, he set the fastest qualifying time at Indy but a pole day disqualification relegated him to an 18th place starting position. Nonetheless, he took the lead on Lap 7 and led 155 consecutive laps until a broken axle caused his car to go airborne, ride the wall for 200 feet, and catch fire. Arnold and his riding mechanic Spider Matlock were ejected from the car with Arnold suffering a broken pelvis and Matlock a broken collarbone. His injuries caused him to miss the rest of the season. In 1932, he took the lead on the second lap and had nearly lapped the field when he crashed while avoiding another car. Coincidentally, this time Arnold had a cracked collarbone and Matlock a broken pelvis. Arnold’s wife made him retire after that. Later, he received a Ph.D. from MIAT College of Technology, served as Chief of Maintenance for the U.S. 8th Air Force in World War II, and was an early water-skiing pioneer.

Like many pre-World War II racing stars, Arnold was a venerable polymath with innumerable unrelated successes. While his driving career marked a relatively short portion of a rich life, his numbers remain astonishing. Despite starting only five Indy 500s, he ranks 13th in laps led. He certainly benefited from extremely weak ‘30s fields but he still had to race the best of who was left, and I think his dominance was extreme enough to compensate for the lack of competition.

Year-by-year: 1928: C+, 1929: C+, 1930: 2, 1931: E-, 1932: C+

BILL CUMMINGS…………………….USA

Born: November 11, 1906
Died: February 8, 1939

Best year: 1933
Best drive: 1930 AAA Championship Car Race #1 at Langhorne Speedway

Indianapolis’s first native son to become a major IndyCar star, Cummings was exposed to auto racing from his early childhood as he was born two miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway where his father worked for the Marmon company for whom Ray Harroun won the first Indy 500. After serving as a messenger boy and taxi driver, he began racing motorcycles at age 16 before switching to cars a few years later, where he became a regional dirt track star by 1929.

Cummings next shocked the racing world with a start-to-finish win on his IndyCar debut in the 1930 season opener at Langhorne, where he eventually became the first driver to win at the notoriously dangerous track four times. After bookending the season with a win at the Syracuse Mile, he garnered the nickname “Wild Bill” the following winter while racing on several dangerous high-speed California ovals. Immediately after the 1932 Indy 500, Cummings forged a relationship with car owner/sponsor Mike Boyle, for whom he drove for the rest of his career. In his first eleven starts for Boyle, he won eight poles. This stretch also contained a streak where he won four of five races. In the 1933 season alone, he won all three poles and earned flag-to-flag wins at Detroit and Syracuse despite a mechanical failure at Indy.

In 1934, the AAA mandated a limit of 45 gallons of fuel for the Indy 500, which resulted in teams developing radically low-displacement engines to save fuel. Cummings’s win marked not only the first for a four-cylinder engine since 1920 after eight-cylinder engines had dominated the intervening years, but also the then-closest margin of victory of 27 seconds over Mauri Rose. Rose attempted to protest by arguing that Cummings had gained three quarters of a lap when the cars were supposed to be slowed down but was rebuffed. However, that would be Cummings’s last win and he fell off significantly afterward. Sadly, during the 1939 offseason while driving his street car, Cummings penetrated a guardrail and fell 50 feet into Lick Creek. Although a couple bystanders found him and took him to the hospital unconscious, he never regained consciousness and died two days later.

In addition to his driving successes, Cummings became a pillar of the Indianapolis community when he established a bar called the “Lucky Seven” after his winning car number and was also noteworthy in smuggling the era’s greatest black driver Charlie Wiggins as an engineer for his winning Indy 500 entry when African-Americans were not allowed to enter the Speedway, pretending he was his janitor. Cummings’s win paved the way for a series of winning low-cost, high-efficiency engines that helped IndyCar racing survive the Great Depression, and Boyle’s success continued with Cummings’s replacement Wilbur Shaw, a three-time Indy 500 winner and fellow Indianapolis native who became vastly more iconic but was generally rated lower when both were alive. Cummings’s heyday might have been brief in an uncompetitive era, but his peak dominance was more explosive than most.

Year-by-year: 1929: C+, 1930: E, 1931: C+, 1932: C+, 1933: 3, 1934: E, 1935: E-, 1937: C+

BILL HOLLAND………………………USA

Born: December 18, 1907
Died: May 20, 1984

Best year: 1946
Best drive: 1947 Indianapolis 500 (yes, I picked the one he didn’t win)

One of the most successful sprint car drivers in the World War II era and IndyCar drivers immediately afterward, Holland came from a sports background as his father Willard Holland had been a Major League Baseball player for the original Baltimore Orioles in 1889. Bill Holland had a different athletic background, initially starting out as an ice skater, where he tried out for the 1932 Winter Olympics before switching to sprint cars (then called big cars) and midgets in 1937. Holland emerged as a major star when he narrowly lost the 1940 AAA Eastern Big Car championship to Joie Chitwood. After winning the 1941 title, World War II interrupted his career.

When racing resumed, the AAA inexplicably added all 71 big car races to the 1946 IndyCar schedule alongside the six full-length championship races. Despite entering no championship races, Holland finished fourth in the championship and won 17 times. He finally made his championship car debut at the 1947 Indy 500 as a last-minute replacement for Tony Bettenhausen, who gave up the coveted Lou Moore ride to strike for more pay. Holland immediately impressed with 143 laps led. While leading his teammate Mauri Rose in a presumptive 1-2 finish, Moore displayed a pit board reading “EZY” to convince both drivers to slow down. Holland agreed but Rose passed him and won. Holland waved Rose past, erroneously thinking Rose was a lap down. He won the next two races at Milwaukee and Langhorne for car owner Fred Peters before reuniting with Moore despite the ignominy in 1948, where he lost another 1-2 finish to Rose, this time legitimately.

In 1949, Moore again issued the “EZY” board while Holland led Rose. Holland again obeyed it while Rose again violated it, but this time, Rose’s magneto failed with eight laps left and Moore fired Rose for disobeying orders. After another second-place finish in 1950, the AAA suspended Holland for a year for competing in a five-lap match race in Opa-locka, Florida against future NASCAR winner Bobby Johns; they added another year when he complained in the media. His career never recovered. After retiring, he and his wife managed skating rinks in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Although Holland is primarily known for his Indy 500 starts these days, I am most impressed by his sprint car career. He still ranks fifth with 64 AAA/USAC sprint car wins, only one behind Rex Mays. Even more impressively, he achieved this despite not seriously racing until his thirties and the World War II hiatus. While his IndyCar appearances outside Indianapolis were often hit-or-miss, no one will likely ever earn top twos in their first four Indy 500 starts again. Although his career was probably already winding down, his suspension marked one of the pettiest political decisions in motorsports history in an era when all American sanctioning bodies were trying to keep their drivers under control. Holland’s decision to rebuff that may have ruined his career, but proved inspirational to later generations of drivers who wanted to race anything anytime.

Open wheel model: #272 of 931 (.056)

Teammate head-to-heads: 3-2 (2-0 vs. George Connor, 0-2 vs. Mauri Rose, 1-0 vs. Lee Wallard)

Year-by-year: 1938: C+, 1939: C+, 1940: E-, 1941: E-, 1946: 3, 1947: 4, 1948: C+, 1949: E, 1950: C+

Well, some big stuff’s happening in my real life as it looks like the guy at Onondaga County Community Development has finally found a contractor to install a ramp and repair the roof so hopefully Mom will be able to come home soon. I just need to get it notarized and signed, and I figure that will take another couple weeks of phone tag before the construction will begin. Also, it looks like I’ve finally found someone to extricate our car, which hasn’t been running for six years, from the garage so I can donate it to Habitat for Humanity as planned. The main reason I want to do this is so I can move a lot of things sitting on the floor in other rooms into the garage both so I can create more space for Mom to navigate if/when she comes home and also so I can finally have a deep clean done after my mom’s hoarding. Looks good on both of those.

RENÉ THOMAS………………….FRANCE

Born: March 7, 1886
Died: September 23, 1975

Best year: 1914
Best drive: 1914 Indianapolis 500

In the wake of Jules Goux’s dominant Indy 500 win in 1913, a cavalcade of Europeans invaded the Indianapolis Motor Speedway thirsting for glory the next year. Thomas became the second straight Frenchman to win the Indy 500 as a rookie. A pioneer in both motorsports and aviation, he was involved in the world’s first mid-air collision when Thomas’s Antoinette monoplane fell onto Bertram Dickson’s Farman biplane in 1910. Miraculously, both pilots survived but Dickson never entirely recovered from his injuries and died three years later. After starting out racing motorcycles, Thomas switched to cars in 1906, primarily racing Delages. He won Delage’s first race at the Course de Dieppe in 1908 and his teammates Albert Guyot and Paul Bablot would also occasionally win races across Europe. However, Thomas’s first major win came in a Lion-Peugeot at the 1200 kilometer Coupe d’Ostende Formula Libre race in Belgium in 1912.

In 1914, Thomas reunited with Delage in an Indy 500 dominated by French cars and European drivers. Georges Boillot set the fastest qualifying time, but a different Frenchman Jean Chassagne started first since the grid was determined by a random draw. The race proved to be a battle between the Delages of Thomas and Guyot and the Peugeots of Belgian Arthur Duray, Goux, and Boillot. Boillot suffered a broken frame and failed to finish, but the other Europeans swept the top four with Thomas leading Duray, Guyot, and Goux in a 1-4 finish for French cars, beating Duray by over six minutes and Goux, the defending champion, by thirteen.

While that was the pinnacle of Thomas’s career, he did return to Indy three more times, becoming the first polesitter to average 100 mph in 1919 and finishing second in 1920. He also led the Targa Florio for its first three laps in 1919 before losing the lead to Georges’s brother André Boillot after pitting and crashing on the final lap in a failed attempt to catch him, earned a major voiturette win in Le Mans in 1921 and became the first Indy 500 winner to set the world land speed record in 1924 at 143.31 mph, although Ernest Eldridge broke his record six days later.

Thomas couldn’t have been less like Goux as while Goux was brash, bombastic, and flamboyant, Thomas was more mild-mannered, more interested in checking the condition of the car after the race than playing a media persona, which actually garnered him some mild criticism from the Indianapolis Star, although according to observers in his pit, he did say “damn” after the race. As a result, he fell into obscurity relative to even most of the other early Indy 500 winners. The reign of French dominance over the Speedway did not last long, as the devastation that ravaged Europe during World War I decimated European industry and the balance of power at Indianapolis would switch back to the United States for the next 50 years.

Year-by-year: 1908: C+, 1912: E, 1914: 2, 1919: E, 1920: E-, 1921: E, 1924: E

GASTON CHEVROLET……………….USA

Born: October 26, 1892
Died: November 25, 1920

Best year: 1919
Best drive: 1920 Indianapolis 500

The younger brother of drivers and eponymous car company co-founders Louis and Arthur, Gaston was not involved with the company but eventually followed his brothers into the cockpit and won the 1920 Indy 500 and season championship. The Chevrolet brothers were ethnically Swiss and Louis and Arthur were born in Switzerland, but the family moved to France before Gaston’s birth. Louis emigrated to the United States in 1901 to work for the French manufacturer de Dion-Bouton and raised enough money to bring his brothers along shortly thereafter. Although Gaston died before obtaining his American citizenship, he always identified as American.

Louis had already sold his shares of Chevrolet to General Motors founder William Durant in 1914 before Gaston’s career began, but the Chevrolet brothers started another car company, Frontenac, in 1916 and this time Gaston was heavily involved. After failing to qualify for the 1916 Indy 500, he emerged as a rising talent during World War I, earning podiums in his first three starts in 1917 for his family’s team. After receiving a one-year ban from the AAA for entering an unsanctioned race, Gaston sporadically entered races in 1919, winning three consecutive races on wooden board tracks at Sheepshead Bay, New York and Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

1920 was the first season when the IndyCar championship started to be held regularly. Chevrolet won at Indianapolis after Ralph DePalma’s car caught fire then stalled in the pits, becoming the first Indy 500 winner to not changing tires. Since all five 1920 races were won by different drivers and the Indy 500 awarded substantially more points, he won the championship despite dying in a crash at the Beverly Hills finale. Chevrolet and Eddie O’Donnell were trying to simultaneously lap Joe Thomas when they collided. O’Donnell’s car flipped while Chevrolet’s car rode the guardrail for 20 feet and took out considerable fencing before landing atop the wreckage underneath which O’Donnell and his riding mechanic Lyall Jolls were pinned. O’Donnell and Jolls were also killed, but Chevrolet’s riding mechanic survived and the race actually continued. Gallingly, AAA officials retroactively decided to count some of the non-championship races towards the 1920 championship years later, handing Tommy Milton the “championship”. IndyCar’s Astor Cup erroneously lists Milton as the champion to this day.

Chevrolet’s brief career marked a perfect turning point between the era of French dominance in the 1910s and the era of American dominance in the 1920s. Although born in France, his Indy 500 win for Frontenac was the first for an American car since 1912. While I don’t think Chevrolet would have ultimately rivaled Milton and Jimmy Murphy, the two dominant drivers of the 1920s and indeed, I ranked both of them higher in 1920, it’s kind of disgusting that IndyCar took away a title from the first posthumous champion and the first Indy 500 winner who died as the defending champion. The Chevrolet name lives on as one of the world’s most storied car companies even if the brothers bearing that name are sadly overlooked.

Year-by-year: 1919: 2, 1920: 3

After going through a combination of the current drivers as well as the near-miss drivers from the A’s and B’s who I had underrated, I am now upgrading all the following to the bubble: Rico Abreu, Jack Aitken, Gunnar Andersson, Facundo Ardusso, Richard Attwood, Julian Bailey, Andreas Bakkerud, Warwick Banks, Jason Bargwanna, Kevin Bartlett, Whit Bazemore, Jack Beckman, Bernard Béguin, Dave Blaney, Maximilian Buhk, Nicky Catsburg, Anton de Pasquale, David Gravel, Ayhancan Güven, Matt Hirschman, Shawn Langdon, Austin Prock, Davide Rigon, Luca Stolz, and Frédéric Vervisch.

This means I now have 731 locks and 324 bubble drivers. That leaves 471 drivers for me to go through, which should include nearly all the likely contenders except for rising active drivers. Most of these drivers in my near miss category probably belong in that category or lower. I tend to find that the drivers I’m overrating most are sports car or rally drivers with marquee race wins but not many overall wins in total, while the drivers I’m underrating the most I think are pre-World War II sprint and midget racing drivers (which was a much more important era for those series, midget racing especially, than the drivers who emerged post-World War II).

Technically, this now means the bubble should be 15 points, not 14, which means a lot of the guys I felt instinctively didn’t really deserve it have now fallen off, but there are others who I will still want to retain. I still have even more years “overextended” obviously as I have more than 200 drivers listed for a lot of years and I’m going to have to reduce them. As a result, I’m not going to shift the bubble up from 14 points until I’ve nailed down the top 200s for those overextended years, and that might take months.

Anyway, here are the current point totals for the active drivers who have points but are not yet deserving of being on the list (although some of them will no doubt make it) through the year 2025, which does not consider anything from this season yet:

13: Maximilian Götz, Hayden Paddon, Jordan Pepper, Ricky Thornton, Jr.
12: Julien Andlauer, Philip Ellis, Ricardo Feller, Jules Gounon, Buddy Kofoid, Jan Kopecký, Matt Payne, Alexander Sims, Kenta Yamashita
11: Chris Buescher, Luca Engstler, Antonio Giovinazzi, Andre Heimgartner, Harry King, Norbert Kiss, Dylan Pereira, Nick Yelloly
10: Laurin Heinrich, Hiroaki Ishiura, Oliver Jarvis, Christian Lundgaard, Kevin Magnussen
9: Klaus Bachler, Alex Bowman, Matteo Cairoli, Ed Carpenter, Louis Delétraz, Alessandro Ghiretti, Maximilian Günther, Kevin Hansen, Liam Lawson, Alex Lynn, Brandon Overton, Bobby Santos III, Lance Stroll, Santiago Urrutia, Charles Weerts
8: Connor de Phillippi, Tom Dillmann, Sam Hafertepe, Jr., Jack Hawksworth, Carson Macedo, Robert Renauer, Mick Schumacher, Adrien Tambay
7: Robert de Haan, Marcus Ericsson, Robby Foley, Erik Jones, Bubba Pollard, Aaron Reutzel, Alex Riberas, Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., Yuki Tsunoda, Bubba Wallace, Ye Yifei
6: Taylor Barnard, Chase Briscoe, Paul-Loup Chatin, Danny Dietrich III, Ferdinand Habsburg, Callum Ilott, Daniel Juncadella, Anthony Macri, Miguel Molina, Ryan Preece, Morris Schuring, Madison Snow, Jaap van Lagen, Rinus VeeKay, Connor Zilisch
5: Kimi Antonelli, Robert Ballou, Dmitry Bragin, Bastian Buus, Santino Ferrucci, Jochen Hahn, Côme Ledogar, David Malukas, Daison Pursley, Matthieu Vaxivière
4: Oliver Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto, Charlie Eastwood, Sacha Fenestraz, Ty Gibbs, Isack Hadjar, Loek Hartog, Corey Heim, Carson Hocevar, Jens Klingmann, Théo Pourchaire, Bryan Sellers, Robin Shute, Robert Shwartzman, Ryan Timms
3: Kai Allen, Justin Allgaier, Eduardo Barrichello, Josh Berry, Austin Cindric, Jaxon Evans, Nirei Fukuzumi, Ross Gunn, Harri Jones, Tadasuke Makino, Martin Ragginger, Joel Sturm, Lukas Sundahl
2: Yazeed Al-Rajhi, Ricky Collard, Austin Dillon, Dennis Hauger, Trent Hindman, Arvid Lindblad, Tim McCreadie, Norman Nato, Kakunoshin Ohta, Freddie Slater, Daniel Suárez, Nicolás Varrone
1: Marcus Armstrong, Ben Barnicoat, Cole Custer, Louis Foster, Michael McDowell, Paul Menard, John Hunter Nemechek, Ma Qing Hua, Christian Rasmussen

I know there are current drivers who I’ve rated who aren’t on the above list, but that’s at least the vast majority of them. (Franco Colapinto and Zane Smith are currently at 0 points although I expect both of those to change soon.) Let me know in my chat feature if there is anyone you think I should have rated higher or lower based solely on performance before 2026 or if there are any current drivers I have not listed there who you would like me to evaluate.

Obviously, including this year changes quite a bit. Barring a generational collapse, Antonelli will certainly be in my top 25, which is an E (10 points) and moves him onto the bubble, and if I list him 4th place or higher that’s at least 20 points and he attains lock status. Heinrich will probably also be an E and will jump to 20 points. Matt Payne will likely crosses the threshold as well. Some of the others at 11-13 stand a shot of making the bubble this year. Malukas and Lundgaard are probably both sitting at E- right now, which is 5 points. That would move Lundgaard to the bubble (15) and Malukas closer to it (10). Gibbs I’d be a little harsher (C+/3 points) because while he’s much improved, he is not the JGR team leader while Malukas and Lundgaard have been at Penske/McLaren. I suspect those two will do a lot better in my open wheel model this year than Gibbs will in my stock car model. Malukas beating Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin and Lundgaard beating Pato O’Ward is worth a hell of a lot more than Gibbs only beating Briscoe (who, as indicated above, doesn’t really excite me historically yet, although he stands a slight chance of making it).

Today’s DePalma entry raises another issue. One thing I’ve become more aware of recently is that there was actually a fair amount of racing going on during the two World Wars. The Indy 500 may have stopped, but aside from that, AAA championship racing continued on as scheduled throughout the US and DePalma actually won eight races in 1918; it’s his winningest year. Most sites like ChampCarStats and Racing Reference will tell you he only won six because apparently those were the only races that were marked as “championship races”. ChampCarStats acknowledges the two non-points wins. I say they were all non-points wins. All respected IndyCar historians acknowledge that there were only two championships (1905 and 1916) prior to the year 1920, so all eight of DePalma’s non-points wins should count as wins to me. This raises the question: if this is the season when he won the most races, should I rate it? I think the answer is no. For the most part, racing shut down globally in 1917 and 1918 and most of these races were scrimmages lasting less than a half hour. While racing entirely shut down globally in 1943 and 1944, one thing I learned relatively recently was that there was a lot more racing than I thought in 1942 and 1945. There were a lot of midget series that ran in 1942 as well as in the US in 1945 after the war ended, and there was some South American racing in 1942 as well. Again, I think there wasn’t enough racing globally for me to feel comfortable rating those years, although once again, I will take that stuff into consideration to a slight degree when calculating drivers’ career dominance or longevity or whatever once I start ranking those categories after I’ve decided on the 1,000.

Obviously, for 1915, 1916, 1940, and 1941 I’m making a different decision though. I realize Europe shut down all its motorsports activities during the two World Wars, but the US had everything running as usual in those years and so did South America prior to World War II. Obviously, those top fives will be shallower since they almost completely exclude European drivers and will mostly be dominated by IndyCar drivers, but Juan Manuel Fangio won both the 1940 and 1941 Turismo Carretera titles and Luigi Villoresi won the 1940 Targa Florio, one of the last races in Europe before the war, so actually both of those seasons have a bit more international flavor than you might expect. I will not be adjusting the points structure for those years, although I obviously won’t be completely filling all my tiers for those years since there simply won’t be enough deserving drivers. Your loss for your imperialist tendencies, Europe.

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But in a way, I was more of a proto-zoomer than a millennial. I know most forms of alcohol and drug consumption (except for marijuana) have declined markedly among Gen Z, but a lot of that is in part due to the fact that people are so addicted to screens and content they forget to live, become more withdrawn, and increasingly disengage from any form of socialization, which I think is the only reason why drug and alcohol consumption has declined, and as I can attest as the prototypical Zoomero Uno, that isn’t a good thing. The War on Drugs kind of succeeded as drug addictions were replaced by possibly even more potent content addictions, but I’m starting to wonder if the latter might have been worse.

Anti-drunk-driving campaigns were also constantly in the news in this period. I remember being a kid and not knowing what “drinking and driving” even meant. When my mom and I visited my Uncle Steve in his Washington, D.C. suburb in 1994, I remember we toured the University of Maryland campus where he worked and a lot of Washington landmarks. At some point during all that, I remember him literally drinking a beer in a glass mug while he was driving, holding the steering wheel in his other hand. And he had muscular dystrophy, no less. I could see with my own four eyes how dangerous drinking and driving was. Apparently, no one had told me that the phrase meant “driving after you drink”. I know it took me way too many years before I learned that “sleeping with” was a euphemism for sex also.

I bring this up because today’s driver Jules Goux literally did just that. According to legend, he ostensibly drank six bottles of wine during his Indy 500 win before the AAA outlawed the practice the next year, although more reputable historians feel this is blown out of proportion and he drank far less. I try to capture what seems to me like the most accurate story of events from the various secondhand sources I read for today’s entry.

I wound up missing the bus by only 20 or 30 seconds. Very much my uncle’s nephew, I was eating my oatmeal for breakfast while I walked to the bus stop and just missed the 10:18 bus, earlier than the 12:08 bus I normally take. While the bus blew by me, I yelled at nearly the top of my lungs, “Bleep you”. Yes, I actually said “Bleep you”, not “Fuck you”. My blend of 1/3 nerd, 1/3 family values guy, and 1/3 trailer trash makes me a total weirdo. I really wanted to go to the men’s support group meeting at Unique Peerspectives today that started at noon after last week’s was canceled due to the Cinco de Mayo party and I skipped the week before. I want to stop venting here as much to people who don’t need to hear it. I ended up actually taking an Uber because I felt I needed to talk to people that badly. But I don’t even feel the $25 I spent was wasted. I actually think it was worth it. I value connection more than I value money and most of the people I used to talk to online seem to want little to do with me anymore… And Internet culture is all about everybody exchanging snarky jokes and I grew tired of that at least a decade ago, maybe two. I want to be earnest, vulnerable, brutally honest, and genuine online and there are few platforms that really reward that. (I guess things like this and Medium are probably the best.) I need to cherish anything that allows me to express myself in those ways, and I think support groups are where it’s at. I’m probably going to go to the neurodivergent support group tomorrow, but I haven’t liked that one as much.

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As for the NASCAR race, I guess Ryan McCafferty said it best:

I mean the only other valid answer is Dan Gurney, but I think SVG probably takes it over Gurney because 1) his cars are weaker, 2) his opposition is stronger, 3) he’s been winning on a bunch of different tracks rather than the same one repeatedly, even if I would say Gurney’s crossovers overall make him better than SVG I think, since SVG has very few wins outside of full-bodied cars, while Gurney being one of only three drivers to win in F1, IndyCar, and Cup along with Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya put him in much more exclusive company.

Even when he was back in traffic, I never really thought SVG wasn’t going to win but even I didn’t think he’d gain 29 seconds in 17 laps. I thought it was going to be something more along the line of the O’Reilly race, where Connor Zilisch hunted down Jesse Love in a very similar way, and I thought SVG was probably going to be a last-lap pass as well, but he really exceeded my expectations there. I was especially impressed he put 20 seconds on Tyler Reddick in that final stint considering Reddick beat him in the previous road course race at COTA and has led the points standings for the entire season, but this is Reddick’s worst road course, and while Reddick has been the best NASCAR driver this season, he’s still had an overrated season as his extreme good luck means his actual performance does not come close to his season record.

For the rest of the month of May, I intend to go through the remaining 21 Indy 500 winners who are locks who I haven’t covered yet. I originally had them listed one a day from May 11 to May 31, but I haven’t been very diligent at keeping to my schedule and there are now nine drivers I intended to do who I’ve skipped. I’m already starting the Harroun post on May 12, and I think I might end up doing multiple posts on some days. First, I’m going to go through the remaining one-time winners who are locks on my list in order of when they won the race, followed by the two-time winners Bill Vukovich and Gordon Johncock in chronological order, the three-time winners Louis Meyer and Mauri Rose in chronological order, and the four-time winners Al Unser and Rick Mears in chronological order. I forgot to include 1919 winner Howdy Wilcox on this list, but I think I’ve been equivocating about whether I considered him a lock or not (he’s been sitting right on my 25-point lock boundary threshold, but so is Kenny Bräck and I’m not debating that one at all).

There are still some other Indy 500 winners I intend to list who I don’t think are locks, so I will get to them later: Ray Keech, Kelly Petillo, Johnnie Parsons, Buddy Lazier, and Takuma Sato. Right now, Lazier is sitting RIGHT on the 14-point bubble threshold so don’t be surprised if I eventually cut him, but I don’t want to. There is enough stuff I admire about him (being 95% responsible for Hemelgarn Racing’s success, the fact that he’s one of the most clutch drivers in IndyCar history with an 8-1 lead change record, winning the Indy 500 with a broken back, the fact that he DID prove he could outduel the CART drivers to some extent at Indy in 2000 when he passed Jimmy Vasser BEFORE he ran out of fuel and in 2005 when he passed Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan late in the race, being the second-youngest Can-Am winner (although admittedly the series was dead by then), leading an IROC race start-to-finish (although admittedly he was gifted the pole because he was last in points and then I think it was just an aero push affair) that I think should be enough to push him over the line in spite of his short longevity and weak competition, but he’s never going to leave the bubble and I’m probably gonna be equivocating about him until the bitter end. I’ll probably end up finding a couple extra points somewhere so he at least beats some of his contemporaries who are also at 14 points and in my opinion less deserving (Scott Goodyear, Maurício Gugelmin, Roberto Moreno, etc…)

And these Indy 500 winners I will not be listing at all: Joe Dawson, Lora L. Corum, Joe Boyer, George Souders, Louis Schneider, Fred Frame (might reconsider this - he’s a borderline no, but he does have a lot of sprint car wins), Floyd Roberts, Floyd Davis, George Robson (close, but one year is not enough), Lee Wallard, Pat Flaherty, Buddy Rice (like Frame, I might reconsider this if I find that he was a major player in his 2009 24 Hours of Daytona win but as I recall he was along for the ride; as it stands, I think it’s like Robson where his one year isn’t enough), and Marcus Ericsson (no way I see him doing enough by the time I’m done to make it - I honestly don’t think he’ll ever make any future top 200 lists again; his win and leading the points for half of the 2022 season already feels like a fever dream).

Here is the schedule. I had it for the 11th-31st, but I’m going to remove the dates to put less pressure on myself.

Ray Harroun (paywalled)
Jules Goux (paywalled)
Ralph DePalma (paywalled)
René Thomas (free)
Gaston Chevrolet (free)
Billy Arnold (free)
Bill Cummings (free)
Bill Holland (free)
Troy Ruttman (paywalled)
Bob Sweikert (free)
Jim Rathmann (free)
Parnelli Jones (paywalled)
Tom Sneva (free)
Kenny Bräck (free)
Alexander Rossi (free)
Bill Vukovich (paywalled)
Gordon Johncock (paywalled)
Louis Meyer (paywalled)
Mauri Rose (paywalled)
Al Unser (paywalled)
Rick Mears (paywalled)

By the way, I originally had Harroun just at E for 1910, but after reading that he supposedly won 45 races that year, I moved him up to #1.

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

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

SAM BIRD………………………………UK

Born: January 9, 1987

Best year: 2015
Best drive: 2024 São Paulo ePrix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLENN SETON………………AUSTRALIA

Born: May 5, 1965

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s schedule:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALESSANDRO CAGNO……………ITALY

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

Best year: 1907
Best drive: 1906 Targa Florio

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

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

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

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

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