However, part of the reason I accepted more drivers than you might think in earlier installments was because I knew who was coming. There are many drivers in the later letters of the alphabet who have substantially weaker cases, and three of them are right here. I thought I was going to drop all four, but I decided Girolami’s case was stronger than I thought it was. I suspect many people if they were doing this would consider Ginther and Goodyear no-brainers, but I think I have strong cases for why they are actually no-brainers in the other direction.

Kuba Giermaziak (15)

Summary: Polish sports car driver with five Porsche Supercup wins, 9 Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie wins, an overall win at the 24 Hours of Zolder, a class win at the Petit Le Mans, and 2 ADAC GT sports car wins.

Case for: Although tons of drivers have wins in NLS (the series formerly known as VLN), Giermaziak’s case is stronger than many other drivers because all nine of his wins were overall wins. I think Porsche Supercup has the largest gap between the talent level of its drivers and their actual recognition, as many of the stars there become the best sports car drivers in the world. While most people wouldn’t include Porsche Supercup towards a touring car model, his touring car rating of .245 is very high.

Case against: Most of the best sports car drivers win regularly for years and he had a lot of starts and stops with no major wins between 2014 and 2022, which is a big red flag since the truly great sports car drivers tend to win in at least one series if not several every single season. Although I do rate Porsche Supercup more than most people, I think I overrate the series in reaction to other people underrating it, and it’s not like he won the title there, and he only won five times in four full-time seasons, going winless twice. A couple of the co-drivers he won with in the NLS like René Rast and Kelvin van der Linde are unquestionably superior and you could make cases that both Luca Engstler and Christian Krognes are as well (although those are more debatable, and I clearly have both of those guys out). He has few solo wins by himself and no overall marquee race wins. He never even won a class win at the Nürburgring 24 Hours despite his many NLS wins, which is very unusual.

Verdict: Drop. Giermaziak is an underrated driver and his career is still ongoing so it’s possible he could work his way back into contention at some point in the future, but I don’t really see a need to keep him on the bubble for the time being, and I’m probably going to push him back into the Pending tier where I have other active drivers who have not yet accrued enough points to make the list.

Richie Ginther (16)

Summary: One of five American drivers to win a Formula One race (not counting the years when the Indy 500 technically counted for the World Championship), Ginther was the first driver to win for Honda in F1 in 1965. He finished in the top ten in the World Championship six consecutive seasons from 1960-1965 including losing out on a tiebreaker for second in 1963. He also earned two class wins in the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1957 and 1959, two SCCA National Championship wins and four more in class, and a USAC Road Racing Championship win and another in class.

Case for: Ginther had a similar trajectory to his mentor Phil Hill, who discovered him as both of them made an unusual transition from SCCA sports car racing to F1. Considering how important Honda would become as an engine manufacturer in F1, Ginther getting their first win was a big deal. Six consecutive top ten points finishes may also be too much to dismiss.

Case against: His career may have been similar to Hill’s in where they were racing, but they were never close in terms of talent. Hill was a World Champion and an SCCA champion as well with multiple overall wins in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 12 Hours of Sebring. Ginther never won a championship in anything and never won a marquee sports car race overall. His one F1 win in Mexico City was impressive as he blasted past front-row starters Jim Clark and Dan Gurney to take the lead at the start and led the rest of the race, but Clark fell out of the top ten quickly due to an engine issue, so he arguably really only outdueled Gurney. The problem is that the rest of Ginther’s F1 career was not great. Ginther’s 14-29 record against his teammates wasn’t either, and he was 4-16 against Graham Hill and 1-7 against Phil Hill, both World Champions, sure, but that’s pretty bad when considering Phil is widely regarded as the worst World Champion in history. He finished fifth in the 1961 points standings for Ferrari when his teammates Hill and Wolfgang von Trips finished first and second (with von Trips even doing so posthumously), then finished eighth in 1962 when his teammate Graham won the championship for BRM. He was not very close to drivers who were not exactly among the most top-tier World Champions, and his rating of -.170 is quite bad (he’s behind Danica even!) Nor am I the only one who feels this way as Ginther ranked 147th on the F1metrics list. Some drivers from this era look a lot better when you include their performances in non-championship races, but not Ginther, who entered 16 non-championship races but didn’t win any of them.

Verdict: Drop. Ginther is somebody I used to inflate just because he was one of the five American F1 winners (not counting Indy 500 winners) along with Hill, Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti, and Peter Revson, but he was nowhere near as good as the other four. The other four all won major national or international championships and he didn’t. He is way lower-rated in my model than any of the others, even though Andretti and Revson curiously both have below-average ratings. There was a time when I was younger when I would sneer at overhyped drivers like Eddie Cheever and say things like, “Well, even Richie Ginther won an F1 race, so what’s Cheever’s excuse?” Having done more research and understood the full context of his career, Ginther is nowhere near as good as Cheever, who himself wasn’t amazing. He really doesn’t have much going for him except that one admittedly impressive win, but I don’t think that’s enough.

Franco Girolami (16)

Summary: Girolami, the younger brother of the more venerable Néstor Girolami, has five touring car titles, the TC2000 championship in 2012, the Top Race title in 2018, the 2022 and 2024 TCR Europe titles, and the 2023 TCR Italy title.

Case for: Franco has more titles than his brother Néstor does and he is obviously still very much relevant today since he is only 34, which means that his career might continue to blossom in the future. His 2018 Top Race title was a big deal as he beat Agustín Canapino, Néstor, and Matías Rossi, who were three of the best Argentine touring car drivers of his era. His 17 wins in this series are the most important part of his career.

Case against: The TC2000 championship that Girolami won was not the same as the TC2000 title I have been discussing in previous entries, as the top-tier TC2000 was briefly renamed Súper TC2000 while the TC2000 series Girolami won was a feeder for the actually prestigious series. TCR Europe and TCR Italy are minor leagues. He has fallen off lately and not done very much the past couple years.

Verdict: Keep. Okay, I was going to say no at first mainly because his .018 touring car model rating is not good, but his best performances came in Top Race, where he had almost no teammate comparisons in his best seasons including 2018. If he was running similarly to drivers like Canapino, Rossi, and his brother (who I have as locks) for about half a decade in Top Race, I probably shouldn’t immediately dismiss him despite the poor touring car rating and despite the fact that he didn’t do as much in the international major leagues.

Scott Goodyear (14)

Summary: Goodyear won the Atlantic East championship in 1986, two CART wins in the Michigan 500 in both 1992 and 1994, three IRL wins in 1999 and 2000, a class win in the 1992 24 Hours of Daytona, and an overall Grand-Am win in 2003. He had two top ten points finishes in CART and four in the IRL, the best being a second-place IRL points finish in his final full-time season in 2000.

Case for: Goodyear was definitely one of the fastest superspeedway drivers of his time for a while, famously thrice nearly winning the Indy 500 in 1992, 1995, and 1997. He won the first race for three different car owners (Walker Racing, Kenny Bernstein’s King Racing, and John Barnes’s Panther Racing). He outdueled his more legendary countryman Paul Tracy to win his first race at Michigan.

Case against: For all that, I have never been really able to take him seriously. The problem is that basically every one of his big accomplishments comes with a “Yeah, but…” Yes, he outdueled Tracy to win at Michigan, but Tracy was a part-time pre-rookie replacement for Rick Mears who retired mid-season and he hadn’t even won a race yet, so he was not at the peak of his powers. Yes, he won at Michigan again in 1994 for a team that never won a race without him, but that was more because almost all the faster drivers including Raul Boesel and Al Unser, Jr. blew engines more than anything he did. Yes, he lost the 1992 Indy 500 in a photo finish to Al Unser, Jr. in what was then the closest finish in history, but Michael Andretti had owned everyone before his mechanical breakdown and Goodyear had actually DNQed but due to a confusing deal with his teammate Mike Groff, Walker swapped out Groff’s qualified entry for Goodyear’s DNQ entry, so he backed into arguably being in that race at all. Yes, he was running away with the 1995 Indy 500 until he passed the pace car on the final restart, but 1) you could argue that’s his fault; 2) his countryman Jacques Villeneuve inherited the win and came back from a two-lap penalty for the same infraction, so he obviously had the more impressive race anyway; 3) Goodyear threw away the race with an overwhelmingly dominant car because his Firestone tires were clearly grossly superior to the Goodyears, as proven by the Firestones’ dominance in 1996 and 1999 and also Parker Johnstone, a driver who had never made an oval start before, setting the all-time CART qualifying record at Michigan later that season. Throwing away a race with an overwhelmingly dominant car is hard to ignore. Then in 1997, he got passed by his teammate Arie Luyendyk for the win. Goodyear’s rating of -.128 is a little better than Ginther’s, but still pretty bad. Granted, that is because I have Luyendyk beating him 8-1 in 1990 when they were teammates and you can argue that’s unfair since Luyendyk had the dominant Chevy engine and Goodyear the inferior Judd. But Luyendyk swept him 2-0 in 1997, a year Goodyear went winless while Luyendyk was the only driver to win twice, so maybe Luyendyk would’ve beaten Goodyear nearly as badly as he did even if he didn’t have an engine advantage. Finally, Goodyear’s late-period IRL stuff is okay as he finished second to Buddy Lazier in the 2000 IRL championship, but that looks pretty bad in hindsight when his replacement, a prepubescent 22-year-old Sam Hornish became the youngest IndyCar champion of all time (to this day) and led the 2001 championship for the entire season, beating Lazier by nearly two full races.

Verdict: Drop. Goodyear is not the worst driver I will be discussing in this bubble group, but he might be the most overrated. Few drivers have built up such a legacy from almost winning a marquee race multiple times (not to mention how he erroneously portrayed himself as a legend in his far too many years in the ABC booth), but even having multiple near-misses in the Indy 500 isn’t all that rare. Roberto Guerrero did it. Vitor Meira did it. Carlos Muñoz did it. Nobody talks about them like they are legends to nearly the same extent. Was Goodyear that much better than them? I don’t think that he was. People just have nostalgia for the early ‘90s because those were the last years before the IndyCar split.

However, what is significantly concerning me is that Mom keeps saying she isn’t hungry. She’s been getting Meals on Wheels every day and keeps refusing them, and now there are about 20 Meals on Wheels stockpiled in the fridge. I’ve been badgering for her to eat and she keeps saying she isn’t hungry and I know she’s lost about 60 pounds since she went into the nursing home. I wonder if she’s no longer able to feel when she needs to eat, much like how she’s losing the sense of feeling when she has to go to the bathroom (I had to clean her up twice today, but I enjoyed doing it honestly). I managed to get her to eat a little pie an hour ago, but I know she needs more than that, and that’s really freaking me out right now.

Usually, I go off for a few hours by myself once she is getting ready to sleep usually around this time (7 PM), but I stay in the room with her consistently throughout the daytime hours almost every day while simultaneously working on this project and/or my other paid work. I would like more in the way of social connections, but it feels like the Unique Peerspectives men’s group I used to be has been enshittified now that they’re going to add more lectures and less freeform conversation (which is what I wanted), and the trivia that I used to go to at Heritage Hill Bar was just shut down a couple weeks ago, so even if I’d wanted to still go, that is now over. Maybe I’ll want to go back to counseling soon since I have so few other people to talk to, but I also don’t know if I can justify leaving Mom at home that long unless I really need to (typically meaning a medical appointment for myself).

I am planning on starting the fourth and final season of LearnedLeague, which starts next week right after the NASCAR Cup Series and WEC finales, but I think I’m going to quit after that. It wasn’t that much fun and was kind of a waste of time. It was obviously much less social than the bar trivia and if I wanted to be as good as I’d want to be, that would require far more study than I desire to partake in. While I made content out of all my past LearnedLeague matches, I don’t think I’m going to do that this time. I know nobody was interested. I did also finally collect the head-to-head teammate comparisons for all the NASCAR seasons this year, so I’m trying to get myself ready to have my full post-season NASCAR statistical table pretty soon after the season ends.

Fred Frame (19)

Summary: An Indy 500 winner from 1932 during the least competitive era in the history of the sport, I would instantly reject Frame based on his IndyCar career, but what makes his case more complicated is that he also won 30 AAA Eastern Big Car wins (even though only 7 of them counted for points) and a non-points AAA Stock Car race as well.

Case for: Frame’s Indy 500 win from 27th was not his only good run there, as he led three Indy 500s for a total of 106 laps (67th-most all time) and finished second in 1931 when he did not win. Because Indy awarded vastly more points than the other races on the schedule, he was a consistently strong points finisher, finishing 6th, 4th, 2nd, and 2nd in the 1928, 1929, 1931, and 1932 IndyCar championships respectively. But really, it all comes down to how seriously I take his sprint car wins.

Case against: Frame’s Indy 500 win was his only major league win and he kind of backed into it after 1930 winner Billy Arnold and eventual 1932 rookie/champion Bob Carey both crashed while leading. Frame entered many IndyCar races besides Indianapolis but never led any of them. There wasn’t even a points championship when Frame was at his most dominant in sprint cars, so how competitive the AAA Eastern Big Car championship was is an open question when even IndyCar competition was terrible. Three of the five winners in both 1931 and 1932 won races only in those seasons, including both Indy 500 winners. The big question is whether the sprint car competition was good enough to override this. Frame received no votes in a poll of the top 25 greatest sprint car drivers of the 20th century. He did not make my 100 greatest IndyCar drivers list, and there are drivers I included on that who won’t make this one. I typically rate him as one of the ten worst Indy 500 winners and find him kind of analogous to Marcus Ericsson, who I will probably not be listing.

Verdict: Drop. I’m gonna make the call. No, Frame’s sprint car competition was not good enough. There were some great drivers who won AAA Eastern Big Car races in the years when he was at his peak (Bill Cummings, Ralph DePalma, Mauri Rose, Gus Schrader, Wilbur Shaw, Billy Winn) but it seems like most of those guys entered sprint car races only occasionally in that period and peaked in other periods or competed in other regions. For the most part, sprint car racing in the early ‘30s was a bunch of flash-in-the-pan drivers just like IndyCar racing and I think that puts me in the no camp. Winn is an exception as he did win (har) 34 sprint car races from 1931-1934 and 46 overall, but that’s a lot more than Frame won, even though Winn died at age 31, younger than Frame was at the start of his career. There’s some nice versatility here, but I think he falls a little short and since he’s technically in the top 1,000 right now after I made the adjustment to the ‘30s seasons, I’m going to have to downgrade some of his seasons to reflect that. But this is definitely a close miss.

Damion Gardner (17)

Summary: Regional sprint car legend who dominated the California Racing Association, a title that has existed in some form since 1946 (the original California Roadster Association shut down and was replaced by the Sprint Car Racing Association in 1994, then that was replaced by the USAC-sanctioned CRA in 2004). When counting all sanctions of this series, Gardner holds the record with ten titles (2005 and then nine consecutively from 2013-2022; the 2020 season was canceled due to COVID). His 95 wins in the series are probably also a record. He has 126 wins listed on The Third Turn.

Case for: What separates Gardner from a lot of other regional dirt legends like the Fornoro brothers in yesterday’s installment is that he had considerably more success at the national level than they did, as he won 16 USAC Sprint races, proving he could win against national-caliber drivers much more often than them. Furthermore, Gardner showed more versatility as he also won the Chili Bowl in 2008, proving he could also win in midgets, while the Fornoros won only in midgets, and I think that California is typically a stronger region for dirt competition in sprints and midgets than the Northeast as well, where dirt modifieds tend to dominate.

Case against: He spent most of his career competing in a regional minor league and he never won the overall USAC Sprint title.

Verdict: Keep. I find the case for much more compelling as he had enough national wins to prove he was more than just a regional legend and his Chili Bowl win proves he was more than just a sprint car driver as well.

Mario Gayraud (17)

Summary: Short-lived Argentine touring car driver who won the 1984 championship and 14 races in the top-tier TC2000 series and four class wins in the lesser Turismo Nacional series.

Case for: What makes him arguably stronger than some Argentine touring car drivers of this era was that he was highly competitive with that generation’s best touring car driver Juan María Traverso. Since Traverso was competing in TC2000 and not the rival Turismo Carretera series at that time, I tend to rate the TC2000 drivers of the ‘80s higher and the TC drivers lower. Gayraud was the first driver to win a TC2000 championship in a Ford and his 14 wins and one title from 1983-1988 aren’t far behind Traverso’s 18 wins and two titles over that time span. He was actually the highest-finishing Ford Taurus driver in points in both 1983 and 1984, two seasons when Traverso was also driving a Ford Taurus.

Case against: Gayraud had a surprisingly short career as he never won anything of relevance after 1990, even though he was still only in his early thirties at the time. He attempted to transition into Turismo Carretera, making 51 starts without managing even a single podium. I definitely prefer the drivers who competed and won in both series to those who specialize in only one. This is still a very niche scene and sometimes I think I overrate it too much.

Verdict: Drop. I kind of think his failed Turismo Carretera pivot in the ‘90s makes his prime in the ‘80s look worse, since it suggests maybe he just had a dominant car for a little while and then when that faded away, so did he. His four consecutive top two points finishes are nice, but he only won more than one race in a TC2000 season three times from 1984-1986 and I kind of think it’s not enough. The Fords couldn’t have been that terrible since Rubén Daray won the following year’s TC2000 title in a Ford in 1985, but only won four races and I’m not even close to listing him.

Felipe Giaffone (19)

Summary: The Giaffones are a generally unheralded but sneakily very successful Brazilian motorsports dynasty. The brothers Affonso Giaffone, Jr. and Zeca Giaffone both won Stock Car Brasil titles for their family team in 1981 and 1987, respectively. Affonso, Jr.’s son (confusingly named Affonso) and Zeca’s son Felipe had more international ambitions, with Affonso briefly competing as a mid-packer in the IRL in 1997, while Felipe went on to be much more successful, finishing 6th and 4th in the IRL standings in 2001 and 2002 and winning at Kentucky 2002, before an injury in 2003 effectively ended his relevant career. He bounced back in Brazil, where he won a record eight titles in Brazilian truck racing, winning the Formula Truck title in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2016, and the Copa Truck title in 2017, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Case for: Giaffone’s IndyCar career is vastly underrated as his open wheel rating of .113 is very solid and he was one of the only drivers to improve in the championship in 2002 as the series got more competitive after Penske defected from CART to the IRL with Hélio Castroneves and Gil de Ferran. He was very strong in the 2002 Indy 500 while driving for Mo Nunn’s IRL operation. Nunn entered his CART driver Tony Kanaan in the race as well and they ran about the same. Giaffone was running second to Castroneves when laps-down Dario Franchitti threw a nasty block on Giaffone to allow Tracy to pass him, which set up the infamous controversial finish. If that hadn’t happened, would Giaffone have been able to pass Castroneves before the race-ending caution came out? It’s worth thinking about. However, his IRL career as strong as it was probably too short for consideration. His truck racing career, where he won 59 races, is clearly his main legacy at this point. I actually decided to include those Brazilian truck racing series in my touring car model. I know most people would argue a truck racing series should not be included in a touring car model, but there was enough crossover between drivers from Stock Car Brasil in that series that I decided to do that. Giaffone’s touring car rating of .265 is outstanding, and the list of drivers who did that well in two different models isn’t that massive.

Case against: Giaffone’s 2003 injury came at the worst possible moment as the established ex-CART drivers and teams were taking over the IRL while a lot of the old-line IRL teams were going out of business now that they were unable to compete with the more well-funded, professional teams. Unlike Sam Hornish, Jr. or Scott Sharp, Giaffone wasn’t quite established enough to survive this transition, and I think a lot of IndyCar fans (erroneously) consider him a bust. After a part-time stint with Dreyer & Reinbold in 2004, he made an improbable comeback with A.J. Foyt in a successful last-minute attempt to bump Arie Luyendyk, Jr. out of the 2005 Indy 500 (continuing the long-standing feud between Foyt and the Luyendyks), which briefly landed him an IRL ride with Foyt in 2006 before he fired him mid-season and he returned to Brazil.

Verdict: Keep. Giaffone never really got his due in the US because he was arguably the last IRL star to emerge before the CART drivers took over the series (it’s between him and Tomas Scheckter, I guess). He probably would’ve had a much longer IndyCar career without the injury or if he’d won the 2002 Indy 500. As Castroneves and Tracy both became insufferably annoying in the latter stages of their careers, a part of me wishes Giaffone had won and kind of thinks he got robbed instead. But washing out of the IRL allowed him to fulfill his true potential back home, so I doubt he regrets it. Even though the most famous part of his career is not his career highlight, he had easily enough longevity, versatility, and good enough ratings in both of my models to make him probably a stronger contender for the list than where I have him here.

Zeca Giaffone (17)

Summary: However, Felipe’s father I’m much less sure about. Zeca did win the 1987 Stock Car Brasil title like I said and 14 races in the series from 1979-1986, but he did not attempt any international crossovers, so I have to judge him by his Brazilian career alone.

Case for: Zeca definitely outlasted his brother Affonso, Jr. in Stock Car Brasil as he won in seven of its first eight seasons from 1979-1986, while Affonso, Jr. only won five races (four in the inaugural 1979 season and one in 1981), which is why I have Zeca on the bubble and Affonso outside of it. He also won the Mil Milhas de Interlagos a record five times.

Case against: On the other hand, Affonso was a lot better than Zeca when they were teammates. Affonso’s touring car rating of .261 is almost on par with his nephew’s .265, while Zeca at .113 is substantially behind both. Affonso beat Zeca 17-8 when they were teammates (9-2 in 1979, 5-1 in 1981, and 3-1 in 1985, although Zeca swept him 4-0 in 1984). This gives Zeca actually a losing record of 19-21 against all his teammates, and none of Zeca’s other teammates won a race or got a top five points finish, so this is definitely worthy of criticism. For all his wins, Zeca’s 1987 championship was actually winless and he never won again after 1986, which makes the title seem pretty hollow.

Verdict: Keep. I think I’m going to reluctantly leave him on for now for the five Mil Milhas wins since that is a prestigious race, but I’ve definitely almost talked myself out of it.

Esteban Ocon was released by Haas F1 after some temper tantrum that nobody has properly explained. It was clear his F1 career was already over since Oliver Bearman utterly destroyed him both last year and this year, but this might have cost him some future ride in another series. I think I’m gonna wait to talk about that one until some more information has been released. I do have Ocon in this bubble group so I’ll certainly have time to talk about it then.

Carson Hocevar’s suspension from the NASCAR season finale at Homestead kind of surprised me because for years, it seemed like NASCAR only suspended drivers when they either intentionally retaliated or right-hooked a competitor into the wall. I had never heard of anyone getting suspended for brake-checking before. I admit I wasn’t watching the Martinsville race that closely, because I found most of it really boring after William Byron finally got to the lead, and I was preoccupied with simultaneously entering all the lead changes from the last 15 races to make sure I have my statistical table so I can do my post-season NASCAR analysis pretty soon after the season ends. Looking back on it, it was certainly intentional and I actually didn’t realize he tried to wreck Austin Cindric five or six times because again, I wasn’t watching closely, but it somehow seemed really minor to me relative to Brian Vickers’s horrific Martinsville race in 2011 or Danica Patrick’s in 2015 or worst of all, Ty Gibbs intentionally wrecking his teammate Brandon Jones to win an Xfinity race in 2022 and knocking him out of the Championship 4. None of them were suspended, and I kind of thought all those things were worse. I guess the difference nowadays is that it’s easier to prove intentionality due to the in-car SMT data, while before that technology existed, NASCAR was forced to give people the benefit of the doubt more often. I guess I for one am glad that we’re no longer in the era of “boys, have at it”.

But I get that it wasn’t just about Martinsville. Hocevar has been a menace for virtually the entire season and I get that he needed someone to take him down a peg. I’m not convinced it will work, since he is a Child of the Social Media Age in an era when whatever causes the most outrage is most likely to go viral. He thrives on maximizing his virality rather than maximizing his pretty great talent, and I find that pretty tiresome. (Andrew Marantz’s takedown of the culture of virality in The New Yorker was my favorite article of the 2010s.) I kind of suspect Hocevar won’t be whipped into shape by being suspended and he’s going to keep doing what he does because it plays well on social media. Maybe eventually he’ll learn. [shrugs]

Dodge is returning to NASCAR effective in 2027 after a fourteen-year absence and boy, is that a wet fart. Their Craftsman Truck Series operation has been rather slow and inept this year (unlike the years leading up to their 2001 reentry into the Cup Series when they’d actually been winning in trucks), the announcement was made only months before the Daytona 500 as opposed to the 2001 announcement which was made in 1999, and they only got one awful team (Kaulig Racing) to join them, who has one driver in A.J. Allmendinger who is past his prime and another in Ty Dillon who was never any good to begin with. Have fun getting outrun by Cody Ware, guys.

Finally, I guess I need to talk about the always-irritating Colton Herta situation. Even though Herta has been appallingly mediocre against drivers five years younger than him in Formula 2 and sits a miserable 19th in the championship of 22 regular drivers (geez, I thought he’d be like 7th or something), Cadillac is still all in about developing him to replace Valtteri Bottas at their F1 team. There was a big hubbub about how apparently the FIA thought that Herta had accrued enough Super Licence points because IndyCar’s website made it look like he had won a tiebreaker for 6th against Felix Rosenqvist when he actually lost it, so when that was cleared up, it was again revealed that he didn’t have enough Super Licence points.

Now the Super Licence points system is stupid and I don’t think it necessarily reflects how much talent each driver has to begin with, particularly in an era of Formula 2 where it doesn’t seem like how you perform has much of anything to do with F1 anymore. In 2024, Kimi Antonelli finished 6th in points in F2 two years before dominating the current F1 season. Antonelli’s teammate Bearman was only 11th but he’s been very good too. Taylor Barnard was 21st in an abortive F2 season that year and is now one of the best Formula E drivers. And then you have Herta and his teammate Ritomo Miyata, who were both great in other series what with Herta winning nine races and being extremely unlucky not to win more and Miyata winning the Super Formula and Super GT titles simultaneously in 2023, looking at times awful.

I get that F2 performances don’t have much of anything to do with F1 performance these days, but still, it feels weird that Cadillac is all in on Herta when Jak Crawford and Ugo Ugochukwu are Americans who have already been more successful on the European ladder, and they would probably be cheaper options as well. Herta at $7 million a year is the most overpaid driver in motorsports, and I guess perhaps Cadillac thinks it is a sunk cost, so no matter how badly he flops in F2, they’ll make sure he gets enough practice sessions for them to get a return on their investment, even though I still think he’d be a downgrade from washed-up Valtteri Bottas.

But all the discourse is so annoying. Yes, it’s really silly that Cadillac is doing this, but you’re also seeing lots of people saying that Herta was never good and that he was just a middling IndyCar driver from fans who should know better whose measure of success is how successful you are in F1, people who genuinely seem to believe that the 15th best F1 driver is better than any other driver in any other series. My open wheel model has disproven this. Herta has obviously proven he can compete against F1 drivers. He thrashed F1 alumni Alexander Rossi and Marcus Ericsson when they were IndyCar teammates and he outperformed Romain Grosjean too. Even after all this, his rating of .213 is still higher than most F1 drivers, even last year’s champion Lando Norris. You can argue that isn’t even spurious considering the last time Herta raced in Europe, Herta and Norris were actually teammates in the 2015 MSA Formula Championship. Yes, Norris outperformed him, winning the title while Herta was third, and winning 7 races to Herta’s 4, but Herta actually won the head-to-head. In other words, they were close. I realize junior series don’t mean everything as Corey LaJoie beat Chase Elliott and Bubba Wallace in the 2012 K&N East Championship and because LaJoie never developed properly, he ended up becoming the butt of jokes. I guess one can argue Herta is something similar, except that he was actually a big star and people seem to not realize it because to far too many younger fans, if you’re not a champion, you’re mid.

So, I find myself irritated by every bit of the Herta discourse all the time. Do I think he deserves the Cadillac ride next year? No. It’s obvious that it’s almost impossible these days to transition from outside F1’s ladder system once you leave it like how Brendon Hartley and Nyck de Vries flopped also even though they proved to be truly great talents elsewhere. I’m sure Sébastien Bourdais would’ve done better if he’d gone to F1 in 2003 immediately after winning the 2002 Formula 3000 title rather than having the Champ Car detour in between. You always have to relearn the tracks and the tires if you are transitioning from another series so you’ll always have a disadvantage over people who are committed to one ladder and one ladder only (especially in an era where it seems like all series do less real world testing than they used to, and much more on simulators), but that doesn’t say a lot for your overall talent in my opinion. So, Herta has definitely sucked this season but he doesn’t suck. And to see all these people on social media calling him a mid-pack IndyCar driver. No, a mid-pack IndyCar driver is like Marcus Armstrong. Herta is probably the fourth-best IndyCar driver of the 2020s after Alex Palou, Pato O’Ward, and Josef Newgarden (I think I’d take him over Scott McLaughlin, but you could argue Kyle Kirkwood’s jumped him now). That’s far from mid-pack. It’s just that it seems to be impossible to climb the European ladder again once you leave it for any reason. It says nothing about Herta’s talent. I still don’t want him getting the Cadillac ride though, not least because Europeans’ schadenfreude about watching Americans fail gets really tiresome, even though I understand where it comes from.

Normally, I do five drivers but tonight I did six because I think it would be stupid for me to split the Fornoros and not do them on the same day since their careers are so intertwined and it’s impossible to talk about them separately. If I’d only done five drivers today, that also would have meant I’d have to split the two Giaffones I will be discussing tomorrow, and I don’t wanna do that either. So, I think it’s gonna be 6 today, 5 tomorrow, and 4 on Friday. And you won’t have to worry about me doing any TV reviews you don’t want for quite a while!

Ed Flemke (19)

Summary: Minor-league NASCAR driver from the ‘60s and ‘70s with 118 verified Modified wins and back-to-back second-place points finishes in 1961 and 1962 along with 9 Late Model Sportsman wins.

Case for: He has more verified wins than six-time Modified champion Jerry Cook’s 95 or seven-time Modified/two-time Busch North champion Mike Stefanik’s 88. Including races in other series, the difference is even more stark, with Flemke at 218 wins on The Third Turn to Cook’s 135 and Stefanik’s 110. He had more verified wins in 1961 (16) than either Bobby Allison (15) or Ray Hendrick (10). Winning in both Modified and Late Model Sportsman races increases his case.

Case against: Flemke’s two second-place points finishes in the Modifieds were pretty distant seconds since he lost to Johnny Roberts in 1961 by a margin of 5752-4234 and Eddie Crouse in 1962 5044-3972, but I suspect that is more because he entered fewer races than because the performance wasn’t there, as his 16 verified wins in 1961 tied Roberts and his 21 verified wins in 1962 were more than double Crouse’s 10. Although these win totals were massive, there were 467 total races held in 1961 and 379 in 1962, so I believe Cook and Stefanik certainly had higher winning percentages amongst the races held.

Verdict: Keep. I’ve been all over the place with these grassroots modified drivers as I believe at various points I’ve had Flemke both as a lock and then outside the list entirely. He keeps bouncing around and I have no idea what I’m going to do with him, but I wouldn’t be surprised whether I ended up listing him or not, and it might come down to how strong I consider his competition to have been. Definitely not worthy of an immediate elimination, but I’m going to feel weird listing him and not listing Cook.

Pete Folse (18)

Summary: Folse won the IMCA Big Car championship three years in a row from 1959-1961 shortly before big cars were renamed sprint cars driving Hector Honore’s iconic Black Deuce. Honore won seven consecutive IMCA titles, four with Bobby Grim in 1955-1958 and three with Folse after Grim defected from IMCA to embark on an IndyCar career, where he was 1959 Indy 500 Rookie of the Year and won one race.

Case for: Although the sanctioning body IMCA still exists, its historical importance has been widely forgotten now that nearly all its current championships are regional, not national, it was an important national sanctioning body for several decades, spawning several drivers who became major stars. IMCA’s stock car division spawned the likes of Dick Hutcherson, Johnny Beauchamp, and all-time winningest USAC Stock Car driver Don White. I already have all those drivers as locks, but IMCA’s Big Car division was actually regarded more highly at the time, which makes a strong case for Folse. It’s clear USAC sprint cars eventually overtook IMCA in prestige because drivers had to fully commit to USAC to be eligible for the Indy 500, which eventually decimated the championship. But that largely hadn’t happened yet during the run of Folse’s dominance. I looked up who he beat in his IMCA championships. In 1959, Jim Hurtubise finished second in points and Parnelli Jones was fifth, yet Folse scored more points than them combined! Eventual five-time IndyCar winner Jim McElreath (who also became the first driver to win a Silver Crown race) finished in the top ten in points during Folse’s last two title seasons. Okay, that convinces me that the competition was probably strong enough.

Case against: It’s easy to say Folse backed into his dominance because Grim defected from the series to embark on an IndyCar career, and Folse was not quite as dominant as Grim was overall, even though his 31 wins in 1960 were more than Grim ever managed in a season. Furthermore, Grim’s IndyCar career was pretty mediocre even if he did win a race, suggesting that maybe Honore’s dominant chassis inflated both of them. Since Folse was generally regarded as not as strong as Grim and I only barely have Grim as a lock, there’s still a question here.

Verdict: Keep. I was unsure about this one until I did more research, but if he was beating drivers like Jones in 1959, who won three consecutive sprint car titles immediately after he pivoted to USAC in 1960, I think he’s actually a pretty obvious selection. He’s forgotten because IMCA has faded from the limelight and because he never really wanted to compete in the Indy 500, but I’m starting to think maybe he should be a lock.

George Fonder (17)

Summary: A ‘40s and ‘50s midget racer who zigzagged back and forth between the better-known AAA championship (which had an affiliation with the Indy 500) and the then-comparable American Racing Drivers Club (you’ll be hearing more about that series shortly), Fonder won 53 AAA midget races and 24 more in the ARDC. Fonder peaked in 1941 immediately before World War II with a 23-win AAA Eastern Midget championship season.

Case for: Even though Fonder is not in the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame and the Fornoro brothers (see below) are and even though the Fornoros won more races and titles, I think Fonder was better. Midget racing was one of the most popular forms of motorsports in the country in the pre-World War II years in a way it really wasn’t after the war, and the ARDC when Fonder was competing there was almost on par with the AAA, while it had become a much more second-tier league by the time USAC was paramount. Fonder probably would have also won the 1940 AAA Eastern Midget title had he not been injured for six weeks.

Case against: Most of his wins were concentrated into relatively few seasons: 8 in 1940, 25 in 1941, 9 in 1946, and 17 in 1948, while most of his other years were more middling. The fact that he peaked in 1941 right before America went to war suggests that the competition in 1941 might have been rather questionable. Fonder had as many IndyCar DNQs as starts (4 each), and he never finished better than 7th in any of his IndyCar attempts.

Verdict: Keep. I think what’s making me tentatively say yes is that midget racing was very important in the pre-World War II years in a way it never was since. Additionally, his 1941 is one of the winningest midget seasons of all time, but I really need to probably do more research on the competition.

Brittany Force (19)

Summary: Recent NHRA Top Fuel star and daughter of 16-time Funny Car champion John Force with two titles in 2017 and 2022 and 19 career wins. She retired after the 2025 season to raise a family and the big question I have is whether she did enough before she retired.

Case for: Every other NHRA driver with multiple Top Fuel titles I have as a lock except for Scott Kalitta and Bennie Osborn and there is a part of me who wants to list her just to have an opportunity to include more women on the list. She still holds the elapsed time record of 3.623 seconds from 2019 and she set five consecutive speed records as well, holding the all-time speed record of 343.16 mph at the time she retired, although Shawn Langdon broke it this year. As I mentioned in my Mike Edwards entry, I also think I’ve been underrating recent drag racers when I would give drivers who had the same performances higher grades in earlier decades, and that’s not fair. All the Top Fuel drivers with more wins than her except for Langdon I currently have as locks on the list.

Case against: Every other NHRA driver with Multiple Top Fuel titles also has more wins than her except Gary Beck (tied at 19), Kalitta (18), Shirley Muldowney (18), and Osborn (2). I would say Beck and Muldowney were stronger since there were fewer races in a season in that era, and Muldowney was surely a hell of a lot more important as a pioneer. The fact that she retired so soon means that I can’t give her the benefit of the doubt that she’ll work her way up the list like with a lot of more recent drivers. She never won either of the most prestigious races (the Winternationals or the U.S. Nationals), and it’s easy to say that the Force daughters’ careers were inflated due to their dad’s connections, although she was obviously better than her sisters Courtney and Ashley.

Verdict: Keep. I think what makes me say yes is that she retired as the fastest driver, and the seven years she has held the elapsed time record are the longest period in history. It’s easy to dismiss drivers for nepotism and it’s also easy to dismiss modern NHRA Top Fuel drivers ever since the races were reduced from 1/4 mile to 1,000 feet, but I think she probably deserves it.

Drew Fornoro (14)/Nokie Fornoro (14)

Summary: Sons of 1950 American Racing Drivers Club and 1953 NASCAR Midget (did you know NASCAR had a Midget Series? Probably not) champion Nick Fornoro, Drew and Nokie (the latter of whom was actually Nick, Jr.) dominated the regional northeastern midget scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They competed in a variety of regional midget car series, but Drew primarily raced in the Northeastern Midget Association, where he won nine titles (1983, 1985-86, 1988, 1992, 1995-96, 1998-99) and Nokie, like his father, primarily raced in the ARDC, where he won six titles (1982-86 and 1995). All of Drew’s titles came in the NEMA, but Nokie also had titles in other divisions (winning the 1981 NEMA title before any of Drew’s as well as the ATQMRA Midget title in 1988).

Case for: Drew’s nine titles and Nokie’s eight are not necessarily easy to dismiss, nor are their win counts, as Nokie has 118 verified wins to Drew’s 103 according to The Third Turn. Now many sprint and midget races count for multiple tours simultaneously and a lot of races counted towards both the NEMA and ARDC championships. However, these counts are based solely on unique wins, so I’m not double-counting anything here.

Case against: In the years immediately following World War II (like the years when Nick was racing in it), the ARDC was a pretty prestigious midget title and had some great drivers in it, but by the time the younger Fornoros came of age, it was definitely second-fiddle to USAC. Nokie is credited with six USAC Midget wins to Drew’s three, but almost all those wins came in double-counted NEMA and/or ARDC races, and they did not exactly compete against the strongest competition in the Midwest very often. Furthermore, as far as dirt grassroots drivers are concerned, I prefer drivers who win in a bunch of different kinds of cars to people who win only in sprints or only in midgets, etc…

Who was better?: My initial gut instinct was Nokie (mainly because he won a bunch of different titles while Drew won the same one repeatedly), and the more research I did, the clearer it became. Although lots of NEMA and ARDC races do not have complete finishing orders available, based on what we have, Nokie beat Drew 60-46 in NEMA and/or ARDC races where they both competed. Furthermore, Nokie seemed to pave the way for Drew’s success: even though Drew was five years younger than Nokie, Nokie actually won first in 1979 and won the family’s first title in NEMA in 1981 before he left the series and mostly switched to ARDC, allowing Drew to dominate. Furthermore, all three of Drew’s USAC wins came in double-counted NEMA and/or ARDC races, while Nokie actually won the 1985 and 1987 “Night Before the 500”, a much more prestigious race, where he did compete against a lot more of the national drivers.

Verdict: Drop both. Even though I think Nokie was the better driver, I just don’t think the northeastern midget competition in that era was strong enough overall to justify listing either of them, as dominant as they were. I might feel differently if either of them showed versatility and won in a bunch of different cars, but in a world where I’m rejecting Dave Blaney, I don’t think I can justify drivers like this (although admittedly, maybe this is making me reconsider drivers like Blaney).

I’ve been teasing this for a few months and I know almost none of my regular subscribers will care, but after I finished watching Malcolm in the Middle, I decided to watch all of the original run of Murphy Brown. I know everybody was getting tired of my political and cultural takes (even me), so I decided to wait until now before reentering those choppy waters. I guess this was pretty good timing since the congressional midterm elections are only in a couple days.

I grew up watching a vast array of studio audience family sitcoms in the ‘90s and enjoying most of them, but I certainly wasn’t old enough to understand the shows for adults, particularly when you consider that the best seasons of Murphy Brown ran at the earliest before I was even in preschool and at the latest when I was in elementary school. It was also on at 9:00 on a school night so even though I knew about it, I never stayed up that late except on Fridays, when I did watch all the TGIF sitcoms, and often on Saturdays also.

When I was unemployed and failing to launch after graduating from college in the late 2000s, I started watching a bunch of adult sitcoms from the ‘70s to the ‘90s long after anyone cared about them on Netflix DVDs by mail. Murphy Brown was one of them, but only the first season was ever released, both because it didn’t sell and because of the exorbitant costs of the music rights. In the earliest and best seasons, nearly all episodes started with a classic soul song that would often be tied to the plot of the episode. Honestly, I think you could cut out most of those musical cues and it wouldn’t affect the show much if you put generic music instead. I really liked the first season and was interested in watching more, but it just wasn’t possible since despite being one of the most popular and acclaimed sitcoms in its heyday, it never lasted long in syndication and its legacy literally just disappeared as if it had never existed.

What got me into it again was a series of YouTube video essays by José, a Breadtuber who makes hour-long video essays mainly about 1980s-2000s sitcoms and I’ve watched a bunch of them (he’s also the one who got me to finally watch Malcolm in the Middle). I don’t agree with him on everything and I have no interest in his other content, but I do really like his TV reviews. After I watched his Murphy Brown review years ago, I wanted to seek it out and it was syndicated on some obscure cable channel I had for a while before I eventually dropped cable. I enjoyed the first three seasons and I really didn’t understand why it had such a bad reputation now and was mostly just the butt of jokes. I watched a bit of the 2018 revival, but not every episode. I finally found the entire original series on the Internet Archive and hunkered down, watching two episodes most days for month ‘cause I know almost anything on the Internet Archive (particularly video content) can be taken down at any time.

I think the reason I wanted to write about it was that I want to interrogate my nostalgia for the monoculture of my youth. It’s weird to remember a time when people generally respected the news media. 60 Minutes was the most popular show on American television in the ‘90s, and Murphy Brown, about the behind-the-scenes operation of a 60 Minutes-style show was in the top five. I watched the news way more diligently as a kid in the ‘90s than I ever did in my adulthood, and I genuinely felt I was better-informed. I watched Peter Jennings on World News Tonight like clockwork and while I probably venerated that era of journalism more than I should have, the news anchors of that day strove to adopt a stern, serious, sober veneer and they genuinely gave off an air of wanting to inform the public more than wanting to be entertaining (now, local news shows and morning talk shows were another matter). I’m sure if I looked back on it, I was credulously being fed loads of bullshit. But it’s so much harder now to know who on earth to trust when almost everyone wears their biases on their sleeves much more openly (I suppose you could argue that’s a good thing) and nobody seems to take anything seriously whatsoever. I didn’t understand why so many of my peers’ main source of news in college was Jon Stewart. Okay, yes, I did. Because he was openly against the Iraq War at a time when not many people in the media were. But the unfortunate effect of his popularity is that what people seemed to learn from him is not to have integrity on the issues but that the mission of news reporting is to entertain.

It’s kind of baffling now to remember a time when even conservatives respected the mainstream news media. Oh, they were griping about liberal bias in media for decades, don’t get me wrong. But mainstream conservatives believed in civility then in the “family values” era, and a lot of them didn’t like the crude, in-your-face, proto-barstool conservatism that has since taken over the entire conservative movement. Plenty of conservatives (especially conservative women) did not like rude, edgy shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Jerry Springer, who took pride in being offensive. While this was never okay, they actively wanted to censor edgy content like Married with Children… (ironically now remembered as a right-wing show), rap, metal, violent movies and video games. I’m not saying that was ever okay, but I’m still sometimes shocked by the whiplash of growing up in the family values era when conservatives were pearl-clutchers who believed you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and slowly over time watching people take pride in being offensive and seemingly increasingly believing that kindness is for suckers. And although the conservatives made this transition first, many people in my generation of liberals started reflexively acting in the same crude way, albeit with diametrically opposed politics.

Yes, growing up watching people like Peter Jennings probably made me more pompous and pretentious than I would have otherwise, and I know that era had its flaws (I’m sure there was an obvious bias towards neoliberalism as demanded by sponsors and there were hardly any non-white people on network news broadcasts, for instance). But before FOX News started in 1996, it was only really the fringe extreme conservatives who turned to people like Limbaugh at a time when the conservative mainstream as defined by Bob Dole or whoever still believed in civility and that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. At least people were more likely to be reacting to the same narratives and facts, whether they agreed with them or not, whether the reporting was accurate or not (but it was probably less inaccurate than now), and at least the newsmen weren’t trying to be comedians. What I miss and what I long for is an era when adults weren’t expected to be performative. I guess why I really decided I wanted to watch Murphy Brown this year was so I could get my head out of my ass and stop believing this was in any way an idyllic time.

Because the show really isn’t part of contemporary culture anymore and almost all my subscribers are younger than me, I guess I have to explain it. Murphy Brown was a sitcom that ran from 1988 to 1998 and was set at the newsroom of FYI, a fictionalized news show that was like 60 Minutes with each host having one investigative journalism segment a week, except unlike shows like 60 Minutes or 20/20, it was live, so wacky hijinks frequently ensued. Like almost all shows set at radio stations or TV stations, there were a certain set of stereotypical situations that appeared on many shows: someone Murphy is interviewing dies on set, someone holds up the set and hijacks a newscast, the set is destroyed and they have to go on location somewhere else, etc… I’ve seen most of these situations on other shows so you can argue that entire era of television wasn’t very original and I wouldn’t blame you. When you have to fill hundreds of episodes, you’re going to repeat yourself a lot or echo what others have done before you.

It was kind of a send-up of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the same way Family Ties was for All in the Family. Just like how Family Ties inverted All in the Family’s “conservative parents, liberal kids” for the ‘80s and became revered by conservatives who didn’t realize Alex P. Keaton was supposed to be a joke because Michael J. Fox was a good enough actor to sell it, Murphy Brown, like Mary Tyler Moore, was set in a newsroom and spoke to the feminism of the time. Mary Tyler Moore was daring for the ‘70s because her character was one of the first on a mainstream show who never married, but she was also kind of polite, sweet, and saccharine, while Murphy was ruthless, obnoxious, and would do anything to justify getting a story, even if her reporting itself was typically ethical.

It was daring as one of the first times a female character was allowed to be openly obnoxious, just like men had been allowed to be before. Unfortunately, it seems like it might have accidentally been one of the pioneers of girlboss feminism, which I know most of us are tired of now, including me. Murphy Brown emerged in the late ‘80s era that also spawned Married… with Children, Roseanne, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and in an era when family sitcoms were dominating the cultural landscape in the wake of The Cosby Show’s pop cultural dominance, it seemed like a breath of fresh air to have shows where the characters didn’t have to be sweet and saccharine like Full House or whatever. The odd thing now about watching any of these (except Married… with Children, which would still be hated since it took pride in being offensive in a way the others really didn’t) is how tame they are now. Married… with Children and The Simpsons were a little edgier since they were on FOX, which was still an underground network until they landed the NFL in 1994, but back then, shows were still concerned with getting the highest possible overall ratings rather than catering exclusively to a group of affluent 18-45 year old yuppies once advertisers decided catering to specific demographics was preferable to catering to everyone. That meant pretty much all the shows except for HBO (which was very underground) were a bit compromised so as not to alienate normies. Ironically, I think that did grant these shows more power. If you have the eyes of all of America on you, intentionally shocking a part of your audience is arguably more daring than being much edgier but only catering to an audience who caters to that kind of material. I think that’s one of the reasons I do prefer mainstream shows, but the quality still has to be there, and I recognize that in this century, the best writers haven’t wanted to make anything like studio audience sitcoms, believing that they are “telling you when to laugh”. Yeah, I guess so. It’s just a different genre that has kind of gone out of fashion, but I don’t really think on principle either multi-camera or single-camera shows are intrinsically better than the other when they are different forms attempting to do different things. Obviously, how well it is made still matters.

The other big trend in the ‘80s was a reaction to the extremely male decade of pop culture. Besides family sitcoms, extremely male action shows also dominated that decade’s era of television, and there were extremely few shows where women held a lead role. The Golden Girls started to change this and then Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne followed in its wake. I already liked The Golden Girls, Roseanne (no, I do not and have never endorsed her as a person but the show is good), and Roseanne ripoff Grace Under Fire (which is Chuck Lorre’s best show and it’s a pity no one remembers that when it was so much better than The Big Bang Theory, which I didn’t even hate as much as I think I should have, but still). And I liked all the Murphy Brown I’d seen, but Designing Women is terrible. I thought it was worth a shot to go through the whole thing once.

Murphy, played by Candice Bergen, is a recovering alcoholic who just returned from a trip in rehab and renounced alcohol and cigarettes. You want to know how silly the family values era was? CBS thought having her be a recovering alcoholic would be too edgy for mainstream viewers and tried to veto that storyline and they were also pushing for sex symbol Heather Locklear to play Murphy as well; I really don’t think she would have been able to play the grizzled veteran that Bergen successfully does. The only reason those things didn’t happen was because there was a writer’s strike in 1988 when the show started so CBS network executives weren’t able to edit the pilot and they had to let it through. It would’ve been a much worse show if they didn’t. I really don’t see how a recovering alcoholic didn’t fit the time. Around the same time, lots of boomer rockers like Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan were giving up on drugs and writing about their recoveries (sure, I’m not denying that the first three of those were assholes as people), so I don’t see why the execs were worried at all.

The other main characters were Jim Dial, a pompous veteran anchor who is strait-laced, stiff, and a little boring but widely respected despite taking himself comedically seriously, Corky Sherwood, an evangelical Christian Miss America winner who starts the series as a vapid airhead (in the pilot, she nearly mispronounces “Shiite”), but she grows much smarter as the series progresses without losing her sweetness), Frank Fontana, an ostensibly “sensitive” New Age guy who goes to therapy and uses his faux-sensitivity as a means of unsuccessfully picking up women (he’s the most boring character, but the show recognizes this and constantly jokes about how none of the show’s fans even recognize him), the producer Miles Silverberg (a 25-year-old recent Harvard graduate and extremely caricatured Woody Allen-style Jewish nebbish nerd, but thankfully without the sexual improprieties; although a cliche, at least he’s more realistic than Steve Urkel and I actually think Grant Shaud can nearly match Jaleel White’s charisma), the bartender Phil (whose eponymous bar is the characters’ popular hangout; clearly this is just riding the popularity of Cheers, but it works), and Eldin (Murphy’s housepainter and later nanny who occupies her house doing odd jobs for seven years and never leaves).

At the start of the series, Miles had just taken over as producer and hired Corky to fill in for Murphy while she was at rehab. But, because the audience loved Corky and the ratings actually went up instead of down, she was hired as a permanent anchor, which horrified the other anchors who believed her to be completely incompetent. She does actually become a pretty skilled anchor by the end of the series herself, but for years, they refuse to give her the hard stories and just assign her celebrity profiles and other soft stories, believing she can’t handle anything else.

One of my first reflections while watching is how similar it was to The West Wing a decade later. Eerily similar, in fact, even down to which seasons are good and which seasons are bad. Besides the shared liberal boomer politics, both Murphy Brown’s creator Diane English and The West Wing’s creator Aaron Sorkin helmed their respective shows for four very good seasons before leaving the new writers and showrunners in a messy cliffhanger after they left in Season 4. Both shows were consistently strong when their original creators were running them with a slight dip in Season 3, and then they were all over the place but usually pretty mediocre after English and Sorkin left. Both shows were favorites of the Emmy Awards, which have always had a bias towards any shows that pander to upper-crust professionals and against the hoi polloi or mass audience shows (Murphy Brown, Frasier, and The West Wing all deserved some Emmys, for sure, but not as many as they did win and they didn’t deserve to be overwhelming awards juggernauts like they were, especially when The Simpsons and Roseanne were never nominated for Best Comedy Series even once, despite both of them being better than Murphy Brown). And I can have no doubt that Murphy Brown was an important influence on everything Sorkin ever did as I can’t imagine The Newsroom existing without it (which I mildly liked, but it is a worse show).

The West Wing tends to be better respected because it comes out of the “prestige drama” era of television, a genre critics love, while Murphy Brown was a studio audience sitcom, which critics increasingly grew to hate. Furthermore, TV critics have often preferred shows that were run by one auteur rather than shows that had a team of writers splitting episodes. Certainly The West Wing had greater innovations in terms of its cinematic production style and nobody on Murphy Brown could write a pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquy like Aaron Sorkin. On the other hand, sometimes having a team of collaborators can be better because when you are full of shit (as Sorkin often was) you can have somebody calling you out on it. Murphy Brown definitely writes its male characters better than Sorkin ever wrote its female characters, and the gender dynamics seem to be more balanced, and that’s a big plus.

I know lots of people my age grew to hate The West Wing particularly for its neoliberal politics, which younger people grew to loathe. I still like it. The problem is that people took it as an aspiration for “what politics should be like”, when it is very clearly not. If you simply view The West Wing as a symbol of how Democrats act, it’s fine. If you consider the characters to be heroes to model your career after (as a lot of Obama staffers did - cringe), it’s a big problem. Murphy Brown in the long run didn’t have any long-term influence, so it’s hard to find its worst moments as cringeworthy now, I guess. I honestly think the writing quality between the two shows is pretty close, and the only reasons The West Wing is conventionally rated higher now are its slicker production values, Sorkin’s stylized dialogue, and his auteur status. But stylized dialogue is not necessarily better when it advocates for bad things, as Sorkin often did. If you forced me to pick, I would probably say The West Wing is better, but it’s really close and they have a lot in common.

The first four seasons of Murphy Brown are consistently strong, although the show did seem to be beginning to tread water at the end of season 3 (particularly in a dire two-parter fantasy episode where Murphy and Frank imagine themselves dead), but the show revives itself with its most famous storyline when Murphy becomes an unwed mother. In the ‘60s, she had briefly married the radical activist Jake Lowenstein, who impregnated her at the end of season 3, but he reveals in season 4 that he’s on the run from the feds and she will have to raise the baby alone. While babies on sitcoms are definitely viewed as desperation moves and this certainly was, it nonetheless worked. If you know anything about the show, it’s probably this. Somehow in the ‘90s, this actually became a national scandal in 1992 as Dan Quayle gave a speech on the L.A. riots a couple weeks earlier where he claimed, “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” The subtext is that he was blaming the L.A. riots on crime in the black community while exonerating the cops who were committing police brutality and implying that black culture was depraved because of single-family households. Around the same time, George Bush infamously said that American families should be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. They both became the butt of jokes by taking on TV characters, which was probably a minor factor that swung the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.

It was beyond stupid for Quayle to invoke Murphy’s pregnancy in a discussion of inner-city riots, not only because it was racist but also because the show itself didn’t really appeal to any of the people on either side of the riots. However, in one teensy way, I feel like Bush and Quayle were right. I don’t think single-parent households are intrinsically a problem. My parents divorced when I was six, so I don’t think I could argue that. But the real problem here is that the more people you have in your life, the better. It seems to me like the most functional people are the people who have rich social lives and are well-integrated into their real world communities. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a single parent household if you still have other mentors in your life whether it’s relatives, teachers, friends, friends of parents, classmates, people you know from church or extracurricular activities, etc… The decline in community life outside the home is why single-parent households are often brutal. For a lot of kids, the only mentors they have are their parents, and they often aren’t great mentors. So, if you only have one mentor in your life instead of two, that can be a real problem. But if you only have one parent but you are well-integrated in a functional community (like an ethnic enclave for example), you’ll likely have more people who give a shit about you and have a better chance to develop into a functional person. And as people increasingly withdraw from community life mostly to stare at their screens, this is becoming more and more of a problem as people have fewer and fewer mentors at all, and it should come as no surprise that poor mental health has skyrocketed. As for Bush, I never watched The Waltons but from what I understand, it’s about the solidarity of a family suffering from the destitution of The Great Depression? I agree solidarity is a great thing! Pity that that had to come out of Bush’s mouth. And I don’t think people actually viewed The Simpsons as aspirational. They just thought it was funny. I’ll admit that another problem emerging in this era was people developing parasocial relationships with TV characters. I don’t think that was as bad as people doing so for pop music stars or streamers today, but it was still pretty bad.

What Bush and Quayle failed to realize (pretended to fail to realize?) was that the neoliberal politics they endorsed severed the old community bonds that led to strong family relationships. Like maybe I read too much Christopher Lasch and Robert Putnam, but it seems to me that the moment when community life in the United States began to decline and people began to withdraw from interacting with their neighbors in real life was around 1970, basically the same time neoliberalism began to be mainstreamed. When Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister, she famously said, “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families”, but only the first clause of that was really remembered. Just like Reagan, Thatcher would’ve said she wasn’t anti-family but this way of thinking leads directly to the “look out for #1” ethos, which eventually also degrades family bonds. All the conservatives of this era venerated the nuclear family, but that was also a problem. Sure, it’s better for a kid to have two people advocating on their behalf than one (assuming they are good parents), but it’s better still for people to have a whole embedded community around them, and the neoclassical economics they endorsed eroded that community even faster.

So, predictably, Murphy Brown got the last laugh and the new writers who took over the show after English left started Season 5 with a two-parter mocking Quayle titled “You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato”, because Quayle had infamously “corrected” a child’s correct spelling of the word potato. In its most Sorkinian moment, Murphy Brown got more full of itself than it ever had before by sentimentally displaying a variety of nontraditional families to get back at Quayle, then the characters threw potatoes at his house at the end of the episode. He became one of the biggest laughingstocks in political history at that point, but it’s hard to care now. The Republicans to their detriment have been pandering to people who took pride in their stupidity for decades, starting with Reagan and continuing with Quayle, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Trump, while the Democrats to their detriment have been pandering to upper-crust professionals who went to college and sneering at everyone else. Quayle lost and he ended up being rendered basically powerless, while the others had more of a lasting effect. The other problem is that in retrospect, I kind of think Bill Clinton was worse than Bush could ever have dreamed of being.

My main criticism of Murphy Brown is actually that it isn’t political enough. Most people making fun of the series or talking about why people don’t watch it anymore say it’s about the topical humor. When Family Guy made fun of it, that show implied that all of Murphy Brown’s punchlines were funny names of politicians (“blah blah blah John Sununu”). Yeah, that’s a lie. It figures an inferior show like Family Guy that operates only in references would act like that’s what all other sitcoms do. No, most of Murphy Brown’s humor is character-based with the personalities of the characters bouncing off each other like any good sitcom. Yes, there are references to politicians and various TV journalists often, but even if the show does joke about them, I think the jokes are still mostly accessible to people who don’t know them, just like the comic strip Bloom County is (which people criticize for the same reason). Perhaps part of it is that I still remember many of these politicians since I did watch the news more diligently in the ‘90s than I did now. The only time I would say Murphy Brown actually creeps up on this is when they are referencing pop culture figures who were important at the time but are now forgotten. I’m talking about people like fashion designers, soap opera stars, supermodels, and the like. A lot of people like that were extremely famous in the TV monoculture era but nobody thinks or talks about them anymore while people still are far more likely to talk about politicians or pop musicians from the past. So, I had some problems with those kind of references but not really the political references, and for the most part, they still only referenced either famous politicians or made politicians up.

After the Quayle episodes, the show really rested on its laurels and got complacent for most of the rest of its run. I’m serious that more often than not the show ignored politics afterward and it was definitely to its detriment. It’s obvious that the new showrunners who took over from English didn’t have as much of an interest in politics. That might have been okay if they seriously investigated the life of a working mother, which would have at least broken new ground for television. Nope! The show never used Murphy’s son Avery properly from seasons 5 to 9 and he practically became window-dressing and was almost forgotten. They tried to write episodes addressing motherhood, and they were nearly all clunkers (how the hell did season 5 actually get an Emmy nomination?) The new writers didn’t want to write a political show anymore, but they weren’t good at writing a family sitcom either; the attempts at that were sub-TGIF level, and the writers quickly knew it and abandoned it and practically almost forgot she’d even had a kid, which in retrospect, rendered the whole thing toothless and made it completely irrelevant.

So instead, you get lots of slight stories about the characters’ lives and their dating relationships, and quite frankly, none of the characters’ dates or outside friendships are particularly interesting. There are more and more shows about literally nothing. Murphy accidentally steals President Clinton’s cat! Jim buys a piano bar but, har har, wouldn’t you know it’s secretly a gay bar! An entire episode set at a poker match on Phil the bartender’s boat! Barry Manilow shows up to serenade Murphy’s son! Murphy steals the mascot of a burger franchise she once frequented right before it goes out of business! It was at this point when I finally understood why the series has a bad reputation now. The problem with Murphy Brown was rarely the politics, which would be mostly tepid and uncontroversial today because again, they were concerned about not alienating their entire national-size audience. The problem was the increasing number of shows about nothing in later years. I don’t even think most of those are godawful (except the gay bar one), but they were shows about nothing. It’s like after a year of failing to be a family sitcom, they were instead trying to be Seinfeld and failed at that as well. As a general rule, if it’s a Murphy Brown episode and there are any scenes not on the set of FYI, in the newsroom, in Murphy’s house, or in Phil’s bar, it’s gonna be pretty bad.

And it’s frustrating because the show could’ve been truly great if it had the balls to go after Clinton like it went after Bush and Quayle, but it didn’t have the heart. The show “went to brunch” as we would now say and laid off Clinton, even though I think in retrospect Clinton was clearly worse and I did not expect to be saying that 30 years ago. You think about the best thing Bush ever did and I would say it was the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was a major breakthrough for a previously-underrepresented minority. Clinton’s best accomplishment is… the Family Medical Leave Act I guess, which was also an important followup in terms of disability rights, but if that’s the best thing he accomplished in eight years as President, WOW. The worst thing Bush did was probably the extremely racist Willie Horton campaign ads he used to get elected, but honestly, I think Clinton topped that numerous times (NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform, deregulating the banks and the media). And Clinton’s philandering and sexual peccadilloes were also very bad and they might not even make his top five. Not to mention his Epstein connections. Because Bush had a Democratic Congress, they kind of owned him and he couldn’t get anything done, whereas Clinton got way more bad legislation passed and gave the Republicans whatever they wanted. But people didn’t realize it for quite some time because he was “cooler” and because the economy was strong in the ‘90s (which had nothing to do with him: it primarily had to do with investment into the US surging after the Soviet Union’s collapse and people believing that the Internet economy was going to be more lucrative than it actually ended up being - the dot-com bubble).

For all I said, there are still two noteworthy reverse shark jumps, which again parallels The West Wing (which likewise had a terrible Season 5 before having a couple good seasons after that). I do generally like Season 6, where they finally give up on their awkward family episodes and engage in serious political topics again. I think the two best episodes of the series are from this season, especially since the characters show more growth and self-reflection than I saw in previous seasons. After that, it’s mostly back to wacky episodes about nothing, including an increasing focus on the network machinations of network boss Stan Lansing (played by film director and Happy Days creator Garry Marshall) and his simpering, sniveling, scheming nephew played by Paul Reubens (interestingly after the scandal). That stuff isn’t terrible, but I still would’ve rather seen them go after Clinton, and I have to say that disappointed me.

The second reverse shark jump came in the last season when English returned and revamped the show. Miles had left after season 8 and was replaced as producer by Lily Tomlin’s Kay (who was not as good as Miles, but she was still the only interesting thing about the lackluster season 9). English decided to shake things up by giving Murphy breast cancer. Most of the original fans had given up on the show years ago. It was still popular, but after years of dumber storylines, it seems like the people still watching were only watching for wacky newsroom hijinks, and this was a downer for sure. The ratings tanked and the show was canceled, but the quality did improve. There are still some duds in there, but the show can say it finished on a high note at least.

There was also a followup season 11. I watched some of the episodes of that when it was on. It was a baffling idea to revive the show since the general public didn’t care about it anymore, but it obviously only happened because the Roseanne revival was so popular and people thought, “hey, if one classic feminist-oriented sitcom that debuted in 1988 can strike it big, why not another?” And the difference is that Roseanne had a general audience and a lot of kids watched it while Murphy Brown had an exclusively boomer audience that was aging rapidly. The show never seemed to transcend its generation, and that is why it wasn’t remembered as a classic when people started shitting upon any art linked exclusively to boomers. It seems the only works people have nostalgia for are things that have youth appeal. Any work of art that doesn’t really cater to young people seems to quickly get forgotten, regardless of its quality.

In short. Do I think it’s great? No. Do I think it’s very good? Yes. I’d probably put it around Boy Meets World: not really essential but still worthy. Did it deserve some Emmys? Yes. Did it deserve nearly as many as it got (or any Best Comedy Series Emmys)? Probably not, but because it made bourgeois yuppies feel good about themselves, I guess it was inevitable that it would be an awards show favorite. It did not deserve the reputation it had then, but it probably desrves a better reputation than it has now.

I want to finish with a few words on boomers. It seems like a lot of people my age treat the words “boomer” and “reactionary” as synonyms and I would like to use this opportunity to push back on that a little bit. As someone who grew up on boomer art and is still vastly more familiar with it than most of the works of my own generation, I think people get a lot of the attitudes of boomers wrong. I do not think they are the most reactionary generation; I definitely think that’s Gen X. One of the undercurrents running through the show is a large emphasis on soul music. I think what a lot of younger people don’t understand is how much boomers actually venerated black artists. There was this odd movement amongst middle-age white boomers to co-opt soul music that nobody talks about now. As aging rockers like Phil Collins, Rod Stewart, and Billy Joel began to enter their adult contemporary phases, they took increasing influence from R&B and you saw this on television too. Murphy Brown was one of the foremost examples. For a show that had like four black people on it (very briefly) in its entire history, the soundtrack was littered with a Motown classic in most of the episodes in the original English run of the show. China Beach was another white show that had The Supremes’ “Reflections” as its theme, while Grace Under Fire’s original theme was Aretha Franklin’s cover of “Lady Madonna”. For a while there as the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, boomers’ love of soul music was all over the culture (the revival of the blue-eyed soul of The Righteous Brothers in Dirty Dancing and Ghost is a similar example, even if they weren’t Motown).

But nowadays, it seems like a lot of people equate Donald Trump’s views with boomers as a collective. This is a mistake. Yes, boomers loved classic rock, but they also grew up with ‘60s radio stations that were not segregated and played rock & roll and R&B artists on the same stations. Radio was not segregated until the ‘70s when Lee Abrams invented the album-oriented rock format, the forerunner to classic rock, and essentially excised all the black artists other than Jimi Hendrix from the format, and that is what led to the increasing separation of rock and R&B for the next decade. But the boomers still usually/often liked blues, soul, and jazz even though they tended to hate rap and often hated disco, yet it seems like people strawmanning the generation now think that white boomers were all about rock and nothing but rock. Yes, there’s probably something clumsy about co-opting black artists for the use of white media properties, but those artists clearly loved and venerated this music and I don’t know if I can say the same thing for the next generation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like ‘90s alternative rock, but its influences were often much more limited than that of the classic rockers. The Gen X rockers grew up on segregated radio and it affected their thinking. So you would have venerable alt-rock producer Steve Albini saying “pop music is for children and idiots”, Kurt Cobain saying “I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed tee-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia” (gee, Kurt, how pleasant), and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament designing a t-shirt of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame snubs upon their own induction that included hardly anything except white male rock bands (either of the classic, punk, or alternative variety). It wasn’t white boomers who dismissed black music. It was more often Gen Xers.

I would also associate Gen X with the rise of the movement that took pride in being offensive (as those Albini and Cobain quotes prove; sure, Albini was technically a boomer but his sensibilities obviously helped pioneer Gen X), and I do not think that is a good thing. Yes, you can argue the boomers started it with the rise of David Letterman and the aforementioned Limbaugh, Stern, and Springer. But here’s the thing. The fans of an artist or media personality are usually going to be younger than those personalities themselves. Tons of boomers clutched their pearls at these people and did not like them and they were considered fringe and alternative personalities before their edgy aesthetic eventually took over Internet discourse for the worse. Sure, Trump was a boomer but I would say the people who brought him to power were largely Gen X. Lots of boomers grew up at a time when people were expected to have good manners and they would have found that kind of thing crude. Boomers weren’t the people who were watching when he became a pop culture celebrity with The Apprentice; they generally thought reality shows were stupid. Boomers grew up at a time when civility was taken for granted, while Gen X to their credit, realized how hypocritical they were being in terms of frequently selling out their own values. Unfortunately, they were better at criticizing than building anything, so that explains in part why they never built up as much political power and also why a lot of their pop culture was so dark, like early South Park (I never watched and yes, I know their values have changed, but for a long time, I know they made fun of people who took anything seriously). We’re still struggling to get out of this morass now since people still haven’t stopped believing that ironic detachment is a virtue, even though I never did.

So, I guess that’s one of the reasons I end up preferring boomer art to the more acclaimed Gen X art it seems like most of my fellow millennials grew up with. Boomers may have sold out their ideals but at least at one point they had ideals, which is why I find them easier to respect. While the Joe Biden movement was stupid also, I think this was really the boomers’ final hurrah as a cohort. A bunch of early boomers who were pissed off at COVID managed to outvote the later boomers/Gen Xers who went for Trump. But people just use boomer and reactionary as synonyms and it drives me up the wall. They grew up believing in civility and many of them continued to even as the world devolved into something they could not understand. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush definitely came closer to embodying the boomers at their worst as a voting cohort than Trump did and I do largely blame the boomers for those two, but somehow even as navel-gazey as it can get, I still admire the art. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that boomer art was the last that tried to speak to the entire population rather than the mass narrowcasting of the cable and streaming era. I know I need to get over my monoculture nostalgia, but I guess that will have to be another day.

I did unenthusiastically vote today and I spent way too much time watching fictional politics and not paying attention to my own. I honestly wasn’t planning on voting but Mom decided she wanted to fill out her absentee ballot at the last moment, so I walked that down to the polling place and I voted too. I had voted in every even-numbered year except 2022 (I was really depressed after losing my job and I couldn’t make myself give a shit), but I haven’t been following the news for a long time because I don’t know who to trust. Obviously, I know the national news has significantly degraded since the ‘90s era that I’m sure I overrate, but most people prefer Internet news instead and I kind of don’t. The one thing that was better about television news was that at least as bad as it got, it was theoretically under the jurisdiction of the FCC so TV news can be regulated. Internet news? No such regulation. By the extremely neoliberal era that the Internet came to be, basically neither the Democrats nor the Republicans believed in regulating shit, so it never stopped being the Wild West. People can make any kind of claim they want, few people will check it, and there are far fewer consequences for being wrong when a story is inaccurate. Furthermore, as reporting (like all forms of media) increasingly narrowcasts into smaller and smaller niche audiences, people become increasingly beholden to the group of people who watch or listen to your show (say, Patreon subscribers) over the general public and then you’ll want to play to your base, which can honestly be just as bad in some ways as playing to your advertisers. I’m sure I could do loads of research to try and find the most accurate sources, but screw it, I just prefer being with my mom or writing my racing statistics rather than curating a proper media diet, although it was really dumb of me to watch a hundred hours of fictional news instead (don’t worry, I was almost always entering racing data in the background, so I was still working on this project). It’s not like you’re gonna vote neoliberalism out of office anyway.

I didn’t do too much research on my local candidates, and that’s particularly rough in a year like this when there was neither a Presidential nor a New York State U.S. Senate election. One thing I will say is that I was genuinely pleased by how normie most of the local candidates sounded - that none of them seemed to be playing for the social media audience, and that’s a BIG plus for me, even if I still find both parties’ platforms loathsome. Obviously, the people up for re-election who had been there for years I was still familiar with, but I hadn’t heard of either the sheriff candidates, and many of the others were obscure for me. So, before I went off to the polls, I did a 15-minute blitz like a teenager writing his essay at the last minute to try to find as much as I could about the more obscure candidates before I ultimately and reluctantly just voted blue no matter who anyway, which I will probably continue to do as long as the Republicans don’t move to the left of the Democrats on economics (which they probably never will), even though I switched my registration from Democrat to Independent a couple years ago. But I sure didn’t feel good about it.

Anyway, I made my selections for the best ten episodes of Murphy Brown if you want a sampler along with my grades for each season. And no, I do not have the Dan Quayle episodes on the list: I don’t even think they’d make my top 50.

Respect (Season 1, Episode 1): The pilot does excellently set the stage for the rest of the show, with Aretha Franklin’s two most famous songs bookending the episode, and as I mentioned above, the show got really lucky that the writers’ strike prevented them from meddling with it.

Subpoena Envy (Season 2, Episode 15): Murphy gets arrested for refusing to reveal a source and she’s initially excited to go to prison believing it is the mark of greatness as a reporter, only to find that because she is rich and famous, she is sent to a country club instead of doing hard time in the big house.

I Want My FYI (Season 2, Episode 16): CBS is attempting an FYI spinoff for kids, albeit with a radical Nickelodeon-style aesthetic for the MTV generation and shallow news stories. When the FYI anchors realize how much the kids remind themselves of them growing up, they decide to take them under their wing and teach them to become real reporters, only for the show to be canceled because it wasn’t entertaining enough. Features Zack Morris of Saved by the Bell and Mayim Bialik before she was Blossom. The kids took the loss of the show in stride and were more professional than the grown-ups, who were devastated and threw a bit of a fit.

The 390th Broadcast (Season 3, Episode 1): Sort of “I Want My FYI” all over again, the network bosses decided to revamp the show because focus groups felt the anchors (mainly Murphy) weren’t warm and inviting enough, so they instead turn the show into a morning talk show clone with a fancy living room setting adorned with comfy couches where all the anchors sip coffee simultaneously in a clearly-synchronized moment, but the episode turns into a disaster when they randomly select an interview guest from the phone book and she turns out to make racist comments against five different ethnicities before Murphy dunks on her on the air. Yeah, it’s kind of a forerunner to SNL-style clapter, but I thought this was funny.

Birth 101 (Season 4, Episode 26): This was considered one of the most important episodes in television history at the time and its final image of Murphy reprising “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, which she sang at the end of the pilot, was expected to be an unforgettable television moment before it was quickly forgotten, except for The Simpsons’ parody of it, which ended up being bigger.

Angst for the Memories (Season 6, Episode 2): If you think boomers are incapable of self-reflection like a lot of people think, this is up there with Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” as one of the best counterexamples. Martin Sheen (gee, another West Wing connection!) plays a countercultural author who Murphy had envied in college. However, when he actually appeared on the show, he had renounced his ‘60s values and started spewing Rush Limbaugh talking points, how the country turned into hell in a handbasket when Ronald Reagan was elected… because he wasn’t conservative enough! After wondering how her hero had let her down like this, Murphy and the other FYI anchors (yes, even Corky is a liberal, which is not realistic for that time period, but whatever) reflect upon how they too have become more conservative in their thinking without even realizing it.

Political Correctness (Season 6, Episode 4): Best episode in the series. I was into this episode after seeing it on YouTube before being into the show in general. War correspondent Peter Hunt (played by Quantum Leap’s Scott Bakula) has just joined the show and later becomes a Murphy love interest, but his character isn’t very important to the series at large. Nonetheless, he refers to some women in the military as “girls” and Murphy calls him out for his sexism. At the next show, they are live on location at a fictional Virginia town which had had a military base that was the center of the town close down, losing to mass unemployment (imagine actually reducing military spending now, geez! Would be great). They start the show by apologizing for their insensitivity on the air after some lawyers got to them, which culminates in Murphy (rhetorically) asking people to say what they find offensive. This results in all the representatives from every demographic group fighting each other, like in that scene from Do the Right Thing where everybody is bigoted at everybody else. Some people are offended by things for good reasons, like the Native American who calls out the names of the then-Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and Atlanta Braves, while on the flip side, you have one woman who says she’s not tall but “vertically-enhanced”. The topper is when some mild-mannered unemployed guy does a proto-”healthcare pls” by saying, “Look, I don’t care what anyone calls me. I just want a job.” Murphy acknowledges that’s what’s truly important, but the crowd could not give less of a shit and seconds later they return to voicing petty grievances and all the serious issues are forgotten. Man, does that not summarize the entire last 15 years of social media discourse or what? This episode can reveal anyone’s hidden Bernie Bro.

The Best and Not-So-Brightest (Season 7, Episode 13): Wallace Shawn, who is maybe the best actor the series ever had, periodically pops up as an annoying pest who was one of the original FYI anchors before the current anchors lobbied to have him fired. After that, he goes on a wild ride where he becomes a tobacco lobbyist and is accused of committing arson, but in this one, he is elected to Congress and participates in a debate with an establishment Democrat and an establishment Republican. He starts off spewing far-right talking points that would make Rush Limbaugh look like a leftist, including talking about reinstating slavery. But what stands out to me more about this episode is that they finally went after the Democrats. The Democrat and the Republican had almost exactly the same talking vapid points with tiny distinctions (although obviously still preferable to Shawn’s). I wish they had done this more.

The Feminine Critique (Season 8, Episode 7): Murphy returns to her old college campus both to give a speech and for a segment on the show. This was another good episode for self-reflection, as none of the students in the women’s studies department she helped launch want anything to do with her, as both the liberal and conservative students end up trash-talking her for different reasons.

The Last Temptation of Murphy (Season 10, Episode 12): After Murphy is diagnosed with breast cancer, a businessman who has just gotten out of prison for insider trading decides to attempt to win back public support by setting up a charity race to raise money for breast cancer research, and he wants to have Murphy interview him on the show and to name the race after her. Murphy eventually realizes this is a scam when the crook raises $1 million, invests it in the stock market (presumably due to insider trading again) and comes back with $2 million. She still reluctantly participates in the race, but at the end of the street, a bunch of people come up to her. Half of them praise her for helping others with breast cancer, while half of them condemn her for working with that sleazebag. And I was like, “Wow, they’re going after effective altruism before it even had a name! This is really ahead of its time.” There are so many of those effective altruist guys who want to make as much money as they can by any means possible and claim that is the best way to do the most good, regardless of who they step on to make that money. This was a relatively new idea, and I couldn’t believe there was a sitcom episode at the start of 1998 about it. But nobody was watching season 10 of Murphy Brown (well, okay, the show apparently had a tangible effect on women getting mammograms, which was the best thing it probably ever did, so clearly some people were) so nobody noticed or cared about this, but I was impressed years after the fact. The show doesn’t attempt to have an opinion on whether what she did was right or wrong, which helps.

Season 1: 8
Season 2: 8
Season 3: 7
Season 4: 8
Season 5: 3
Season 6: 7
Season 7: 5
Season 8: 5
Season 9: 4
Season 10: 7

After this, I will be back to my regularly scheduled Bubble Wrap posts, but if I was going to do a political post any day, this wasn’t a bad choice.

The most important way to evaluate sports car drivers in my opinion is based on the differences between each driver’s speed percentile and that of their teammates, but obviously marquee wins are extremely important (and probably more important than the actual championships) and you can really tell which driver(s) on a given sports car team are pulling their weight and which aren’t based on comparing drivers’ lead change records. I went through every driver who I thought had a significant case for the list based on only their IMSA data (although I’m sure there are drivers whose IMSA seasons aren’t deserving despite deserving WEC seasons, and I’ll deal with them later).

I provided screenshots for my advanced statistics for each class, but I had to zoom out to such an extent that you’ll either need to squint to read them or right-click on the images and open them in a new tab. While I managed to include every GTP driver here, I had to crop a lot of drivers in the other three classes since there were simply too many drivers. I decided to make sure I cropped the remaining drivers for the LMP2, GTD Pro, and GTD classes low enough on the list so that everybody who did basically anything in a given class appears in this article, so you don’t have to click back and forth between the link to my spreadsheet and here.

GTP

Aitken and Heinrich were obviously the best drivers in IMSA this year, as they combined to lead nearly all statistical categories, with Aitken leading in natural races led, lead shares, cumulative races led, poles, fastest laps, fastest races, and speed percentile, and Heinrich leading in lead change record, wins, terminal natural leads, and races with the most lead shares. The only category neither of those drivers led was races with the most laps led, which went to Felipe Nasr, who actually led the most laps in all three races Heinrich won. Interestingly, Aitken and Heinrich finished first and second in the points standings by themselves because Aitken’s teammate Bamber skipped two races and Heinrich spent time in three different cars, which is very unusual since normally two drivers share each position, especially in the prototype classes.

So, do I like Aitken or Heinrich better? Aitken definitely seems to have the better numbers, but I think Heinrich was better when considering the season holistically. Even though Aitken won the title and Heinrich finished second, Heinrich won both the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring with Nasr and Julien Andlauer and while I wouldn’t say this in most other disciplines, the sports car marquee races are more important to drivers’ legacies than titles. Heinrich also had an undefeated lead change record at 4-0 (better than Aitken’s 4-2), he tied Sheldon van der Linde for the most TNL, and Heinrich drove three different cars and was the linchpin of his team, outperforming his teammates every time. While Aitken beat Bamber by 19 percentage points in speed and crushed him in lead change record (4-2 to 0-4; Bamber was kind of embarrassing since he got passed for the win four times), Heinrich had an even bigger advantage over Nasr and Andlauer, beating them by 27 and 31 percentage points, and they shared in his marquee race wins and Nasr led a lot, so I think that’s more impressive. Heinrich > Aitken is actually a no-brainer, I think, though they both obviously deserve Es.

Van der Linde and Yelloly absolutely thrashed their teammates as well, with van der Linde beating D. Vanthoor by 26 percentage points, Wittmann by 30, and Eng by 42 in speed. With an undefeated lead change record and numbers that are only barely behind Aitken’s even though his car seemed to be slower, you could argue he should be an E also since his car finished 6th while their team car finished 13th in points, and he was obviously the linchpin of the team. Yelloly was the second-fastest driver in the class, beating Blomqvist by 19 points, his co-driver van der Zande by 36, and Colin Braun by 39. Now, I’ve stated before in their bubble entries that I think Blomqvist is overrated and Braun seems to be past his prime, but Yelloly utterly destroyed them in addition to also earning a class win at Le Mans. I think I’m going to deny Yelloly the full E because he had no passes for the lead while van der Zande somehow actually led more, but I think it’s an E- for sure since his car did finish 3rd while the Blomqvist/Braun car finished only 11th in points and he crushed all the other Meyer Shank drivers in general in addition to also having a Le Mans win, which none of them had.

As for those guys’ co-drivers, I guess I should list Nasr, even as slow as he was because he did lead the most laps at both Daytona and Sebring and he had the pass for the win at Sebring (Heinrich obviously did at Daytona), but he was so far behind Heinrich in both speed and passing that it’ll probably have to be a C-. Andlauer doesn’t really seem to have a case. Bamber getting passed for the win four times with no on-track lead changes is really bad, and being 19 percentage points behind Aitken isn’t great either, but he’s still fourth in lead shares and second in CRL, so I’ll reluctantly put him in the C- category also. Blomqvist did win two poles and demolished Braun in speed, but Yelloly demolished him, so Blomqvist is at best C-. I’ll put him on the bubble for this year regardless, but I might drop him. None of the other BMW drivers besides van der Linde deserve it based on their IMSA performances, although when I throw in the WEC performances as well, that might change my evaluations of the BMW drivers and Bamber.

Albuquerque did pass Aitken for the win at Road America, but the Wayne Taylor drivers did next to nothing otherwise, and Jordan and Ricky have really fallen into complacency since returning to their father’s team. Albuquerque’s 45.16 was faster than Ricky’s 39.53 and Jordan’s 33.28, but Delétraz was actually faster than any of them at 52.86, and that’s surprising to me. Nonetheless, I’ll tentatively slot Albuquerque in C- as well.

And then that leaves Kévin Estre. The arguably-greatest-sports-car-driver-in-the-world had been snakebitten in his IMSA starts, improbably taking 32 starts to finally win the season finale of his first full-time prototype season at the Petit Le Mans. Considering the Penske drivers’ dominance at the endurance races, this kind of feels like underachievement since Heinrich at 75.83 was faster than Estre’s 67.47, although Estre was still a lot faster than Andlauer and Nasr. I’d say C+ for him. There are no other realistic contenders except for drivers I decide to rate primarily for performance in other series.

LMP2

This class is weird because it has so many amateurs in it and the amateurs tend to start the race before the professionals finish, which means sometimes amateurs get rewarded in my lead change statistics for passing other amateurs, which makes them look substantially better than they are. Like Goikhberg ended up with the best lead change record at 3-0 because he passed the even worse Goldburg three times, but neither of them is particularly good, so you have to just throw out all the amateur drivers when evaluating this.

Although his amateur co-driver Clarke actually led more because he won four poles, Dillmann led the pros in pretty much every statistical category in addition to sharing in Yelloly’s LMP2 Le Mans class win. Dillmann’s an obvious no-brainer for this year’s list, but Dillmann and Clarke did lose the title to Quinn and his amateur driver Kurtz, who also combined to win the 24 Hours of Daytona and Petit Le Mans while Dillmann had no marquee race wins (except of course Le Mans in the WEC). This class always has the worst competition as well. I think I’m going to award Dillmann’s better numbers and versatility over Quinn’s title and greater number of marquee race wins, but I’m going to have them pretty close and they’ll probably both be C+.

Sowery is probably one of the most underrated drivers in the world today. Although he never got the serious IndyCar shot I kind of felt he deserved (he is rated a very good .070 in my open wheel model right now thanks to beating David Malukas in some IndyCar minor league feeder. I’m not gonna say Sowery is better than Malukas now obviously, but it would’ve been cool to see him get more IndyCar opportunities. Sowery co-drove with Quinn and Kurtz in both of their wins and put up almost the exact same numbers despite two fewer starts. He deserves a C+ too.

I usually list Jensen, but I think the season wasn’t good enough. Despite his Sebring win and TNL, he and Fayer never finished better than 7th outside of that. More interesting is Jakobsen, who started only the 24 Hours of Daytona, had the fastest lap, and made the last two passes for the lead against Formula E champion da Costa and IndyCar rising star Rasmussen, while Jensen’s pass for the lead came against IndyCar bust Vautier, which… who cares? Jakobsen also won the LMP2 Pro-Am title in the European Le Mans Series, which is at least worth something. However, a pro-am title isn’t worth as much as a fully professional title and the LMP2 class in IMSA is also pretty bad. I’m thinking C.

Cameron is past his prime, but his numbers are pretty solid. 3rd in both lead shares and CRL and also he ranked third in the standings amongst professional drivers who won a race. That’s probably strong enough to list barely, so pencil him in for C-.

I was kind of shaky about whether Rasmussen belonged on the list this year because even though he was very strong in the IndyCar oval races, his championship finish was abysmal, but he had the fourth-most laps led at Daytona and the second-most at Indianapolis, which he won, so I think that confirms he deserves a C- too.

Edgar was very fast and has good numbers, but he is currently leading the WEC LMGT3 standings by himself, so I’m going to wait until the WEC season is over to decide what to do about him.

That leaves di Resta; the former F1 driver and cousin of Dario Franchitti, who was somehow the fastest driver in the class with three fastest races despite never having an on-track pass for the lead. I think he was let down because Goldburg was so awful, although di Resta was basically single-handedly responsible for Goldburg being third in points even though di Resta didn’t get to share in it because he missed one race. Let’s say C-.

GTD Pro

As usual, this is a mess since this class typically has the most even competition of any class and it seems like nobody stood out as different drivers shone in different categories. For as much as I talk about LMP2 being the weakest class, I think the stronger performers were more obvious, which is why I’m going to have Dillmann, Quinn, and Sowery in the top 100 and probably all drivers I choose from here will be either C or C-.

Verhagen and De Phillippi won the title as well as the 24 Hours of Daytona, but De Phillippi’s numbers are honestly too bad to list. Verhagen probably had the most consistent numbers across the board and I’d probably say he was the best driver in the class. I had him in the C tier last year and I guess I will again, even though his advanced numbers are worse against what I would say is weaker competition.

Barnicoat and Hawksworth led almost all the statistical categories and did win twice, but they didn’t win marquee races and they both had below-average speed. Still, Barnicoat’s 4-1 lead change record is pretty dominant and he generally outperformed Hawksworth in most statistical categories overall even though Hawksworth was faster and both were not that fast. I guess C for Barnicoat and C- for Hawksworth.

Caldarelli and Mitchell narrowly lost the title to Verhagen and de Phillippi, and just as de Phillippi didn’t really contribute anything to the title, neither did Mitchell in his second-place points finish. Even though Caldarelli’s numbers were basically comparable to Verhagen’s, I think I have to put Caldarelli a tier down from Verhagen since Verhagen won the title, the 24 Hours of Daytona, and the Michelin Endurance Cup while Caldarelli’s wins only came in minor races. C- for him.

I think Sims is the only Corvette driver who probably deserves it. He was the fastest driver and he has substantially better numbers than Catsburg, García, and Milner overall, even if none of them were amazing. C- probably.

King was the fastest driver by nearly 10 percentage points and beat his co-driver Tandy (who made my top 25 just last year) by 30 percentage points, even though Tandy led more and had better passing numbers. Considering how highly I had Tandy rated last year, I think King gets a C.

Preining, Engel, and Feller are obviously list-worthy, but I’ll wait until I discuss DTM before talking about them. Drudi probably also is since he also won some GT World Challenge endurance races, but I’ll deal with that later.

Despite only starting five races, Bachler had a stellar 3-0 lead change record and won at Sebring. He was definitely a step down from Preining, but only very slightly. I decided after the fact that he should’ve been C- last year, so he probably should again this year.

GTD

I had to shrink this one to capture a screenshot consisting of all the drivers I wanted. This year had a real oligopoly as Ellis, Fuoco, and Gamble all had more passes for the lead than any driver this season in any IMSA class with Ellis and Fuoco at 8-3 and Gamble at 7-4. Fuoco would have been ahead at 9-3 if I hadn’t nullified his pass where he cut off and wrecked Patrese at the Petit Le Mans simultaneously, for which he was penalized.

Deciding whether to rate Ellis or Fuoco higher is difficult because Ellis utterly dominated the season and his Winward Racing teammates Ward and Dontje did literally nothing. Ellis and Ward have always been wildly mismatched teammates, but probably never more so than this year. In addition to running away with the title, Ellis won at Daytona and the Petit Le Mans also, and he made passes for the lead in both. Fuoco was nowhere near as consistent, but posting the same lead change record despite only starting 5 races to Ellis’s 11 is impressive, particularly because Fuoco obviously faced stronger competition since he only entered the endurance races while Ellis feasted on the less competitive and smaller GTD fields. Fuoco was faster, but Ellis had way better numbers otherwise. Fuoco did have one of the highlights of the season by passing Gamble for the win on the last lap at the 12 Hours of Sebring, and he also won a WEC event. However, Fuoco is nowhere near the WEC title chase, but he’s probably the fastest driver on his WEC team as usual. I think at the moment, I’m going to put both Fuoco and Ellis in the E- tier, but I might promote Fuoco up to E based on his performances against his IMSA teammates.

Gamble’s advanced numbers were definitely in the same league, but he was basically the hard luck driver of the year. Much like David Malukas, he was very fast but it seemed like a cartoon anvil fell on him all year as he failed to win and finished 10th in points, although that was in part because he skipped two races that his teammate Eduardo Barrichello (who finished third in points) started. I have to take Gamble a tier below the other two even though he was the fastest driver in the GTD class because Ellis and Fuoco both won marquee races and multiple races across all series, while Gamble didn’t win at all and Ellis and Fuoco both passed him for wins. Additionally, Ellis and Fuoco blew out their teammates significantly worse than Gamble did, as Barrichello surprisingly led all drivers in CRL, races with the most laps led, and poles, even though Gamble was 20 points faster, ranked second in lead shares, and narrowly edged out Ellis for second in CRL (they tied to the hundredth decimal place). I’m thinking C+ for Gamble and C- for Barrichello, but I could easily drop him.

Patrese was fast and had good numbers, but he finished 13th in the championship and his co-driver Albert Costa was eighth. Even though Patrese’s numbers were better than Costa, I think Costa with a 5-3 lead change record was better than Patrese at 1-0. I kind of think neither of them deserve it, but both are close.

Robichon’s numbers are sneakily very good also, but I do think they pale to both his co-drivers Gamble and Barrichello.

Wickens got a full lead share for winning the pole at Long Beach, and while I’m gobsmacked he managed to do that as a paraplegic, I don’t think the season is good enough.

I guess I should do Foley since he was second in points and 26 points ahead of his co-driver Gallagher, but I’m not super enthused about it. Mark him down for C-.

E: Jack Aitken, Laurin Heinrich, Kyle Kirkwood, Álex Palou, Oliver Rowland, Sheldon van der Linde, Pascal Wehrlein
E-: Taylor Barnard, Philip Ellis, Antonio Fuoco, Christian Lundgaard, David Malukas, Edoardo Mortara, Nick Yelloly
C+: Tom Dillmann, Marcus Ericsson, Kévin Estre, Mitch Evans, Tom Gamble, Scott McLaughlin, Pato O’Ward, Alex Quinn, Felix Rosenqvist, Toby Sowery, Rinus VeeKay
C: Ben Barnicoat, Lucas di Grassi, Malthe Jakobsen, Harry King, Nico Müller, Josef Newgarden, Will Power, Neil Verhagen
C-: Filipe Albuquerque, Marcus Armstrong, Klaus Bachler, Earl Bamber, Tom Blomqvist, Andrea Caldarelli, Dane Cameron, Paul di Resta, Robby Foley, Jack Hawksworth, Pepe Martí, Felipe Nasr, Christian Rasmussen, Alexander Sims, Dan Ticktum

Other Formula E/IMSA drivers I’m certain I’m listing, but I want to wait until I’ve finished the WEC/GT World Challenge statistical tables to decide on their exact placements (I might not even attempt to do a GT World Challenge statistical table because that series still doesn’t provide post-race lap times):

Sébastien Buemi, Nick Cassidy, Nyck de Vries, Jake Dennis, António Félix da Costa, Jonny Edgar

It’s likely some of the drivers I have rejected based on their IMSA seasons I will accept based on their WEC seasons too, but since I haven’t calculated any WEC data yet and won’t until after the season ends next weekend, I’m going to wait to rate all those guys.

Here’s five-year-old me dressed as a pirate for Halloween in 1990:

My vision in my left eye was so bad at 20/400 when I started elementary school that I needed to wear an eye patch at all times, but my parents came up with a clever use for it here…

Harald Ertl (15)

Summary: German touring car driver who won the 1978 Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft championship, the forerunner to today’s DTM. In that series, he won 11 races from 1978-1980 and I have six recorded race wins for him in other series, most notably the 1973 RAC Tourist Trophy, probably England’s most prestigious touring car race.

Case for: DRM was an important championship and I have literally every other champion in the series except for Ertl as a lock. The field he beat in 1978 was quite strong also as I have seven of the top ten drivers as locks, with Ertl, Manfred Schurti, and Markus Höttinger as the only exceptions, and I expect Ertl and Höttinger might also be locks if they hadn’t died young, with Höttinger dying in a crash at the age of 23. Although Ertl benefited from the fact that Class II, where he was competing in 1978, had weaker competition than Class I where many of the drivers were taking wins off each other, he still had to beat three-time champion Klaus Ludwig and the very strong Markus Winkelhock in Class II.

Case against: The rest of Ertl’s career is really bad. His F1 career is terrible, and he wasn’t particularly strong in F2 either. His open wheel rating of -.442 is abysmal, although that is admittedly only based on a small sample size of eight teammate comparisons. Ertl didn’t really have teammates during his DRM heyday, so it’s hard to identify how much was him and how much was the car. He did not have enough teammate comparisons to be eligible for my touring car model, but he only has a 1-3 record against the teammates he did have. He was only relevant in DRM for three seasons before he quit racing in 1981. While attempting a comeback, he died in a plane crash in 1982.

Verdict: Keep. I think he won enough against strong enough competition in DRM that he shouldn’t be an immediate cut, but there’s a reason why he’s the only DRM champion who I don’t have as an absolute lock.

Nasif Estéfano (17)

Summary: Estéfano won the 1973 Turismo Carretera championship posthumously after he died in a crash near the end of the season. He won nine races in the series along with the Turismo Nacional Class D championship in 1965.

Case for: There’s always a certain sentiment where people feel more warmly about drivers who die at their absolute peak, because you can argue “what could have been”. He had a fairly long career as he had made an F1 start as early as 1960 and he also won the rather minor Argentine Formula 1 Mechanics championship twice in 1963 and 1964.

Case against: He was only really relevant in Turismo Carretera two years (1972 and 1973) and those other titles he won were much less prestigious. Although he won a handful of Turismo Nacional races, he went winless in his 1965 title season. He was almost 41 years old at the time he died, so it’s rather likely he wouldn’t have kept up his dominance in my view. I don’t think the early ‘70s were a particularly strong era in the series, since there was a long string of flash-in-the-pan champions. From 1966 to 1973, there were seven different champions in eight years, so I’m not sure anybody dominated enough to be worthy of being listed on an international list. Although Estéfano did win the title posthumously against the four-time champion Héctor Gradassi (who won in 1972 and then again the three seasons after Estéfano died), Gradassi won 10 races to Estéfano’s 8 in Estéfano’s peak seasons.

Verdict: Drop. This is a really close one since he did win a number of minor league titles, but I just don’t think he won enough or had long enough longevity in the series that truly mattered, at a time when the series was at a relative competitive nadir. And yes, I think it was a competitive nadir despite how many different champions there were, because most of those champions didn’t last long and because there seemed to be a major power vacuum after Juan Gálvez died and his brother Oscar retired.

Damien Faulkner (14)

Summary: Cool name. Faulkner finished third in the 2001 Indy Lights championship behind bust Townsend Bell and legend Dan Wheldon before embarking on a sports car career, where he won back-to-back titles in the Porsche Carrera Cup Great Britain in 2005 and 2006, four Porsche Supercup wins and back-to-back second-place finishes in 2007 and 2008, and four American Le Mans Series class wins from 2011-2013, including the 2011 12 Hours of Sebring.

Case for: I rate Porsche Supercup drivers higher than I think practically anyone else in the world does, and usually I’m justified in doing so because many of those drivers do go on to become amongst the best sports car drivers in the world shortly afterward. Excluding some of the recent 2020s champions who have arguably not had complete career arcs yet, I have every Porsche Supercup champion as a lock on the list except for Alessandro Zampedri (I can’t believe that happened). Faulkner’s touring car rating of .219 is quite solid also. He only lost to two-time champion Richard Westbrook, who was great, by six points.

Case against: In Faulkner’s other second-place season, he was demolished by that year’s champion Jeroen Bleekemolen, 192 points to 121. Being competitive against Westbrook suggests he could’ve gone on to a great sports car career, but it didn’t really happen. Yes, he got some ALMS wins, but they came in the relatively shallow GTC class, and Bleekemolen was the only full-timer there who I consider a lock for my list.

Verdict: Drop. The talent was there, but the record wasn’t. Considering he was at least relatively in the same league with Westbrook and Bleekemolen, he possibly could have become an elite-tier sports car racer but it just didn’t happen. I also acknowledge that while the rest of the world underrates Porsche Supercup drivers, I probably overrate them. Let me remedy that here.

Esteban Fernandino II (14)

Summary: Argentine touring car driver with 9 Turismo National Class C wins, 4 Turismo Carretera wins, and 12 TC2000 wins, but he never won a title in any of those series.

Case for: He’s kind of the opposite of Estéfano as he didn’t have as high a career peak, but he had a lot more longevity and relevance, especially in his 30s when Estéfano didn’t do as much. I also think Fernandino faced stronger competition, as he won 12 TC2000 races from 1980-1987, not much worse than the possible Argentine touring car goat Juan María Traverso, who won 17. If you stop it at 1984, Fernandino was actually ahead 11-7. I kind of take him more seriously than other drivers like Oscar Aventín because he won in multiple series and didn’t solely win in Turismo Carretera and he was much stronger than Traverso head-to-head.

Case against: No titles and I don’t think the even Argentine fans consider him to be a legend (they’d probably rather I list drivers like Estéfano or Aventín, even if I think Fernandino’s record is low-key stronger).

Verdict: Keep. I suspect I’m going to drop him eventually when considering my precedents with other drivers who have stronger reputations, but I kind of feel I need to do more research on this one to make the call, since he had more longevity than most of the drivers I rejected and I think he faced stronger competition since he beat Traverso head-to-head over an extended period and a lot of others didn’t. But there is no discipline of motorsports that seems to be harder to research than this one.

Martino Finotto (14)

Summary: Finotto won the 1979 European Touring Car Championship with his co-driving countryman Carlo Facetti. He was a prolific winner with 62 wins across various series, including 11 overall and 5 ETCC class wins, 17 overall wins plus 11 class wins in the Italian touring car championship, where he won a class championship five consecutive years from 1972-1976, five World Sportscar Championship class wins including the 1980 24 Hours of Le Mans, and seven IMSA class wins.

Case for: That’s a lot of wins to dismiss and the European Touring Car Championship was a pretty prestigious touring car championship, even though I kind of view it as more of a sports car championship due to the multi-driver teams.

Case against: When I previously evaluated Finotto and Facetti, I kept finding that the classes they dominated were extremely shallow, and I also find them difficult to distinguish. I think the ‘70s was a weaker decade for ETCC competition than either the ‘60s or the ‘80s were, and neither of them was very high-rated in my touring car model, with Facetti at .042 and Finotto at .027. I think Facetti has the higher reputation as well, but I placed Finotto on the bubble and Facetti outside because Finotto has 62 wins in series I cover to Facetti’s 39.

Verdict: Keep. Yes, the fields he faced were very bad and I think the ‘70s were a down period competition-wise for both sports cars and touring cars globally, but I think he has too many wins and I think not only have I underrated him, I’ve significantly underrated him. I kind of feel that not only Finotto should be on the list, but Facetti probably should be too. They’re probably more career compilers than drivers who hit a massive peak, but even if their competition in the ETCC in 1979 was not top-tier, . I think I downgraded them too much for their model ratings, but how accurate can a model rating be anyway when you’re talking about drivers who mostly competed on multi-driver teams? I think I goofed here.

I went to the gastroenterologist yesterday. He said I should be taking IBgard peppermint capsules every day and Metamucil twice a day. I was concerned that my abdominal pain was because I had ratcheted up my Metamucil intake too quickly after having not taken it for a while, but my gastroenterologist didn’t think so and thought I actually needed to take it more, so I’ll try to work my way up to that, I guess. He also wanted me to have celiac testing. I was tested for celiac before, and I think it was negative, but I decided to try again, so I walked to another building on the North Medical Care campus to have some blood drawn. I scheduled a breath test to see whether I actually have SIBO instead of IBS, which my colonoscopy did not rule out. It annoys me that it was scheduled for November 11 because I was hoping that I could go to the bank and set up my representative payee account for Mom so she can again have her Social Security checks deposited there, and hopefully, I can have the mortgage automatically withdrawn from her account as it was before, which should free up a lot more money out of my own paycheck to do other things with. Because her Social Security is in limbo, and I had to pay to replace the furnace pump as well as two months’ health insurance bills, I ended up bouncing a check yesterday and had to transfer money from one of my bank accounts to my main one, and I probably won’t get paid until November 2 or something. This is what finally convinced me to turn on charges again, but I still intend to make it worth your while, even if probably most of my posts are going to be free for a while.

I also accompanied Mom to her follow-up doctor’s appointment at PACE CNY today. After she canceled her previous vision appointment because she was (in my opinion, irrationally) afraid that she was going to be attacked on the bus, she scheduled another one today to hopefully have her cataracts removed, as well as a dental appointment. Although Van Duyn replaced her sixty-year-old dentures after they either lost or stole them, in this Wonderful World of Planned Obsolescence, her replacement dentures were nowhere near as good, and one of the teeth in her replacement dentures already fell out and was lost, so I guess they’re going to need to be replaced again. I also expressed concern that Mom hasn’t been eating enough. She keeps saying she’s not hungry, and she keeps refusing her Meals on Wheels meals (there’s a stockpile of about fifteen in the fridge now), and I’ve been very concerned about that since I don’t think she’s meeting her caloric intake, but she keeps saying she’s not hungry. I estimated that she lost fifty pounds in the nursing home while she was there, since I think she was refusing food there a lot, too. I wasn’t sure, but I know she weighed over 200 pounds entering the nursing home at the end of 2024, and she just did a weigh-in today and was at 139.6. That concerns me deeply, since it’s arguably the first time in my life I actually outweighed her (I was at 142 yesterday, although I normally weigh 136 while at home). Yes, she is six inches shorter than I am and is still technically overweight, so I guess it isn’t dire, but I think she has lost too much too fast, and I want to make sure she retains her strength. I’m probably going to need to be cooking for her more if she keeps refusing her meals. If she does fall into the normal BMI range at some point in the near future, it will be the first time in my life that she was neither overweight nor an addicted smoker (she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years so God knows how much I breathed in, even though I always tried to avoid her smoke trails and she always pointed the cigarettes away from me). I suspect she probably wouldn’t have lived as long as she already has if she hadn’t quit smoking in 2007, but I’ve got to see what I can do about her diet.

Mike Edwards (14)

Summary: 21st-century drag racer who won the 2009 Pro Stock title and 40 career wins from 1996 to 2013. He won the U.S. Nationals twice in 1998 and 2013 and the Winternationals once in his winningest season of 2010, when he won eight times. His 40 wins are tied with Kurt Johnson for 7th all-time. He set an elapsed time record and a speed record in 2009 and two elapsed time records in 2013.

Case for: If you look at the all-time Pro Stock win list, there is a sizable gap between Edwards and Johnson and Darrell Alderman’s 28. I think some of the drivers behind Edwards hit higher peaks, including Alderman (who won three titles and is a lock) and Lee Shepherd (who died early in the 1985 season as the four-time defending champion), but I have all the other drivers with 40+ wins on the list and it would stand out if I don’t include Edwards.

Case against: Basically, I’ve been underrating all the 21st-century drag racers relative to their 20th-century peers because I felt the current era of the NHRA had significantly worse competition, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably wrong about that. A lot of people struggle to take modern drag racing seriously, particularly after the races were reduced from 1/4 mile to 1,000 feet, although this did not apply to the Pro Stock class where Edwards raced. It seems to be much less culturally relevant than in the ‘90s, when it was all over RPM2Night, but how much of that is an actual decline in relevance, and how much of it is that it simply got more cross-promotion when it was on ESPN? Even if the NHRA was definitely less respected in Edwards’s era than it was in Bob Glidden’s, I’m not docking any of the NASCAR and IndyCar drivers for dominating in eras when those series had less of a cultural footprint or were embracing gimmicks or for competing in eras when the race distances were reduced. Ergo, I don’t think there’s much of a real case against.

Verdict: Keep. I’m either massively overrating most of the other drag racers or significantly underrating him. I’m going to go with the latter.

Ray Elder (16)

Summary: Arguably the all-time greatest NASCAR West Series driver (now ARCA West), Elder won six titles in seven years (1969-1972 and 1974-1975) and 47 wins, making him possibly the most underrated NASCAR driver in history. Two of Elder’s NASCAR West wins in 1971 and 1972 came in 500-mile combination races with the Winston Cup Series at Riverside, where he managed to win for a privateer family team in Winston West equipment against the Winston Cup regulars.

Case for: Elder’s chief rival, Hershel McGriff, made both NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers list and the Hall of Fame, while Elder didn’t even make the 75 Greatest Drivers list, and he’s only been nominated for the Hall of Fame, but who knows whether he’ll ever get in. Elder has the more impressive career as McGriff won only one title in 1986 at age 58 (long after Elder retired, when his fiercest competition was Chad Little) and 34 West Series wins, yet Elder made fewer starts (240) than McGriff (271). McGriff’s peak period came against Elder, as he had 12 wins the only time he competed against Elder full-time in 1972, but Elder, who won 7 times, still won the championship. McGriff might’ve been more talented when considering his longevity, but he would stop racing full-time for decades at a time and never accumulated the same volume as Elder, and I certainly like Elder’s career peak better. Even though McGriff won four races in the Cup Series to Elder’s two, Elder’s came against much deeper fields in family equipment, while McGriff was driving for Frank Christian in the ‘50s, and his performances were actually a step down from Fonty Flock’s before him, yet Flock has never been recognized on any of NASCAR’s lists.

Case against: The question is whether this is more of a case for Elder or against McGriff. I think McGriff had the talent to make the list, but just didn’t have the record. Elder does have the record, but it seems people in the know always regarded McGriff as better despite his weaker record. Another driver, Jack McCoy, is worth mentioning because he won two NASCAR West Series titles and a record 54 wins, even though his Cup record is pretty bad. McCoy also leads the West Series in laps led (6,603) to Elder’s 6,033 and McGriff’s 4,580, and I actually have McCoy as a lock (although I suspect I shouldn’t).

Verdict: Keep. I am probably not awarding Elder enough points since I would probably pick him as the greatest NASCAR West driver ever over McCoy and McGriff if you asked me point-blank. He had twice as many titles as McCoy and McGriff combined and a more concentrated peak, while McCoy was more of a career compiler and McGriff was much more of a career compiler, and his two wins at Riverside were bigger than McGriff’s more minor Cup wins, while McCoy had none at all. I think I am overrating McCoy (who should not be a lock) and underrating Elder right now, although I still remain convinced McGriff should not be on the list. He had the talent and the longevity, but he just had too many long periods of inactivity in his prime to justify his placement, in my opinion.

Casper Elgaard (17)

Summary: Danish touring car great who won the Danish Touringcar Championship four times, including three in a row (2004-06, 2010), then won its replacement, the Danish Thundersport Championship, twice more in 2014 and 2015. When considering both those series and the later TCR Denmark, Elgaard has 46 wins. He also earned a Le Mans class win in 2009, 1 European Le Mans win, and another in class.

Case for: Although Denmark is a small country, its domestic championships had better competition than you’d think. Jan Magnussen was one of the best sports car drivers in the world at that time and had two Danish Touringcar titles and one Thundersport title, and fellow two-time champion Michel Nykjær also won two European Touring Car Championship titles and three World Touring Car Championship races, indicating that the top drivers were more internationally relevant than you’d think. When counting all series, Elgaard held the record for championships until Kasper Jensen overtook him recently, if you count the TCR Denmark stuff.

Case against: How strong was his competition really? Magnussen was a spectacular driver with an open wheel rating of .204 and a touring car rating of .147, a former Karting World Champion who blew the crap out of Dario Franchitti in British Formula 3, and then went on to four ALMS/IMSA titles in addition to his three Danish titles, but I’m not sure any of the rest of the Danish drivers of this era really measure up to him. While Elgaard might’ve won more titles, Magnussen had exactly 100 Touringcar/Thundersport/TCR Denmark wins, so it’s hard to argue Elgaard was even close. Most of the Danish drivers never really competed in major league touring car racing, and the drivers who did weren’t amazing. Besides Magnussen, the other two Danish champions in my touring car model both have negative ratings (Nykjær’s -.013 and Jason Watt’s -.121).

Verdict: Keep. I really can’t make up my mind here. Elgaard was substantially worse than Magnussen (who is obviously a lock) and substantially better than Nykjær and Watt, but I find both his cases for and against to be equally compelling. The only conclusion I think I can draw from this is that Nykjær (whom I also have in this tier) shouldn’t make it.

Tommie Elliott (14)

Summary: Minor league NASCAR driver with at least 73 verified Modified wins and 1 Late Model Sportsman win.

Case for: The main thing Elliott has going for him is that he had at least 28 verified Modified wins in 1954, where he finished second in points to Jack Choquette’s 17. Elliott did beat some major drivers in points that year, including Banjo Matthews, Cotton Owens, Ray Hendrick, and Fireball Roberts, although I imagine most of those guys probably entered fewer races.

Case against: There are so many pre-modern era Modified drivers you’ve never heard of with close to, if not more than, 100 wins and other than that season, I see little that stands out. He’s on the bubble because I gave him a full E grade for 1954, but that season really feels like an outlier since he never had more than 8 verified wins in any other season.

Verdict: Drop. Nothing in his record really separates him from his peers, and that isn’t enough. When you consider the fact that Frankie Schneider had consecutive seasons with 44, 41, and 29 verified wins, and Joe Weatherly had back-to-back seasons with 37 and 35 verified wins, Elliott doesn’t really stand out even that much in context, and if I’m not going to even list Jerry Cook…

Tomáš Enge (18)

Summary: A onetime hot open wheel prospect, Enge won six races in F1’s then-top feeder series, Formula 3000, and was running away with the 2002 championship until he was disqualified after winning the Hungaroring race due to testing positive for marijuana at a time when pot use was much more frowned upon (I remember watching the New York gubernatorial debate that year and there was a candidate from the Marijuana Reform Party in the debate, just to put the era in context for you). While that basically ruined his open wheel career and his one IRL season in 2005 was pretty forgettable also, he had a smattering of sports car wins from 2003-2016, including the 2009 European Le Mans title and two overall wins and three class wins there, four American Le Mans class wins, including the 2003 and 2006 Petit Le Mans, a 24 Hours of Le Mans class win, five FIA GT wins, two World Challenge wins, one ADAC win and another in class, one International GT Open win, and one VLN class win.

Case for: Enge won in a lot of different series, and he was one of the drivers who put Aston Martin’s sports car program on the map. While I think a lot of drivers can match that sports car record on paper, what stands out to me most of all is that he won five consecutive Le Mans class poles from 2002 to 2006, even though he only won once, suggesting his speed was greater than his results. His open wheel rating of -.005 is better than you think for a driver who is routinely considered a bust for how loudly he flamed out.

Case against: Although he significantly elevated the Aston Martin program, how much is that really worth when his raw speed was greater than results? Qualifying on pole five times in a row at Le Mans is nice, but on the other hand, is there any discipline of motorsports where qualifying matters less than sports car racing? No. Consistency in speed matters more than top speed there, and Enge never exactly had a reputation for consistency.

Verdict: Keep. I kind of feel that such an extended run of qualifying dominance should be rewarded when considering that most retirements at Le Mans are mechanical and mechanical DNFs have more to do with the car than the specific drivers. I think in order to properly judge Enge, I would need to compare his lap times to his teammates, but the problem is that lap data are scarcely available for most of his best seasons, so I’m probably going to have to go on vibes here. I will say that I feel like I have insufficient evidence to drop him at this point.

Jon Dooley (17)

Summary: An ‘80s British Saloon/Touring Car Championship driver with 19 career wins and two class titles: the 1981 Class A championship and 1984 Class B championship.

Case for: He has a lot of wins, and he had a multi-win season all but one year from 1980 to 1987. Dooley’s rating of .201 is higher than a lot of champions. Since he had the highest rating amongst BSCC drivers in my touring car models in 1981 and 1985, he’s the only driver to do so twice in the ‘80s.

Case against: Dooley never won an overall race, and usually, I prefer to award overall winners over class winners. However, I realize the series’s bizarre multi-class format incentivized drivers to compete in less competitive classes. It doesn’t help that he has no wins in other major league series, while a lot of British touring car drivers also had significant sports car wins. Despite competing in less competitive classes in the ‘80s (which probably had the shallowest competition in the series in general), he never finished better than third in the series. About the only thing propping him up is his touring car rating, but how impressive is that really? He has a 22-8 teammate record, which consists of a 20-8 record against his main teammate, Rob Kirby. Dooley also had a 2-0 record against teammates other than Kirby, while Kirby had a 5-0 record against teammates other than Dooley, which explains why Dooley ended up so high. Kirby only had three class wins in the BSCC, but also won a Class B championship. Do I find outperforming one obscure teammate significant enough to list Dooley?

Verdict: Drop. The answer is I do not. The teammate comparison is good, and I’m not going to say Dooley’s rating in my teammate model is spurious or something (usually, a rating like that would strongly indicate including a driver on the list), but Dooley competed in the least competitive era in the BSCC/BTCC, didn’t win an overall title, didn’t have any important wins elsewhere, and was not connected to any great drivers. If I’m not going to list drivers like Chris Craft, who at least had a bunch of sports car wins in addition to his BSCC wins, Dooley looks a lot weaker to me now than he once did.

Tony Dron (19)

Summary: Dron won six overall British Saloon Car Championship races, 12 class races, back-to-back Class C championships in 1977 and 1978, the non-points RAC Tourist Trophy in 1974, and six World Sportscar Championship class races in the 1980s, including a class win at Le Mans in 1982.

Case for: Unlike Dooley, Dron competed in a lot more disciplines of motorsports and seems to be better-respected. His Wikipedia page claims he won “hundreds of” races in 24 makes and 41 models of car, but obviously, this is difficult to verify. He even crossed over into rallying a little, making a couple of World Rally Championship starts and earning four class wins in extremely minor rallies. He hit a higher peak than Dooley by winning 10 out of 12 races in 1977 and the first 8 in 1978, giving him an extremely high winning percentage of 18/47, compared to Dooley’s 19/118.

Case against: Unlike Dooley, Dron’s touring car rating of -.189 is abysmal, mainly because he got swept by the one-time winningest BTCC driver Andy Rouse in 1974, although Dron was a rookie and Rouse was in his second year. (Dron didn’t have teammates in his two peak seasons, which is why his rating is so low.) Although he hit a very high peak, he only raced in the BSCC four seasons and was only seriously competitive in two of them. If he truly won hundreds of races, he feels like a no-brainer, but I don’t know how I could possibly verify that, since grassroots British racing results in the ‘70s are difficult to find. His best overall World Sportscar Championship finish amongst his class wins was fifth, five laps down at the 1982 1000 km of Nürburgring. However, his next-best is an eighth-place finish 29 laps down.

Verdict: Keep. Dron feels like a driver I should keep on reputation alone, but I am not entirely convinced. You often hear about drivers who supposedly have hundreds of wins, and look at their actual record, and it’s way off. You always hear about Dick Trickle’s supposed 1200 wins, but Auto Racing Research Associates “only” came up with 741 (still massive, mind you, and easily list-worthy). Jerry Cook has a claimed win total of 342, but he has barely 100 wins verified and I find that number impossible to believe, especially after finding out how many wins he had in his NASCAR Modified title seasons. So am I just gonna buy that Dron actually has hundreds of wins without being able to prove it? No, but there seems to be enough evidence to keep him from being an immediate dismissal.

Robert Droogmans (16)

Summary: Droogmans won the 1990 European Rally Championship and is tied for second with Dario Cerrato and Giandomenico Basso with 26 wins, albeit far behind Patrick Snijers’s 44. I have already discussed Cerrato, Snijers is also in this group, and I suppose Basso (who has five Italian Rally titles from 2007-2025, two ERC titles, and two TER titles) also should be, but I haven’t scored him yet.

Case for: In addition to his ERC record, Droogmans won three Belgian Rally titles in 1986, 1987, and 1992.

Case against: I don’t find Droogmans very compelling at all. His contemporaries or near-contemporaries in minor league rallying, whom I have recently discussed, like Cerrato and Gianfranco Cunico, were both competing in the Italian Rally Championship, and Italian rallying was more significant in the international ecosystem than Belgian rallying. Not only was Italian rally driver Miki Biasion a World Rally Champion in the era these guys were competing, but no Belgian driver won a WRC event until François Duval, a decade after Droogmans’s relevance ended. Droogmans also had a small sample size of comparisons in his teammate record (5-4). He did lose to Cerrato 1-2, which isn’t terrible, and beat Belgian Rally champions Jean-Pierre van de Wauwer and Marc Duez, but van de Wauwer doesn’t belong on the list, and Duez was better as a sports car driver.

Verdict: Drop. The ERC was clearly second-rate compared to the WRC by the time Droogmans was racing and the Belgian rally scene was too weak for me to justify including a driver like him. His level of dominance was not enough to overcome the lack of competition.

John Duff (15)

Summary: Duff was an important sports car pioneer, winning the second running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1924.

Case for: While that one win certainly isn’t enough for consideration (especially since it’s his only major win), I ended up giving him an elite-tier rating in five consecutive seasons from 1921-1925 because he was a dominant driver at the Brooklands Circuit in England, setting numerous all-time speed records there, including a 24-hour record at 95.02 mph with future three-time Le Mans winner Woolf Barnato. He then crossed over to IndyCar racing in 1926, finishing 9th in the Indy 500 and 3rd at Altoona before suffering a career-ending crash at Salem, New Hampshire.

Case against: Basically, all his successes other than the Le Mans win came in informal exhibitions, and I’m not sure how much to take those seriously. I know I’ve decided to include world land speed record-holders, and I know it would probably be more significant to include drivers who set records over longer distances, but I don’t think those sorts of endurance records are viewed as being as significant historically, in part because endurance records have more to do with how long your car lasts than your own brute speed. I think that’s why I’m going to say no.

Verdict: Drop. If I’m going to be stingy enough about this era, where I’m not sure whether I’m going to even include Henry Birkin (who was one of the most dominant sports car drivers of his time), I probably shouldn’t list a driver like Duff whose best performances for the most part came in exhibitions rather than full-length races. I realize this may be somewhat inconsistent with what I did with Louis Disbrow, but even though most of what he did was also in exhibitions and speed trials, I think he had way more volume and way more longevity than Duff did. It’s telling that he didn’t even make the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame until 2006, and that Hall of Fame is not very selective, boasting around 300 inductees.

Mike Eddy (16)

Summary: Eddy is a regional stock car legend with seven American Speed Association titles in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1982, 1989, 1991, and 1992. He also won the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Super Late Model title in 1977, the ASA Gran Marque championship in 1985, and the prestigious Winchester 400 short track all-star race in 1981 and 1983.

Case for: The ASA was a strong regional tour that arguably produced more stock car greats than even the NASCAR Busch Series for a while. Eddy was relevant for almost the entire history of the original series, as his 1974 title came in the series’s second season, and he won his last race in 2004, the last year it was a national series. His seven titles are a series record. Eddy was highly competitive in eras dominated by other stock car greats, as his 1981 and 1982 titles bridge the gap between Mark Martin’s three straight titles in 1978-80, Rusty Wallace’s in 1983, Dick Trickle’s back-to-back titles in 1984 and 1985, and Martin’s fourth title in 1986. If I don’t include Eddy on the list, he would be the only missing ASA champion from 1978 to 1992, so it feels like he belongs. Eddy had more wins than Alan Kulwicki (9-5) and Jimmie Johnson (2-0) in the years they both competed full-time.

Case against: Eddy was also originally offered the Jack Roush #6 car before Martin eventually got it, in one of the most interesting “what could’ve been” stories in NASCAR history. But I do not think he was better than Martin, who beat Eddy 20 wins to 10 and finished higher in points all six years they competed full-time, even though Martin was six and a half years younger. That’s kind of the problem in general, as the times he dominated the series were the times when Martin, Wallace, and Trickle weren’t there. Wallace’s 1983 season was his only full-time season there; Eddy finished 7th in points that year. In the nine seasons Trickle competed regularly from 1980 to 1988, Trickle won 23 races to Eddy’s 14 and beat him seven out of nine seasons in points. You look at it this way, and Eddy starts to look a little second-rate. When comparing him to his chief ASA rival Bob Senneker, who won a series record 85 races (even though he only won one title to Eddy’s seven), there’s no comparison. Senneker actually won more races than Martin (23-20), more races than Wallace (5-3), and more races than Trickle (35-23) when they all competed full-time, even if all those guys won more titles. That’s why Senneker is a lock, and Eddy isn’t.

Verdict: Keep. Still, even if he wasn’t as good a driver as Martin, Wallace, Trickle, or Senneker, snubbing Eddy feels like it would be deliberate. I have all the other ASA champions from 1978 to 1992 as locks except for Butch Miller, and I have Miller in the near-lock category. It feels like it would be rude not to list the driver with the most titles, especially since he was winning titles in the same era as the rest of these guys, even if he was not as dominant as Senneker, and his title years consistently came in seasons with weaker competition. His longevity and number of titles in an era when all those guys were competing suggest that he was close enough that he still should be listed. While I find it a little weird that Roush initially wanted Eddy over Martin, since Martin had destroyed him at a younger age when they were in the ASA together, there’s still a reason why that happened.

I would have preferred for her to have complete access to her money again, but once again, they said she did not have the cognition to make her own decisions, simply because she can’t remember her address, even though she remembers everything else they ask her. Instead, I had to be made a representative payee, which obviously limits what can be done with the money since it is not supposed to go to anything for me. That’s fine, but thinking about things like shared grocery bills is really confusing, as this seems to imply that I would only be allowed to buy her groceries with this money, which might force me to do separate grocery orders with separate delivery bills if I try to do this. What I’m probably going to do instead is have her mortgage come directly out of her Social Security. Since the mortgage payment has gone up from $500 to $1,000 because the escrow includes her taxes and insurance and she has emergency homeowner’s insurance until I can get some insurance company to take her after the previous one dropped her, since I couldn’t get the roof repaired in time. I’m still going to try, and have that lowered, but if I can move that from my ledger to hers, that should free up enough money for me to cover everything else after that and maybe I can actually save now. One thing I know I’m going to do immediately is pay off my last credit card company in default, which is only about $400. Then, I suppose I can decide between some combination of saving, paying off student loans, paying off Mom’s credit cards in default, paying off the debt we took out on our life insurance policies, saving, trying to repair our dryer/see if our oven needs fixed, and/or paying for funeral expenses. That’s a lot of different possibilities to consider and I still haven’t decided which of these things I’m going to focus on first, but that will finally give me a lot of options again. She’s going to receive a debit card with her back payment on it, so only the next week until I’m paid again is going to be rough now. I’m probably going to have to go to the 0 to see what paperwork I need to fill out to have the mortgage withdrawn from her Social Security again, and if she’ll be able to have direct deposits again. I guess since I’m the representative payee now, I can do all that myself, and she doesn’t have to go out again, which is a blessing. And obviously, I can and will use her money to buy her pants that fit better, but it might be a challenge buying online since she probably isn’t strong enough to go to a store.

Since the Social Security office is located in the Syracuse Federal Building and it is also a courthouse, they are required to take everybody’s cell phones when they enter the building (presumably so they do not take pictures or make audiovisual recordings of the proceedings). That was really frustrating to me, because the transport company told me that I was supposed to call them to arrange a return trip twenty minutes before leaving the Social Security appointment, but how do I do that without my cell phone? Well, the Social Security teller or whatever his title was allowed me to use his phone to make the call, so we were good. When the return cab arrived, I couldn’t find it though, and we had to stay out there 30-45 minutes later as I tried to simultaneously walk around the block to look for the cab while trying to make sure Mom didn’t leave the bench where I had sat her down, ‘cause I was very concerned that she would after she talked about wanting to walk home. The cab driver drove around the block four or five times, but I guess we were never in the same corner of the block at the same time, so it took me forever to find him. Then, as Mom was trying to walk off the sidewalk and into the van, she fell on her bottom. I couldn’t lift her up, but the driver and I together could. I asked her several times later whether she was hurt there and she insisted that she wasn’t hurt and that she didn’t even remember falling (that’s how bad her short-term memory is these days). Hopefully, this was one of the last times she’s going to have to go to an office for paperwork, because I don’t know how many more times she’ll have the strength for an outing like that.

Anton de Pasquale (14)

Summary: Active Supercars driver with 11 wins. After qualifying for the Supercars playoffs this year, he has earned his sixth top ten points finish in seven seasons.

Case for: He is very much still relevant today and is arguably having his best season yet, since he has posted a 26-4 head-to-head record against his teammate David Reynolds, meaning he has a chance to be the highest-rated Supercars driver this year in my touring car model. He also won six races in 2021, second-most to Shane van Gisbergen’s 14. His rating of .089 entering this season was still a little questionable, but his rating has markedly increased from .012 in my original model, and it should markedly increase again this year.

Case against: Five of those six wins in 2021 happened in the gimmicky Sydney SuperSprint series, where Supercars raced on the same track 11 races in a row after races at several other tracks were canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions. Winning repeatedly at one track isn’t as impressive as winning at a bunch of tracks, and it seemed people defined de Pasquale’s career based on that for a long time, especially since he only won three races in all other seasons.

Verdict: Keep. He might not belong on the list yet if I finished today, but given his current trajectory, he probably will before I’m done. This year, I think he finally proved that he did more than simply benefit from having to compete and dominate on the same track over and over.

Giniel de Villiers (18)

Summary: De Villiers won four consecutive South African Touring Car Championships and 42 races from 1997 to 2000 before winning the first fake Dakar Rally in 2009.

Case for: Winning four titles in a row in any national touring car series is difficult to dismiss, and he did not necessarily back into any of those titles. Crossing over between touring car racing and rally racing also helps his case. In addition to winning the first Dakar Rally that didn’t actually race to Dakar, he won a couple of South African Rally Championship races as well.

Case against: His case comes down basically entirely to how seriously I take his touring car titles, and I really don’t think that I do. Looking at all the other drivers that he beat, I don’t see any that even felt to me like the slightest contenders to make the list. The most famous driver he beat was Shaun van der Linde, the 1994 champion, I guess, because he is Kelvin and Sheldon’s father. Shaun has a rating of .109 (pretty paltry compared to Sheldon’s .349 and Kelvin’s .328), while de Villiers is not eligible for my model, but de Villiers did win 32 races to Shaun’s 9 from 1997 to 1999 when they both competed. He also had a pretty short run in touring cars as he had his four great seasons and then he was done, but the “Dakar Rally” win was admittedly nine years later in 2009.

Verdict: Keep. Since de Villiers is not eligible for my touring car model, I have to do some hazy guesswork here, but if Shaun van der Linde has a rating of .109 and de Villiers won over three times as many races when they competed together, my guess is de Villiers, if he had a rating, would be around .25. So yeah, probably. But the competition there was so bad that you shouldn’t be surprised if I change my mind.

Don Devendorf (16)

Summary: IMSA driver with two titles in the GTU and GTO classes in 1979 and 1982, respectively. He has 7 overall wins and 15 more in class.

Case for: The volume of wins alone is enough to make a case for him, especially because 15 of his 22 wins came in solo drives (the other 7 were shared with the more famous Tony Adamowicz, who I have already rejected). Before that, Devendorf also had five SCCA Runoffs titles, one in the G Production class in 1968, one in E Production in 1970, and three consecutive in the C Sedan class from 1973 to 1975.

Case against: Devendorf never won a 24 Hours of Daytona or 12 Hours of Sebring and that’s a major strike against for an IMSA driver since those races are probably more important than the championships. He had a short run as all his IMSA wins were from 1978 to 1983. What his case ultimately comes down to is how strong the fields were, and I don’t think they were amazing. Excluding Daytona and Sebring (where he didn’t win anyway), there were only three IMSA winners in Devendorf’s classes during his run who even have Wikipedia pages: Adamowicz, Walt Bohren, and Yoshimi Katayama, and I have none of them on the list. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything since there are great drivers without pages, but it suggests his classes weren’t all that relevant. Devendorf was better than these guys, but was he that much better?

Verdict: Drop. I like the fact that almost all his wins were solo, but he was competing against fields of nobodies, and he wasn’t dominant enough for long enough to overcome that. At least de Villiers won four titles in a row and a lot more wins against his shallow field, and his Dakar Rally win is more prestigious than anything Devendorf ever had. I suspect I’d feel differently about Devendorf if he had endurance wins or a longer period of relevance, but he didn’t, so I don’t.

Darel Dieringer (16)

Summary: Solid NASCAR driver with 7 wins from 1963-1967. He also has 9 proto-ARCA wins, 1 proto-ARCA West win, and 1 NASCAR Short Track win.

Case for: Dieringer had a strong reputation, because his wins often came in major events, including a 400-mile Riverside race, the 1966 Southern 500, and a 400-lap 1967 North Wilkesboro race that he led flag-to-flag. He was always hyped as one of the big stars in his heyday and he consistently drove for big factory car owners like Bill Stroppe, Bud Moore, and Junior Johnson. He also won a race by eight laps despite starting 20th in a weird race where they kicked all the factory cars out.

Case against: 1963 to 1967 is a very short run, and four of his wins (1965 and 1966) and his best points finish (3rd in 1965) came in the years of the Chrysler and Ford boycotts, when plenty of the top drivers weren’t entered in most races. Most of his wins came for Bud Moore, but three of them came in 1965 and 1966 after Joe Weatherly died as the two-time defending champion, then Billy Wade died the year after becoming the first driver to win four races in a row. He did beat Wade for a win once when they were teammates, but he likely never would’ve been the team leader there if Weatherly or Wade hadn’t died, and I don’t have Wade on the list either. Despite his flag-to-flag win at North Wilkesboro for Johnson, I don’t think anybody’s ranking him highly on the list of all-time Junior Johnson drivers. I don’t find his .048 stock car rating compelling.

Verdict: Drop. He had his moment with bursts of dominance but it came against some of the worst fields of all time. He might have a strong case if he was a dominant driver in other stock car tours like his contemporary Paul Goldsmith or something, but he wasn’t. I think if I was going to go for a driver like this, I’d rather go for someone like Nelson Stacy, who had a much higher winning percentage (4/45 vs. 7/181) with Cup wins that came arguably against stronger fields on average and with consecutive proto-ARCA titles and much more dominance in other divisions in general, but I’ll get to him later. This is like Jamie McMurray against worse fields to me.

Louis Disbrow (15)

Summary: Disbrow was one of the most prolific winners in an era that has been very poorly documented. There is a great historian named Darren Galpin, who I’ve talked with before, who has archived more pre-1950 races than anyone else in the world. I really recommend his site, and I’ve downloaded all his books, and this guy seems to know more about pre-World War II American racing than probably anyone else ever, even though he’s a Brit!

Case for: What is best-known about Disbrow is that he has four non-points IndyCar wins in seasons that did not actually exist in 1911 and 1913, although you’ll often see him listed as a four-time winner because previous inept historians retroactively “counted” those seasons that never existed. The Third Turn also lists him as a three-time IMCA Big Car champion, but as far as I can tell, those seasons are fake too, and the actual IMCA Big Car championship didn’t start until 1925. From my best count, Disbrow has 111 wins in Galpin’s books, and he obviously has many more unrecorded. It was difficult for me to figure out what races to include since there were various heat races, match races, time trials, record attempts, and free-for-alls, and nearly all the top drivers competed in all of these things, which were frequently held on the same weekends. I counted the heat races, match races, and free-for-alls, but did not count time trials or record attempts, and that’s how I got the number 111, but that is very, very fuzzy. I ranked Disbrow #5 for 1915, but obviously, he significantly benefited from the fact that Europe was already at war.

Case against: Most of Disbrow’s wins (as with most of anybody’s wins in this era) came in 1 to 10 mile “races” against fields of only a few cars. (This is also how Ralph DePalma can end up with 2,557 listed wins.) He had some wins in 100-to-200 milers but nothing longer, and the vast majority of Disbrow’s wins came in scrimmages. He was very lackluster in his four Indy 500 attempts, and he wasn’t a standout in his American Grand Prize (proto-USGP) races either. He only seemed to perform strongly against weaker fields for the most part, but he was definitely one of the most dominant drivers of his era, with one of the strongest reputations. There’s also an intangible where he was indicted but acquitted for murder before his career began. While I’ve decided I’m not going to omit a truly deserving driver for moral reasons, for a possibly more marginal driver like Disbrow or Dick Seaman, I might.

Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, my vibes-based opinion right now is that I should keep him for his dirt track dominance because I know he was considered kind of a rival to drivers like Barney Oldfield, who I do have (reluctantly) as a lock. Additionally, Disbrow seemed to have been winning consistently for a lot longer period than even Oldfield did, even if none of Disbrow’s IndyCar wins were official, and Oldfield was probably better against stronger fields. Furthermore, I initially rated Disbrow’s seasons before I seriously looked at Galpin’s books. I only rated five of his seasons (1911, 1913, 1915, 1921, and 1922), and it seems like, from what I’ve learned from Galpin, that I need to rate him in a lot more seasons than that. I suspect he probably needs to be a lock, especially if I have later (and arguably even more obscure) perennial IMCA Big Car champions as locks. It just feels like there’s insufficient evidence for it, and I will mostly have to go on vibes here, whatever I decide.

After the 2009 season had the worst restrictor plate racing of all time, I’ve pretty much ever since expected the worst at all drafting tracks. By setting the bar so low,, I guess I’ve built a glass-half-full attitude that helps me to appreciate any race that exceeds my really low standards, so often I find myself enjoying races other people hate more than I expect to. The ridiculous fuel-saving in recent Talladega races was getting annoying, so I thought it was really funny when only the three RFK Racing cars of Brad Keselowski, Chris Buescher, and Ryan Preece went out to a 30-second lead because only they decided to race at full speed. I initially assumed they were going to have to pit twice while everyone else pitted once in Stage 1. But since the entire field still only needed to pit once, I really have no idea what everyone else was doing. Their sweeping the top three in that stage as a result didn’t really do anything for them in the race overall, but it was amusing just to see something so unexpected, and hopefully that’ll kill the fuel-saving for good. I wish I knew who made that call: was it Brad Keselowski itself or was it my onetime-boss-turned-RFK-analytics-guru David Smith who decided to do that? It makes me wish NASCAR still had all those corny contingency awards in the ‘90s for Mechanic of the Race. That was probably the pit call of the year, whoever made it. Christopher Bell did his best Ryan Briscoe imitation by crashing himself out of the caution in a solo spin on pit road. Although I instantly compared him to Briscoe at the time, I doubt it was the same kind of “jump the shark” moment for Bell, since what really sank Briscoe was Will Power being promoted to full-time status at Penske’s IndyCar team in 2010, and it’s still hard for me to imagine Chase Briscoe or Ty Gibbs genuinely overtaking Bell as Joe Gibbs Racing team leader after Denny Hamlin’s retirement.

After the Big One triggered by some combination of Bubba Wallace, Ryan Blaney, and Joey Logano sent Logano on his roof and eliminated basically all the other title contenders, Larson was running second to Todd Gilliland and was already likely to win since manufacturer team tactics have been happening on these tracks since at least the ‘90s, and most of the remaining cars were Chevies like Larson’s. However, he got forced out of line by Austin Hill and fell to 10th overall before rocketing back to the lead in less than half a lap in the kind of performance I hadn’t really seen before (without everyone crashing). That left a lot of people suspicious because conspiracists assumed that all the Chevies were in cahoots to let Larson win. I neither particularly like nor dislike Larson, so I don’t feel I’m significantly biased either way here, and it seemed no less legitimate than most other Talladega finishes. I don’t think Chevy was ordering everyone to allow Larson past (I think he presumably would have won the title even if he finished 10th, based on where everyone else finished). Maybe I’m just too credulous or something, but it honestly seemed to me a lot of the drivers were really tentative simply because they were trying to avoid a last-lap crash (which seem to happen like routine clockwork these days) more than because they were in the tank for Larson, but I suppose I could be wrong.

I’ve decided to shut down my racermetrics Twitter account due to lack of engagement, not wanting to distract myself, and trying to focus on nothing other than my work, my book project, and caregiving (and often failing at stopping myself from consuming things). I do still have a lurker account through my Gmail account with a fake name just to read things, but I know I should just get off it entirely. I think reading months of people making fun of anyone who complained about being lonely really set me off, although I always chose not to engage. I’m glad I wasn’t on there during this race after a string of shitty drivers who were either accused of domestic violence or publicly made homophobic rants were leading, not to mention the winner, who lots of people will never forgive for what he did in 2020, and I still think that’s (not so secretly) underlying a lot of the backlash for people who want to call him a fake champion.

I really don’t understand why so many NASCAR fans think the driver who had the best season and the champion have to be the same driver. Fans in other disciplines - particularly F1 - understand that a driver can win the championship without being the best driver if the champion’s car advantage was greater than the superior driver’s advantage as a driver. There are extreme examples like 1996, where obviously no one in their right mind thinks either Damon Hill or Jacques Villeneuve were even close to Michael Schumacher, but Ferrari just wasn’t strong enough to compete with McLaren or Adrian Newey at that time. You could even argue Max Verstappen has been better than Antonelli this year, and I expect Verstappen will likely lead my open wheel model again this year since he has swept all teammates this year, while Antonelli has not swept George Russell (but I’ll address that later, and I think I’m rating Antonelli higher this year). But when it comes to NASCAR, fans are so dead set that there must be one best driver, and the best driver is by default whoever scored the most overall points in a season.

I think this is a year where, due to the superior speed of the Toyotas until perhaps recently, the #11 car has certainly been the best team, and Denny Hamlin has reaped the benefits of that. Really, all drivers’ championships should be regarded as teams’ championships since the driver is only one member of the team, albeit the team member who gets the most credit. But what F1 fans get, and NASCAR fans seem not to, is that drivers should be compared to their teammates, or at least other drivers using the same chassis or engine. Hamlin accumulated more overall points than anyone else, both because he was really lucky and because the Toyotas were faster than the Fords and significantly faster than the Chevies. However, when you compare him to the other Toyota drivers and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, I don’t think this has been his best season. He outperformed all three JGR teammates (Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe, and Ty Gibbs) by a larger margin in 2025 than in 2026 in my opinion, and the same goes for Tyler Reddick, who drives for his team. Hamlin was unambiguously the best Toyota driver in 2025 when some of those other guys were slumping, but this year, I’d say he was only barely better than Bell and Reddick overall, and if you ranked either of them over Hamlin, I wouldn’t laugh. That’s pretty bad, considering both how unlucky Bell was and the fact that he even had an injury this year, yet his numbers improved significantly more than Hamlin’s did. I’d still say he’s the best Toyota driver and I’d take him third overall, but I think people have been overrating him all season just because he led the overall points (just as they were probably overrating Reddick when he was leading the points), and that had more to do with Toyota’s advantage than their advantage specifically.

I guess it’s just venerating what people believe to be the glory days, but the problem is the Latford points system sucked, and a lot of people didn’t like it when it was around. Darrell Waltrip was upset he was nowhere near the title chase in 1984 when he dominated that season in terms of wins and laps led, and to his credit, when he won the 1985 title, even though Bill Elliott grossly outperformed him, he acknowledged that Elliott should have won the title over him also. Even my late, lamented hidebound traditionalist hero Matt McLaughlin hated it. Yet a lot of fans who were only barely alive for the traditional points format seem to think that’s how we should measure drivers ever? The best driver is whoever has the best average finish automatically, but even the Latford system wasn’t that extreme. Mark Martin had the best average finish in NASCAR three times (1990, 1997, and 2002), won none of those titles, and he’d probably admit he didn’t deserve any of those titles, and I actually think his best season was a third-place points finish (1993), not one of his five seconds. You have to do more than look at the box scores to evaluate a driver when an inferior driver can have a car advantage that is greater than the superior driver’s driver advantage. I’m puzzled why NASCAR fans still can’t see this.

I get that Hamlin is the sentimental favorite even from people who hated him because he’s never won a title before, and his father just died, and people are sick of repeated champions like Larson (and even though I can’t prove it, I have to figure a lot of people are still pissed about either his gamer moment or him claiming he’s a better driver than Verstappen, which is stupid, and these are the main reasons people feel such schadenfreude when something happens to him like they do for few other NASCAR drivers). He’s never been the best driver in a season, and he never will be. Sure, a number of drivers worse than Hamlin, like Kurt Busch, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, and Bobby Labonte, were arguably never the best driver in a season and lucked to the titles, but you always need to have a little luck, and Hamlin just never had enough to overcome the fact that someone was always better. And the Chase was favorable to him because it had a lot of intermediate tracks when the Toyotas were dominant on the intermediates and because it had no road course races and he still underachieved. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that Hamlin deserved the championship for his full-season performance if you want, but I don’t think that makes him the best driver. I think Bell, Briscoe, and Gibbs have been way too close to him to call Hamlin the best driver, even though I’d still rate him highest of the four.

The real question is whether Larson or Blaney has been better. For most of the year, I’ve been saying Blaney, but even though Larson had more unforced errors in the regular season, Blaney absolutely has in the Chase. I don’t think he was the main cause of either the Bristol or Talladega wrecks, but he was certainly a partial contributor to both, while Larson has been clean. Of course, you can say that avoiding DNFs is where it’s at, and that’s how you get people who act like Chris Buescher is a great driver when it now looks like Ryan Preece is legitimately on the verge of overtaking him, and Buescher should be embarrassed by that. But here’s the point: if the drivers were actually racing under a points format where every race counted the same, I’m sure Larson would be vastly more conservative in the regular season races and not swing for the fences in a way that results in crashes. Larson’s rookie season was in 2014, the first year of the knockout playoffs, so he was raised in a win-and-in environment where winning is everything, and nothing else matters in the first 26 races. I genuinely think if he needed to points race, he’d be able to do it (and this Chase is arguably proving it), but his high-volatility strategy is what works in this format. I believe Larson was better than Blaney this year, not only because he rose to the occasion and Blaney didn’t, but also because Larson has arguably never outperformed his teammates, William Byron, Chase Elliott, and Alex Bowman as much as he did this year, while Blaney has outperformed Joey Logano worse in other years, in my opinion. For Larson to stand a chance of becoming the first Chase driver to clinch the championship a race early in a year when Chevy has been absolutely horrible is pretty remarkable. Sure, perhaps in a full-season championship format, Hamlin would have still pointed his way to the top (although I’m sure Larson would have crashed less in a full-season format - which I’d still prefer by the way, just not this one), but even if Hamlin had scored the most points overall in a full-season format, that still wouldn’t have made him the better performer.

Another former David Smith writer, Chris Mitchell at NASCAR Probabilities, had a great piece yesterday about Casey Atwood to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his pole at Phoenix. Even though I was reading Jayski updates every day during the period of Atwood’s relevance, I’d somehow forgotten how many near-miss opportunities he’d had with other teams and how close he was to potentially ending up in the marquee rides that Kevin Harvick and Jimmie Johnson rode to superstardom. I personally don’t think he was ever going to be as good as them, but I do think it was ridiculous that Ray Evernham fired him for Jeremy Mayfield, the most overrated NASCAR driver of his generation, after he had beaten Kurt Busch in the points standings (who Roush Racing did not fire the year before he blew up to 3rd in points, and Atwood was a couple years younger than Busch even! I do kind of think he had a low ceiling, and if he’d had the decade-long career he’d deserved, I think he would have been around Jamie McMurray or something, but that’s still not bad. If Evernham had replaced Atwood with Johnson, that would be one thing. But for Mehfield? Yuck.

Atwood’s story resonates with me a lot because, like him, I feel like I had a lot of raw talent I never properly harnessed because I lacked many other things I needed to be successful. When I was in high school, I was recruited heavily by colleges. I was surprised by this since I genuinely didn’t know that colleges recruited anyone for academics, because all you ever hear about in the media is athletic recruiting. But colleges were borderline fighting over me back in the day. I received pamphlets from like 60 or 70 colleges, including half the Ivy League and either Oxford or Cambridge (I don’t remember which). That’s not to say I would’ve gotten into all of those colleges, but there was interest. Washington University in St. Louis, probably the most prestigious American college I’d never heard of, and Johns Hopkins seemed to want me the most. Because I always had very sloppy handwriting and I tended to dangle my lowercase a’s to make them look like g’s, UCLA thought my name was Sean Wong after I filled out one of their postcards. (Bet I’d have struggled more to get in then!) Growing up at the weird cross-section between elitism and trailer trash as the son of two Mensa members who both dropped out of college, I had zero financial know-how, and now I realize I should have used my leverage to see who would’ve given me a free ride. I bet someone would have bitten. It kills me now that almost the elite colleges give everyone free rides now, and Cornell started giving everyone from households less than $75,000 a free ride almost immediately after I graduated. Of course, my test scores were slightly below average for Cornell, well below average for the other Ivy Leagues, and by the time I would’ve benefited from this, I might not have been able to get in. But after I initially targeted Syracuse University (probably just ‘cause I was a fan of their sports teams? Cringe), I got more ambitious and targeted Cornell simply because it was the most prestigious school close to me, and pretty much all the schools recruiting me knew that was likely my eventual target. Cornell sent me some stuff too, but they didn’t really try very hard since I think they knew they already had me.

And what did I get out of it really? A lot of successful projects that were impossible to monetize, basically no real world connections to successful people (since almost nobody there wanted anything to do with me), over $100,000 in debt, bone-crushing loneliness, a jagged career trajectory and failure to launch, decaying health, a constantly shrinking social sphere, and utter depression. At least Atwood seemed to bounce back and find happiness someday. I hope one day I may find the same.

Wally Dallenbach, Jr. (18)

Summary: The son of five-time IndyCar winner and long-time CART chief steward Wally Dallenbach, Sr., Wally, Jr. is best known for his career as a NASCAR driver and announcer but his real legacy came in sports car racing, where he won back-to-back Trans-Am titles in 1985 and 1986 and 9 wins. He also won 4 overall IMSA races and 12 more in class. He earned three consecutive 24 Hours of Daytona class wins from 1991-1993, back-to-back 12 Hours of Sebring class wins in 1988-1989, and he won both races in class earlier in 1985 as well.

Case for: Dallenbach was the youngest Trans-Am champion at the time, winning back-to-back titles at age 22-23. He was instrumental in Roush Racing’s rise to powerhouse status in sports car racing, as his 1985 Trans-Am title was Roush’s first of six titles in that series, and he successfully defended his title in 1986 even though he defected to the Chevy Camaro team, Protofab Racing. Roush never forgot what Dallenbach did for him and re-hired him for IMSA in 1989, which ultimately resulted in him landing the #16 NASCAR Cup Series car in 1992. Although Roush fired him in 1993, Dallenbach elected to remain in NASCAR rather than returning to sports cars. He never really learned oval racing, but he probably got more longevity than he deserved in NASCAR due to his road course performances, as he earned five top fives at Sonoma and Watkins Glen, including second-place finishes at Watkins Glen to Mark Martin in 1993 and 1995, both of which were arguably stolen from him. Even the Martin biography I own (Bob Zeller’s Mark Martin: Driven to Race) heavily implies that as Martin was driving up through the field, Roush ordered Dallenbach to let Martin past before he eventually inherited the lead after Kyle Petty and Dale Earnhardt crashed, although I can see no evidence of this on the video footage. The 1995 race was even more egregious, as Dallenbach was running away with the race before a caution for oil on the track that many fans felt was bogus allowed Martin to catch up; if Dallenbach had been allowed to win, it would have been Bill Davis’s first. He was obviously still very strong on road courses even after he gave up on sports car racing despite never really figuring out ovals. His low-key legendary announcing career also gives me warm feelings towards him as an intangible. Three of Dallenbach’s IMSA wins came in solo drives.

Case against: I obviously think he belongs on the list on vibes at the very least, but the big question is whether he did enough in his sports car career before he pivoted to NASCAR, where I’m sure he made a lot more money and fame despite a downturn in performance. Trans-Am was pretty weak in 1985 as Dallenbach and his Roush teammate Willy T. Ribbs combined to win 12 of 15 races that year, and obviously, both of them were very bad in their CART and NASCAR starts, although at least Dallenbach had some success as effectively a full-season road course ringer for years, while Ribbs never got that chance, presumably due to racism in the NASCAR garage. Ribbs is obviously historically more significant as well, since he was the first of a grand total of two black drivers to start the Indy 500, which makes him probably more interesting to write about. I think they both deserve it, but their poor crossovers make it questionable. Dallenbach also never won an IMSA title, but I think his four 24 Hours of Daytona wins and 12 Hours of Sebring wins matter far more than his never winning a title.

Verdict: Keep. My only question here is whether I thought he did enough in sports cars before his NASCAR pivot. I can’t really convince myself that he didn’t, even if none of his NASCAR seasons are worth rating (although I do think his 1992 and 1993 are probably worth rating due to his three-year Daytona streak). It’s utterly bizarre he’s one of the few drivers to drive for both Jack Roush and Rick Hendrick, though - I get Roush hiring him at the time, but what did Hendrick see in 1998?

Jonathan Davenport (19)

Summary: Davenport is one of the greatest dirt late model drivers of his generation, and I admit that’s been a major blind spot for me for a long time. I was really too dismissive of grassroots late model stuff, and I’m trying to rectify that now. I’ve had Davenport on top 200 lists before, just like I’ve had Brandon Overton, Bobby Pierce, and Shane Sabraski on lists, too. However, I now realize I should’ve been having drivers like that on my list at least somewhere every year, and I haven’t been diligent about that yet, but I’m starting to improve in that regard.

Case for: Davenport’s primary series is the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt series, where he won three titles in 2015, 2018, and 2019 (including 12 wins in both his 2015 and 2019 championship seasons). He has a staggering 98 wins in that series alone, having recently overtaken Scott Bloomquist’s 94 for the most all-time, and I definitely have him as a lock. He has also won many other titles including the Wild West Shootout three times, the Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals twice, and the XR Super Series once. His five wins in the late model World 100 all-star race at Eldora rank second to Billy Moyer’s six. Across all series that The Third Turn covers, he has 315 wins. And I’m sure they’re missing stuff.

Case against: It only comes down to whether I think the competition wasn’t strong enough to justify his inclusion. I don’t find that argument convincing.

Verdict: Keep. If I already have Davenport with more points than the vast majority of other drivers in this bubble group, and I’m openly acknowledging that I historically did not give enough respect to the dirt late model scene, it’s likely I’m going to be bumping several of Davenport’s seasons up, so he’s far more likely to attain lock status by the time I’m done than to be off the list entirely. And you can pretty much Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V that for when I get to Bobby Pierce, who has 276 wins even though he’s thirteen years younger.

Jean-Philippe Dayraut (15)

Summary: Dayraut won the 2001 French Supertouring Championship after the sries no longer really mattered much, but his main legacy is his dominance in the Andros Trophy ice-racing championship in France.

Case for: Although the Andros Trophy was obscure outside of France, it was a significantly underrated part of the French racing ecosystem, as plenty of great French touring car drivers and rally drivers competed there, with four-time World Touring Car Champion Yvan Muller winning it ten times and even Alain Prost winning it thrice long after his retirement. Dayraut is tied for second with Jean-Baptiste Dubourg with six championships, but Dayraut is the all-time leader with 59 wins to Muller’s 48, Prost’s 38, and Dubourg’s 31. Considering how great Muller and Prost were, I might end up considering Dayraut is a lock once I’ve done more research. Considering how dangerous racing in the rain is, racing on ice is probably even worse, so these drivers have balls.

Case against: Even though this series had better competition than you’d think, it no longer exists and seemed to attract very little interest or reporting from outside the Francophone world, and few non-French drivers ever competed there, so this could be viewed as rather niche. While Muller certainly was in his heyday when he competed there, Dayraut was admittedly Prost’s rival there (with the duo winning nine consecutive titles from 2006-07 to 2014-15) at a time when Prost was in his 50s, which could suggest perhaps Dayraut was rather second-rate.

Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, the competition seems to have been strong enough with enough French rally and touring car champions competing there that being the winningest driver in this series should be worth something, even if nobody cared about it outside of France. This whole ecosystem of drivers seems to be weirdly disrespected as Jean-Pierre Malcher and Dany Snobeck, who both won multiple French touring car titles (Malcher also won a Porsche Supercup title and Dany Snobeck also won a French rally title) somehow don’t have English language Wikipedia pages despite the fact that they both won 5+ Andros Trophy races. But just because these drivers’ press coverage does not properly reflect their legacy does not mean they should not be listed, and I think the same applies to Dayraut. However, I might draw the line at Dubourg and not list him, as I think the series was running on fumes by then (before it was literally canceled due to climate change because France no longer had enough ice to race on).

Andrea de Adamich (16)

Summary: De Adamich was the first driver to win the European Touring Car Championship twice in 1966 and 1967. Admittedly, he did so at a time when there were three different ETCC champions a year. However, his touring car run was a little short with only 9 overall wins and 2 class wins, and 1 World Sportscar Championship win and 6 class wins. He also had a pretty abysmal F1 career.

Case for: Being the first driver to win multiple championships in any major league series seems like it should be an automatic lock. He was significantly faster than his 1966 co-driver, Teodoro Zeccoli, and he beat Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx for ETCC wins that year, but it’s worth noting that Stewart had a 45-second lead before he had to make an extended pit stop, and Ickx was not yet even a Formula 2 driver really, and neither of them would peak until years later.

Case against: The original European Touring Car Championship had some prestige, but I think it was not as highly regarded as touring car championships today, being viewed as roughly on the Formula 2 level, and in practice, it operated more like a sports car championship with multi-driver teams, but probably didn’t have the prestige of the elite modern-day touring car championships or the World Sportscar Championship. His open wheel rating of -.302 is terrible, as his teammate record of 6-20. Even though he won a number of World Sportscar Championship races in class, none of them were especially prestigious.

Verdict: Keep. However, I don’t have much enthusiasm for him, as I really find the case against to be stronger than the case for, but not enough to eliminate him yet. I suspect de Adamich is a driver I will eventually drop.

Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat (15)

Summary: De Chasseloup-Laubat was the first driver to set an official world land speed record in 1898 (63.15 kph), then the first to set this record two and three times (70.31 kph and 92.78 kph) in 1899, alternating the record with the Belgian Camille Jenatzy three times. He also won the Marseille-La Turbie race in 1897 in a steam car, which Wikipedia lists as a proto-Grand Prix.

Case for: If I’ve decided I’m listing world land speed record holders, which I am, de Chasseloup-Laubat is extremely important as a pioneer in that endeavor, and his and Jenatzy’s three world records rank tied for third behind only Malcolm Campbell’s nine and Craig Breedlove’s five (albeit tied with a bunch of other drivers: Henry Segrave, George Eyston, John Cobb, and Art Arfons, so this isn’t exactly that exclusive of a club.) I gave him three consecutive #2 seasons from 1897-1899.

Case against: The first decade of auto racing, from 1894-1904, was entirely amateur, and there was minimal competition at all. There’s a reason I only award the top five drivers points from those seasons, and I award them way fewer points than any later era. Lots of the early drivers were winning in cars of their own construction and one could argue this era of motorsports entirely consisted of engineering exercises with no strategy at all (I would argue Léon Thery was the first actually strategic driver). I don’t really feel the competition level pre-1905 was strong enough to justify including any of these drivers, since there was hardly any “competition” to speak of at all and it was really a bunch of rich kids screwing around (de Chasseloup was literally an aristocrat and even Henry Ford set a world land speed record significantly later than this in 1904 so how competitive could it have really been?) I currently have de Chasseloup-Laubat’s mani rival Jenatzy off the list too.

Verdict: Drop. As the first driver to set a world land speed record, he’s historically important, but my vibe-based opinion here is that the competition was too shallow. I don’t really think any drivers from this era deserve it unless they remained competitive in the post-1904 period (which Felice Nazzaro, Arthur Duray, Théry, and Victor Heméry did, but most others didn’t.)

Mom didn’t fall, but I did wake up four hours later, and she had shat all over herself, and it took me an hour to wipe her off, and I was still paranoid I didn’t do a good enough job. While I was wiping her off in the bathroom, I ended up hitting my back hard against the shower door handle, and it produced a pretty large cut. I know I should probably get a tetanus shot, and I know that I’m very unlikely to do so anytime soon due to the copay, not wanting to leave Mom at home any more than I have to, and desperately needing to go to both Monday’s meeting at the Social Security office to hopefully have Mom be able to get access to her social security checks again, my Wednesday follow-up appointment with the gastroenterologist after I left the ER early, and her Thursday appointment with PACE CNY that has now been delayed twice. And then, probably because of the sleep deprivation, I had another huge round of diarrhea to boot. Today was not as bad, although I need to make headway on my paid work. Anyway, here are the remaining C drivers in this bubble group, and maybe I’ll have some thoughts about Talladega in my next column.

Bartolomeo Costantini (15)

Summary: Constantini won five pre-World Championship Grands Prix in the 1920s for Bugatti, one in 1925 and four in 1926, before he abruptly retired at the end of that season and became Bugatti team manager.

Case for: Costantini won the 1925 and 1926 Targa Florios back-to-back when that was considered one of the most important sports car races in the world and featured many Grand Prix talents. In his 1926 win, he led start-to-finish and beat the first European champion Ferdinando Minoia by 10 minutes and Jules Goux by 15. He also beat Goux at the Spanish Grand Prix by 16 minutes and by 11 minutes in the Milan Grand Prix. Goux and Minoia were both also driving for Bugatti, and they were hardly washed up at the time since Goux won both the French Grand Prix and the European Grand Prix that year and Minoia’s championship was five years later in 1931, but Costantini beat Goux 3-2 and Minoia 3-0.

Case against: Costantini had one good year, followed by one great year, before he retired. Is that enough when drivers like Goux had a lot more longevity and versatility? Going out on top certainly helps his legacy, but is there enough there? It doesn’t help that you could easily argue he only has four wins, not five, because the Targa Florio essentially double-counted as the Coppa Florio. In the two races Goux beat Costantini, it was significantly worse: 36 minutes at the San Sebastián Grand Prix and 15 laps at the French Grand Prix.

Verdict: Keep. I currently have Goux ranked 4th and Costantini ranked 5th for 1926, but I’m now wondering whether I should switch them. I had Goux ranked higher because his wins came in the more important Manufacturers’ World Championship races while Costantini’s did not and he had a larger cumulative margin of victory, but Costantini winning the head-to-head suggests to me that maybe I should switch them. If I do, Costantini becomes a lock in addition to Goux, so I can see the argument that maybe I should do this. But if I decide it’s not enough longevity, I can certainly easily leave him off.

Johnny Coy (17)

Summary: A prolific Long Island midget winner in a bunch of obscure series, Coy has at least 137 verified wins according to the Third Turn, and ten midget championships. I’m still missing some of this information, as I have “only” 118 wins and 8 titles listed: the ARA Midget championship in 1949, the NASCAR Midget championship in 1958 (yes, NASCAR actually had a Midget championship briefly), four American Racing Drivers’ Club titles in 1968, 1969, 1971, and 1972, and two ATQMRA titles in 1974 and 1978.

Case for: The volume of wins and titles is massive, as is his longevity, since the first listed title I have for him was in 1949, and his last significant midget win came in 1981. Despite hardly ever competing in the AAA/USAC Midget Series, which came to monopolize all the attention, given how it was once a feeder for IndyCar racing and later became a feeder for NASCAR, he was still inducted into the Midget Hall of Fame in 2004 and is recognized as one of the best of his time.

Case against: The ARDC was once a very prestigious series and a legitimate rival to the AAA/USAC series, and even Mario Andretti started there in 1962 and 1963, shortly before Coy’s run, before defecting to USAC, but it still did not have the prestige of USAC and was a little second-rate in comparison, even at that time. Despite how much prestige NASCAR has now, most people don’t even know they had a midget title, so it’s hard to know how much to take that seriously.

Verdict: Keep. An intangible is that his son, Joey, was also a prolific champion with three NEMA Midget titles, one ARDC title, and three ATQMRA Midget titles, but not nearly as many wins (only 23 verified). It feels like the family deserves representation on this list for all its success, but I would honestly prefer Johnny over Joey since he won a lot more often in a lot more different series over a much longer time period, and in an era when regional Northeastern midget racing wasn’t as ancillary to the national USAC tour as it would later become.

Chris Craft (19)

Summary: Craft was a prolific winner in the British Saloon Car Championship, the forerunner to the British Touring Car Championship, where he earned four overall wins, 21 class wins, and back-to-back class championships in 1969 and 1970, although he did not win the overall championship. He also won the European Sportscar Championship in 1973, and two races in that series, four British Sportscar Championship overall wins, and one more in class, and one class win in both the European Touring Car Championship and World Sportscar Championship.

Case for: That might be too many wins to dismiss, particularly considering he won in several different series in both sports cars and touring cars. I have already rated him at 19 points, which is higher than most of the other drivers I am going with.

Case against: I realize many of the top BSCC drivers intentionally competed in less competitive classes to give them a better chance of winning overall championships, so I’m not going to criticize him for having vastly more class wins than overall wins, although I think never winning a championship when you do that is a strike against. The European Sportscar Championship wasn’t that prestigious, as the previous champion was Arturo Merzario, and the succeeding champion was Alain Serpaggi and I don’t like I’m listing either of them. His open wheel career wasn’t impressive as he had a single DNF and a DNQ in F1. His open wheel rating of -.685 is terrible. His touring car rating of .005 is mediocre. He didn’t even have any class wins in sports car endurance races, and winning those races matters more than season championships anyway.

Verdict: Drop. You know, when weighing all these arguments together, I don’t find the case for Craft remotely compelling at all. Even his Wikipedia page doesn’t even attempt to provide evidence of his greatness: “One of the highlights of his career was a third-place finish in the 1976 24 Hours of Le Mans.” Now, sometimes Wikipedia is wrong (the Jim Reed and Thierry Tassin pages are horrible), but if even his Wikipedia page is arguing just finishing third is a career highlight, meh. I’m clearly overrating him based on his win count.

Gianfranco Cunico (16)

Summary: Italian rally racer who earned a surprise World Rally Championship victory in 1993 as a privateer. Cunico won 34 overall races in the Italian Rally Championship and three consecutive championships from 1994-1996. I think he’s quite similar to Dario Cerrato, who I’ve already gone through.

Case for: Winning a World Rally Championship race for a non-factory team was extremely rare in the ‘90s, which separates him from a number of the other Italian Rally Champions who never won internationally. He beat Cerrato the one race they were teammates in 1994, although that was at Cunico’s peak while Cerrato was past his prime, and his 41-11 head-to-head record against his teammates is better than Cerrato’s 23-14.

Case against: On the other hand, just comparing these two guys, since I think Cerrato is the best comparison, Cerrato won more Italian rally titles (5) and almost as many wins (32) while also winning two European Rally Championships, a title Cunico never won. Cerrato’s seven consecutive title-winning seasons suggest a higher sustained peak, even if Cunico won a WRC race and Cerrato didn’t, and even though Cunico had a slightly longer run of relevance. Cerrato’s record is worse but he also had more head-to-head comparisons against World Rally Championships, while Cunico was never teammates with a WRC champion. (He lost to Stig Blomqvist three times and beat Markku Alén one time when they were teammates, but they weren’t competing in the same class, so I decided it doesn’t count.)

Verdict: Keep. I can’t really decide right now whether I think Cerrato or Cunico was better, even though I gave Cerrato a couple more points. I might not end up deciding on these guys until I see which one of them ends up higher rated in my rally drivers’ model, if I ever finish that and I have no idea which way that would go. I could see either of them being rated higher. If I can’t decide between them, and I kept Cerrato on the bubble, I have to do the same for Cunico.

Jorge Cupeiro (14)

Summary: Basically a one-year wonder in Argentina’s Turismo Carretera series, Cupeiro won 9 races and finished second in points in 1965, which was arguably better than the rest of his career combined. He had four other Turismo Carretera wins overall and five overall wins in Turismo Nacional, and a second-place points finish in the Class D championship in 1961, but that’s about it.

Case for: Only four other drivers won nine races in a season, Juan Manuel Bordeu, who won 9 in his 1966 title season, Eduardo Copello, who won 11 in his 1967 title season, Dante Emiliozzi, who won 10 in back-to-back seasons in 1963 and 1964, and Roberto Mouras, who won 9 in 1984. Even seven-time champion Juan Manuel Traverso never won more than 8, and Cupeiro won 9, to that year’s champion Emiliozzi’s 4, but Emiliozzi was still certainly the bigger star as that was his fourth title in a row.

Case against: Clearly, the win totals of the ‘60s drivers are inflated because there were more races in a season in the mid-’60s than there were in other periods. Winning 9 races in a year doesn’t stand out as much if people are winning 10 and 11 in the same period. The fact that he fell off almost immediately afterward suggests he just had a really dominant car that year and didn’t in other years, but not really bouncing back or ever finishing better than fifth in points after that does not speak well for him. Additionally, while I rate Turismo Carretera higher than most other North Americans do, especially when considering that Juan and Oscar Gálvez, who won 14 out of 15 championships from 1947-1961 and were legitimate rivals to Juan Manuel Fangio before he left for F1, but after Juan died in 1963 and Oscar stopped racing, there was a major power vacuum, and I don’t believe the competition level was as strong.

Verdict: Drop. If I’m even going to leave off drivers like Oscar Aventín, who won multiple titles in this scene, Cupeiro didn’t have a chance. That one year was definitely an elite season, but the rest of his career is insufficient to push him across the line. He really just benefited from weaker competition and more races in a season.

Michael Christensen (17)

Summary: A long-running and successful factory Porsche sports car driver, but not necessarily an elite one, Christensen won 24 major races from 2012-2024, including the 2019 24 Hours of Spa and 2021 24 Hours of Nürburgring overall and the 2018 24 Hours of Le Mans, 2017 24 Hours of Daytona, and 2014 12 Hours of Sebring. He also won the 2018-2019 WEC GTE title with Kévin Estre, but that is his only major championship.

Case for: Since the marquee endurance races are generally more important than the actual championships in sports car racing, it’s hard to dismiss a driver who has won almost all of the major ones, and it’s also hard to dismiss a driver with that many wins and a decade of longevity. He was also Richard Lietz’s co-driver in Lietz’s 2015 WEC championship season, and only didn’t share in that title because he missed one race while Lietz started every race. He also had a faster speed percentile than Lietz that season (60.99-55.51).

Case against: His WEC teammate for most of his glory days (2017-2022) was Kévin Estre, who is arguably the best sports car driver of his generation, and I have the sneaking suspicion he was the Memo Rojas to Estre’s Scott Pruett. He’s obviously better than Rojas (who I don’t even have on the bubble at all), but almost all of Christensen’s big accomplishments were shared with Estre, and he was vastly less successful without him, suggesting to me that Estre significantly carried him. Christensen is recent enough that I do have a lot of advanced data on him, and I don’t love it. His speed percentiles are generally weak as he was usually one of the slowest drivers on his teams. I have calculated speed percentiles for 2014-2016 and 2022-2026 in IMSA and 2015-2016 and 2022-2025 in WEC. In his one full-time IMSA season, he was the slowest of four drivers on his team at 46.08. His WEC speed percentiles have been middling at best (60.99, 19.75(!), 37.41, 46.07, 68.20, 54.22), and he has an 0-2 lead change record in both IMSA and WEC in the seasons I have covered (but I don’t have complete lead change data prior to 2022).

Even in context, his speed percentiles look kind of meh, especially compared to Estre:

2014: Tandy 72.44, Lietz 60.34, Long 48.05, Christensen 46.08
2015: Pilet 63.68, Makowiecki 62.79, Christensen 60.99, Lietz 55.51
2016: Christensen 19.75, Lietz 10.93
2022: Estre 79.81, Bruni 52.31, Lietz 42.33, Christensen 37.41, Makowiecki 30.00
2023: Makowiecki 67.20, Estre 66.88, L. Vanthoor 58.59, Lotterer 51.97, Christensen 46.07, Cameron 36.14
2024: Estre 82.42, Christensen 68.20, Campbell 66.73, L. Vanthoor 64.69, Lotterer 60.35, Makowiecki 59.96
2025: Estre 76.16, L. Vanthoor 61.05, Andlauer 60.31, Jaminet 58.96, Christensen 54.22, Campbell 47.16

But I acknowledge that I don’t have data for 2017-2021 yet, and that era is generally considered to be his best. One thing this is telling me is that maybe I was a little too hasty to declare Richard Lietz a lock since his speed wasn’t any better, and Christensen was actually faster in Lietz’s title season, even though the two drivers who didn’t win the championship were faster than both. Also, Christensen’s solo drives aren’t terrible but don’t swing me in any particular direction (one Porsche Supercup win and one Porsche Carrera Cup Germany win in a short career in single-driver entries and a rating of .111, which is fine, but doesn’t make him an obvious selection either, especially when compared to Estre’s rating of .451).

Verdict: Keep. I just don’t have the data yet to make this call. The post-race PDFs from those WEC seasons are still there for now, so I’d better get on that at some point. While I don’t doubt that Estre was probably faster than Christensen and the team leader for all their 2017-2021 stuff as well, based on their later trajectories, what matters to me is the margin. If Christensen was only like 5-10 percentage points behind Estre in his peak seasons, I might still list him. But if, as I suspect, he was averaging 20 points slower (which I kind of think is more likely), he might end up being a surprise drop.

Ted Christopher (17)

Summary: I have some personal nostalgia for this guy, since he was just beginning to cross over to the NASCAR national series when I went to my first race, the 1997 Lysol 200 at Watkins Glen. I have pictures of his badly mangled car, although I think my dad took this:

Does that nostalgia mean I’m going to be more inclined to list him? Not necessarily. He does have an unusual number of wins and titles, including the 2001 NASCAR Weekly Series national championship, another regional championship in 2000, the 2008 NASCAR Modified championship, and eight World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Tour-Type Modified championships.

Case for: I think the eight World Series of Asphalt titles are why Christopher isn’t an immediate dismissal. He also has 284 overall wins listed on The Third Turn, but most of those are in weekly-series type racing. This does give him substantially more confirmed wins than Jerry Cook or even Ron Hornaday, Jr., or many of the other more obscure modified drivers I am going through, even if most of them weren’t NASCAR-sanctioned.

Case against: The problem is that I think the NASCAR Modified tour is more prestigious than most of the lower-level modified series he dominated and he only won one title there in 2008, which is probably how most people judge his overall career. (However, it’s worth noting that he did win or tie for the most wins in the NASCAR Modified Tour six times, which is second to Justin Bonsignore’s seven and ahead of Mike Stefanik’s four, and that wasn’t even his best modified series by any means.)

Verdict: Keep. You know, I ended up in a different position than I thought I would when I started writing this. I expected him to be an easy drop, but he has over twice as many verified wins as Stefanik, Cook, or Hornaday across all series, even though his NASCAR career is not the most important part of his overall career. That makes him more similar to Dick Trickle or Stewart Friesen, drivers whose mediocre NASCAR careers mask their actual greatness. This feels like way too many wins and titles to be an immediate dismissal. He’ll never make the NASCAR Hall of Fame or any of their greatest drivers’ lists, nor should he, but he seems way better than the vast majority of either the Modified champions or the Weekly Series champions, and winning both is an interesting distinction. Still, by no means a guaranteed keep, but he shouldn’t be an immediate dismissal.

Rob Collard (15)

Summary: British Touring Car Championship career compiler with 15 wins from 2005-2018, followed by two British GT titles, one with Sandy Mitchell in 2020 and one with son Ricky in 2024.

Case for: While crossovers between BTCC and British GT are not unheard of, few drivers have been successful in both, and 15 BTCC wins and 7 British GT wins may be too many to dismiss.

Case against: Both of Collard’s British GT titles came in his 50s, and it’s hard to imagine he was at the peak of his powers by then (I don’t know much about Mitchell, but Ricky was clearly faster and the team leader by 2024). Even though he won a lot of BTCC races, he never finished better than fifth in the championship, and his touring car rating of -.026 is pretty weak. I also don’t think his peak in the 2010s was a particularly strong era for the series. One out of every three BTCC races a reverse grid race, and he had a slightly higher percentage of reverse grid wins (6/15) than wins where the grid was determined by speed (9/15).

Verdict: Drop. There’s nothing really wrong with his career except for the lack of a high ceiling, but while I’m not against career compilers on principle, I think he had neither the longevity or the peak to make up for his weak teammate comparisons.

Stefano Comini (18)

Summary: After the World Touring Car Championship, the ostensibly most prestigious touring car series, split in 2015 with the new TCR International Series taking its most prestigious race (the Macau Guia Race) before the WTCC and TCR International Series re-merged as the World Touring Car Cup (which was abbreviated WTCR to reflect the influence of both sanctioning bodies). Comini was the TCR International Series’s dominant driver with 12 wins, including two titles and two Macau Guia Races, achieving both in 2015 and 2016.

Case for: While the TCR International Series wasn’t as prestigious as the WTCC, having Macau gave it instant credibility even if the quality of the fields weren’t there to match. Comini beat the 2017 TCR champion and 2010 Indy Lights champion Jean-Karl Vernay for the 2016 title when they were teammates, and his 9-8 record against Vernay and 10-2 record against Frédéric Vervisch in 2017 are both really solid when considering Vernay won seven races and Vervisch won four after the WTCC and TCR International Series reunited. His .310 touring car rating certainly demonstrated the potential for all-time greatness, as he has a way better touring car rating than a ton of more highly regarded touring car drivers.

Case against: He stopped racing. He just stopped! He made two starts after the 2018 season and never raced consistently again, even though he was still in his late twenties at the time. There’s no reason why Comini shouldn’t still be a perennial championship contender in the TCR World Tour or some sports car series instead if he wanted to, but he just disappeared entirely, and that leaves me completely befuddled. He didn’t suffer a career-ending injury, and he didn’t retire, so I’m guessing he probably just ran out of money. It doesn’t help that I think the TCR International Series had weaker competition than the WTCC in the years he was there, and he never competed in the merged series, even though he outperformed several drivers who won there.

Verdict: Keep. TCR has become an important brand, as the TCR ended up winning the touring car war after the FIA shut down the WTCC, and Comini won its first two international championships. Sure, you could scoff that the TCR International Series was like the IRL to the WTCC’s CART, and you probably wouldn’t be wrong. But Comini was certainly a lot better than Buzz Calkins, with two titles and 12 wins to Calkins’s one win and shared championship in a three-race season. Since he’s still in his thirties, I suppose he could also make a comeback someday.

Jerry Coons, Jr. (17)

Summary: Coons is one of eight drivers to win the USAC Triple Crown with titles in the Midget, Sprint, and Silver Crown divisions, along with Pancho Carter, Dave Darland, Tracy Hines, Logan Seavey, Tony Stewart, Chris Windom, and J.J. Yeley. He has 19 Midget wins, 17 Sprint wins, and 7 Silver Crown wins.

Case for: It’s hard to dismiss any driver who completed that sweep of titles because it’s relatively rare.

Case against: Every one of the other Triple Crown winners had more combined wins in the three USAC divisions than Coons’s 43, except for Tony Stewart, because he stopped competing regularly in those divisions in his IRL and NASCAR years, and even Stewart wasn’t very far behind with 40. Seavey has already passed him even though he isn’t even thirty yet. Coons’s four titles were all in the very short span of time from 2006-2008, and his Sprint and Midget performances really fell off in the 2010s, although he remained much better in Silver Crown, earning nine consecutive top five points finishes there from 2010-2018, and I do consider that more prestigious than the other two series.

Verdict: Keep. Even if Coons is the least distinguished Triple Crown winner, he’s still a Triple Crown winner, and it’s hard for me to say no to any of them (although admittedly, I don’t have Hines, Windom, and Yeley as locks either, but they’re in the near-lock category so they won’t be discussed in this series). However, somehow, I feel like I need to be convinced on this one.

Summary: An obscure but eclectic ‘60s Italian racer who deftly crossed between rallying, sports cars, and touring cars, Cella won the 1966 Italian Rally Championship, earning three wins in that series, two wins in the European Rally Championship (which was, at the time, the deepest rallying championship), three European Touring Car Championship wins and five more in class, and nine World Sportscar Championship class wins including four Targa Florios and one 24 Hours of Le Mans before his death at 29 in a sports car testing crash.

Case for: 23 wins is a lot, especially for a driver who only had five winning seasons. His versatility was also pretty impressive. He did finish second overall in the 1967 Targa Florio.

Case against: Crossing over between rally cars, sports cars, and touring cars in the ‘60s was not exactly rare, as the distinctions between those types of cars or even disciplines of motorsports were not as rigidly defined as they are today (for instance, there were hill climbs on the World Sportscar Championship). His only championship was a minor league title, and I’m probably not even listing all the ERC champions of this era, and the ERC certainly outranked the Italian Rally Championship. Only 8 of his 23 wins were overall wins, and I have a preference for overall winners over class winners, especially in eras when classes were particularly shallow. The Targa Florio had a zillion class winners every year, and apart from the 1967 Targa Florio, he only finished better than fifth in a WSC event overall once and that was in a hill climb.

Verdict: Drop. If I’m even doubting Dario Cerrato (see below), Cella didn’t have a chance. He was not exactly unique in crossing over between rally, sports cars, and touring cars, and I think his sports car starts had by far the deepest competition, and he was in no way unique there. Cella was like John Andretti in that he was good in a lot of things but I’m hard-pressed to say he’s great in anything. And unlike Andretti, I don’t believe anybody would even care if I listed him or not (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page), and he’s not somebody I feel strong enough to make a defense for in spite of this since he didn’t have a high enough ceiling for how short his career was.

Dario Cerrato (18)

Summary: A much more dominant rally driver who won seven consecutive minor league rally titles from 1985-1991, the European Rally Championship in 1985 and 1987, and the Italian Rally Championship in 1986 and every year from 1988-1991.

Case for: In addition to his many overall titles, he has 38 major wins in either the ERC or IRC and all of them were overall wins. He also has a bunch of wins that didn’t count for championships. His 23-14 record against his teammates is pretty solid, and his 3-6 record against World Rally Champions (1-1 vs. Markku Alén, 0-1 vs. Didier Auriol, and 2-4 vs. Miki Biasion) isn’t horrible. He never won a WRC rally, but he finished 6th in points in 1990 despite only really dabbling in WRC events. He won the Targa Florio four times after it switched from being a round of the World Sportscar Championship to a round of the Italian Rally Championship.

Case against: All his wins came in minor league events. While the ERC still had some prestige in the ‘80s, it had already been eclipsed by the WRC for sure, and the Italian Rally Championship was less prestigious yet, despite containing the historic Targa Florio. If you compare his record to just WRC winners instead of champions, his record doesn’t improve much (5-9 when considering his 1-0 record vs. Andrea Aghini, 0-1 vs. Gianfranco Cunico, and 1-2 vs. Antonio Fassina).

Verdict: Keep. Unlike Cella, who only won one Italian rally title, Cerrato was definitely too dominant for too long for me to immediately drop him, but his record doesn’t scream that he should necessarily make the list either when comparing him to more successful rally drivers. He’ll likely remain very much a borderline list candidate. I probably won’t be able to resolve my thoughts on him until if/when/ever I finish my rally drivers’ model. I’m nowhere near that yet, since I still have well over 10,000 drivers to go through.

François Cevert (16)

Summary: French F1 driver who won one race in 1971 and finished 3rd, 6th, and 4th in the championship from 1971-1973 despite his death in qualifying for the 1973 U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen.

Case for: In addition to his win for Tyrrell at Watkins Glen two years before he died there, he was also a strong sports car racer, winning a Can-Am race at Brainerd in 1972 and the 6 Hours of Vallelunga with Henri Pescarolo and Gérard Larrousse, and setting six fastest laps in World Sportscar Championship events that year. Cevert passed his teammate and World Champion Jackie Stewart for the win at Watkins Glen. His 3-1 lead change record in 1973 was actually better than Stewart’s 2-2. Cevert’s 13-27 record against Stewart in head-to-head finishes is pretty solid considering Stewart’s overall record.

Case against: Stewart waved Cevert by because his tires were lasting longer, but I do tend to count those kind of passes. More damningly, Stewart absolutely annihilated Cevert as teammates, winning two titles and beating him 15-1 in wins, 41-6 in qualifying, and 19-5 in shared finishes (much worse than his actual finishing record). Then again, Stewart is one of the greatest drivers in history so that’s not necessarily a disqualification, and Cevert was still rated well-above average in my open wheel model at .072, which is not unacceptable to make the list, but hardly a lock either. Ditto for his 92nd-place ranking on the F1metrics list, although the fact that that list is so biased towards modern drivers that it has Marcus Ericsson a hilarious 43rd makes me way more inclined to say yes.

Verdict: Keep. It’s always easy to overrate a driver who died right when they were peaking since we never saw their decline. However, since Stewart had already planned to retire after the 1973 season even before Cevert’s death, it stands as likely that Cevert would have been the Tyrrell team leader in 1974 and it’s likely based on his speed in 1973 that he’d have won several more races but probably not a World Championship. I think his blinding sports car speed and the fact that he actually had a better lead change record than Stewart in a year Stewart won the championship makes me want to stick my neck out for him. But he’ll never be a lock by any means.

Ross Cheever (14)

Summary: This is a funny one to probably dismiss quickly. Eddie’s little-known brother primarily competed in Japan’s F3000 series (the forerunner to today’s Super Formula), where he won 10 races from 1989-1994, finishing 2nd in points in both 1989 and 1991, and 3rd every year from 1992-1994 but he never won the title. He didn’t really compete anywhere else.

Case for: Surprisingly, Ross is actually one of the highest-rated drivers in my open wheel model at .234, way higher than Eddie’s -.003, which is why I wanted to give this a quick look. The reason he comes out so impossibly high is his 19-6 teammate record includes teammate wins against Johnny Herbert, Jan Lammers, Masanori Sekiya, and even Michael Schumacher.

Case against: I do not think Japanese F3000 had the same prestige as Super Formula does today. While it was certainly a destination series for the Japanese drivers who made their home there, like Kazuyoshi Hoshino, I would argue that the non-Japanese drivers there who competed there permanently were rather second-rate. Yes, he finished 2nd in F3000 points in a year Johnny Herbert was 10th in 1991 (and even beat Schumacher in a 1-2 finish straight up that year), but Cheever was the only driver in the entire field with the dominant Reynard chassis while Schumacher and Herbert had the inferior Ralt chassis. Cheever was heavily reliant on the Reynard chassis his entire career, and although he was often the highest Reynard finisher in points, I think this is a case where the car was better than the driver. If Ross had been truly great, he presumably would have been able to ride Eddie’s coattails further than he did, but his brief Indy Lights, CART, and European Formula 3000 careers were all subpar.

Verdict: Drop. The numbers are there, but my vibe is that he doesn’t deserve it since even though he was consistently beating the other Reynard drivers in the series, I think he had the fastest car with it and never won in an uncompetitive era. If I didn’t count drivers who had different chassis as teammates (and thereby removed the races where he beat Herbert and Schumacher since they had a slower chassis), his open wheel rating would presumably be a lot worse. It’s an interesting outlier, but not enough of one for me to justify listing him, I think.

Joie Chitwood (16)

Summary: Better known as a stunt driver and proto-Evil Knievel celebrity thrill seeker, Chitwood’s explosive sprint car career may be difficult to dismiss in its own right.

Case for: Despite a relatively short period of relevance from 1938-1947 that was interrupted by World War II, Chitwood won 47 AAA Big Car (proto-sprint car wins), including the 1939 and 1940 Eastern Big Car titles. Even after the U.S. entered World War II, he actually won another Big Car title in the CSRA tour, where he won 10 races in 1942. That’s an important part of his legacy, even though there was so little racing globally in 1942 that I can’t possibly award grades to that season. He is technically credited with 7 IndyCar wins in that bizarre 1946 season, where they added 71 Big Car races to the schedule because they were worried there wouldn’t be enough suitable venues otherwise. I ended up awarding fewer points to the 1940 and 1941 seasons because there was so little competition globally after Europe entered the war, but these were some of Chitwood’s best, as he won 16 races even in those two seasons.

Case against: While sprints and midgets to a lesser degree were two of the forms of racing that were really continuing to thrive even well after World War II started, it’s certainly questionable how strong the competition was at a time when global industry was beginning to shut down, and presumably many drivers were getting drafted. The bigger question is whether I would only be listing him for his celebrity status outside of pure racing rather than his actual accomplishments.

Verdict: Keep. I don’t find myself persuaded by my own counterarguments. He won seven races in 1946 and nine in 1947, proving that he continued to be relevant after the war as industry was ramping back up again. The fact that he peaked in 1939-1942 actually hurts him since I awarded fewer points to some of his best seasons even though those seasons were an important part of his legacy. And even if I am partially swayed by his celebrity status, who cares? It’s not like this is somebody like Paul Newman or Patrick Dempsey who doesn’t have the numbers as a driver. Chitwood has the numbers, and his carnival barker thrill shows make him a lot more interesting to write about than most of the other drivers I’m discussing here, which would likely result in a more entertaining book. I can’t deny that intangible is important, but I wouldn’t be doing it if his record didn’t have a case on its own merits.

Ivan Capelli (17)

Summary: A Formula 1 driver from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, Capelli came in with a lot of hype after winning the Italian F3, European F3, and F3000 titles in four years from 1983-1986. While he never became a star, he was a sneakily underrated driver for March/Leyton House Racing for five years before a disastrous Ferrari season in 1992 effectively ended his career.

Case for: The three minor league titles in four years obviously indicate he was very talented. While he had no teammate in his 1987 rookie season, he was teammates with Maurício Gugelmin from 1988-1991 at March/Leyton House and he consistently outran him. I have calculated crude average running positions for all historic F1 seasons and each year Capelli beat Gugelmin, usually significantly: 8.85 to 10.68 in 1988, 11.72 to 12.98 in 1989, 10.26 to 12.23 in 1990, and 9.44 to 13.61 in 1991. He also briefly passed Alain Prost for the lead at Suzuka in 1988, becoming the first driver to lead an F1 race without a turbocharged engine in five years, then led the most laps at Paul Ricard in 1990 until Prost overtook him when his engine turned sour with three laps left. Even though Gugelmin somehow made F1metrics’ top 100 list and Capelli didn’t, I don’t think anyone would argue that Gugelmin was better in F1. and my model certainly doesn’t, as it has Capelli at .069 (well above average) and Gugelmin at -.021 (actually below average).

Case against: The problem is that Capelli’s career after Leyton House was absolutely miserable. Although he was Ferrari’s last intended Italian full-time driver hire, Capelli’s 1992 was possibly the worst Ferrari season in my entire lifetime. Although the 1992 Ferrari was not very good, Capelli was the last driver to fail to score a podium for them until Felipe Massa in 2011 (after his injury, while Capelli didn’t even seem to have been affected by a major crash). He was fired before the season ended and never really recovered. While many drivers after falling out of F1 reemerged as major stars in IndyCar, sports cars, or touring cars, that didn’t really happen for him. He raced on and off in the Super Tourenwagen Cup, but never finished better than 11th in points or 5th in a race. His touring car rating of .037 is still above average, but that’s worse than it looks because the average major league touring car driver is worse than the average major league open wheel driver. He won essentially nothing after his F1 career ended, except for 3 wins in the 2006 Italian GT Championship, which might not be enough to even be worth listing.

Verdict: Keep. It basically comes down to whether I think the four seasons he outran Gugelmin and his two great races are enough, since there’s little else there. Some people might argue Gugelmin belongs on the list instead of Capelli for what he did in CART (he did beat his teammates Danny Sullivan and Mark Blundell in points six straight seasons, but Sullivan was washed up and Blundell was injured twice and still beat Gugelmin 3-1 in wins and 18-16 in finishes). I feel since I have Blundell currently off the list, I should have Gugelmin off the list too (but I’ll get to him) and Capelli barely on (I really value his pass in 1988 because he was one of only two non-McLaren drivers to make an on-track pass for the lead all season in the year when McLaren’s Ayrton Senna and Prost won 15 of 16 races). But Capelli’s run was so short that it’s hardly a no-brainer or anything. A very interesting borderline case.

Patrick Carpentier (14)

Summary: Won five races as a CART/Champ Car driver in the early 2000s before making a huge gamble to switch to the IRL for Eddie Cheever’s team in 2005. Although he actually beat Scott Dixon in points to be the highest non-Penske Toyota that year, his career effectively ended when Cheever’s sponsor Red Bull bailed after that season, before he got a brief and goofy reprieve when George Gillett hired him for the former Evernham Motorsports NASCAR team in 2008. Hilariously beat Dario Franchitti for ROTY in CART in 1997, and then beat him in the ROTY battle again in NASCAR, although both of them got their doors waxed by the mighty juggernaut that was Regan Smith.

Case for: Although he was steamrolled by his first Forsythe Racing teammate, Greg Moore (who was almost four years younger than him), which is not a good look, his other teammate comparisons are really solid. He beat Bryan Herta 6-2, Tony Kanaan 4-2 (even though Carpentier’s Mercedes engines were inferior to Kanaan’s Hondas), Alex Tagliani 15-10, and tied Paul Tracy 10-10, even though they were teammates when Tracy won the championship. In the IRL, he beat the underrated Alex Barron 8-5. This gives him a surprisingly high rating of .137 (basically identical to Will Power’s) with a long enough career that it might be difficult to dismiss. He also had three consecutive top five points finishes in CART/CCWS and five consecutive top tens in his last five seasons before his career ended due to lack of sponsorship.

Case against: He kind of was to Gen X what his countryman James Hinchcliffe was to millennials, and I do not have Hinchcliffe presently on the list. No one at any point ever really thought Carpentier was one of the best CART drivers. He never came close to contending for a championship. His passing record is pretty putrid, and his wins are pretty humdrum, also. Despite 5 wins, he only has a 3-6 lead change record, giving him fewer passes for the lead than wins. All three of those passes came in the 2001 Michigan and Fontana Hanford device races, which had 60 and 73 lead changes respectively. Although he did win the Michigan race, he only led three laps, and the driver he passed for the win was Michel Jourdain, Jr., which is… not a big deal. In races where it was not so automatic to pass, he never made a pass for the lead ever. Beat Dario Franchitti out of the pits at Cleveland, won from the pole at Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca, then won again on Laguna Seca, but that time on pit strategy. It doesn’t help that he didn’t finish better than 10th against the stronger CART fields of 1997-2001 and earned all his top five points finishes in 2002-2004 after the fields were rapidly declining. His third-place points finish in 2002 is solid since that field was still strong despite Penske’s departure, but the 2003 and 2004 fields were really gutted. And all his teammate comparisons have asterisks: Moore destroyed him, but Moore is the highest-rated IndyCar driver in my model and as great as he was, I’m not sure that holds up, which means Carpentier should have been hurt more by that comparison than he was; Kanaan won at Michigan and dominated Long Beach before crashing while Carpentier didn’t fight for a win when they were teammates; Carpentier was in seasons 4-6 while Tagliani was in seasons 1-3; even though Tracy and Carpentier tied in their head-to-head, they weren’t close on performance as Tracy won 9 races to Carpentier’s 2.

Verdict: Drop. You know, I thought I was going to say yes, but I wound up in a very different place after weighing all these arguments against each other. For as much as I do value my open wheel teammate model for driving comparisons, I think it breaks down in this case. Carpentier was nowhere near as good as my model thinks he is, and that is proven by his poor passing numbers, which I think override his strong teammate numbers, especially because he didn’t really start his rise until the CART field quality was plummeting. I expected him to be a yes, but now I think he’s a hell no. Sorry, Canada.

Duane Carter (17)

Summary: Father of the better-known dirt racing legend Pancho, Duane was a very good sprint and midget car driver in his own right. However, unlike Pancho, Duane’s greatness might be debatable. He won the AAA Midwest Big Car championship in 1950 and 20 proto-sprint car wins after transitioning out of midgets, where he won 19 AAA and one American Racing Drivers’ Club race. He also won a non-points race in both IndyCar and the AAA Midwest Big Car series and had a single top five points finish in IndyCar (fourth in 1952), along with a string of solid Indy 500 finishes.

Case for: He demonstrated versatility by winning in both sprints and midgets at a time when those series were in their heyday and at their peak of relevance. His career was interrupted by World War II because he won his first major midget races in 1939. He won a rare 500-lap midget race in 1947. He beat a rising Troy Ruttman for the Midwest Big Car title in 1950, the year before Ruttman won the Midwest and Pacific Big Car titles simultaneously.

Case against: In the roadster, pre-formula car era of IndyCar racing, when it was much easier for sprint and midget car drivers to cross over and become major IndyCar stars, Carter didn’t do that, which kind of stands out in that era. The ‘50s were a pretty weak decade for IndyCar competition because drivers were either dirt or pavement specialists, and it feels like almost half the drivers were bad at both disciplines, and very few could master both (Carter certainly didn’t). Although he had five top tens in the Indy 500, including a third and two fourths, he never led a lap, and this third-place and one of his fourth places were shared with Indy 500 winners Sam Hanks and Ruttman respectively, who were clearly better. Although Ruttman and Carter briefly had a rivalry in Big Cars, it’s worth noting that when Carter beat him for the title, he was 37, and Ruttman was 20, and Ruttman still won 10 races to Carter’s 6 that year. I think that’s the deciding factor.

Verdict: Drop. Even though he’s a widely-respected driver as his inductions to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame and the sprint and midget car Halls of Fame attest, he didn’t win a points race in IndyCars when many of the Big Car stars were doing so (despite 45 attempts) and he was more of a career compiler in sprint cars rather than a driver who had an extremely high peak. While Pancho obviously deserves it, I think he can stand in for the entire family.

Eugenio Castellotti (14)

Summary: Castellotti never won an F1 race, but finished 3rd in the points standings in 1955 and sixth in 1956 and won four major sports car races (the 1952 Portuguese Grand Prix, 1956 12 Hours of Sebring and Mille Miglia, and the 1957 1000k of Buenos Aires) before his death in an F1 testing crash at Modena at the age of 26.

Case for: In his heyday, he was hyped as the best Italian driver since Alberto Ascari. His .151 open wheel driver rating arguably backs that up as well. F1metrics claims him (see the Sergio Pérez entry) as the driver with the highest ratio of podiums to his teammates at 4-0. All those sports car races he won were considered very important. At the 1955 Belgian Grand Prix, he was the youngest polesitter for thirteen years until Jacky Ickx in 1968.

Case against: Being the best Italian driver since Ascari’s death doesn’t necessarily mean much, considering his peak season in 1956 was the year after Ascari died. That season, Castellotti went winless and finished sixth in points, which looks a lot less impressive when you realize that his teammates, Juan Manuel Fangio and Peter Collins, combined to win five of the seven non-Indy 500 World Championship races that year. Since Ferrari entered all its drivers in F1 and sports cars simultaneously in the ‘50s and ‘60s, most of them won major sports car races by default. F1metrics’ 4-0 statistic seems to be based only on races where Castellotti and a teammate had the same chassis-engine combination. Perhaps Fangio and Collins had superior car combinations, but they also earned them by outrunning Castellotti in the first place. I’ve already decided the F1 career doesn’t deserve it, so now I have to look at the sports car career. The 1952 Portuguese Grand Prix was a solo drive but there were only two other notable drivers in it (Clemente Biondetti and Felice Bonetto, and both of them were at least age 49 and I’m not listing Bonetto either). His Sebring win was with Fangio, and Fangio probably would’ve won without him. His Mille Miglia win was stronger since he won an eleven-hour race straight up against Collins, Luigi Musso, and Fangio. His Buenos Aires win came with Musso and Masten Gregory, who were probably roughly comparable.

Verdict: Keep. Even though I’ve probably made a stronger case against than case for, this feels like the opposite of Patrick Carpentier to me in that I expected to drop him immediately and am now reconsidering for the moment. Being the youngest polesitter in thirteen years is an important statistic and the fact that he legitimately outran Fangio in an 11-hour sports car race where they both drove solo may somewhat make up for how badly Fangio outperformed him in the shorter F1 races. I suspect if I do more research into that race, I’ll likely find out Fangio had much more significant mechanical problems than Castellotti did, which might cause me to change my mind. I guess my entire ruling on him comes down to how seriously to take that race, but I don’t think I have enough evidence to drop him yet.

Nicky Catsburg (19)

Summary: The first driver ever to interact with me on Twitter when I ranked him in my first top 100 in 2015 (a list which I would now change considerably), Catsburg has had an eclectic career with wins in most of the major endurance races, including the 24 Hours of Spa overall in 2015, the 24 Hours of Nürburgring overall in 2020, and class wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, and 24 Hours of Le Mans three consecutive years from 2021-2023. In 2020, he won what is probably his most prestigious title (the Intercontinental GT Championship) and in his best season of 2023, he won the WEC title in the LMGTE Am class, the Asian Le Mans GT title, another 24 Hours of Nürburgring, and another class win at the 24 Hours of Spa.

Case for: In addition to winning several major races and several major titles, he’s still very relevant today as he and his teammate Tommy Milner combined to finish third in the IMSA GTD Pro championship in 2026. It was a fairly equal partnership (Catsburg was slightly faster while Milner had a better passing record), but he certainly isn’t done. He was also a pretty solid touring car racer, with two World Touring Car Championship wins, a fifth-place points finish in 2017, and a solid if not electrifying touring car rating of .122.

Case against: I’m starting to think there isn’t one, since he is a still-relevant driver who has already won all the major 24 Hours races either overall or in class with a consistently rotating bunch of teammates. He has already exceeded the 17-point threshold, where the 1000th-place driver is ranked currently, and it feels like he is way more likely to become a lock eventually than to fall off the list entirely.

Verdict: Keep. I still likely need to do more research into lap times and passing for some of his sports car and touring car seasons if those data are still available, but I don’t think he’s going to be one of my most likely cuts.

It took me a while, but I figured out that, apparently, the reason water is profusely spilling onto my basement floor is because a condensate pump attached to my furnace has been malfunctioning. The furnace itself seems to be fine, but the water spewing out of it could be a fire hazard since it’s at least somewhat near a bunch of cords. My big concern here is that Mom is getting cold all the time. She was constantly complaining about being cold while she was at Van Duyn because she left the heat on at home at around 83° constantly during the last two years she was home, and Van Duyn had it at only around 72°. After Mom returned home, I’ve had it on about 78° or 79° as a compromise, but she’ll likely get really cold until I have it repaired. I finally decided to have the furnace shut off, and I got an HVAC contractor to come look at it today, and I can probably afford it. (They haven’t arrived yet.) Since the furnace likely doesn’t have to be replaced, and at most I need to replace the condensate pump, that should only cost a few hundred dollars and I can afford that now and can then move on to seeing about fixing the oven, possibly replacing the dryer, and/or finally taking pictures of the roof to prove it was completed so hopefully Mom can get a new homeowner’s insurance provider and lower her monthly mortgage costs as a result. Fingers crossed.

Bob Burman (19)

Summary: A pioneering IndyCar great, Burman earned six non-points IndyCar wins and arguably more depending on how you count. He was not really old enough to race in the inaugural IndyCar season in 1905, and he died in a crash in a non-championship race at the Corona road course early in 1916, the next season that had a points championship. In the years in between, when incompetent IndyCar historians retroactively added a bunch of races to championships that didn’t exist at the time, he was credited with six wins, more than any driver who never won a points race.

Case for: Those six races weren’t his only wins, either. In addition to winning the first 250-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (the 1909 Prest-O-Lite trophy), he also won a scrimmage there in a five-mile event before the Indy 500 started. He set an unofficial world land speed record, but the record was not formally recognized. He also set quarter-mile, half-mile, kilometer, and mile speed records in the run up to the Indy 500. I ranked him as the #4 driver of 1909 and 80th on my 100 greatest IndyCar drivers list. He made the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame (albeit nearly a century after he died), which suggests he may have a bunch of wins in races I’ve never heard of, like the supposed 2,557 his contemporary Ralph DePalma won. In addition to his minor Indy wins, he also won multiple races on dirt tracks and road courses.

Case against: He never won an Indy 500, only finished on the lead lap once, and only led 41 laps there. He arguably never had as strong a peak as some of his contemporaries; when Russ Catlin created imaginary championships for the seasons that had no points championship, Burman didn’t win any of them. Obviously, the races he won at Indianapolis did not have Indy 500-quality fields. None of his wins had more than 13 drivers entered.

Verdict: Keep. Burman nonetheless feels like a driver who should make the list on reputation because I know he was regarded as one of the greatest pioneering drivers in this scene, and his speed records (even though most of them were unofficial) were certainly important for the era. I suspect he was a truly prolific winner, and we just don’t have records of most of his wins. None of his six major points wins were shorter than 1 hour, 20 minutes, so they were full-length (unlike Barney Oldfield’s, for instance).

Steve Butler (16)

Summary: The first driver to win four USAC Sprint titles (1986, 1987, 1988, 1990), Butler also won two USAC Silver Crown titles in 1988 and 1992, becoming one of the most prolific USAC champions of all time. I suspect I am vastly underrating him here.

Case for: He was the only driver to win USAC races on both pavement and dirt, and both winged and non-winged sprint cars in the same season, showing great versatility. An important intangible is that he engineered many of his successful chassis himself at a time when fewer drivers were doing that. Although his number of wins is rather small, winning at least one championship in five out of seven seasons from 1986-1992 is a pretty high extended peak, and in 1989 (the only time he didn’t win a sprint car title from 1986-1990) he was injured when he crashed and broke his shoulder in Indy 500 practice (he never ended up starting the race, but was very fast as a rookie before the crash). He also retired at 37 in 1993, so that prevented him from obtaining as many wins as other drivers who were probably worse.

Case against: It really is just longevity and his relative lack of wins. 25 sprint car wins are okay, but that’s only tied for 27th on the all-time USAC Sprint Car win list, and he’d be even lower if you counted the pre-USAC AAA-era sprint car drivers. Despite winning two Silver Crown titles and finishing second in points twice, he actually only won three Silver Crown races and five All Star Circuit of Champions wins, which is why I’ve awarded him far fewer points than you might expect.

Verdict: Keep. Even though I currently have him below my 17-point threshold, where the current 1,000th-ranked driver is, I feel like this is a snub I would have to explain if I made it. He is probably the best driver I have gone through in this entire group of bubble drivers thus far, and snubbing him might be my biggest mistake despite the lack of wins. The fact that he was successful in both winged and non-winged sprint cars when not a lot of others were also makes a strong case for him. You could say that applies to Dave Blaney also, and maybe I was too hasty to drop him, but I would say that even though Blaney has a lot more wins. Butler probably hit a higher career peak and he was also competing in the same era when drivers like Jeff Gordon were coming up. Omitting him would be a bad mistake.

Wally Campbell (15)

Summary: While Campbell has fallen into obscurity, he has a surprisingly eclectic career with multiple stock car titles, and many wins across stock cars, modifieds, open wheel cars, and sprint cars, despite dying only one day after his 28th birthday.

Case for: Campbell’s 1951 NASCAR Modified title came at a time when the Modified Tour was still highly relevant (it was considered NASCAR’s top division in 1948 and on par with Cup in 1949, and it took quite a while for the Modifieds to fall into a completely ancillary role, so the series was still very relevant at this time). Buck Baker, Buddy Shuman, Fireball Roberts, Speedy Thompson, Cotton Owens, and Ralph Earnhardt were all semi-regulars that year, so this title was not necessarily a gimme. He also has 27 confirmed Late Model Sportsman (proto-O’Reilly) wins in two seasons, two stock car titles in the rival ASCRA stock car series, three wins in NASCAR’s short-lived open wheel Speedway division (where he finished second in points in 1952), and eight Big Car (proto-sprint car) wins before he was killed in practice for a Big Car race at Salem. He was leading the Eastern Big Car championship at the time. The 50 career wins I have for him are a lot considering they only came in five years (1950-1954), and definitely an underestimate.

Case against: I have no idea how many Modified wins he actually has. The Third Turn claims he only had a single Modified win in his 1951 championship season, which is strange considering how many races most of those early Modified seasons had, the fact that he also won 19 Late Model Sportsman races that year, and the fact that he has 12 listed Modified wins in other seasons. It’s almost impossible to find any information about the ASCRA series, so it’s hard to know how many wins he has there either.

Verdict: Keep. Although he was just starting an IndyCar career at the time of his death, and the AAA refused his entry for the 1954 Indy 500 (mandating that he gain more experience first), Campbell’s ability to deftly cross over between stock cars, modifieds, open wheel cars, and sprint cars wasn’t that common, and he won multiple times in each of those disciplines. I have to assume that if he won 19 Late Model Sportsman races in 1951 and he beat all those Hall of Famers/50 Greatest Drivers/prolific Cup winners for the Modified championship also, that he had to have won more than one Modified race that year but we just don’t have a record of it. I think this is a profile worth rewarding, but I’d like to know how many Modified races he actually won in 1951 before I decide.

Jamie Campbell-Walter (16)

Summary: Sports car veteran who won the 1999 British GT and 2000 FIA GT titles back-to-back with his co-driver, Julian Bailey, who I earlier rejected. I argued at the time that even though Bailey is the bigger name (probably) that Campbell-Walter has the longer case since he had greater longevity and more sports car wins. He added a third title in the inaugural WEC season in 2013, although it came in the relatively shallow WEC LMGTE Am class.

Case for: 13 FIA GT wins, 10 British GT wins, 2 WEC class wins, 2 wins in the marquee RAC Tourist Trophy sports car race (one of which counted for FIA GT credit and one of which did not), and a win in the 2007 Dubai 24 Hour. His 27 wins (only 2 of which came in class) are better than the 22 I have for Bailey.

Case against: On the other hand, I acknowledge Bailey has a stronger reputation since he was also faster at Le Mans and had solo touring car wins and at least made starts at F1, while Campbell-Walter’s only wins came with other co-drivers. While he had a lot more success without Bailey than Bailey had without him, the lack of single-driver wins for him and knowledge of which driver was carrying the weight in his peak period makes this a little dodgy. Winning an amateur class in the WEC isn’t amazing, although he did beat Jean-Karl Vernay, who I have as a lock, and Campbell-Walter and Stuart Hall did beat their Aston Martin teammates Kristian Poulsen and Christoffer Nygaard, but those two seemed to be faster as they won five poles to Campbell-Walter/Hall’s 1 and those two seemed to win the title mainly because they had 0 retirements while Poulsen/Nygaard had 3. And Poulsen/Nygaard I have nowhere near the list. He never finished better than 14th at Le Mans overall or 6th in class.

Verdict: Drop. I’m starting to think if I drop Bailey, I should drop him also. I thought I was going to keep him and drop Bailey, but it seems like Bailey’s greater versatility, number of solo wins, and Le Mans performance kind of cancels out Campbell-Walter’s greater longevitty of wins, and it’s telling that in both cases, their two years of dominance with one specific car were probably better than the rest of their careers. I think if I drop one, I have to drop both.

Shorty Cantlon (15)

Summary: 1930s IndyCar driver with four wins and five poles. He was nowhere near the bubble when I originally envisioned the list, but when I awarded more points to the 1923-1939 seasons, he entered bubble consideration, but I’m still far from convinced.

Case for: He finished second as a rookie in the 1930 Indy 500 to Billy Arnold, also finished second in the championship, and he ranks third in verified laps led behind Arnold and Wilbur Shaw that year. In 1931, he led all drivers with two wins (tied with Lou Moore for most) and three poles. He added another win in 1934.

Case against: The first half of the ‘30s had arguably the worst competition in IndyCar history, even including the early IRL and late CCWS years. After a majority of the great drivers of the 1920s were killed in crashes, the so-called “junk formula” era was very dumbed-down and disrespected by IndyCar historians, and apart from Arnold, Shaw, Bill Cummings, and Louis Meyer, it’s hard to argue any of the other drivers were genuinely very good. Despite finishing second in his first Indy 500 start and competing at Indy almost every year until he died in a crash in the 1947 500, he never led a lap at the track. His two wins and three poles in 1931 came when he was driving Louis Schneider’s car with which he had won the Indy 500 earlier that year. I consider Schneider (who inherited the win in 1931 after Arnold crashed with a five-lap lead) to be a bottom-five Indy 500 winner in history. While Cantlon was probably better than Schneider overall, I don’t think he was significantly better by enough of a margin to justify listing him.

Verdict: Drop. While I’m not going to say I was wrong to award more points to the 1920s and 1930s drivers, because it seemed like, in general, their cumulative points were coming out worse than I would rate their overall legacies, he never really had much of a case, and I was never really seriously considering him. The points increase was useful to promote drivers out of the bubble who didn’t belong there, but I’m going to remain skeptical about the drivers who remained on the bubble even after I made this adjustment, particularly those who didn’t even reach the 17-point threshold where my 1,000th-place driver is right now, even after the adjustment.

Warwick Brown (15)

Summary: A primarily domestic Australian open-wheel racer, he won the 1975 Tasman Series championship (which included the New Zealand Grand Prix) and back-to-back Rothmans International Series titles, including an Australian Grand Prix win in 1977 and an undefeated season in 1978. He also finished a relatively close second to his countryman and future World Champion Alan Jones in the 1978 Can-Am Championship. Despite only winning one race to Jones’s five, Brown did beat Al Holbert, Elliott Forbes-Robinson, and George Follmer, who are all locks on my list.

Case for: Even though he doesn’t seem to have the same reputation as contemporaries like Kevin Bartlett, I think he was better because he won three open wheel titles to Bartlett’s two, his .154 rating in my open wheel model is well above Bartlett’s -.272 (although both have extremely low sample sizes), and personally, I value his Can-Am win over Bartlett’s Australian Touring Car Championship wins because I think those fields were bigger.

Case against: The fact remains that he didn’t start competing in the Tasman Series until after the F1 drivers left so the domestic Australian competition was not that great. He did beat Jones and F1 winner Peter Gethin for the 1977 Rothmans title, but Vern Schuppan was the only particularly good driver he competed against in 1978 and I don’t know if I’m even going to list him. In his crossovers to the American Formula 5000 series in 1975 and 1976 against much stronger fields, he finished 7th in points both times and didn’t really factor for race wins.

Verdict: Keep. I am more persuaded by the case for, as it seemed he was at least comparable to Jones in the years right before Jones’s World Championship win (he even has a higher rating in my open wheel model than Jones, but again, small sample size), and I think I find his career stronger than a lot of the other Australian domestic drivers like Kevin Bartlett and Frank Matich who get more hype in Aussie circles.

Will Brown (15)

Summary: An active Supercars driver and 2024 champion with 13 career wins, Brown is also the only driver to win both that title and Australia’s arguably second-most prestigious touring car title in TCR Australia.

Case for: I was actually relatively early on the Brown bandwagon, placing him on my top 100 list as early as 2021. Considering that many people would say Supercars is the deepest touring car series (I think I would say DTM, but then those people would argue that DTM is no longer a touring car series), Brown would be an automatic selection for people.

Case against: For all his success, I think Brown is the most overrated driver in the world currently. He sort of reminds me of Damon Hill, Jimmy Vasser, and Bobby Labonte in that I feel he backed into his title by default because he had an overwhelmingly dominant car against an inexperienced teammate who went on to eclipse him easily. I once went on a podcast and called Brodie Kostecki the most overrated driver in the world for similar reasons because Erebus Motorsport seemed to dominate out of nowhere with two drivers who really hadn’t done much in their career to that point. Kostecki proved me wrong as he backed up his performance in subsequent seasons, but Brown really hasn’t. He got really lucky to be elevated to the team leader after Kostecki had throttled him and had a third-year teammate in Broc Feeney, but Feeney even then was just as fast and everybody knew he’d eventually overtake Brown. Once he did that clearly in 2025, Brown has scarcely been relevant again. His rating in my touring car model at last update was only -.010.

Verdict: Keep. Even though I suspect that Brown has already peaked and he will never win a title again, he is still a currently relevant driver, and it’s hard to imagine that he won’t garner enough cumulative points to make it onto the list by the time I’m done.

Ivor Bueb (15)

Summary: Bueb won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice in 1955 and 1957, the first time coming as a rookie, and he also won all three of his British Saloon Car Championship (now British Touring Car Championship) starts, a non-points British toruing car win, a class win at the RAC Tourist Trophy, five international non-points British sports car races and seven national ones before his death in a Formula 2 crash in 1959.

Case for: It’s hard to dismiss a multiple Le Mans winner, as I will definitely be listing the vast majority of them, and the undefeated BSCC record and winning Le Mans as a rookie also looks very good on the surface.

Case against: But I think in Bueb’s case, it was almost entirely car over driver as all his success came in overwhelmingly dominant Jaguars. Obviously, his first Le Mans win is tainted because it came in 1955 after his co-driver Mike Hawthorn triggered the infamous crash that killed Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh and 80 fans. Hawthorn and Bueb did not even inherit the lead until Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss in the other Mercedes withdrew from the race with a 1.5-lap lead in solidarity with their team car. Not to mention that Hawthorn was clearly the team leader as he was an eventual World Champion and he set the fastest lap at Le Mans four years in a row, while I kind of think Bueb was along for the ride. After Mercedes entirely withdrew from international motorsports after that season, the Jaguars ran essentially uncontested at Le Mans for a couple years and completed a hat trick in 1956 and 1957, but I think Bueb probably wasn’t the team leader his second year either as his co-driver Ron Flockhart was probably better. Flockhart had also won the race in 1956 with Ninian Sanderson, a driver who did almost nothing else, while at least Flockhart had three non-points F1 wins and an F1 points podium. This is much better than Bueb’s lackluster F1 record, but I even have Flockhart in my Near Miss category, and even Flockhart’s open-wheel rating is a fairly lackluster -.085. Why I think I had Bueb higher was the BSCC wins, but even that is a hollower accomplishment than it looks like. He took over the Equipe Endeavour Jaguar from owner/driver Tommy Sopwith, but Sopwith had won all eight races he finished in the inaugural BSCC season in 1958, so Bueb going three-for-three looks less impressive, especially since I don’t have Sopwith on the list either.

Verdict: Drop. Although I initially started this entry thinking I was going to go the other way, I’ve definitely talked myself out of it. He probably wasn’t going to win Le Mans in 1955 except for benefiting from his World Champion teammate also causing a devastating wreck which prompted the truly-deserving Mercedes drivers to withdraw from the race, then benefited from Mercedes’s departure in subsequent years. If I’m not going to list either Flockhart or Sopwith, I shouldn’t list Bueb either. Flockhart probably has a stronger case. Jaguar overrated everyone.

Maximilian Buhk (17)

Summary: Buhk won both the Blancpain Endurance Series and Blancpain Sprint Sereies championships in his first three years as a major league driver from 2013-2015, including the 24 Hours of Spa as a 20-year-old, and he did so with different teammates.

Case for: The Blancpain Series are now regarded much more highly than they were at the time after they were renamed the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint and Endurance Cups. Given their current prestige, Buhk’s 11 GT Sprint wins, 3 GT Endurance wins, 5 ADAC (German) GT wins, 3 GT Asia wins, and 1 VLN win plus another in class are a lot to reckon with. In his 2013 Blancpain Endurance title, he and his teammates actually ran part-time.

Case against: Even if the Blancpain Series did feature the 24 Hours of Spa as a round on its calendar and even if he did win it as essentially a rookie, I have to figure his teammates Maximilian Götz and especially Bernd Schneider (one of the best drivers of his generation) were carrying more of the weight, although Schneider was admittedly almost 50. The GT Sprint title impresses me more since I do think Buhk has a stronger career than his co-driver Vincent Abril. But my main issue is that he didn’t seem to keep it up. After a very productive twenties, he retired in 2022 after two weak DTM seasons. He didn’t have a DTM teammate, so he isn’t in my touring car model, but I don’t think his rating would be that great if he was.

Verdict: Keep. I don’t think I have enough evidence to drop him yet, but I very well may. What I woiuld need to make my decision on this is some means of determining how fat Buhk was relative to his teammates in the 2013-2015 period. Unfortunately, the GT World Challenge series still don’t provide lap leaders and lap times like the IMSA and WEC do, which is one of the reasons why I think I end up underrating drivers from that sphere. Since I don’t have any means of determining how fast he was relative to his teammates (especially in that era since it’s even more difficult to find lap times from ten years ago), I don’t really know what to do with him. I might end up dropping him just because I don’t have enough evidence of his own speed, and the fact that he struggled more in single-driver racing like DTM is definitely a strong case against.

Doc Bundy (14)

Summary: Like Darin Brassfield, Bundy’s a sports car career compiler with a lot of wins but a relatively shallow peak. He was a 24 Hours of Le Mans class winner in 1982, a year he also won two Trans-Am races. Additionally, he earned seven overall IMSA wins from 1983-1998 and four more (including the 1985 24 Hours of Daytona) in class, a championship and five wins in the short-lived IMSA Supercar series in 1992, four SCCA World Challenge wins, and an SCCA Endurance overall win and a class win.

Case for: His 25 wins is a fairly solid number and I’m impressed how old he was at his career peak, as all his wins came at the ages 36-52. Unlike Brassfield, he did at least win both Le Mans and Daytona. He did beat Hurley Haywood to win his one major title in the IMSA Supercar Series in 1992.

Case against: Honestly, I’ve talked myself out of this before I even started writing. First off, while a lot of IMSA drivers in Bundy’s era had solo wins, Bundy didn’t and every single one of his teammates in his wins was better (Al Holbert, Bobby Rahal, Bob Tullius, Brian Redman, Wally Dallenbach, Jr., Sarel van der Merwe, Andy Wallace, David Brabham, Johnny O’Connell) with the sole exception of the third driver in his Daytona win, John Jones, who he only co-drove with in that one win. Yes, he beat Haywood to win a relatively minor IMSA title, but freakin’ Kenny Wallace (not known for his road racing prowess) finished fourth in points the year before his Cup Series rookie season. Bundy might have finished second in the Trans-Am standings in 1982, but he was well behind Elliott Forbes-Robinson, only winning out on a tiebreaker against Phil Currin (who never won a Trans-Am race and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page) in a year when actor Paul Newman actually got a win at the age of 57.

Verdict: Drop. There really isn’t much of a case here. He’s a redundancy.

I turned off charges indefinitely for my Substack late Wednesday night when I was in what I believe to have been the worst pain of my life. Worse than when I cracked my head open after I slid on my dad’s recently-waxed hardwood floor in 1993 and needed stitches. Worse than when I cracked my head open (again) when I was bouncing on an exercise ball and slammed my head into a wooden food cabinet (also at my dad’s apartment) in 2000. Worse than when I was coughing for pretty much all of fourth grade before my tonsils and adenoids were removed. And I think worse than when I was freaking out about potentially having appendicitis a couple weeks after my colonoscopy in the summer of 2025.

While I’ve had numerous bowel issues for over a decade now, I usually haven’t felt much abdominal pain before, aside from last year’s post-colonoscopy ER visit. That changed on Wednesday night around 11:00 PM when I felt what I considered to be serious abdominal pain that felt like it was crushing down on my stomach. I didn’t really think it was appendicitis this time since it was around all four quadrants surrounding my belly button. I estimated the pain at an 8/10, and I did think it was the worst pain I’d felt to that point ever. I was equivocating about whether I wanted to go to the emergency room or not, since I really didn’t think I could leave Mom at home, and I’ve been trying not to as much as possible, but ultimately I decided to go to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and I called 911. I assumed it was just gas pains since I do have irritable bowel syndrome, and this was most reminiscent of the colonoscopy incident when my gastroenterologist told me the next day that was gas pain as well. I must have visited the restrooms in the hospital waiting rooms at least 12 times, the toilets flushed about 20, since every time you stand up, it immediately flushes, and I went about six times in the 1:00 and 2:00 hours. I was moaning more than anyone else there, even the many people who presumably had more serious issues. I fell asleep while covered up in one of the St. Joseph’s blankets for about an hour from 3:00 to 4:00 and by the time I woke up, my pain had dissipated to a 2/10. I finished reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (which my counselor assigned) before I was seen at about 8:00 AM, eight hours after I arrived. By that point, I already wanted to leave.

After Mom came home on September 30, I’d never left her home more than half an hour at a time and that was only once, but she had a lot scheduled for Thursday. She has people from PACE CNY coming to clean her at 10:00 AM on both Mondays and Thursdays, I have to give her all her pills also around 10:00, and she had a follow-up appointment with the doctors at PACE that was scheduled for 11:00. I felt like I needed to get back to her before all those events, so I didn’t end up having any tests done. I would have had to stay another 2-4 hours and not been there for any of those things if I chose to either have a blood test or an image scan done, so I decided not to. Because I’m no longer on Medicaid, St. Joseph’s couldn’t even arrange for me to take a cab back, and I had just $60 left in my bank account, so I walked a mile or so to the nearest bus stop on the North Syracuse bus route (I arrived five minutes late, but luckily, the bus arrived six minutes late) and got home just in time, only to find that Mom’s appointment with PACE is being delayed to next week because there was some confusion since Mom was originally assigned to always go to the PACE day center on Thursdays until she decided she hated all the people and the events and she’d rather than just stay home, which is very frustrating for me trying to arrange medical appointments.

Since I’m also no longer on Medicaid and had to buy health care through the marketplace for the first time, I was charged $476 for basically nothing but a referral plus however much the ambulance costs, which I think will be $150 or something. And my abdominal pain still didn’t go away. While it never got as bad as it was on Wednesday night, I’d say it got up to about a 5/10 yesterday and I’ve been debating about whether to throw more money away at urgent care to have those tests done. It’s usually bearable when I’m sitting down, but when turning, pivoting, or especially bending down, it feels like something is pressing down hard on my stomach.

My sleep has also been a major issue. After sleeping one hour in the ER waiting room, I slept two or three hours in two separate stints after I got home, then another ten hours nonconsecutive on Thursday night. Mom was getting on my case yesterday about not having gone to bed yet when it was 4:30 PM and I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. Even when I was a little boy and I would literally scream at her when she put me to bed even a minute after my scheduled bedtime of 7:00 PM, I never went to bed that early. But I figured after all that, I needed the rest so I compromised and tried to go to bed at 6:30 PM. In the weeks before Mom came home, I was usually going to bed between 3:00 and 5:00 AM, so that was a big adjustment. I didn’t think I could remotely fall asleep at that time, but I tried. And then I didn’t fall asleep the entire night and Mom pooped her pants worse than she ever had since she came home. I had to wash her in like 20 places, scrub the toilet, and launder everything. As I was wiping her off, she also peed on the rug so that created even more work after I had had zero sleep. I was really angry Mom tried to force me to go to bed that early because I’m convinced I probably would’ve been able to at least sleep some if I’d waited until I was tired. But I decided I had nothing better to do than try to sleep (especially since I canceled YouTube TV for at least a few days since I couldn’t make that payment until I was just paid today), and then I failed to sleep at all. The pain has dissipated some as I write this, so I don’t think I’ll be going to urgent care, but it hasn’t gone away completely.

This has been kind of a rougher month financially than I expected it to be. I thought my mom’s Social Security would automatically be returned to her, but I needed to schedule an appointment with the Social Security office to have the Van Duyn nursing home removed as her representative payee and that won’t be until next week and who knows when she’ll get access to her money again. Obviously with her being home, there is more in the way of grocery expenditures too. While she was in the nursing home, I was allowed to withdraw $50 a month by New York State law (because Medicaid takes the rest to pay for the nursing home) and I deposited that manually each month to (mostly) cover two of her three life insurance policies, which add up to over $60, but I had to cover those policies entirely myself this month. And there are still a lot of other issues, as there has been water pouring out of either our furnace or our hot water heater (I couldn’t tell, but I need to have it looked at). I did just get paid today, so I should be able to finally make some headway on that. And I need to try to get Mom’s mortgage back to what it was, which requires getting a new homeowner’s insurance policy so we no longer have to have emergency homeowner’s insurance bundled into the escrow for her taxes and insurance (which requires taking pictures of the roof when I’m not even sure I have a functional camer) and also getting her enhanced STAR tax exemption for her school tax back (which was removed once she was no longer living in the house, and raised our monthly mortgage payments $300 by itself). My bills for the medical services can wait.

Obviously, I’m trying to figure out what caused this specific stomach episode and maybe I’ll never know until I’m finally looked at. I did have a follow-up appointment scheduled with a gastroenterologist (which was basically the only thing they did for me in the ER before I left). However, there was a big paper chase and bureaucratic maelstrom I failed to resolve yesterday. I didn’t tell the St. Joseph’s ER about my new doctor’s office (where I went for the first time a few weeks ago) so they shared no information from them. My new doctor’s office has not yet obtained medical records from my old doctor’s office. The gastroenterologist told me they did not receive the referral from St. Joe’s so I would either have to go there somehow (and leave Mom at home for probably an hour) to hand them the information personally, mail it, or ask the St. Joe’s ER to fax it to the gastroenterologist and I was unable to get any of that mumbo-jumbo done. I think my preference is to still do this at the gastroenterologist rather than going to urgent care now, but don’t get me wrong. I’ve thought of the latter, too.

I know that no doubt all my IBS issues stem from my atrocious diet growing up. Let me quote my book on this:

“Even beyond anything mentioned so far, my biggest adverse eccentricity without a doubt was my eating habits. While I ate pretty much everything until I was one, I abruptly stopped eating all solid food and reverted to formula shortly thereafter. Still on formula and not potty-trained at almost age four, I was almost not allowed to enter preschool, but I did eventually move on to solid food. I must be the only person in the history of the world who learned to touch-type before being pottytrained. Unfortunately I ended up likely having one of the worst extended diets in human history. For basically my entire childhood, I ate practically the same diet with almost no variations. For breakfast, I ate Freihofer’s Canadian Oat Bread or Pepperidge Farm Cinnamon Bread with a Flintstones vitamin and a box of cherry Juicy Juice. For dinner on weekdays, I ate a Tony’s frozen pizza – either cheese or sausage and pepperoni. For lunch, I would eat school pizza, hash browns, French toast, or chicken nuggets when available (and chicken nuggets for dinner on the days I ate pizza for lunch), but other than that, I always ate 2 Pop-Tarts, a cracker and cheese pack and chocolate milk for lunch, or chicken nuggets in the summer. On weekends, I would have six slices of Domino’s sausage and pepperoni pizza at my dad’s apartment on Saturday and four on Sunday, eating either Kraft macaroni & cheese or nothing for Saturday night dinner and chicken tenders from Burger King on Sunday night on my way back home to my mom’s. I also ate two 1-pound boxes of Cheez-Its a week and drank two glasses of soda almost every night. Somehow I did not have a coronary as a teenager. I wasn’t even really unhealthy although there was no good reason for that to be the case. That basically was around 95% of what I ate in my entire childhood. This is now actually considered a legitimate eating disorder – Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) but wasn’t at the time. Whenever I tried to expand my diet, most of the time I gagged and was completely unable to swallow whatever foreign substance I was trying to eat – turkey, corn, soup, even unbreaded chicken. Perversely, I even seemed to take this extreme eccentricity as a source of pride as a child, introducing myself by saying ‘Hi, I’m Sean Wrona and I’m a picky eater.’”

I never changed this very much in my adulthood. I can’t do mac & cheese or Cheez-Its anymore as I think my bowels badly reacted to the annatto dye in them. I started drinking two meal replacements most days going back to 2018 or something: initially Soylent but now it’s impossible to get so I’ve switched to Huel. I do eat oatmeal and a banana each day now, I’m trying to integrate applesauce, but pizza, soda, and toast were still staples (although these days I’ve been having the pizzas delivered - I preferred to make them at home but I think our oven isn’t working properly either). While I was on the ambulance, the paramedic asked me what I last ate and I told him I had some saltine crackers. He then asked me what my last real meal was and I told him I ate almost entirely junk food and he was like “No wonder”.

I think I’ve mentioned this before here but back in the ‘90s, I was so proud to not be a drug user in the DARE era when drug users were perhaps most vilified while hypocritically failing to acknowledge that I was doing far more damage to myself than the average drug user. But the difference is that now people have sympathy for drug users, believing it is an addiction that the user can’t control. I’m fine with that, but nobody grants the same mercy to people who eat improperly. Tons of people believe ARFID doesn’t even exist and if you have the palate of a 12-year-old, the vast majority of people will still give you shit for it. While marijuana users are I think considered cool now, poor eaters remain the butt of jokes and people feel such schadenfreude whenever we suffer. Not that schadenfreude is ever okay, and I’ve complained about how that’s taken over Internet culture again and again and again and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself. I know the IBS is presumably a result of four decades of nutritional atrocities (but who knows - maybe it’s not since there does seem to be a connection between autism and bowel issues beyond just dietary differences, I think) but I don’t know how to not make myself gag most vegetables and meats and a lot of unprocessed foods in general. Cannot swallow them: just spit them out on the floor. I can probably integrate more fruits and nuts and that’s what I should be doing, but I don’t necessarily know 100% that that’s what caused this. But I can be pretty sure. And I’m sure any random who comes across this who’s not already subscribed to me will say, “Skill issue” - one of many, many insufferably smug catchphrases from this epoch that make me want to vomit.

It’s possible that it could have been any of a number of things that triggered this though: the stress of my mom coming home, the fact that I was walking all the time when I was visiting Mom at Van Duyn three days a week and was probably getting multiple miles of walking most days and now I’m suddenly not, the financial stress, Mom waking me up when I was asleep several times for me to walk her to the bathroom and me not being able to fall asleep again, etc… I don’t know which of these was the trigger. Probably a combination. I don’t know what really is going on. I think it’s still IBS because my colonoscopy last year said that it wasn’t colon cancer, Crohn’s, or ulcerative colitis, but I suppose it could be other things like SIBO or pancreatritis. I’ll need to get it seen whenever I finally schedule the gastroenterologist appointment, but who knows when that will be now that all these various doctor’s offices have a failure to communicate. And I still want to see a dietician to see if anyone can help me learn to swallow things that I currently gag.

Needless to say, I’m scared shitless. I knew after my doctor’s appointment a few weeks ago that I needed to schedule follow-ups with a gastroenterologist and a dietician, but I decided not to because I didn’t think I could really leave Mom at home when she has cataracts and is incontinent, but this was scary enough that I now think I need to. It doesn’t help that I’m really feeling signs of old age in a year when Kyle Busch, the first NASCAR superstar younger than me, died along with legendary NASCAR writers Steve Waid, Matt McLaughlin, and Monte Dutton. I already addressed Waid and McLaughlin here, but I suppose I need to discuss Dutton a little also. I read his Gaston Gazette columns off of Jayski links a lot in the ‘90s and 2000s. He sort of felt like the Bob Pockrass of that era in that his reporting was consistently solid but his prose style was a little boring. He was always worth reading, but he never seemed to have many memorable lines and to be honest, I kind of forgot about him until I heard about his death a few days ago. I was surprised to find out that Dutton and McLaughlin were only a couple years apart in age because Dutton felt way older to me when I was reading him, like he was already in his fifties in the ‘90s, but apparently not. In addition to all those guys, I also think about both my mom’s old age and also how Jonas Neubauer, who held essentially the same status in the world of Tetris tournaments that I did in competitive typing (even right down to the specific years we were both on top) died before he even reached 40 and I am really conscious about my own mortality at this point.

I’m not in too much pain now as I write this and I do want to keep making posts here. I think I’ll mostly stop driver posts for the rest of this year and just do my remaining bubble posts before my year-end wrap-ups, but I may at some point change my mind if I’m feeling better. My mom became stricken with multiple sclerosis in the ‘80s right before I was born. She was attempting to work full-time as the music secretary at Onondaga Community College, go to school full-time where she was double-majoring in music and computer science, helping manage a local Syracuse progressive rock band named Aire, which played Genesis, Rush, and Police covers along with their own similar material (she dated both the drummer and the keyboardist at different times), and writing an opera based on Rachel Maddox’s obscure fantasy novel The Green Kingdom. That was too much for one person to handle and it all came crashing down in 1983 when she caught the flu for six weeks and never really recovered as the MS got too bad for her to work again not long after that. She never finished the opera, and honestly one of the things I wanted for her if she ever came home would be to help her finish it. I was never a musician and I know even less about orchestral music, but there’s probably something I could do here and if she has the strength for this (which I don’t know, she probably doesn’t) I’d like to try to help her with this, and it seems like I’m more into this than she is at this point actually. But a lot of times I wonder whether this 1,000 greatest drivers list is going to be my opera and something similar is going to happen to me. Gee, I hope not. I don’t think I need to go to urgent care right now since the abdominal pain is almost entirely gone at this point, but I should probably go to sleep.

Bob Bondurant (20)

Summary: A legendary motorsports personality whose legacy went well beyond driving, Bondurant is best known as a driving instructor, where he trained Hollywood actors to race after training James Garner for his work in the film Grand Prix. That’s an important intangible, but his driving career is also quite solid, as he earned 11 World Sportscar Championship class wins (including the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans as a rookie when he co-drove with Dan Gurney, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the 12 Hours of Reims). He also earned 1 SCCA National Championship win and another in class, two United States Road Racing Championship class wins, and at least 24 wins in minor regional SCCA events.

Case for: Bondurant feels like the kind of driver who I should list on reputation alone, but how much of that reputation is based on his racing performances and how much of it is based on his Hollywood connections? He definitely had a lot of wins, including 18 out of 20 in 1956, 30 out of 32 in Shelly Washburn’s Chevy Corvettes from 1961-1963, so the win count I have for him is likely an undercount. I ended up awarding him another point by rating his 1960 season C- (which I previously had unrated), which technically takes him out of my Bubble group and into my Near Lock group, and I suspect I’m missing a lot of wins for him.

Case against: However, the competition in most of his wins was extremely shallow, and he is rather lacking in overall wins against top-notch competitions, even if he won most of the major races in class. His run as a serious international competitor only lasted for a couple of years in the mid-’60s. His chief rival was Dave MacDonald, whom I currently have outside the list, but maybe that was a mistake. His F1 and NASCAR crossovers were not amazing.

Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, I think the volume of his wins overcomes his lack of competition. I might’ve said no if he didn’t win internationally, but even if they were only class wins and not overall wins, 11 World Sportscar Championship class wins in only two years is quite substantial. Unlike Stan and Stanton Barrett, he was much more than just a Hollywood stunt driver.

Darin Brassfield (15)

Summary: Solid sports car career compiler with 11 Trans-Am wins from 1984-1992, and 10 IMSA wins in addition to 6 class wins from 1985-2002, including a class win at the 1992 12 Hours of Sebring.

Case for: It’s hard to immediately dismiss a driver with that many wins over such a long time, but it’s worth noting that he had only one win after 1996, so his longevity isn’t quite what it seems from the above. His period in Trans-Am didn’t quite line up with the series’s late-period heyday with Scott Sharp, Jack Baldwin, Ron Fellows, Scott Pruett, Tommy Kendall, and Dorsey Schroeder, but he did race and win against all those guys at some point, even if he left the series before its deeper seasons in the mid-’90s. Nine of his IMSA wins came in solo drives.

Case against: While he was always fairly relevant from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, he was very much a career compiler who never had a particularly strong peak. Not only did he win neither an IMSA nor a Trans-Am title, he only even seriously contended once in 1993, and even that year (when he won four times), he still only finished third of the four full-time drivers in the championship. When there were often only 5 or 6 either good and/or full-time drivers competing in Trans-Am or his IMSA classes, that’s not amazing even if he did win a lot. He only won the 12 Hours of Sebring once in class and never won the 24 Hours of Daytona, and the marquee races are probably more important than the titles in sports car racing since they have deeper fields.

Verdict: Drop. If I’m even having second thoughts about Baldwin, who had three major titles, more marquee race wins, and a lot more longevity, even though he didn’t start winning until 35 (by which point Brassfield had basically already stopped winning), Brassfield didn’t really have a prayer.

Colin Braun (19)

Summary: Braun can certainly do a lot more for you than Brassfield. A very prolific sports car champion and winner, Braun has five titles, three in IMSA (two in the PC class and one in the LMP3 class), one in the Asian Le Mans Series LMP2 class, and one in the GT World Challenge America Pro-Am class. Across all those series, including IMSA predecessors Grand-Am and the American Le Mans Series, and one win in the SprintX Series, he has 17 overall wins and 28 additional class wins. These include three 24 Hours of Daytona wins (one overall), three 12 Hours of Sebring class wins, and one Petit Le Mans overall win.

Case for: That’s a lot of titles and class wins I just rattled off. He has been relevant for a very long time, having won his first Grand-Am race in 2006 before he was even old enough to vote, and still winning as late as 2025. When you compare him to his contemporaries Jordan and Ricky Taylor, they seemed to fall off sooner than Braun did, even though he’s older than them. A lot of Braun’s co-drivers, especially the amateur and manufacturing magnate Jon Bennett, who owned the CORE Autosport team Braun won both his PC titles with, were very bad. He was relevant in a bunch of different series, although almost of them were American.

Case against: My big issue with Braun at the moment is that the competition in all five of his title seasons was truly putrid, as the PC and LMP3 classes were arguably the most amateur in their eras and the number of drivers who were even good in those classes was… limited, although he did beat Renger van der Zande in both 2014 and 2015 and Bruno Junqueira in 2015, João Barbosa and Felipe Fraga in 2022, Bryan Sellers and Ryan Dalziel in 2023, and Julien Andlauer, Louis Delétraz, Tom Dillmann, and Alessio Rovera in 2025. His speed percentiles have been very weak relative to Tom Blomqvist, who I also found to be borderline, and his 24 Hours of Daytona win is obviously tainted due to the cheating scandal.

Verdict: Keep. Even though he spent most of his best years racing in very weak pro-am classes, there were still at least a couple of good drivers he had to beat almost every year. Enough so he should make the list. I haven’t finished calculating speed percentiles for all the post-IMSA merger years, but I plan to do that in the next year. I’ll probably sort out discrepancies between a lot of the modern sports car drivers when I do that, but I don’t think Braun will be one of the drivers I ultimately drop.

Dick Brooks (14)

Summary: Highly-regarded underdog ‘70s and ‘80s NASCAR driver. If you exclude crossover drivers who competed in a bunch of different series, many people would argue he’s the best one-time Cup Series winner.

Case for: Although his one win at Talladega was rather fluky, which is not a good sign, Brooks really put Junie Donlavey’s team on the map with its first four consecutive top ten points finishes from 1975-1978, improving the team to such an extent that Ricky Rudd and Jody Ridley arguably piggybacked off his previous success when they replaced them in their second and rookie seasons, respectively. Rudd and Ridley’s three straight top ten points finishes after Brooks extended Donlavey’s streak through 1981, but then in the team’s final two decades after that, only Ken Schrader in 1987 (the year before he went to Hendrick Motorsports) got a top ten points finish. The Donlavey team, for all its hype, was always pretty bad, with only a single win due to a scoring error in half a century as a car owner, and Brooks might’ve been the team’s most important driver.

Case against: The ‘70s were the worst decade for NASCAR competition. Although some might argue that the ‘50s or ‘60s were worse (and the short track competition, especially the west coast short track competition, definitely was), the superspeedway fields in the ‘50s and ‘60s were vastly deeper than the ‘70s. By the ‘70s, most races were on superspeedways. So many of the best stock car drivers of the era weren’t racing in the NASCAR Cup Series; they were either competing in other NASCAR divisions or, more often, in different sanctioning bodies like the USAC Stock Car Series, ASA, and ARTGO. When you only had 5 or 6 great drivers competing regularly most of the time in the ‘70s (the only decade where there weren’t even ten different drivers to earn 10+ wins), being the best of the rest feels a little hollow.

Verdict: Drop. While I definitely think Brooks was an underrated driver, I find my case against more convincing than my case for. I guess the big question here is whether Brooks reminds me more of James Hylton (who I have in my near lock tier) or Lake Speed (who I have in my near miss tier). Like Brooks, I find both those guys to be underrated drivers who consistently elevated their uncompetitive cars. However, Hylton was an owner-driver in his prime years, while Brooks wasn’t, and Speed’s era was more competitive. I think Brooks was better than Speed, but I also think Speed is probably his best overall comp, so if I’m going to say no to Speed, I should say no to Brooks also. Nonetheless, he deserves more respect than he gets.

Perk Brown (14)

Summary: There are a surprising number of NASCAR drivers you’ve never heard of with a crapload of wins, even if you’ve been a NASCAR fan for decades. Usually, these drivers won dozens of races in either the Modified tour (before it became the modern Modified tour in 1985) or the Late Model Sportsman tour (before it became the eventual Busch Series in 1982). Since those series were never properly archived, these drivers’ legacies have been whitewashed. I decided to award specific letter grades for each number of wins in these two tours, and Brown’s 92 verified Modified wins and 8 verified Late Model Sportsman wins from 1950-1973, certainly make a solid case for him by itself.

Case for: It’s all about the number of verified wins Brown has, but I admit that even after I did all this research on him, I still know close to nothing, and I’m probably not going to research him unless I actually write an entry for him.

Case against: But I do not believe I will be writing an entry for Brown. While 100 wins seems like a lot, it’s not exactly unique, as there are a bunch of other quite obscure drivers who also met that threshold. A lot of the modified drivers racked up substantially more wins than their legacies warranted, in my opinion, because there were hundreds of individual races on some of the early Modified schedules, far more than in the Cup Series. He also never finished higher than third in the Modified championship, and doesn’t really show up on any of those lists of the greatest Modified drivers either.

Verdict: Drop. There are some of these obscure minor league NASCAR drivers who I will genuine[y fight for, like Bugsy Stevens (who has 141 wins and three consecutive Modified titles, including a 29-win championship season in 1968), Al Pombo (who has 194 Modified wins and 55 Late Model Sportsman wins, including eight consecutive Modified seasons with 14+ wins), and Sonny Hutchins (who has 56 Modified wins and 119 Late Model Sportsman wins). Compared to those guys (all of whom I have as locks despite their extreme obscurity), Brown seems fairly mundane. Even Jerry Cook seems mundane compared to them, and he’s a Hall of Famer. Brown basically has a similar career to Cook, but without the titles. This is a pretty easy no.

Lucien Bianchi (15)

Summary: Very similar to his similarly-initialed contemporary Lorenzo Bandini, another eclectic driver who won in a bunch of different series before being killed in a late ‘60s crash. Both of them were Le Mans winners, and Bianchi was, in fact, the defending Le Mans winner when he was killed in testing for the next 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1969.

Case for: Both Bianchi and Bandini were primarily sports car racers, but I like Bianchi’s career better even though Bandini won in F1 and Bianchi didn’t because Bianchi was a three-time Belgian Rally Champion, he won six World Sportscar Championship races overall and eight more in class, including two more Le Mans class wins, slightly better than Bandini’s six overall wins and four class wins, although Bianchi also lived four years longer. Although he didn’t win the 24 Hours of Daytona like Bandini did, he did win the 12 Hours of Sebring and two class wins at the 24 Hours of Spa, which Bandini didn’t. I like his eclecticism more because he won in rallying, sports cars, and touring cars, but admittedly, the differences between those disciplines were much less clear in the ‘60s. And he was less reliant on a single manufacturer for his success than Bandini was with Ferrari.

Case against: My main hesitation has been that I think Lucien’s grandnephew, Jules, the last F1 driver to die in a crash, was better. While Lucien’s open wheel rating of -.036 is better than Bandini’s -.076, Jules showed potentially generational potential with a rating of .240 and had World Champion hype early in his career. It would feel weird for me to list Lucien over Jules when Jules is universally rated higher.

Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, I think he did enough things in enough different disciplines that he has a stronger case than Jules. Even though Jules was obviously more talented, I think his career simply wasn’t long enough to merit a place on the list solely based on potential, and Lucien, while also dying young, had a more complete set of accomplishments. This is just keeping him on the bubble, mind you, so I might still drop him later.

Henry Birkin (16)

Summary: One of the then-vaunted Bentley boys who dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, Birkin was not as significant as his co-driver Woolf Barnato, who won three straight years in a row in his only three Le Mans starts from 1928-1930 with three different teammates, including Birkin in 1929. Birkin won the race again without Barnato in 1931.

Case for: Even though Barnato won at Le Mans three years in a row, it sure seems like Birkin was faster since he set the fastest lap all three years. Unlike Barnato, whose success was entirely tied to Bentley, Birkin remained relevant even after Bentley withdrew after their 1930 win, as he won again in 1931 in a privateer entry with the English lord Earl Howe. He also held a record at Brooklands at the time of his death, and he had occasionally strong Grand Prix results, including a second place at the 1930 French Grand Prix, where he used a Bentley road car rather than a traditional road car.

Case against: Birkin was one of the drivers in my Near Miss category due to his short career who I really thought belonged on the bubble, and he was one of the big reasons why I decided to award drivers from the ‘20s and ‘30s more points. But he was below the cut line when I started this project, and I’m not sure how strong the competition was in the pioneering years of sports car racing. He never actually won a Grand Prix event as far as I can tell, while his teammate Earl Howe actually did, although Howe’s was admittedly a 43-minute Formula Libre race.

Verdict: Keep. The fact that Birkin was the fastest driver at Le Mans three years running in the era when Bentley was dominating suggests he really should be on the list, and the fact that his successes extended beyond the Bentley era makes a strong case for him too. I’m not going to list all the Le Mans overall winners obviously, and I don’t think Barnato’s other two co-drivers Bernard Rubin or Glen Kidston have much of a case, but Birkin definitely does.

Dale Blaney/Dave Blaney (15)

Summary: I’m going to handle these guys together because their cases are very similar. While Ryan Blaney is obviously a lock for his highly successful NASCAR career, I have always been far less certain about what to do with his father, Dave, and his uncle, Dale. Dave certainly has the stronger reputation, since he was the only driver ever to win both the most prestigious titles for winged and non-winged sprints, the World of Outlaws and USAC Silver Crown, respectively. Dave was more ambitious and more eclectic as he was one of only two World of Outlaws champions to also win the Chili Bowl, along with Sammy Swindell, and he spent much of his career primarily racing in NASCAR. Dale, however, has the most wins (137) and championships (6) in the All-Star Circuit of Champions, which is not as prestigious as WoO and did not have as good fields, but was pretty prestigious in its own right. According to the Third Turn, Dave has 179 career wins to Dale’s 170.

Case for: Dave being the only driver to win both the most important winged and non-winged sprint car championships is an important distinction, as is Dale being the most dominant driver in the ASCoC, which also has a rich history, and both of their raw win volumes are difficult to dismiss. I didn’t think any of Dave’s NASCAR seasons were worth rating, but he was a lot better in NASCAR than I thought he was at the time, and he didn’t embarrass himself as much as many other crossover drivers despite starting at a relatively late age. Dave’s ranks ninth on the all-time WoO win list with 95; he even has more than five-time champion Brad Sweet. Dave did win all three of the big national sprint car events (the Knoxville Nationals, the Chili Bowl, and the Kings Royal). Dave won 10+ races in the World of Outlaws in five consecutive years (1993-1997). Dale won 10+ ASCoC races in back-to-back years in 1995-1996 and 2014-2015; he also won the Kings Royal but did not win the other two races.

Case against: My knee-jerk reaction has always been to say that Dave didn’t belong on the list because I think his sprint car record is weaker than it appears. Although he won a Silver Crown title, he actually never won a race in any of the major USAC divisions, including Silver Crown. Although he did win the World of Outlaws title, he only did so in 1995, a year when Steve Kinser and Swindell (who had combined to win 16 of the first 17 titles), both made unsuccessful NASCAR moves, with Kinser driving in the Cup Series and Swindell in the inaugural Craftsman Truck Series season. I feel Blaney really backed into both of his main titles. And honestly, having gone through all that, Dale’s case looks weaker as he was dominating in one series repeatedly, while Dave was more versatile.

Who was better?: I had to go down to the nitty-gritty on this one and compare their WoO and ASCoC records against each other. In the races both of them started, Dave had a 6-1 WoO edge over Dale in wins (they peaked in different eras) and a 12-9 edge in the ASCoC, while Dave beat Dale 62-27 in finishes (including DNFs) in WoO, and Dale beat Dave 39-32 in ASCoC finishes, giving Dave a 94-66 edge in starts and 18-10 in wins across both series. However, there is a major divergence in eras here as before Dave’s NASCAR move, he beat Dale 58-6 in finishes and 6-0 in wins in WoO, while after that, Dale had a 21-4 edge in finishes and 1-0 wins. Before Dave’s NASCAR move, he beat Dale 13-5 finishes and 7-2 in wins; afterward, Dale beat Dave 34-19 in finishes and 7-5 in wins. In the only two years they were both competing regularly at full strength in my opinion, 1995 and 1996, Dave beat Dale 15-2 in WoO and 6-5 in ASCoC in finishes (even as Dale won the ASCoC titles, mind you, and 2-0 in WoO wins and 3-2 in ASCoC wins). Okay, Dave was better, even though I was initially leaning Dale. If I’m going to take either, it should be Dave.

Verdict: Drop both. But I think this is my conclusion. Dave has the stronger career, but not winning a race in any USAC division makes him, by definition, one of the weaker Silver Crown champions, and I’m not listing all of them, while his WoO record is inflated because of Kinser and Swindell’s NASCAR moves. Granted, Dave might’ve done enough to make the list if he hadn’t made his own NASCAR move when he did. Maybe this is still too many wins to dismiss, so don’t be surprised if I end up changing my mind.

Tom Blomqvist (14)

Summary: The son of 1984 World Rally Champion Stig, Tom has a strong sports car record, as he won the overall IMSA title in 2022 with teammate Colin Braun and six IMSA races, including the 24 Hours of Daytona and Petit Le Mans back-to-back in 2022 and 2023. He also won the 2018 24 Hours of Spa, a DTM race, a GT European Endurance race, and a race in the electric touring car series ETCR.

Case for: Blomqvist is truly a Daytona master. Not only has he won the 24 Hours twice, but he was clearly the linchpin of those wins with a 3-0 lead change record in the 2022 race, a 1-0 record in the tainted 2023 win, and a 3-1 record in 2024, even though he only finished second. His .269 open wheel record is unfathomably high (he actually beat Max Verstappen in European Formula 3 in 2014, although both of them lost the title to Esteban Ocon). His .099 touring car rating is pretty solid, too. He’s still active in the IMSA GTP division and very much relevant, finishing the 2026 season with back-to-back poles at Indianapolis and Road Atlanta. And he’s usually faster than his teammates, including his current teammate Colin Braun.

Case against: For all that, I have always found Blomqvist to be one of the more overrated sports car drivers, mainly because his passing record excluding Daytona has been pretty putrid. In his 2021 WEC season, he was 0-2. In 2022, he was 1-4 after Daytona. 0-0 in 2023 and 2024. 0-1 in 2025 and 2026. In all his other major league sports car starts, disregarding Daytona, he’s 1-8, and that is bad. For this reason, I always find that his reputation outstrips his actual record, and I end up rating him lower every year than I expect to. I don’t take his open wheel rating even the least bit seriously, since that stems from dominating drivers in minor league series like Jake Dennis who ended up being better in the long run, and both his Formula E and IndyCar stints were pretty awful. And, of course, the 2023 Rolex win is tainted by the tire pressure data manipulation scandal. Even though Meyer Shank Racing returned to full-time status after briefly dropping back to part-time, I’m not sure the team is as strong as it once was, and Nick Yelloly definitely seems to be the team leader now.

Verdict: Keep. If only because he is still a going concern and he is performing well enough to probably career-compile himself to a safer status by the time I finish the book. And he’s truly a Daytona master, and you could argue that that race is more important than the entire IMSA championship. It’s like listing Takuma Sato for his two Indy 500 wins because he was truly great there, even if the rest of his career was meh-worthy, and I do plan on listing Sato. However, I still think Blomqvist’s overrated.

I’ve been struggling this week to try and arrange for Mom’s Social Security checks to once again be deposited into her bank account. Although the Van Duyn business office told me that after they discharged her, they would automatically revert back to being direct-deposited in the same bank account, that is apparently not the case. So, after playing phone tag for hours and hours with the business office, the national Social Security number, and the local Syracuse Social Security office, there were a zillion issues. First, they wouldn’t give me any information because even though I have a power of attorney, I never filed it with them. Then, they wouldn’t give Mom any information because even though she remembered her name, Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, and mother’s maiden name, she forgot her address (indeed, she usually forgets that she even bought this house), and it didn’t matter that she remembered the other five out of six items. I tried to log in to her Social Security account online, but it was unwilling to let me log in unless I provided backup codes. Apparently, they started requiring backup codes at some point a couple years ago since the last time I logged in, so I couldn’t log in for her at all now because I had never set backup codes to begin with and there was no other way of authenticating her (especially because my mom’s cell phone was stolen in the nursing home). I’m getting sick of multi-factor authentication in general, to be honest, as someone who was never down with the phonification of all the processes we used to handle in less cumbersome ways. I wanted to do this either on the phone or online since I didn’t want Mom to have to go to the Social Security office when I know that she’s been incontinent. However, after jumping through hoops, having to set up a printer to scan in her license, having to half-lie and say her license was valid (since it wasn’t expired, even though she failed her vision test) just to get a chance of getting back into her Social Security account, and then having to go through two video chats with her through ID.me because the back side of the license I scanned in got cut off when I scanned it, I finally got her logged in and realized that Van Duyn was still listed as her representative payee. I was told finally yesterday that we could not get the representative payee changed without going to the Social Security office, so I’ve scheduled for PACE CNY to pick her up on one of her buses and take her to an appointment two weeks from now for her to get access to her Social Security account, but if they decide her cognition is insufficient, I might have to be made the representative payee myself.

Over the past couple days, I didn’t get a post done, but I did finish calculating speed percentiles for all IMSA drivers this season as well as determining all the on-track lead changes for all four classes, but I still want to look at the video footage and make sure those are all real lead changes. Admittedly, since there are four classes and most of the lead changes are on restarts, many IMSA restarts don’t appear on video every year, but I usually can tell from the lap times which ones are legit. I’ll probably try to finish my IMSA table over the next week before I move on to the BTCC and DTM tables (if I can find DTM lap data for this season, which I’m not sure I can) since those series are also ending this weekend.

Kevin Bartlett (15)

Summary: Boy, do the Aussies really overrate this guy! A Wheels Magazine poll from 2004 ranked him the 15th-greatest Australian driver of all time (and they even included the New Zealanders who competed in Australian domestic motorsport). Obviously, this is before the emergence of Jamie Whincup, Shane van Gisbergen, Scott McLaughlin, Will Power, and Oscar Piastri, but I still kinda find it laughable. Bartlett won the Australian Drivers’ Championship (at one time the most prestigious Australian title) twice in 1968 and 1969 and won 13 races in that series, along with two Tasman Series wins, a win in the 1974 Bathurst 1000, a win in the 1965 Sandown 6 Hour, three wins in the Australian Touring Car Championship (what is now Supercars) including a second-place points finish in 1980 and a third-place in 1982, and four Australian GT wins.

Case for: I did admittedly just rattle off 24 wins across open wheel cars (the Australian Drivers’ Championship), sports cars (Australian GT), and touring cars (ATCC, Bathurst, and Sandown). He had more versatility than most of the other Australian Drivers’ Champions (who tended to only win in that series), and he won the Macau Grand Prix too. He was the only Australian Drivers’ Champion to eventually win in what is now Supercars until 1984/1985 champion John Bowe.

Case against: I think Bartlett’s case comes down mostly to how seriously I take the Australian Drivers’ Championship and I don’t take it seriously at all. Although it wsa ostensibly designed to be Australia’s premier domestic series and many of those drivers competed against and won titles against essentially the same pool of drivers, they simply weren’t competitive with the international open wheel talents. It’s telling that the two Aussie World Champions Jack Brabham and Alan Jones did not really compete for championships there, and also that many of the ‘60s/’70s Australian Drivers’ Champions competed in the Tasman Series, but none of them actually won there until 1970 after the F1 drivers left. The three proto-Supercars wins certainly help his case, but in 1980, there was only one other list-worthy driver who ran full-time (Peter Brock), and in 1982, there were only two (Brock and Dick Johnson). He also made an IndyCar crossover and was pretty abysmal, DNQing from the Indy 500. His open wheel rating of -.272 (albeit based on a small sample size) is also very bad. Hilariously enough, he was on the panel that decided that Australian greatest drivers list, which is no doubt why he was so inflated (although he’s still better than Spencer Martin who was ranked one position above him).

Verdict: Drop. I simply don’t think the competition in any of the series where he competed was strong enough for as few major league wins as he had. The difference is that I don’t take the Australian Drivers’ Championship as seriously as the Aussies themselves do, and the ATCC career wasn’t nearly strong enough to compensate.

Marc Basseng (14)

Summary: German sports car driver who primarily raced at the Nürburgring, where he is tied with Arno Klasen for the fourth-most overall wins in VLN/NLS series history (he also won 15 more in class). At the 24 Hours of Nürburgring itself, he won once overall in 2012, a year he also won the last FIA GT Championship. He also had eight 24 Hours of Nürburgring class wins, three 24 Hours of Spa class wins, and a 24 Hours of Daytona class win in 2007. He also won both Pro-Am and Amateur GT World Challenge championships, four FIA GT wins, two ADAC GT wins, nine GT World Challenge class wins, and a European Le Mans Series class win.

Case for: I just rattled a hell of a lot of wins there and he has won somewhere all but two seasons from 2004-2026 inclusive. Since VLN/NLS now has a 50-year history, being one of the top five all-time winners makes a strong case for him, and he has the most overall wins of any NLS driver who also won the 24 Hours of Nürburgring, so he mostly wasn’t feasting on lesser classes that were easier to win. Unlike a lot of drivers in this discipline, he was not just limited to wins in Germany.

Case against: He only won once in his FIA GT title season, which most would argue might be his greatest accomplishment, and I think his teammate Markus Winkelhock was better. The fact that his other two titles came in Pro-Am and Amateur classes gives me pause. He never placed highly in the VLN/NLS championship, but admittedly, that’s because the drivers who end up winning championships there tend to be drivers who win weak classes by larger margins. His -.143 touring car rating is very bad, mainly because Rob Huff beat him 18-2 in the 2013 World Touring Car Championship, but that was Basseng’s only season in the series where Huff was defending champion. There’s also the usual issue of which sports car driver contributed what, and I’m not sure he has any noteworthy solo wins.

Verdict: Keep. I find my case for more persuasive this time and I think I need to give him more points, probably especially for his 2012 season when he did win the FIA GT title, the 24 Hours of Nürburgring, and 2 VLN class wins. The fact that he was the winningest VLN/NLS driver to also win the race that the series supports says a lot.

Whit Bazemore (14)

Summary: Consistent career compiler in the NHRA Funny Car division, with ten consecutive winning seasons from 1997-2006 and 20 career wins, ranking 14th all time.

Case for: I know he was highly rated by drag racing aficionados and 20 wins is a solid number, but as I write this, I really don’t see it. Maybe if he’d won in some other series.

Case against: Bazemore never won a title, never won more than four races in a season, and only won more than two three times. Although he won two U.S. Nationals, he never won the other major event, the Winternationals. Since I am including Top Fuel, Funny Car, and Pro Stock drivers, and I will probably also include some from outside the NHRA too, I think going as deep as the #14 all-time winner in any of these is overkill, unless they were significantly more dominant in their time.

Verdict: Drop. There really wasn’t much of a case here to begin with.

Raymond Beadle (14)

Summary: Probably best-known now as Rusty Wallace’s car owner when he won the 1989 championship (but even then he seems to be one of the most obscure NASCAR championship-winning owners), Beadle was another Funny Car driver. Although his 14 NHRA wins are actually fewer than Bazemore’s, he was a lot more dominant in his era with three consecutive NHRA Funny Car titles from 1979-1981 as well as three IHRA titles in 1976, 1976, and 1981.

Case for: Even though Beadle won fewer races than Bazemore, it’s worth noting that the NHRA schedule had a lot fewer races on it in Beadle’s era than in Bazemore’s. While the NHRA was always the most prestigious drag racing series, in Beadle’s era, a lot of the NHRA stars also competed in two other leagues, the IHRA and AHRA simultaneously. Because the IHRA is collapsing as we speak and is very poorly-archived, I have not yet researched how many total wins Beadle has (since I’d probably have to make wild guesses from newspaper archives to do it), but if you count his total wins, it has to be more than Bazemore. Ultimate Racing History has records of 18 IHRA wins and 4 AHRA wins and those records may not even be complete.

Case against: Honestly, when I originally rated him, it was because of the lack of NHRA wins. But now better understanding the full extent of his career, I don’t see one anymore. I was ignorant about all the IHRA stuff until very recently and I haven’t integrated that into my points calculations yet. When I do, he will be closer to if not at lock status.

Verdict: Keep. Kind of a no-brainer the more research I do.

Jack Beckman (18)

Summary: The third consecutive Funny Car driver in this group, his 41 NHRA Funny Car wins rank 7th all time. He won the 2012 championship and peaked in 2015 with 7 seasons. Not only does he have more wins than Bazemore and Beadle combined, he is the only one of the three to earn multiple U.S. Nationals and Winternationals wins. Although old age has never been a hindrance for drag racers, it’s noteworthy that he didn’t win his first race until he was 40 and he has still won two races at age 60.

Case for: Honestly, if you look at all the names directly above (Matt Hagan, Tony Pedregon) or below him (Cruz Pedregon, Don Prudhomme, Del Worsham, Kenny Bernstein), it seems like he’s in strong enough company to make it. He has set 10 of the last 23 speed and/or elapsed time records in the class.

Case against: I probably awarded him too few points because it seems like people take drag racing far less seriously than they did when I was a kid in the ‘90s and it’s dismissed more these days, especially after they reduced the racing distance from 1/4 mile to 1,000 feet in 2008.

Verdict: Keep. I think I am too biased against modern drag racers more for reasons of prestige than the level of competition. Drag racers were all over RPM2Night when I watched it as a kid, but now it seems like far people talk about their equivalents on racing shows now, but a decrease in prestige does not necessarily indicate a decrease in competition. I haven’t docked drivers from the IndyCar and IMSA split eras for dominating eras that had a loss in prestige even if the races were sometimes just as competitive, so to be consistent, I probably shouldn’t be doing that here either.

GEORGE FURY………………AUSTRALIA

Born: January 31, 1945

Best year: 1986
Best drive: 1989 Australian Touring Car Championship Race #7 at Winton Motor Raceway

One of Australia’s most versatile and underrated drivers, Fury was the only driver since Colin Bond to be championship-caliber in both rally and touring cars and was the linchpin in developing Nissan’s touring car operation. Born in Hungary before fleeing to Australia in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Fury began competing in rallies, usually with local lecturer Monty Suffern navigating. After his first win in the 1973 Akademos Rally, Fury loaned a Datsun to compete in Australia’s prestigious Southern Cross Rally in 1974, eventually becoming a Datsun factory driver, tying Ross Dunkerton for the 1977 Australian Rally Championship, becoming the first Australian Southern Cross Rally winner in seven years in 1978 (and repeating in 1979), then winning a second ARC title in 1980. Although Dunkerton won five titles to Fury’s two, Fury was clearly better since he beat Dunkerton 8-2 head-to-head.

Around the time Datsun rebranded as Nissan, they withdrew from rallying and pivoted to touring cars, bringing Fury with them. Using his iconic Blueburd chassis, he finished second on his Australian Touring Car Championship debut in 1982. The next season, he led the championship all season despite going winless due to an odd points bonus for cars with smaller engine displacements until his team boycotted the season finale at Lakeside. Fury won both his first ATCC race and the pole for the Bathurst 1000 in 1984, where he set the fastest lap time for seven years, and became the first polesitter with a Japanese car and a turbocharged engine. Most Australians regard this very highly, but I don’t, since his car owner, Fred Gibson, admitted to cheating.

After sitting out 1985 while the team developed the new Nissan Skyline, Fury exploded in 1986, with five ATCC wins and four Australian Endurance Championship wins, including his first Sandown 500. However, despite winning the most races in both championships, he lost them to Robbie Francevic and Jim Richards, respectively. However, he only won twice more in the ATCC (including forcing Peter Brock into a mistake at Winton in 1989) and once at Sandown before Mark Skaife replaced him. Unable to find a full-season touring car ride for 1990, he returned to the ARC and won two rallies before he ran out of money, then earned his final Sandown win later that year. He retired in 1991 to a quiet life farming and driving a school bus in Talmalmo.

Although Richards and Skaife receive most of the credit for Nissan’s Australian touring car dominance, and I do rate them higher, Fury arguably played a bigger role in elevating Gibson’s team, even though they released him immediately before their trifecta ATCC titles. Despite never winning a title and a surprisingly lackluster touring car rating, his 1986 season demonstrated championship-caliber speed. He might not have made my list based on either his rally or touring car career alone, but his success in both clearly makes him worthy. He certainly deserved better than Wheels magazine ranking him as only the 50th-greatest Australian driver.

Touring car model: #698 of 1676 (-.013)

Teammate head-to-heads: 20-26 (0-1 vs. Colin Bond, 1-1 vs. John Bowe, 4-1 vs. Fred Gibson, 0-1 vs. Tony Longhurst, 0-12 vs. Jim Richards, 3-0 vs. Gary Scott, 3-0 vs. Terry Shiel, 2-4 vs. Mark Skaife, 7-6 vs. Glenn Seton)

Rally model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 11-4 (1-0 vs. Rauno Aaltonen, 0-1 vs. Greg Carr, 8-2 vs. Ross Dunkerton, 1-0 vs. Yoshio Iwashita, 1-0 vs. Shekhar Mehta, 0-1 vs. Timo Salonen)

Year-by-year: 1976: C-, 1977: C-, 1978: C, 1980: C, 1983: C+, 1984: C, 1986: E, 1987: E-, 1989: C, 1990: C