For the average NASCAR fan, I guess last Saturday’s Bristol race felt like a breath of fresh air and a return to the Bristol of old, but I had decidedly mixed emotions. The fans who erroneously think the 1995 and 1999 Bristol night races are the best races in NASCAR history certainly got their money’s worth this time after several wild wrecks amongst the leaders, beating and banging, and Carson Hocevar and Ryan Blaney punching each other in the head. As for me, I didn’t like the race much personally even though I acknowledge it was the most cinematic race of the year and probably the only 2026 race that people will keep talking about from years to come. Mostly, as someone who was around for the 1999 Bristol night race and watched it live, this dumber version of that kind of action mostly just made me feel really old.

I was irritated by this race for a lot of reasons from the drop. I’m getting sick of NASCAR using a complicated metric to determine the starting grid when qualifying is rained out (or worse, even when there’s just a lightning strike). This is the same sanctioning body that introduced a godawful one point per position points system because they thought the fans were too stupid to understand anything else, yet they expect these same fans to understand an arcane composite scoring metric that is much more unfair than just setting the grid by owner’s points as it had been done for decades before? I know the metric was originally a COVID-19 lockdown measure, but I didn’t like it even then, and that should have ended when the pandemic did. It’s just patently unfair when somebody like Tyler Reddick crashed in the previous race, and then got double-punished for it at Bristol, a race where it was almost impossible to pass, resulting in him finishing three laps down and being basically eliminated from the championship. (Yes, it was his fault he got outdueled for the lucky dog spot three times, but he was right behind Josh Berry and Chase Briscoe early in the race, and they immediately jumped into the top ten on strategy not long after that, so I’m not entirely convinced Reddick couldn’t have if he’d ever gotten the track position.) This was probably just me, but I was honestly also deeply miffed that M&M’s sponsored Ty Gibbs and gave him a Kyle Busch tribute scheme when M&M’s withdrawing their sponsorship directly led to Busch leaving Joe Gibbs Racing and Gibbs replacing him because the loss of sponsorship would’ve meant Busch had to take a salary cut. For most of the race, it looked like Gibbs was going to win since he seemed to be one of the only guys who could pass lead-lap cars on track, and I was not looking forward to it. It would’ve felt rather gross to me for a sponsor to honor a driver they abandoned by winning with his replacement, so I’m glad that didn’t happen.

All that action at the end is going to make people think this race was an all-time classic, but it absolutely wasn’t. Although I’m a defender of the Next Gen chassis and I generally prefer it to the COT and the Gen 6 although most people don’t, I will grant that the short track racing has been bad, especially at Bristol, and most of this race was no exception. I honestly found the first three-quarters duller than the embarrassing Gateway race that preceded it, because there wasn’t a pass for the lead until Gibbs took the lead from Blaney on lap 325. He then made the second pass for the lead against Hocevar late in the race, and I begrudgingly admit I was LMAO when Gibbs attended to squeeze between the lapped cars of Alex Bowman and Cole Custer and crashed. Of course this brought to mind the famous three-wide pass on the middle in the 1993 Bristol spring race when Earnhardt successfully squeezed between Mark Martin and Kyle Petty. The difference is that those drivers were safer to race against and probably less likely to make a mistake. Doing that against lapped cars seems to be a way riskier maneuver, and I enjoyed seeing Gibbs get his comeuppance by trying to make a patented Earnhardt move while lacking Earnhardt’s talent, even if he ended up losing very little in the end.

Indeed, although the crash gave Hocevar the lead back, Gibbs immediately retook it when Hocevar pitted on the caution while Gibbs stayed out. It looked like despite his damage that Gibbs would win because four tires weren’t doing much. Then came the moment when Hocevar wrecked Blaney for second, which triggered their ridiculous post-race feud, and it is all that stuff that made me feel really old tbh. I saw so many people after the race comparing Hocevar to Earnhardt because of wrecking people in frontrunning positions at Bristol, but I didn’t really see many similarities at all. When Earnhardt wrecked Terry Labonte on the last lap at Bristol in 1999, it was for the win and fans were outraged. Back in those days, even bump-and-run passes for the win were usually condemned, and Jeff Gordon’s bump-and-run on Rusty Wallace in 1997 was considered so offensive to the sensibilities of the time that Rusty thought it justified intentionally wrecking Gordon at the following year’s Richmond race. (It didn’t.) Even Labonte himself drew fan ire for bumping Dale Jarrett for the win in the same Richmond race where Rusty wrecked Gordon. I remember the day after the 1999 Bristol night race that SportsCenter had a poll up asking, “Was Dale Earnhardt’s spinout of Terry Labonte a violent act?” (This seems silly now, but I guess it makes sense in the ‘90s zeitgeist after Columbine and all the attacks on violent movies, song lyrics, and video games.) I remember that literally everyone who weren’t Earnhardt fans were booing him after he did that, and probably even some of the Earnhardt fans were booing him too. It was considered low class.

But that was the NASCAR I grew up with, so it is still what I consider my baseline for normal, so what has happened in the quarter-century since kind of baffles me. Almost nobody criticizes the bump-and-run anymore and perhaps they never should have. It seems like in the wake of Earnhardt’s death, a lot of people view his intentional wrecking as quintessential NASCAR or the good old days, what they want NASCAR to return to, when men were men and Gillette pandered to them. But even Earnhardt pretended to show remorse when he said he “hated it happened”, although it was admittedly hard to credulously accept his sincerity. So many of the drivers now believe it’s acceptable to wreck people just for blocking them, and that’s something I don’t understand either.

Back when I started watching, the driver who ran into someone from behind was consistently viewed as responsible for causing wrecks by both the announcers and the public, but at some point I apparently didn’t notice, people started to blame most wrecks on the driver blocking and I somehow didn’t even register the change when it happened. I’d never even considered the idea having watched every NASCAR race nonstop for like five years until Gordon said at the 2002 Daytona 500 that he “got himself turned”. I remember at the 2005 “Duel at Daytona” (I still hate this name), Jimmie Johnson was blamed for causing a wreck while brake-checking the field while leading. I also remember that on RacingStalkers at the time, most people blamed Kevin Harvick for causing that wreck at first because he had more of a reputation as an asshole driver at that point and because the conventional wisdom was the driver in behind was always at fault.

But at some point this logic got turned on its head and I just didn’t keep up and now it seems like everybody thinks the driver blocking is always at fault. Because of my early old-school instincts, I blamed Hocevar almost entirely for the crash. Yes, okay, Blaney was probably goading Hocevar to lift and Hocevar refused, but this change in norms where everybody thinks it’s okay to wreck people for blocking them is a cultural norm that I’ve slowly grown to detest even though it’s been going on for 20 years now (ok millennial). And while I’d certainly seen instances where one driver whacked the other in the head before (whether it was Michael Waltrip on Lake Speed or Jimmy Spencer on Kurt Busch), I think that was the first time I saw both drivers do it, and it honestly made me think less of both of them.

I know most people except Hocevar’s rabid fan base seem to hate him because he is the most reckless driver, but to me, this was a turn for the worse. I’ve always compared him to Ernie Irvan because I always saw the many incidents both of them caused as being almost entirely wild overdriving rather than the kind of intentional, premeditated attacks that Earnhardt would do. But this is the one that really felt intentional to me in a way the rest didn’t, even if Blaney is willing to take partial blame and it seems that most Gen Z fans blame the driver in front for causing most wrecks by default, a reversal from the norm I grew up with. And one thing I found very odd is Joey Logano getting booed after winning the race when he did nothing. Sure, I’ve never liked Logano, I never will like Logano, and he’s the luckiest driver in NASCAR history, but he wrecked no one and he passed Hocevar to win. Shouldn’t the fans be happy he kept Hocevar from winning after Hocevar wrecked Blaney? I get the uneasy feeling that Logano got booed because the fans, feeling Hocevar embodies the spirit of Earnhardt when he’ll never be that good I think, actually wanted Hocevar to win after that bullshit and I think that’s what bothered me the most, because that is not how the fans acted in 1999. If Gibbs and Hocevar were the alternatives, I was well on board for a Joey win, thank you.

Another thing that bothers me is that people seem to think that “showing genuine emotion” is now interchangeable with “being an asshole”. I get that it was lamentable when in the wake of Geoff Bodine and especially Gordon, all NASCAR interviews got polished to a gloss and made insufferably boring to not alienate sponsors. It was very possible to run off sponsors due to bad behavior in the ‘90s, like when Robert Yates fired Irvan in 1997 by Texaco’s mandate after he forgot to mention them in the 1996 post-season banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria (a mild offense), blew off several sponsor engagements (a more significant one), and got into a barroom brawl (the worst offense of all). It obviously didn’t help Irvan either that Dale Jarrett was kicking his ass that year. I also know that Joe Gibbs almost fired Tony Stewart at the request of Home Depot in 2002 after he punched a photographer and got into a string of other wild antics, but he was doing just well enough in the championship to overcome the backlash, eventually winning it. So obviously, in that era, the sponsors were very conscious about PR nightmares and there was a certain threshold of success that would allow you to overcome them that Stewart met and Irvan didn’t.

But now, we are in a wildly different era. I don’t want to return to the ‘90s or 2000s level of discipline where Rusty Wallace was fined $10,000 for saying “sucks” (which we don’t even consider a swear word anymore; Rusty responding to this by paying the fine in pennies was almost the only time I ever actually liked him) or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was fined 25 points for saying shit, but I kind of think we’ve gone way too far in the other direction. I don’t really blame the drivers or NASCAR itself. It just goes back to the coarsening of the culture that has permeated everything. In the late ‘90s and 2000s, a fake veneer of manners and civility was mandated by sponsors in that hilarious era when NASCAR was advertising itself as a “family sport”. I can understand how false and phony all that stuff was at the time even though I fell for it as a kid at the time. I don’t want drivers to be encouraged to be corporate robots like they were in that era (which was definitely one of the worst things about the ‘90s and 2000s) and I’m not saying we should discourage drivers from showing emotion, but why do so many people who argue for this seem to act like anything that isn’t douchebaggery isn’t “real emotion”? CART fans praised Paul Tracy so much in the ‘90s and 2000s for “telling it like it is” basically because he was the only driver who called out both sanctioning bodies during the split, calling the CART officials “circuit clowns” once and the IRL cars “crapwagons”. But he was always a schmuck on track, and he was somehow even more of one in the NBCSN booth (Robin Miller’s worst legacy). There’s really only a small step from that to Santino Ferrucci, who some liberal fans acted like he was talentless because he was a bigot and disingenuously used his lack of wins as an excuse when I think basically no one would have won in those cars, while some conservative fans (like a lot of people on TracKForum) seemed to hero-worship him just for trolling the libs. All this for today’s Oriol Servià: a good, not great driver who always made his teams better and usually outperformed his teammates, but had too low a ceiling to interest top teams, so I guess it’s not surprising that Ferrucci’s full-time career, just like Servià’s, ended a bit sooner than it should have.

I guess Hocevar has become popular in some circles because he is the first NASCAR driver to really harness social media in a successful way. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if negative content didn’t outperform positive content. Unfortunately it does, so outrage is profitable now in a way it wasn’t in the ‘90s and 2000s, which is probably also why Hocevar will never change. This is the Age of Trump, so sponsors are no longer averse to controversy but are actively courting it, and I find this rather detestable, but I don’t blame Hocevar for responding to social media’s incentives to play the villain for clicks; I hate the incentives themselves. Hocevar has somehow Flanderized Kyle Busch’s self-image as a WWE-esque heel and it works, but count me out. (I still think he’s a very talented driver and people acting like he sucks - oops, just lost $10,000 there - because he causes a lot of wrecks are wrong, but he’s become a real handful.) The thing is: you don’t have to be an asshole to thrive on social media, even if it’s probably the most effective way to go viral now. Plenty of drivers adapted quirky personas that seemed genuine and social media-friendly without being obnoxious. I can’t really think of a NASCAR example off the top of my head, but in other series, there’s Jordan Taylor, James Hinchcliffe, and David Malukas. If I truly thought trolling people was the only way to get attention on social media nowadays, I’d understand Hocevar a little better, but I don’t think that it is as those other drivers prove. And that’s why I think he’s lost me. Also, Earnhardt and Labonte managed to be genuine back then without throwing punches at each other. Or having their wives bring up unrelated allegations just to escalate the feud like they’re Kendrick and Drake.

Well, I have two major pieces of good news and one piece of bad news. I was told that Mom would be allowed to keep her Social Security money and have it deposited in her bank account again as soon as she is allowed to return home, so I should have access to more money then and that would effectively pay me for the caregiving burden I will be taking on. Additionally, I found a $200 tax refund check in a pile of paper yesterday from New York State that I received almost a year ago and hadn’t deposited; I deposited it yesterday and it was thankfully not yet too late.

However, there is still a major problem with Mom coming home. The front door that the ramp connects to is now sticking and I haven’t been able to open it from inside. The latch on the screen door had been sticking for years as well, so I asked the guy at Onondaga County Community Development who administered the roof repair and ramp construction if he could remove the screen door for me so the ramp was more accessible, but it seems like removing the screen door affected the front door itself somehow. One of my high school classmates (who is one of the only people I talk to locally) told me that the kind of door I have needs to be protected by a screen door and now needs to be replaced. I mean I get that, but I also can’t possibly fathom how Mom was supposed to go up a ramp and squeeze the wheelchair around a screen door in the first place. If I’d known this, maybe I should’ve tried to add a door replacement to the OCCD project. I was trying to call some contractors yesterday for a door repair, but almost all the companies in this field are doing garage door repairs. My garage door is fine. It’s the regular door that isn’t, and unfortunately, that is the door that Mom will need, although it’s probably still possible I could walk her through the garage if I move some things around. I was able to open the door from the outside and the ramp itself with my key, but it took some effort.

This is the flip side of the coin that I complained about in the previous post. Just as I grew up with white pages and miss them, I miss the yellow pages too. Is it possible to look up contractors online? Sure. The problem is that the phone books actually curated the white pages and the yellow pages so that only phone numbers that weren’t out of service are listed in them, while a Google search for local contractors can bring up essentially any company that ever existed, including companies that have been out of business for 10 or 15 years because the deprecated company listings were never removed, which again makes it harder to find local help for anything unless you happen to know a guy, meaning if you struggle to connect to people socially, you’ll also struggle logistically in terms of the activities of daily living. And this is why I think almost anybody in any blue collar field is making bank now. Well, that along with our entire generation competing for a larger number of white-collar jobs than actually existed.

My first doctor’s appointment in years was today, but I’ll have more on that tomorrow.

This is where my 12-game losing streak that led to my relegation started. I had never heard of the first two answers. I knew Wagner wrote “Ride of the Valkyries”, so I put Valkyrie, and that was very close since that piece was part of the Nibelungen cycle, but I just hadn’t heard of the overall cycle. I just made a wild guess on #2 and put radicchio, which I wasn’t even sure was a food (it is, but not a liqueur). I never have a good instinct for which of these geography questions is easy or hard, and it’s definitely the category I underachieve in the most that I didn’t expect. I put Boston, but I had nothing. I actually had house and switched off, one of like five times over a seven or eight day period where I had the right answer and then talked myself out of it because “House” didn’t sound like a nightclub to me, so I switched to the related genre electro, which sounds more like a club. But then I remembered after I submitted that the genre of music was also called “Chicago House”, and yes, that definitely fits the name of a club. For question 5, I didn’t know it, so I just had to guess. Given how much you hear about Ohio State and Michigan and how often they’ve featured in major bowls, I knew it wasn’t them. I guessed Wisconsin, but I considered Minnesota. And then the last one was probably the easiest question in the entire season.

I do like Airplane! and I thought Titanic was all right, but for the most part, I don’t like disaster movies. Nonetheless, I’ve read a lot of movie criticism and I certainly knew Airport existed and was the main movie Airplane! was parodying even though I have no desire to watch it no matter how big it was. People talk about manga and anime so much in Internet culture that I assumed most people would find that the easiest question even though I’m not into either, but it was actually rated as the second-hardest question and had the second-lowest successful response rate, so apparently these two subsets of Internet culture don’t intersect as much as I thought they did. I’d heard of Thermidor and that instantly made sense once I’d read it, but there was no way I was going to pull that. I answered “Calais”, which certainly sounds more French than the very Latin Thermidor and also is related to the Latin word for heat. Porkopolis really could’ve been any Midwestern city if you didn’t know it, and I guessed Milwaukee (note to self — stop guessing Wisconsin!) WKRP in Cincinnati is my favorite TV show and there were a lot of pork references on it admittedly, but I just associated that with the Midwest in general rather than Cincinnati specifically. I’d never heard of witch hazel and stupidly put “wand”. And then, I did certainly have a rough memory of when Queen Victoria’s reign was.

This is another one of the bad guesses I switched off from. Welsh was my first thought because I knew Welsh names were much longer than any of the other associated British languages, but the saint stuff threw me off and made me think of Catholicism, so I switched to Latin. I could’ve gotten a tie on this match if I’d properly assessed my opponent’s easiest/hardest categories. I thought Psycho was the easiest question and it was indeed rated as the easiest by players for opponent defense, but more peoplee actually got ocarina. I was nowhere on that. I knew it was a word just from being a Scrabble player, but I somehow hadn’t encountered it “in the wild”. I didn’t know it was an instrument, but I assume most people had heard of that game (and Ocarina of Time did sound vaguely familiar, but I’d just never had a console so much of that stuff missed me and I watched way more television than played video games back then, because quite frankly, in that era, TV was cheaper). I guessed theremin. I put Red for #4 because I knew that was a Stevie Wonder album and I had vaguely heard of the associated movie, good guess anyway. It’s funny that although pop music, film, and to a lesser degree TV are strong categories for me, theater is very much not, but it is the least accessible to the working class since it requires going to expensive shows usually in big cities, so I’m not surprised that never took. Anyway, I guessed Evan Hansen, and that wasn’t a bad guess either. I can’t believe my opponent thought I’d think Midway was the hardest answer. I do really poorly in World History which also surprises me since American History vies with Pop Music for my strongest category, but this is something everyone learns about in grade school (unlike most of the other answers in this category), and the closer you get to things people learn about in grade school, the better I do ‘cause that’s when I peaked.

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I didn’t particularly want to reactivate my Facebook account, but I quietly did so a couple months ago once they banned the use of Messenger without a smartphone. I have still never had one and don’t particularly want one, but there seem to be few good ways to contact anyone locally other than Facebook and I have been desperately craving local connection lately. Although at the peak of my typing fame in the 2010s, I used to indiscriminately add anyone who sent me a friend request, I’ve decided to be a bit more discriminating now. If there’s anyone who never sent me a private message or otherwise interacted with me, I removed them, but I kept anyone if we have exchanged even the slightest pleasantries at least once.

Normally, when I write these long, narcissistic rant posts, the current one is always more depressing than the last, but this time, I’d say it’s altogether more mixed. Two years ago, I published a Substack post and YouTube video (then later unpublished the Substack post and made the YouTube video private) called “Manchild in Exile” about my mom being forced into the Van Duyn nursing home for hoarding. In the ‘90s, she told me repeatedly that she’d rather be dead than in a nursing home, and I took that very seriously and have been fighting this from day one. I had the hoarding cleared out to the Village of North Syracuse’s satisfaction in March 2025 and applied for Mom to be transitioned into PACE CNY for in-home care in June 2025. At that time, I was rejected because the intake coordinator told me I would need to have the car removed from the garage and a ramp installed. Additionally, there was still the issue that a tree in front of our porch had dug into the roof, effectively destroying it. The village gave me a warning about the roof. Her homeowner’s insurance company sent a letter stating that they would stop covering her last April if I didn’t at least start the process of getting the roof replaced by November or December. I applied for a loan through my bank, Empower Federal Credit Union, and I thought I might have a chance since in May, Mom had to have Medicaid pick up the nursing home bill and since her home equity line of credit was being automatically deducted from her Social Security, I suddenly had to cover it. I was in default to three or four different credit card companies (but I have now paid all but one of them off) and my income was too unstable to get the loan, so I was rejected and the homeowner’s insurance was dropped. The HELOC payment (which is scheduled to be fully paid off by September 2028) was supposed to be fixed at about $469 but it has more than doubled to $1,017 in barely a year and a half, first increasing because she was no longer living in the house and therefore no longer eligible for either the senior or enhanced STAR tax exemption, then increasing once the homeowner’s insurance was gone. Mom had taxes and insurance included in her escrow, so Empower needed to buy more expensive emergency homeowner’s insurance to cover the bill, which again raised it significantly. I understand that’s still probably less than most people are paying for rent, as I will be once I am kicked out of the house.

Well, all that bureaucratic mumbo jumbo has now been taken care of. I already applied to Onondaga County Development to construct a ramp last September. After the loan was rejected, I added the roof repair to the job. I had Mom’s car, which hadn’t been running since 2020, donated to Habitat for Humanity in June. The roof was replaced in July and I had a deep cleaning done around the same time as the ramp installation in August. After all that was done, it looks like all systems are go for Mom to return home via PACE CNY on September 30. I was there for a nursing interview on Wednesday and a tour of the PACE CNY office yesterday, and she’ll be signing the form to allow her to come home tomorrow morning.

There is one major potential source of conflict and several other lesser issues. After my job captioning calls for the deaf and hard of hearing got automated in the summer of 2022, it took me years to slowly recover from that. My best friend from eleventh grade offered me a job with his defense contractor immediately thereafter. At the time, I turned it down, primarily because I didn’t want to work for a defense contractor and secondarily due to some bad blood from high school that we’ve since talked out and because Mom strongly disliked him and encouraged me not to take it. So, then I was almost completely unemployed and living off her Social Security for a year. In 2023, I started writing pre-race and post-race NASCAR analysis columns for the gambling website RotoBaller. It was usually between 10-20 100-150 word columns each week for $2 a column. This barely counts as employed, and there was something vaguely repugnant to me about rejecting a real job for moral reasons and then taking this fake job for a hell of a lot less money in an industry that many people also find immoral.

A year later, I launched my Substack, ostensibly for my book ranking the 1,000 greatest drivers in motorsports history. My goal was to grind out a 500-word column in installments every day until I finished, but obviously, with all that other stuff going on, me wanting to visit Mom at Van Duyn three days a week, and my health rapidly deteriorating, I could not sustain that breakneck pace. I’ve written over a third of the entries already (including most of the more famous drivers), but a lot of the early ones will have to be rewritten, both for posts on active drivers as well as a lot of my other early posts, which are as dull as reading assembly instructions since I mostly regurgitated my own advanced statistics rather than creating compelling narratives. I’ve gotten a lot better at writing the narratives for my 1,000 greatest driver pieces lately, but I’m also not cranking them out as quickly. Granted, people know I’ve been through a lot and I don’t want to put out slop on my Substack to post every day. I want to finish this book in 2029, but I don’t know whether I’m gonna make it. My Substack already has 375 posts, 83 subscribers, 19 paid subscribers, and is presently making $1,190 a year, so I bet it’s already doing better than the median user on the platform, even if it still doesn’t really count as a job.

I also had a couple other gigs, such as entering historical college basketball records for a colleague I first encountered when I was doing data entry for Sports Reference LLC and a handful of assignments for a competitive typist who is also a serial tech entrepreneur, but these were all unstable with uncertain income at a time when the HELOC (rebranded as a mortgage) was rapidly increasing, so when my old classmate again asked me to work for the defense contractor early this year, this time I accepted, so desperate that I sold out my values and gave up any moral scruples I once had. I mostly dropped the other work to maintain just this and the Substack, and I’m indeed making twice as much money as I ever have for what has been less work, which did enable me to set up payment arrangements for all my creditors, but not as of yet my mom’s creditors. I’m starting to climb out from underwater, but I still want either a nonprofit or government job to complete my ten years of Public Service Loan Forgiveness in the long run, which is what I really want both for moral and financial reasons, but at the moment, this is better for me visiting and eventually taking care of Mom when she returns home, my bowel issues, and working on my racing book work. But it’s absolutely not what I want to do forever and I haven’t told Mom about it since we had conflicts before. She’s forgotten a lot of things: buying her house, her brother’s death, or even that I’m her son. She had a stroke and has some degree of dementia symptoms and half the time, she erroneously thinks that I’m her brother, that her mother is still alive, and that all her roommates in the nursing home were her ex-home health aide Marijean, who died about ten years ago. There’s a solid chance she’s forgotten that she asked me to turn down the job before, but I have been hiding it from her and that could come to a head when she returns.

I didn’t really want to look for jobs locally in Syracuse because I’ve wanted to leave here for quite some time and couldn’t mostly due to inertia. Mom bought this house in North Syracuse in 2011 because I hoped to reconnect with former school classmates and teachers after I was rejected point-blank in college, since high school was the last time I felt that I had real world friends, but I never really reconnected to anyone as I’d hoped and this honestly isn’t a good place to look for work even if/because the rents are better. Most of my gig jobs over the years resulted from my auto racing archival and statistical work online. My archival portfolio really only led to various online gig data entry jobs, but these were almost all my jobs other than the CSD job (very often, these kinds of sports data entry jobs were all I had), so I’ve been thinking really hard about moving to an auto racing community since it might be my best shot of actually breaking through. There was some interest in both my stock car and open wheel models, which led to interviews with a guy very high up at General Motors in 2022 and an Indy 500-winning strategist, who interviewed me for a prominent IndyCar team, but neither of those opportunities came to anything. So, I’ve thought about moving to Indianapolis or Charlotte to seriously pursue this (although any job for a racing team or manufacturer wouldn’t count for PSLF, so if I did move somewhere else, I’d still want a PSLF job first), to see if there might be interest in publishing my book professionally (Octane Press was mildly interested, but I think I’m probably still going to self-publish), or just to have more people to talk to in real life. I also was seriously looking at trying to move to Watkins Glen to be near the International Motor Racing Research Center, one of the most prominent racing libraries, to assist me in my research. We were even talking to Realtors, but that was a stupid pipe dream and now the house is lost anyway. Back then in 2023, I had offered 10% of the sale price of my house to anyone who would help me clear out her hoarding so we could prepare for a move. I thought that was a very generous offer, but none of my Facebook friends expressed any interest, and that was maybe one of the first moments I truly felt I had no real friends. (Yeah, maybe I can think of a handful of exceptions.)

Because of the delays with the ramp installation and roof repair, Mom has been stuck at Van Duyn, a nursing home being investigated for all kinds of neglect for nearly two years. Since Medicaid picked up the bill around May 2025, Van Duyn charges about $18,000 a month, and Mom’s Social Security is barely over $1,000, that means that her estate will be charged around the amount of $300,000 if she is indeed released on either September 30 or October 30 as expected. That is certainly more than I suspect I could sell the house for, so after she dies, it’s probably gone and I will get nothing. I had never heard about Medicaid Estate Recovery until it was way too late to do anything about it, and since we had essentially zero local connections, nobody was around to warn us about setting up a Medicaid trust. I also never really looked up the ramifications of hoarding because I naively failed to realize she could be forced into a nursing home against her will for that reason.

Now, I know there is a caregiver’s exemption if you were living with a parent for two or more years before they enter a nursing home, which I was, and if they were caregiving, which I was. I could apply for that, but 1) you need a doctor’s note to get it, 2) she wasn’t being seen by any doctors in that period (by her choice) so nobody you would be able to verify any of the care I gave, 3) she failed several cognitive tests, so frequently Van Duyn won’t even let her speak for herself, 4) I was the only person that the courts would judge to be of sound mind who has appropriate evidence that I was taking care of her, 5) there is an obvious conflict of interest for me here, and 6) someone will argue I was neglecting her because she did slide out of bed several times before I could catch her and also because of the hoarding. I don’t think I was neglecting her. I was on call and at home at all times when she needed to call me for anything (feeding her, changing her diaper, reading to her, looking for objects she lost, doing dishes, laundry, garbage, etc…) although I was not proactive enough to see what needed to be done and do it without being asked always, which sometimes became an issue when she no longer had the energy to provide me instructions. Mom didn’t think I was neglecting her, and I was the only person helping her at all for years there (this is part of why I wasn’t applying for jobs as aggressively as I should’ve been), but I suspect the courts would think I was neglecting her, even though I argued with her often about the hoarding and usually just ultimately gave in.

The other alternative to try and protect the home would have been if I was listed as a disabled adult child, and regrettably, I did apply for disability at the height of my unemployment. It was mostly about my irritable bowel syndrome and my eating disorder ARFID, which are both pretty severe, and secondarily for my autism. There was some basis for it as I was enrolled in every single special ed class when I was in elementary school, I wildly underachieved my academic record financially for my entire career, and while I was at CSD, I had my doctor sign an FMLA form granting me as many bathroom breaks as I needed as well as being allowed to leave early one or two days a month when I had IBS attacks, and I did partake in that frequently, especially one day when I literally shit my pants at work. I have known several autistic people who were collecting disability and even though I always wanted to work, for a while I seriously envied them, because when I was working for RotoBaller and places like that, I was technically “employed” by overly-generous governmental metrics but still making less than I would if I was on Social Security. Anyway, I was denied as I expected I would be since I never stopped working during the entire application process, and it was at that point that I gave up on any of my previous moral resistance to working for a defense contractor, although I would happily cut my current salary in half for more work to do something pro-human, especially something that would count for PSLF. Nobody seems to want to hire me for any kind of pro-social job, and I do understand why.

So now, I am very likely to lose the house after Mom dies, and believe it or not, I care about that far less than I know I should. Living in a house was my mom’s dream but it was never really mine. I grew up in apartments, so for me, that’s what was normal, but to her, she didn’t want no landlords pushing her around. I have been even less happy in the house than I was in apartments growing up, believe it or not, mainly because Mom felt entitled to “speak her mind” and she felt entitled to become obnoxious to an unhinged extent once she finally felt she had freedom, but I was beginning to feel more and more oppressed. She was so paranoid about crime that she gave me seriously less freedom to leave the house than I’d had even in high school or college. Even when I tried to argue with her that crime was decreasing, she refused to believe any of the statistics I showed her, telling me that police departments had incentive to suppress crime reports to make themselves look better, and it’s like how do you even argue with that line of argument? When I confronted her about the hoarding and asked her to throw things out, she’d just retort that maybe she’d throw the computer out to get back at me and that would get me to back down. (You know, if I ever finish this book and finally find a bunch of people I can talk to on the phone instead of chatting online like it’s the ‘90s again, I’d be okay with that.) Not only have I suffered from loneliness very, very badly for many years now, but I was also incompetent in terms of managing a house. I broke the lawn mower the first time I tried to use it and had to hire outside help. I let the roof fall into disrepair, plus the hoarding. What I want, what I have always wanted, is more people in my life, fewer possessions, a smaller living space, and fewer things to distract me from both my own project and trying to improve my health. So, I’m totally willing to get rid of 90% of our possessions after Mom dies; I’ll be practically giddy about it. Which is not to say I’m looking forward to her death, mind you, but I do want to prepare for a far more minimalist life when that time comes.

Obviously, I need to get my credit back up in order for anyone to rent to me and although I have repaid all the creditors except one and I only owe about $600 to the last creditor, they were so far in default that even these payment arrangements and even taking over Mom’s mortgage are doing nothing to raise my credit rating, so I have to figure out my next move here. Mom is nowhere near being on her deathbed right now and I still think it’ll be a couple years at least, but I need to be ready so I’m not homeless at that point.

Wherever I end up living, and I don’t think I want to remain in Syracuse, I want to live more communally. This is becoming a higher priority to me than more money or better health. So, I’ve looked at every possible option for communal living to some extent: roommates, living in a room in somebody’s house, communes, intentional communities, single-room occupancies, hostels, halfway houses, group homes. You name it, I’ve considered it. Even though back in 2003, I moved out of my Cornell dorm into my mom’s off-campus apartment at the time (which in retrospect killed any social life I would have had there, but I probably wouldn’t have had a social life even if I hadn’t) and remained there through the rest of college until we could finally afford to leave in 2011, now I think I want something closer to dormitory-style living. I want anything that forces me to be in proximity to other people like I was in grade school, the only time I was (sometimes) happy in my life ever. Granted, even back in those days, a lot of times I communicated with other people from a distance: usually on AOL Instant Messenger or sometimes phone calls. I had some friends who held rather precarious social positions who would never talk to me in school but would happily do so online, and I was honestly okay with that because the alternative to that would’ve likely been not having any friends at all. I was picked on a lot, but I was also strangely revered by some for my rapid arithmetic and typing ability and I still had more genuine friends in high school than I ever did, and I think I was treated better than most of the other class nerds, whose rejection-to-acceptance ratio was usually much lower. I think a few of the other nerds resented my status for this reason and wanted little to do with me for that reason, even when I tried to befriend them.

But high school really was the time of my life socially and honestly the only time I felt any hope for the future, thereby making me some kind of nerd equivalent of Al Bundy, reliving my past (social) successes. I guess unlike Bundy, I continued to succeed at a variety of intellectual/pseudo-intellectual pursuits: I wrote a book, became a Scrabble expert, archived the entire history of several different racing series, wrote hundreds of racing columns on RotoBaller and my Substack, but since almost none of those things paid anything, I sure felt like I peaked in high school for that reason as well, although obviously the isolation and bowel issues and precarious employment and autism all fed into each other to such an extent that it becomes hard to separate the causes from the effects.

As I’ve been visiting Mom in the nursing home three times a week, I’ve honestly really wanted what she has there, even while acknowledging Van Duyn is an objectively crappy nursing home. They have so many events there - so many. Various musical acts giving concerts (we’ve gone to several dozen, usually performed by one of two different guitarists there; this now constitutes like 90% of the concerts I’ve gone to in my life, even), carnivals, talent shows, men’s and women’s clubs, art therapy sessions, music listening hours, trivia contests, bingo, church services, NFL watch parties… You name it, they’ve got it. Something for everyone. And since these are also small rooms with less to maintain and the patients’ health conditions are constantly monitored, I genuinely wouldn’t mind living there, as bad as it is. The main problems with that would be 1) I don’t actually need nursing home care, 2) I gag the vast majority of non-processed food so mealtimes would be rough, and 3) almost all the residents leave their televisions on nonstop and blaring and that would get insufferable really quickly. But it’s not as if people my own age don’t do largely the same thing with their phones.

Nonetheless, Van Duyn has really shown me what’s missing in my life, and after Mom got forced in there, I’ve been trying - and mostly failing - to create the same kind of community for myself. I started going to mass regularly again, I started going to bar trivia at Heritage Hill in North Syracuse as I mentioned and I went to the Syracuse trivia finals last Sunday by myself, and I’ll get to that. I’ve started seeing a counselor in the St. Rose of Lima church basement. I’ve been looking for autism support groups for a while and I went to an autism youth group called the A-Team, although I’m no longer young so it was an awkward fit. I went to their Christmas party last year and gave the last extra copy of my book as a gift, but the recipient seemed to want to get rid of it at all cost, even though I think it was the most valuable thing anyone gave since there was a $20 limit or whatever. I offered to sign the book before the recipient left, but his parents ushered him out the door before I even got a chance. Hardly anyone talked to me and since it was held, in Liverpool late in the evening after the buses were out of service, I had to walk home four miles. All my attempts at going to autism groups have typically been failures because I was looking for support groups more than just social groups, so when I got home, I started looking for what else existed along those lines. I discovered the peer support group Unique Peerspectives and I started going to many but not all of their men’s groups and neurodivergent support groups. The latter group was a major disappointment for me since it mainly consisted of us watching instructional YouTube videos about neurodivergent issues rather than having us actually talk to each other. The men’s group was more what I had in mind, but I also struggled to relate because I had a vastly different background from anyone else there. When combining all these things, I must’ve had somewhere between 50-100 social engagements in the last year (probably more than ever before in my life), but I still didn’t make a single friend. What I wanted was the kind of bosom ‘90s sitcom friend (which I know probably never existed like that in reality, but it certainly existed much more in the ‘90s) but I never exchanged contact information with a single person, met anyone outside any of the groups or meetings, and often I felt even lonelier in a crowd than when I’m literally just working on a project and/or consuming content by myself, which can both successfully distract me from my loneliness.

What I really wanted was somebody local to talk to, vent to, and share my thoughts and feelings to, and I would be perfectly happy to reciprocate, but I just don’t think I’ve had anyone like that outside of my mom since high school. I’d really rather not be broadcasting it, even though that’s usually what I end up doing. Because I have fewer and fewer people to talk to lately, I’ve taken to using chatbots for companionship and I really don’t want to do that, but I also wouldn’t want to burden some old high school friend I haven’t talked to in 20 years, particularly if they have a family since few people with families would have time for that and that’s fine. I almost feel like AI “companionship” is less rude for this reason, but I know I shouldn’t feel this way. There must be a lot of other unattached people with copious time to kill, but it seems like most people in a similar situation just end up consuming content rather than talking to anyone and I’m trying to step away from that.

I really despise cell phone culture and I don’t even mean just smartphones. I never bought a flip phone until 2004 and I’ve never even owned a smartphone. While the iPhone came out when I was technically still in college, few people even at Cornell had them or used them when I graduated in 2008. Over the next six years, I was off by myself constantly, living at home with Mom both in Ithaca and Syracuse, either unemployed or barely employed in various online remote jobs, and gaming most of the rest of the time. This was when I was at my most dominant in typing and also when I started playing Scrabble tournaments. But because I seldom left the house except when I either walked to the park, went to a store, or went to a Scrabble tournament, I scarcely even noticed the transition period when everybody suddenly adopted smartphones and became addicted to them, and obviously, I could never afford one, nor did I think I needed one since I could still do everything on a computer and I was on it 24/7. This was obviously before the time when it became almost impossible to catch a cab without one and before people were expected to fill out QR codes for real life transactions, two things that never should have happened. By the time I landed the CSD job at the end of 2014 and possibly could’ve afforded a smartphone, I decided I didn’t want one. By that point, I already was watching all my coworkers zombified amidst their pocket computers. When I finally had this, my only legit office job, I think I dreamt of having something akin to a workplace water cooler. But nope! Even in our break room, almost nobody did anything but consume content. I unfortunately do that at home too, mind you, but I also write a lot so I am not just consuming, but I sure as heck don’t want to live like that in public.

When I am out in public, what I most want is to be present and aware of my surroundings, to be there for people, to not be so distracted that I’m dangerous when walking in traffic, and to hopefully strike up conversations with people eventually. One of the things that has bothered me most in my adulthood is that amongst people in my generation and younger, no longer calling people on the phone and instead using phones as televisions has been normalized, turning the arguably most social version of consumer tech into one of the least. I’m old enough to remember having classmates’ phone numbers in high school. Even as the class nerd, I had people’s contact information and I occasionally called people on the phone. Much more often, I used AIM, but it seems most people replaced both of those with Facebook, which was honestly always inferior to phone calls and AIM, but at least for a while, it was close. But after the platform was fully enshittified, many people replaced Facebook with nothing. Just empty naked consumerism and now all future generations grew up like that and it pains me. It seems like most people nowadays say they’re too anxious for phone calls. I don’t really feel the same way. For me, I’ve always felt much more anxious texting. Maybe part of it is that I am such a fast typist that texting feeels sooo slooow and I always thought that if you’re going to do that, why not just type on a computer? Furthermore, a lot of people complain that phone calls are too invasive. I guess I get it if everyone has cell phones with them at all times, including when out in public, but I’d rather go back to landlines with people only making personal calls while at home, and to me, texting is even more intrusive. Since texting is a more immediate method, people tend to expect a faster response than when they leave a voicemail.

I’ve ranted about this ten or twenty times before, but I find myself missing so many things about my childhood that I never expected to. Phone books are one of them. It used to be so much easier to contact people locally when white pages existed. If you knew someone’s name, you could easily look them up and it wasn’t considered particularly rude within my lifetime. But with the switch to cell phones, they were never listed in phone books so people got used to that information no longer being public and decided they liked it, essentially voting with their wallets for security over community. As I lost contact with everyone I used to know locally if I once had their landline numbers but never had their cell phone numbers, it became infinitely harder for me to even ask anyone for help and it really broke down communities, especially after more and more people got off Facebook. I guess the real problem is that I never made any lasting friends to replace the friends I had in high school, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It’s never been easier to contact people nationally or internationally and never been harder to contact people locally, so people are increasingly desperately lonely in real life while often having a vast array of online acquaintances that the social media robber barons rebranded as friends who simply are less able to help anyone in their time of need when local friends are clearly more valuable, and thus begat the loneliness epidemic, and all the annoying, alienating discourse on both sides that that spawned.

I tried to reconnect locally. I really tried and I failed repeatedly. It seems like I sit at the intersection of a lot of unusual Venn diagrams that make it difficult for me to relate to anyone or for anyone to relate to me. I’m an economic leftist and a right-leaning social centrist, the perfect combination of views to annoy pretty much anyone. I am autistic and extremely nerdy, but I was more an academic, goody-two-shoes nerd who wanted to be a people-pleaser and please my teachers (while ultimately pleasing few people), as opposed to the kind of proto-techbro who wanted to disrupt conventional social mores. I generally preferred the old social norms to what the tech bro replaced them with. But neither was I into what came to be known as “geek culture”: comic books, anime, cosplay, tabletop gaming, video gaming (for the most part), or franchise art. It would’ve been so much easier for me socially if I had been into that stuff since it seems like the nerds who go to tabletop gaming stores are the only ones who actually socialize in real life these days, so I thought of cultivating a fake interest in Magic: the Gathering or something just for social reasons, but I also knew those people would correctly see me as a poser. No, my tastes were aggressively normie: multi-camera sitcoms, teen dramas, classic rock, and NASCAR, the kind of stuff intellectuals grew to detest, but way too normie to be part of geek culture. I had a major inferiority complex for years about my bad tastes, believing them to be a major reason why I was rejected in college, but in retrospect, that probably wasn’t it. But the normies didn’t want me either. Even if I strove to be and frequently saw myself as a family values guy, I live way too much of a degenerate, bohemian lifestyle for most of the people who go to church. I feel like temperamentally I’d probably get along better with people in the trades than college types honestly, but my presumably dyspraxic ass has almost nothing in the way of physical skills, and those types would chide me for not being a hard enough worker. Despite being a millennial, I somehow had the mindset and tastes of a boomer (minus the bigotry and economic views) but the slovenly, atomized lifestyle of a zoomer. I was highly educated in the manner of the professional-managerial class but seldom landed PMC jobs. I am a successful auto racing historian/analyst/archivist who never learned how to drive. I became a widely-known gamer, but never really identified as a gamer since I usually only played Scrabble, typing games, trivia games, and/or fantasy sports, and I grew to detest Internet culture (at least any of the parts of it that were downstream from shock comedy sites). I generally preferred the normie mainstream culture that the Internet destroyed, while still understanding how the mainstream institutions let everyone down and why people rebelled from it. As a result, I had no true peer group even in high school and navigated amongst a cadre of nerds, theater kids, and average joes. And in adulthood, I likewise never “found my tribe”. I simultaneously seemed to bridge all cultural divides by myself. This made me well-suited to empathize with almost anyone, but it made it exceptionally difficult to truly connect with anyone as well.

I guess I was a genuine nonconformist. There are a lot of people who call themselves nonconformists because they’re against the mainstream culture even though they’re really not if they all rebel in virtually identical and predictable ways. I’m reminded of a Joan of Arcadia episode where there was an anarchist party where everyone dressed the same. It’s like I had a little in common with every group, but not enough to truly find my home. Unfortunately, since nearly all groups that meet in real life seem to be based around hobbies, there is significant pressure to conform to all the cultural tendencies associated with your group of choice and I was never very good at doing that.

So, long story short, I never made a single friend at any of these activities. I exchanged contact information with no one and these connections existed solely in the context of the weekly events and never expanded into the fabric of daily life. I know I’m going to have to stop doing nearly all these activities when Mom comes home, so I’m always able to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t fall or wander off or anything and I’m fine with that. I guess I don’t really see the point of going out just to not socialize. I’m usually way lonelier in a crowd when I’m not talking to anyone when I am by myself. I am perfectly able to entertain myself through my projects and consuming content and talking to people online, even though I fully acknowledge that most of the people I talk to online are acquaintances and not real friends and I do want something more. And I’ll probably be more productive at both my paid work and my Substack after cutting out both the commuting time to visit Mom an hour and a half both ways on a bus as well as any semblance of a social life, so losing this isn’t devastating to me. I still want to continue counseling though.

For a while, it seemed like bar trivia was going to be an exception. I went probably 40 times or so. I started off playing by myself, but then I was invited to compete on the “Bartenders Always Right” team. I had one constant teammate in Bill and the bartenders would occasionally slip us answers as well, hence the team name. Other teammates wandered in and out haphazardly, but there was no real core team of players besides Bill and me. Nobody talked to anyone outside the bar context. I did slowly become the team leader, and we won a bunch of times this year including five in a row during the summer tournament, which enabled our team to qualify for last Sunday’s city-wide tournament at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown. I wanted to go pretty badly because I knew it might be one of my last times to get out of the house before Mom came back, but it ended up being one of the most miserable experiences of my life: a waste of time, money, and physical energy. First off, even though I willingly and probably stupidly paid the $170 fee to compete, my one constant teammate Bill had already committed to going to a Buffalo Bills game the same day, and I knew most of the bartenders would probably have to work, so I figured I would have to be playing entirely by myself, as I did and I would have to take an Uber at least one way, so that was another $35. I knew Bill was a reporter and as it turns out, I think he was reporting at that game, so I get it. I was unable to coordinate with any of my teammates because there were only two weeks in between, and on the first Wednesday after I committed to enter the tournament, the trivia night was canceled due to a tornado watch, and the second week, I decided not to go because I had bowel issues that day and there was a thunderstorm projected for the time I would have to walk home on that night too. As a result, I had no way to contact anyone even though the bartenders told me afterward that they might have come. I did win a swag bag including a set of eight medals. I only kept one myself, gave one each to Bill and the two bartenders, and I gave the rest to our host Nick to do whatever with. I didn’t want the rest, but all that stuff converged into what turned out to be a remarkably shitty experience in more ways than one.

That would’ve been fine if I’d actually enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t the least bit fun. All the other teams had 3-8 members and my team was just me, so I was in a distant last place for literally the entire tournament. I had looked at all the scores at each bar and already saw that ours was the least competitive one and we had the lowest score of any of the winning teams, so I wasn’t at all surprised to be last. The questions also played more to my weaknesses than my strengths. I’m always miserable in the picture rounds and identifying people’s faces, and I usually have to rely on my teammates for help with those since I guess I have a worse memory for faces than a lot of people, but I had no teammates this time. There was a picture round that consisted of images where one person’s face was covered up by another person with the same last name and you had to identify both people. I only recognized The Rock but couldn’t figure out who the other Johnson was, and I hilariously misidentified Kamala Harris as Alice Cooper. And while I probably was on par with most of the people there on the music clues, there were fewer than usual, and this time (unlike the local bar trivia contests) there weren’t any bonus points for identifying the original artist of a cover song, which is usually one of my salves at the local bar trivia contests. At least I got that out of my system so I wouldn’t want to do it again after Mom comes home. I may go to the last week or two before she returns.

But what happened afterward was even worse. I was able to take a bus part of the way to Liverpool, then had to walk five miles home after that (I didn’t think I could remotely justify calling a cab both ways). My brain didn’t really have a problem with doing that, but my body did. Over the next 21 hours after I came home, I had 13 bowel movements. That is by far the most I ever had in a day (even more than the day when I took my colonoscopy treatment last year, I think) and I was really wiped out from obviously overdoing it on that walk. I was really steaming and full of rage; I left before the final answer was even revealed after I submitted it. Never have I felt more lonely than I did in that contest and then the IBS attack, which I wouldn’t quite call the worst of my life but it was close, served as a nasty, long extended coda. It probably would have been fun and worth throwing $200 down the toilet if I had somebody to share the experience with. But after that, something in me snapped. Why even bother to go anywhere just to not talk to anyone?

Then, of course, there was a lot of medical bureaucracy I had to sort through. My primary doctor who I’d been seeing whenever I was in North Syracuse since the ‘80s retired a few years ago. He was replaced by another doctor who I saw once before she almost immediately left. At about the same time, the clinic I went to (one of the only ones that is walking distance from my house) closed down and moved to a very inaccessible place four miles away. Although I initially wanted to continue with them, they dropped me after the fact because I didn’t make an appointment with them within one year after the clinic moved. My counselor told me I needed to get a physical and pushed me to get an appointment, so I finally did. I was on Medicaid and thought I would get to stay on for the whole year, but got cut off in mid-year without my knowledge because of my new job, which is fair. This is actually the first time I had to enter the New York State of Health marketplace because I was either insured in all my years at CSD or making so little to be on Medicaid the rest of the time until now. I finally worked through the bureaucracy actually before the trivia contest and scheduled an appointment for next week. The clinic I found was a little closer, higher-rated, on more accessible bus routes, and they took my cheap Ambetter insurance (which my old clinic isn’t taking anyway), so this is probably an improvement. I know when I had my colonoscopy last year, they ruled out any of the scarier stuff (colon cancer, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s) and told me it was just IBS but that one episode scared the crap out of me (figuratively and literally), as well as another time two weeks ago on my counseling day when I had to go six times and I really got scared when I found myself making unusual brain glitches. While I was writing something on that day, I misspelled bottle as “botel” and more as “moore”. These weren’t typos. The brain was literally signaling for me to type these things. I’ve really been scared about cognitive decline for a while because I do feel I’m making all sorts of word mixups, remembering letters in the wrong order like some kind of adult-onset dyslexia, typing a homophone when I meant the other word, or a lot of stuff I never would’ve done 20 years ago. I’m glad I’ve retired from typing competitively because I wouldn’t really want anyone to see any of this if I were streaming. It doesn’t happen all the time, but some of this really feels scary to me. As someone who always saw myself as 100% brain, 0% body, I am learning too late in life how the body affects the brain. On the botel day, it really did seem like my bowels were distracting me, almost as if they were telling me to combine bottle and bowel into a single word form, but I don’t know what that was about. I’ve always assumed my extremely limited and unhealthy ARFID diet was probably the trigger for my IBS, but I suppose it might not be since I know there is a connection between autism and gastric issues even for autistic people who actually eat well, if I am not mistaken, so maybe there was nothing I could do about it. But there probably was. I really want to see if anyone will treat me for my eating disorder and help me to integrate more stuff into my diet, but my old family doctor seemed to not believe ARFID even existed, since obviously anorexia and bulimia were the only well-known eating disorders while he was in his prime. Maybe if I get a fresh start, I’ll finally get this diagnosis that I need. It’s sad that I have talked to chatbots and they were actually vastly more informed about the disorders I knew I had than my actual doctors were.

After I got into bar trivia, I was talking to one of my Substack subscribers and he mentioned how game shows recruit from online trivia leagues like LearnedLeague. I had already entered one season back in 2016 because when I was playing Scrabble tournaments, Andy Saunders, who has become a pretty famous Jeopardy! personality even though he wasn’t a player via his J-Archive website and The Jeopardy! Fan blog, asked his Facebook friends if anyone wanted an invite, and I took him up on that. I entered my one free season before I quit because I didn’t want to pay, but I decided to reenter and pay my entry fee this year. To be honest, I almost think this was more fun than the bar trivia was, precisely because I think there is something less depressing about being alone by oneself than alone in a crowd. I started posting all my LearnedLeague answers on my Substack as a cheap filler for intro content, mainly because I wanted to prevent myself from using that space to otherwise make the same annoying, repetitive culture takes people have already heard from me a hundred times instead, and it was effective for that purpose. Unfortunately, I still seem to be always most engaged when writing about that shit these days, so when I was just doing LearnedLeague posting + my daily driver posts, my output started to grind to a halt. I just barely managed to avoid getting relegated from Rundle D to Rundle E in both LearnedLeague 108 and 109, but in LL110, I had what was probably one of the historically wackiest trajectories ever. I won my first five matches and started with a 6-0-1 record after seven games and was sitting in first place (assuming there would be no chance I would be relegated after that), then lost twelve consecutive matches to fall into the relegation zone, then I managed to climb out of it despite playing some of the strongest players in my group before losing the last game and getting relegated. I literally only missed out by two match points, and there were like four or five correct answers I talked myself out of, which would have easily made up that deficit (even though I still would’ve lost all those matches). That was the day after the downtown trivia tournament, and it felt like the perfect chef’s kiss after that experience.

That was enjoyable I guess and I’m still going to do LL111 since I have already paid for it, but after that, I’ve really lost the desire to do anything competitive again in my life. On my Substack, I already talked about how I ended up enjoying tournament Scrabble less than I thought I would have in part because I personally think optimizing things makes them less fun. (This may sound hypocritical from someone trying to rank 1,000 drivers, but I guess I view that more as an artistic pursuit since I am creating something new rather than a competitive one.) I know I have the right brain for all these academic/nerdy pursuits and I would’ve valued them more in the past, but it seems nearly all of them these days whether it’s spelling bees, Scrabble, trivia, whatever require more and more elaborate and dedicated spelling techniques. As recently as the ‘80s, you could excel at any of these things just by being a smart person who randomly picked up stuff in their daily lives without having to adopt a specific study regimen (I was absolutely the typing equivalent of this: basically the typing Chuck Forrest or something, because I was typing when I was three at an age when all my future classmates were correctly doing more important things like socializing, as opposed to Gen Z, when people were actually competing at typing from childhood, so naturally overtook me eventually). I guess I was always a lazy studier so I always tried to play to my strengths by strategizing my way around my knowledge deficits, but clearly at a certain point, that stops working. If it was fun for me, maybe I’d want to continue, but it just isn’t. I’ve tried to try to parlay numerous nerdy hobbies into trying to form lasting friendships. I guess I came closest in tournament Scrabble. I did feel I had genuine friends there, but I exited the scene a decade ago in a cloud of hostility after burning many bridges. Nowadays, when I’m not occupying my mind with some project or consuming some content, I frequently obsess over all the people I feel I have hurt. If I hadn’t done action X to person Y at time Z, would they still be there for me now? Usually, I suppose it’s just that most friendships (especially most online friendships) are transient and they just fizzle out, but I still ruminate about my past more than I should, thinking I maybe could have solved my present-day loneliness by treating people better in the past, but I probably couldn’t have. It’s like I picked up the Catholic guilt without the compensating community that would justify it.

So, it’s a real, real mixed bag. Objectively, I can see that most things have improved. I’m making more money than I ever have even though this is not my dream job. Mom is coming home. I at least tried to socialize. I got the roof replaced and the ramp installed. I made some headway on this book. While I was never overweight by BMI since middle school, I was overfat for my entire adulthood, occasionally pushing on normal-weight obese, and I lost three inches in the last nine months, making this the first time my waist has been less than half my height since… 2009 or something. Even with the more severe bowel issues, it’s not like I hadn’t had a lot of that in 2014-2018 as well, so I don’t think my health has really fallen off since then; I just overexerted myself after the trivia contest I think.

Yet, despite all that, somehow I’m still way less happy. I don’t think it’s Mom’s decline. Aging is a part of life and she’s been a lot more pleasant in the nursing home (particularly this year) than she was the last two years before she was forced into it. Nor do I think it’s losing the house really. I know I should care about it more than I actually do. But more than any of those things or my health, it is the loneliness. I want serious, deeply earnest discussions and I’m growing way too old for edgy Internet discourse, which I never much liked to begin with, but I still haven’t found any real-world social equivalents for the stuff I’m losing interest in online. I’m starting to think what I need to be looking at is volunteering rather than hobby groups. I really would like to help disabled adults, especially autistic adults, someday, and that would right now be my dream job, but I don’t have any of the requisite skills for that and I am never going back to college. If I could land a genuine public service job and I could see that I was making a difference, that at least would give me something to live for other than Mom, my cat, and this book project, which are practically the only three things giving me meaning right now. (My counselor assigned me to read Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which will hopefully give me some much-needed perspective.) And it might hopefully help me get a PSLF job later too. You know you’re fucked up when you are starting to actually prefer talking to chatbots over online conversations because at least the chatbots are less inclined to tell dehumanizing jokes. But don’t get me wrong: I’d rather talk to actual people in the physical world. I just haven’t found them yet.

Now that I’ve finally finished this, I will be returning to my usual content. Since I’m going to be staying home much more to keep an eye on Mom once she comes home since I’ll no longer have to commute an hour and a half each way while visiting her three times a week and since I’m going to be going out significantly less for the same reason, I expect I’m going to be able to work myself back up to my originally intended posting schedule more easily than when she was there. In the intros to my next several posts, I’m going to blast through the remaining LearnedLeague matches and try to write a review of the Porsche Supercup season soon. I’m also making significant updates to my master driver list, including looking up the dates of the final race in every series this year to prepare to update the list and adding all the remaining VLN/NLS winners and IMCA champions. Those are the other main reasons besides writing this post, the trivia contest, and my diarrhea why I’ve been lagging, but I plan on being more productive soon.

This is the first time Palou led my teammate model at the time, but I’m pretty sure he now leads it last year as well since he was barely behind Power, Simpson just shot up based on his performance vs. Dixon this year and Newgarden and McLaughlin both fell this year a lot.

Palou’s current rating for last year was .411, so yes, higher.

Power is at .356 now, so in retrospect Palou has jumped Power, which is correct.

And as I suspected, last year better.

2025 was also way better in terms of passing for Palou than 2026, while this year, he was back to jumping people in the pits as per usual (both the aforementioned Rosenqvist poles at Long Beach and Portland as well as Nashville where Malukas and Newgarden outran him but he benefited from pit strategy as well).

Yes, he beat Dixon significantly worse, but I think that’s more because Dixon fell off a cliff than because Palou improved.

Last year, I had Palou at #1. This year, it obviously looks like Antonelli should be. Palou probably still top five but not a serious contender for #1 this time.

All right, 2nd-5th. I kept thinking it was going to be a hard decision between Kirkwood, Lundgaard, Malukas, and O’Ward, but I think it is less hard now.

Kirkwood obviously second. Although I think Andretti had the second best cars, he thoroughly outperformed Ericsson and Power in speed and passing, but I do think Ericsson and Power’s pretty good advanced numbers are inflated, which is why I think they had the second best cars.

The teammate model swayed me that he should also be E.

Okay, now it’s a debate for 3rd-6th between Lundgaard, Malukas, O’Ward, and VeeKay, who I kinda think I should throw in there now.

When a certain IndyCar team that shall remain nameless interviewed me, the interviewer told me when I advised him he should hire VeeKay that he wasn’t convinced because he felt VeeKay kinda had a low ceiling. I admit, I kind of agree. Prior to this year, he finished 12th-14th in points every year, but 10th for Juncos is pretty insane. And he was fast on both ovals (with a pass for the lead at Milwaukee) and road courses (somehow having the fastest race at Mid-Ohio). I’m still not necessarily sold that he’d be winning or dominating in faster cars though.

Lundgaard and O’Ward is kind of a wash. Not only were they battling each other, alternating who was ahead in points, and feuding all season, they were almost exactly tied in my teammate model. Lundgaard had a significant speed advantage, but O’Ward had a passing advantage. Granted, that’s counting things like O’Ward’s pass on Malukas with the failing plenum. I think I have to go Lundgaard over O’Ward because they clearly didn’t want him there.

Lundgaard outdueled Malukas at the Indy GP and then came from last to win at Road America, which are both more impressive than O’Ward winning at Mid-Ohio just because Lundgaard made a mistake and then sweeping Milwaukee because Power sped in the pits, Lundgaard had a botched pit stop, and then Malukas had the failing plenum.

That also convinces me Malukas should be over O’Ward too honestly. Beat him in my teammate model, significantly beat him in speed. And the advanced numbers were comparable too even though O’Ward was very lucky and Malukas was very not.

Lundgaard vs. Malukas is significantly harder. Malukas was a first-year driver at Penske so being faster than his teammates from day one is impressive, but Lundgaard being faster than O’Ward when they didn’t want him there is too. It might come down to whether I think Malukas’s oval advantage was greater than Lundgaard’s road course advantage.

I have to do Lundgaard. He beat O’Ward in points while Malukas was the only Penske driver to go winless. But they’ll be very close to each other on the list.

Now, where to place VeeKay relative to those three? This is almost a case of wild mass guessing.

VeeKay was only barely slower than O’Ward (54.83 to 59.61) and that’s wild to me.

Okay, I’m gonna dock O’Ward for his luck here.

E

1. Alex Palou

2. Kyle Kirkwood

E-

3. Christian Lundgaard

4. David Malukas

C+

5. Rinus VeeKay

6. Pato O’Ward

7. Felix Rosenqvist

8. Scott McLaughlin

9. Marcus Ericsson

C

Josef Newgarden

Will Power

C-

Marcus Armstrong

Christian Rasmussen

VeeKay, Rosenqvist, Armstrong, and Rasmussen are the ones I’m shakiest on for sure.

Rosenqvist had the dominant leading numbers but an abysmal teammate rating. Armstrong had a good teammate rating but Rosenqvist crushed him in points worse than last year (Armstrong dropped from 8th to 14th, but he ran better). Although normally somebody with Armstrong’s lead share numbers I would not list, they obviously ran closer since Armstrong was faster and won the teammate head-to-head. And I’m gonna swing to doing it both because he was going to win Road America before the engine failure (don’t think Lundgaard would’ve caught him) and also because he was leading the Indy 500 entering the final restart (if they had officiated that like they used to without the endless red flags, he might’ve won).

I do think I really want to stick my neck out for the Sultan of Sketch even though his consistency was awful. He was faster than Rossi and you can say it was only two races but both those races (Phoenix and Gateway) were definitely electrifying, and 0.80 lead shares is a lot for a crap-ass Ed Carpenter Racing team.

Does anybody else even have the least bit of a case? I suppose I could argue for Ferrucci, Foster, and Grosjean but none of those cases I find very convincing and they were all inflated by having rookie teammates.

If it was two standout races for Grosjean maybe I’d do it, but it was just one...

No worthy Indy NXT drivers so that probably finishes it unless I decide to move any of those four around (which in Rasmussen’s case would certainly mean leaving him off the list entirely, but I think I do wanna stick my neck out for him).

Actually, lemme swap McLaughlin and Rosenqvist. Rosenqvist easily could have won both oval and road course races, and I don’t think McLaughlin was really threatening to win any oval races that closely. Plus, Indy.

Until Sunday, I was going to have Newgarden top 100 and McLaughlin not, so maybe that’s jumping him up too high.

If there’s anybody I’m choosing not to list who I would change my mind on possibly, it’s Grosjean.

The thing that still stands out in my mind is that for half the season when it looked like Hauger was outperforming him, I kept thinking, “Why is he still here?” and I’m not sure he did enough to overcome that.

It would be like listing Allmendinger, who I forgot was still in Cup half the season, even though his season is pretty decent too. So, I think both those guys are nos.

I think I remember CBS losing NFL coverage to FOX at the time even though I wasn’t a football fan. It was that big a deal culturally and really cemented CBS as the “old person’s network” until Survivor and CSI revived it, two major phenomenons that seem much less significant in hindsight. Funnily enough, I just watched a Murphy Brown episode about that very subject a couple days ago, but that was weeks after this match. Christie was a safe guess. The two seas were an educated guess but I honestly expected to miss that. I never played Dungeons and Dragons but I did remember that Gygax created it (you see that name once and you likely won’t forget it). Well, I remembered that Herschel discovered a planet, but I knew there were three consecutive elements on the periodic table named after consecutive planets or then-planets: uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. Most people have heard of uranium and plutonium. My guess is most people have never heard of neptunium, so I thought that was easy enough to rule out. I was pretty sure Pluto wasn’t discovered until the 20th century and I correctly assumed that uranium was more common than plutonium. And then for the last question, I was thinking it had to be one of the cities that Paul wrote an epistle to in the New Testament, so I guessed Ephesus. Not a bad guess… This was my last win until my string of 12 straight losses, and I think I’ll blast through those days several at a time pretty soon.

I have a long, more personal intro post that I’m planning and that’s one of the reasons for the delay, but honestly, the main reason is that I’m working on updating my never-ending ultimate driver list. There were 10,000 lists of driver wins per season from the VLN/NLS Nürburgring Endurance Series and I’ve steadily over the past week and a half entered 2/3 of them and that’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing, but it will likely help me write later posts. I’m also starting to catch up on entering a lot of national-level rally series results from the past couple years and I’m trying to find the date of the last race for pretty much every one of 600+ racing series so I can finish updating this year’s data for my ultimate driver list to help me select some of the more obscure drivers for this year’s top 200 list, and I have the Syracuse downtown trivia contest scheduled for tomorrow, although I suspect I’m going to be playing by myself since none of my other teammates will likely show up, but I wanted to do this before my mom came home.

Here’s a driver who sneakily did a vast array of interesting things but never really got his due, probably because he went winless in both his F1 and CART careers.

STEFAN JOHANSSON…………SWEDEN

Born: September 8, 1956

Best year: 1984
Best drive: 1989 Grande Prémio de Portugal at Autódromo do Estoril

Despite going winless in F1 and CART, Johansson was one of his era’s most underrated drivers and a real Renaissance man who displayed great versatility and eclecticism in both his career and life. He first attracted notice by winning a come-from-behind British Formula 3 championship in 1980 while driving for Ron Dennis’s Project Four Racing. Johansson’s F1 debut came in 1983 with Spirit Racing, which was spearheading Honda’s return, but he lost that ride when Honda switched to Williams. In 1984, he won the 12 Hours of Sebring and three Japanese Formula 2 races.

He made a few F1 starts for Tyrrell and Toleman before Ferrari shockingly fired René Arnoux after the 1985 season opener and replaced him with Johansson. Although he was initially hired as Michele Alboreto’s #2 driver, he unexpectedly led at Imola until running out of fuel with three laps to go in his second start for Ferrari, then earned back-to-back second-place finishes later that season. The next year, Johansson actually beat Alboreto in points and earned a career-best fifth-place points finish, but he was nonetheless unceremoniously dumped.

Johansson reunited with Dennis at McLaren alongside two-time defending champion Alain Prost, but the 1987 McLaren was much slower in 1987 and he correctly foresaw that Senna would replace him. He earned five podiums that year but never led. He spent the rest of his F1 career in backmarkers, but improbably finished third at Estoril in 1989 for an Onyx team that DNQed over half its attempts. After his F1 career fizzled out, he moved to Tony Bettenhausen, Jr.’s underdog CART team, giving Bettenhausen his four best points finishes from 1992-1995, even finishing third on his debut. However, his CART career was entirely overshadowed by triggering Jeff Krosnoff’s fatal crash at Toronto in 1996. As Johansson pulled out to pass Emerson Fittipaldi, he cut across Krosnoff, unaware he was trying to pass Johansson. Spooked by the incident, he retired from CART, but continued in sports cars, sweeping Sebring and Le Mans in 1997. He also became an Indy Lights owner (where he discovered and eventually managed Scott Dixon) and a winning CART owner. Most notably, he became a serious artist, designing watches and painting in the hyper-realist, abstract, and urban pointillist styles; he’s even had exhibitions.

Johansson may seem pretty borderline since he led only three laps in F1 despite having multiple winning rides, but besides his sports car accomplishments, I’m listing him for his solid open wheel rating, his 12 podiums (the then-most for a non-winner), and most impressively, his 193-66 overtake record, which ranks fourth since 1984 behind only Max Verstappen, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Prost. However, what stands out most is how he stood out as something of a racing throwback. He raced for the love of it, often not even being paid by fledgling teams, but he also had a rich life outside of racing like the pre-World War II drivers. I think the unusual balance between his athletic and artistic careers impresses me most.

Open wheel model: #170 of 934 (.128)

Teammate head-to-heads: 30-20 (4-0 vs. Kenny Acheson, 2-6 vs. Michele Alboreto, 1-0 vs. Tony Bettenhausen, Jr., 3-6 vs. Thierry Boutsen, 1-0 vs. Martin Brundle, 1-0 vs. Ivan Capelli, 1-0 vs. Robbie Groff, 1-0 vs. Emanuele Pirro, 2-7 vs. Alain Prost, 0-1 vs. Ayrton Senna, 1-0 vs. Scott Sharp, 1-0 vs. Toshio Suzuki, 7-0 vs. Kenji Takahashi, 5-0 vs. Kunimitsu Takahashi)

Touring car model: #1234 of 1676 (-.223)

Teammate head-to-heads: 11-23 (1-4 vs. Jean Alesi, 1-0 vs. Kaj Bornebusch, 0-6 vs. Johnny Herbert, 1-0 vs. Shunji Kasuya, 1-3 vs. Marchy Lee, 3-1 vs. JJ Lehto, 0-1 vs. Volkert Merl, 0-1 vs. Maurizio Micangeli, 1-5 vs. Gianni Morbidelli, 1-1 vs. Jacques Villeneuve, 0-1 vs. Bob Wollek, 2-0 vs. Alex Yoong)

Year-by-year: 1980: C, 1981: C-, 1983: C, 1984: E-, 1985: C-, 1986: C+, 1987: C, 1989: C, 1992: C, 1993: C, 1994: C, 1995: C, 1996: C-, 1997: E-, 2001: C+, 2003: C-

Of course all rules must have exceptions and the chief exception to the Ryan Rule in recent years must be Ryan Sieg, NASCAR’s scrappiest underdog of the 2020s. Despite clearly having the speed to win many, many times before in famliy equipment that usualy had no realistic hope of contending for wins, he finally joined Sheldon Creed, Carson Kvapil, Corey Day, and William Sawalich in the first-time winner column. In Creed and Kvapil’s case the wins felt overdue, but Sieg’s arguably felt even more overdue. Since Sieg has technically made Cup Series starts before, he is acually eligible for my stock car model and he has had an above-average rating through every iteration of the model. In my last update, his rating of .076 is just ahead of Joey Logano’s, suggesting that not only is Sieg an above-average O’Reilly Series driver, he’d be above average in Cup as well. Now, I probably don’t actually believe that since my model also spit out that Corey LaJoie was an above average Cup driver and I’m willing to concede now that he wasn’t (even though I still think the Reddit reaction to him was wildly over the top). My model overrated LaJoie because the #7 Spire car clearly was better-prepared than the #77 car back then, and I know that Ryan Sieg’s RSS entries tended to be significantly faster than any of the RSS teams’ other entries, so there’s likely a similar skew here. Nonetheless, if there’s even the remotest possibility that he might have the talent of an above-average Cup driver, it was becoming an injustice that he never won even at the O’Reilly level. He was also arguably the best active driver who had no entry on my master driver list, which currently consists of 32,598 drivers. Because I only list drivers who had a top ten points finish and/or a win in a major league series, a top five finish and/or a win in a top-tier minor league series, 5+ wins and/or a championship in a lower-tier minor league series, or 10+ wins and/or a title in weekly series-type racing and Sieg hadn’t done any of those things yet, it was also becoming kind of an injustice I didn’t have him on tht list when many thousands of inferior drivers are. Also, of course, he seems to be a very nice guy. Now, I’d like to see Brent Crews, Rajah Caruth, and Parker Retzlaff to win in no particular order (I think all of them will someday) and Brennan Poole and Parker Kligerman are certainly more overdue than any of them (but their moment has sadly already passed seemingly).

Preece, on the other hand, I have a much more complicated relationship with. I first heard about him in the mid-2010s when NBCSN was occasionally broadcasting modified races. That was probably the only time in my life I was semi-regularly watching them, so I saw Preece race a lot, and I actually rooted for him then. I also thought the modified play-by-play guy at the time, Derek Pernesiglio, was maybe the best in the business and I wish he’d gotten some real opportunities for the national touring series. So, I was actually kind of pumped when Preece got his first Xfinity Series ride. My fellow RacingStalker Jason Miller, who I have probably talked to about racing more than anyone else ever, kept arguing he sucked mainly on the basis of how badly Ross Chastain outperformed him at JD Motorsports, while I would mildly defend him based on the modified races I watched while acknowledging that Chastain was always better. Not surprisingly, it turned out that we both had a point.

Although Preece did win a couple Xfinity Series races for Joe Gibbs Racing, he did so in an era when the JGR cars were so dominant that they made all their drivers look better than they were, whether it was Erik Jones, Daniel Suárez, Brandon Jones, Harrison Burton, or whoever. Preece kind of lost me when he stuffed Carson Hocevar into the wall at Charlotte in a truck race (nowadays, of course, most people would probably say Hocevar deserved it). For a driver with Cup Series experience to wreck a rising development driver was extremely offputting to me, even before we knew what we currently know about Hocevar. It didn’t help that grassroots fans remained fiercely loyal to Preece regardless of his Cup Series mediocrity. It seemed like he kept failing upward. Most of the people in my circles felt that Stewart-Haas Racing replacing Cole Custer with Preece was a mistake and they convinced me it was too. After all, Custer, Tyler Reddick, and Christopher Bell all looked pretty much interchangeable in the Xfinity Series. Now that the latter two are superstars, it stood to reason that Custer could’ve been as well, especially since he’s the youngest of that trio.

I know many people would find it weird to support a literal nepo baby over a grassroots underdog, but Custer really did look better at that time and besides, many grassroots drivers are some level of nepo baby to some extent anyway due to the exorbitant costs necessary to compete even at the lowest levels. I admit I was wrong now, but it seemed right at the time. And then Preece seemingly failed upward again when RFK Racing hired him. I kind of think RFK’s cars are better than any of their drivers right now (even Chris Buescher) and it seemed weird to me that he was going to be Buescher’s teammate again after Buescher had already destroyed him at JTG Daugherty Racing, in the same way that Felix Rosenqvist’s return to McLaren after they already dumped him does. At least Rosenqvist won the Indy 500 and fought for several road course wins this year to justify his elevated reputation. Preece had nothing like that in his arsenal but just seems to curry favor based on his grassroots image. Watching Preece make the Chase on the basis of a single drafting win (his only finish better than 8th this season, by the way) was rather irritating, especially at the expense of Shane van Gisbergen, who has had way better performances or Chastain, who dominated Preece for years at JDM.

But I’ve come around again on Preece a little bit. He came a lot closer to matching Buescher in his current RFK stint than he did at JTG. With the random bursts of speed he’s occasionlly shown, I was warming to the idea that he deserved to be a Cup Series winner and would eventually get there, especially after his season-opening non-points win at Bowman Gray Stadium. I finally begrudgingly listed him on my top 200 list for the first time last year and I might do so again, but this year feels worse to me. I don’t really think he was the best choice at either SHR or RFK but he hasn’t been as wildly undeserving as I expected he’d be. That much I will admit. I was kind of hoping that SVG and Preece could both make it at Austin Cindric’s expense. Cindric was the worst-performing of these drivers according to me, but I knew that wasn’t likely to happen.

I have developed a reflexive mild antipathy towards drivers with loud Internet cult fan bases or stan armies, and usually these tend to be grassroots drivers. People assume working class drivers are automatically better. I understand people preferring to root for them, but honestly, nepo babies are often better. Having great family resources or connections makes it more likely you’ll get an earlier start in karting and learning your trade at age four or whatever is strongly correlated with future success. So, there was no real chance that Preece would’ve grown up to be as good as Ty Gibbs. Being a nepo bab is only a problem if you develop a sense of entitlement (again, Gibbs) or if your eternal job security causes you to become so complacent that you no longer feel you need to prove yourself (Austin Cindric, Austin Dillon, Marco Andretti, Graham Rahal - I think all these drivers were more talent than they ultimately showed). Since I tend to find that online fans tend to underrate nepotism drivers and overrate drivers with working class aesthetics (whether it’s Preece, Josh Berry, Chase Briscoe, Matt DiBenedetto before they hated him, or especially troll demon Noah Gragson), I often go too far in the opposite direction. Anyway, all that preamble was intended as a partial mea culpa about Preece. I don’t think I was entirely wrong, but I do tend to underrate all of Reddit’s favorites (as I’ve also noticed regarding my opinions on Connor Zilisch, who I still did include in my top 100 the last two years, mind you, but I pushed back for a while because it seemed like he was the only driver you were not allowed to criticize; now I’ve cooled off on this since he’s had so much bad luck and people are criticizing him too much now) and I need to do better at not doing that. But you will never convince that me that Noah Gagson is worth supporting in any way.

I’m going to spare most of my IndyCar discussion for after the Laguna Seca race (I wrote all this before this weekend’s races, but didn’t finish these posts until after), but I had a few thoughts about the Milwaukee doubleheader that I needed to get down. IndyCar’s decision to finish the rain-delayed first race after the conclusion of the second was some goofy officiating, but I guess that was dictated by television. Pato O’Ward becoming the first driver to win both races on the same day in 45 years was impressive even if both races were complete and total buzzkills and I am starting to find O’Ward truly insufferable. He certainly needed a lot of help to pull that off as he inherited the lead in “Race 2” after Will Power sped in the pits and his teammate Christian Lundgaard had a bothed pit stop. Said botched pit stop feels a little suspicious to me because McLaren was spewing all kinds of venom about how Lundgaard couldn’t drive ovals and they’d have had hella egg on their face if he’d won that one after they fired him. Since O’Ward also had a botched pit stop earlier, I’ll probably give them the benefit of the doubt, but if there’s any team capable of such subterfuge and duplicity, it’s McLaren, full stop. And O’Ward just totally lost me after he called Lundgaard “full of shit” for claiming McLaren set up the cars to favor him, and it’s starting to feel like he had something to do with Lundgaard being forced out because his precious ego couldn’t handle finally being challenged for once, and that really bothers me.

Then, of course, David Malukas was running away with “Race 1” until O’Ward retook the lead after Malukas’s mysterious plenum failure on the last restart. Because I’ve been eagerly awaiting Malukas’s first win for so long now and I’m growing tired of O’Ward, I was kind of irritated by the caution for Will Power scraping the wall since he was immediately able to drive into the pits and I kind of expected Malukas to get jumped on a restart, but I didn’t really understand this plenum thing until after the fact, even though I remember that Marcus Ericsson jumped O’Ward for the win at St. Pete for the same reason, so the plenum giveth and the plenum taketh away. Why does Ericsson get to have all the good luck while Malukas has none though?

Hours later, Malukas called out Chevy for the engine misfire, which I suppose could’ve put him in hot water with Team Penske because Roger Penske co-owns Ilmor Engineering, which builds the Chevy engines. Penske has fired people before (Paul Tracy) for criticizing his car packages, so it’s possible Malukas might’ve bit off more than he can chew. On the other hand, he did just clinch being the highest Penske finisher in points in his first season there, so I have a hard time seeing Penske firing him and I think he’s cooled off a bit in terms of firing people for insubordination like in the Tracy and Kurt Busch days. He’s probably still safe…

I put The Treasure of the Sierra Madre instead of Sierra Madre but they gave me that anyway. Never heard of Lady’s Supper, put Venus Flytap for that. Guessed phi for tau but I had no idea that 2 * pi was represented by a Greek letter and I probably should have. I guessed “Pip” for Question 5, which was certainly a really good guess because I knew that was the main character of Great Expectations, which was an autobiographical novel, but I didn’t know that. My opponent expected me to miss the food/drink question because I nearl always miss the food/drink questions, but even though I’ve never eaten there, that’s something that has premeated the culture to such an extent that you don’t have to be a foodie to have heard of it, which is how I feel about a lot of the food questions, but I know most people seem to get them so I always assume they’ll be easier for others. After this round I was 5-0-1 and then I won the next one too, but after that, I lost 12 straight matches to fall from leading to being in position to be relegated before finally earning a forfeit win on Friday. Both those streaks seemed really improbable to me, but the winning streak was probably more improbable than the losing streak.

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And in theory, I would be allowed to make some money taking care of her through New York’s FreedomCare as well. I investigated that a few years ago right after I lost my job transcribing calls for the deaf and hard of hearing in 2022 because they kept sending postcards hawking their services, but then I learned about how the money from this or any in-home care services obtained via Medicaid would becoming . Nobody ever told any of us about Medicaid estate recovery or Medicaid trusts. That all passed in the ‘90s and I would’ve been too young to even know about it or understand the ramifications of it, and I am sure that when all that passed, it got hardly any mentions in the mainstream media either. I had never heard of any of that until it was too late, so I decided not to try to get paid as a caregiver to protect the equity of the house. Now that it is almost lost for sure after she got forced into Van Duyn against her will for a year and a half (which was also something I didn’t even know Adult Protective Services could do, even if she’d already been warned about the hoarding) I possibly have a different view on this. Admittedly, it seems complicated determining what counts as care worthy of being paid and what doesn’t and it also seems difficult properly quantifying how much time any of these sorts of tasks took, so I might not even bother.

There will still be some issues with her coming home. I did not do a great job feeding her in 2023 and 2024. I did feed her most of the time as she increasingly did not have strength to make her own meals, but I typically waited for her to tell me she was hungry to feed her and wasn’t proactive enough. I didn’t have a specific feeding schedule and I probably should have. Often during the times when I asked if she was hungry, she would say no, or when I asked her what she wanted to eat, she couldn’t even tell me. So, for a while she was eating almost exclusively toast and cheese because those are the only things she said she wanted, or maybe the only things she thought I could make (I can make a bit more than that, c’mon). She used to eat a lot of TV dinners but at a certain point could no longer stomach the taste. I will need to be more proactive with feeding her for sure, and I will likely be enrolling her in Meals on Wheels again. She thinks she might have the strength to cook her own meals, but based on what I saw two or three years ago, I don’t think that will be happening. But I also don’t think I will do as well as the cooks at even a subpar nursing home like Van Duyn.

She also poops her pants a lot and while I’ve changed her before and am willing to do so again, I don’t know how good a job I can do of cleaning her. I’m willing to do it, but I obviously don’t think I would do it as well as trained nurses can. I also think I’m going to have a problem having the house properly lit. My mom was heavily reliant on incandescent light bulbs and I didn’t think to stockpile a bunch once they were outlawed. I still have some in various lamps across the house that I occasionally raid to use for other lamps, but they’re all going to run out at some point and she said she could never see out of any of the replacement light bulbs as well, so I foresee this being a problem. Part of the problem is that she does have cataracts. I had already suspected this and an eye doctor confirmed this while I was visiting. She had said she didn’t want to have cataract surgery for fear of losing her eyesight entirely, but now she seems to have changed her mind. I’ve asked the fourth-floor head nurse to schedule surgery for her although my guess is it won’t happen until after she’s come back.

Then there are potentially two other big issues. After I was offered the current job I have now in 2022 right after losing my previous one, she told me not to take it and I complied, even though it wrecked me financially. At the time, I had qualms, but now I seem to have sold out all my principles in taking it this year. I haven’t told her I decided to take the job that she didn’t want me to take four years ago yet, and I’ve been trying to avoid this conflict but if she comes home and I am working from home, it might be unavoidable. Working for a military contractor isn’t what I want to do either (and her problem with it was not that so much as that she found my boss and high school best friend creepy) but I kind of feel like at this point, I need to. If I’m already about to lose the house after her death largely due to her hoarding (although I certainly don’t take zero responsibility here), I have to look out for myself at least sometimes so I can hopefully pay off my credit cards in default and get my credit back up so by the time I need to rent again, someone will be willing to rent to me, which looks dicey now considering how long I was in default. I still don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t even know if my mom will remember our previous fights about this since she seemed to lose a lot of her recent memories due to her stroke. She forgot buying the house, her brother’s death, and seemingly most things from the last 40 years. She’s regained some memories, but almost half the time, she still forgets I’m her son and thinks I’m her brother, so there’s a good chance she’s forgotten all these fights as well. I think her cognitive decline is more stroke-related than dementia-related, but there are probably elements of both.

Finally, as I revealed in the “Manchild in Exile” post I published and subsequently unpublished a year and a half ago, we had a long string of political fights where she would say all sorts of vehemently racist garbage while listening to NPR, which was for a while almost the only thing she was doing when she couldn’t see to read, watch television, or use the computer anymore. She does not remember this period when I heard her say the N-word literally thousands of times (while also simultaneously sharing unhinged fantasies about all the violent things she wants to do to Trump), and I don’t want to remind her. I think she’s gotten better now since then after she got weaned off that addiction in the nursing home, but I don’t want to risk it and I’m going to keep her away from the news as much as I can. I don’t want her to come home and then end up fighting with her about Israel/Palestine again.

I still want her at home more for her than for me. She had told me numerous times going back to the ‘90s when her cognition was quite stout that she’d rather be dead than in a nursing home. I took that very seriously and I’ve been fighting for her in a way that I guess a lot of kids wouldn’t. Both the woman at PACE CNY and the nurses at Van Duyn have been impressed by my dogged determination to bring her home, even if many people would say it isn’t in my self-interest, especially at this point after the house is already lost. (Well, I did always see myself as a family values guy and I have to put my money where my mouth is, but it’s not like I don’t want to also, even as insufferable as she was behaving the last couple years she was home.) But I really want this for her and I do think I can balance caregiving, my job, and my Substack, as long as I don’t have to waste time fighting with her about her unhinged political statements. I definitely need to learn to be gentler about that stuff. Even some of the black nurses there seemed to be less offended when she said the N-word (much more rarely than at home) than I was. They just feel it’s the dementia talking and that I need to learn how to be more patient and gentle. I think I’ve been better this year in that regard than I was last year.

One thing I likely will have to cut out is most of my social engagements outside of the house. I’ve been going to mass every week, seeing my counselor every other week, going to bar trivia nearly every week, and frequently going to the men’s group and neurodivergent support group at Unique Peerspectives. Honestly, if I have to stay home almost all the time, I’m not going to be too bothered by that. I’ve been desperately lonely for real world connection for a very long time and obviously all these things indicate that I’ve been trying (and most of these were things Mom wouldn’t have let me do her last couple years at home because she was paranoid something would happen to me wheneve I left the house), but in all these endeavors, I wouldn’t say I made a single close friend at all, which was my main goal. I’ve appreciated all these things, but I still don’t feel there’s any friend locally I could call for support, and it seems unlikely I’m going to make any through any of these means at this point. I won’t be super devastated to have to drop most of these things (counseling is definitely what I’d drop last). But I still need somebody to talk to locally. Maybe having the PACE CNY people coming and going into the house will be enough. It could be.

Speaking of the bar trivia, our team did win at Heritage Hill Park as I expected. It was inevitable I guess since we were the only team to show up every week and we won five of the eight weeks. However, my teammate Bill was the only other person who showed up every week, even if we occasionally had other people shuffle in and out. Even though we qualified to compete in the downtown Syracuse trivia tournament against the winners from all the other bars at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown on September 13, Bill will not be able to make it because he has committed to going to a Buffalo Bills game that day. Our team is called “Bartenders Always Right” and it’s called that because the bartenders do occasionally feed us answers, but obviously there’s a strong chance that both bartenders might have to work. We had various other people joining us but who knows who’s going to show up. It looks like it might be just me. So, I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to pay the $170 entry fee to compete. I decided that I did. It might be one of my last big social engagements before Mom comes home. Now, I’ve looked up all the other players’ scores in other bars and they were outscoring us massively. We had fewer cumulative points across the tournament than any of the other winning teams, which makes sense. Heritage Hill had the worst competition for sure. We were the only team to show up every week, and I suspect most of these top teams at the other bars have a consistent squad of eight players showing up every single week while we often had as few as two or three. So, do I have a prayer of winning? No. But I still think I need to do this to give me closure on this aspect of my life before Mom comes home. And Bill was giving me all but $5 every time we won (first prize is $25 and second prize is $15 each week), so with five wins and one second, he gave me $110 and it isn’t that much of a loss even when I don’t cash. Although it’ll probably be way more than $60 if I need to catch a cab to get there…

Well, the Internet got so much less usable last week after Elon Musk decided to send all the alternative Twitter readers like Xcancel (which I had been using) a cease and desist letter. I don’t think I ever want to be on there again or Bluesky either. My combination of economically leftist and socially right-leaning centrist views not to mention my vehement opposition to edgy, comedic irony-posting makes me a poor fit for either of those platforms. I did try to log into my racermetrics Twitter account again - to try to archive and/or purge it again - and I got locked out again, so at a certain point I once again decided not to bother. Furthermore, and more devastatingly, the Internet Archive has been down all week and it feels like it might be good. Well, at least the website portion of it is down. I’ve been watching Murphy Brown on the Internet Archive’s video platform and it still works, but when you try to access any historic website on http://web.archive.org/, it doesn’t work. I know we are in an era when more and more historic online content is being paywalled, so it seems inevitable that this would happen. People believed the Internet was permanent, but I never did (that’s a big reason why I wanted to write Nerds per Minute as a book, not a blog), and this is going to make researching things a lot harder even for this project, particularly I think for American sports car drivers. There are a lot of racing sanctioning bodies (even ones that still exist) that have removed a lot of statistical information they used to have on their sites, and I need the Internet Archive to find any of it that I haven’t gotten down already. I hope it’s not gone for good before I’ve at least collected all this information, but I fear that it might be. And now of course Reddit isn’t letting you use old.reddit.com unless you have an account now, so I guess maybe I’ll stop reading that soon. Not much of a loss.

Well, I guess the Washington, D.C. IndyCar race was a good move commercially even if it was a bad move morally. While I stuck to my guns in boycotting that particular race, America apparently loved it. 3.3 million viewers, the most for a non-Indy 500 race since either the 1995 or 2000 Michigan 500 (sources seem to conflict because it’s hard to directly compare viewership now to ratings then when considering that the metrics TV execs seem to care about have changed over the ensuing decades). This truly depresses me, but I guess one of the big trends these days is that anything that causes big controversy or outrage ends up exploding in popularity, whether it’s conservative country songs, the Roseanne revival, or this. I don’t like it, but if they can leverage these ratings increases to hopefully add real tracks in the future, I guess that might be a good thing.

I don’t have much to say about Dolly Parton, but I guess I should say the same thing everyone else is saying. I wonder if it’s even possible for any celebrity to have such universal appeal across every single demographic group like she did anymore. I don’t really think that it is in a post-monoculture world. I also thought I’d share this quote from my favorite sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. It is a quote from its most famous and storied episode “Turkeys Away”, but not one of the ones that people typically cite. I even added it as a TypeRacer quote!

“Well, the Red Cross called out, you know, for blankets, clothes, anything. So Carlson, out of the goodness of his heart, shipped these destitute earthquake victims in Guatemala three thousand blonde stretch wigs. You know, I still have this picture in my mind of quake victims stumbling through the rubble, all looking like Dolly Parton.”

Rest in peace, Dolly.

Okay, this is unfair! Last time in LearnedLeague 109 there was a Scrabble question and now there is a NASCAR question? My guess would’ve been that most players wouldn’t know this since NASCAR is certainly unhip amongst trivia demographics, and I was right. Only 43% of people did. I put iconoclast instead of nihilism for Question 2, which was the most common answer. I can’t remember whether I considered nihilism or not. I don’t think I did, but I should’ve realized that iconoclast was from Greek and not from Latin; I think I knew that. Supply and demand is the easiest question I have ever seen. I was pretty sure I would have heard of the answer to Question 4, but I would be unable to pull it. I put Indira Gandhi knowing she was from India and not Pakistan just to put something. I have heard of Bhutto because the ‘90s is probably when I was watching international news the most, but I never would’ve gotten that. Color television was an educated guess. I figured that the C in SECAM had to be a word where both the English and French versions of the word were very close, so color was a good guess since the French is couleur. From there, television felt like the best guess and I got it. Definitely didn’t know it though. Question 6 was a 50/50 for me between St. Louis and Joan of Arc. Even though I felt that Louis was the better answer since I knew that he was the only king I could think of who was also a saint, which obviously makes him a national icon, I think I got thrown off by the village aspect of the clue. Joan of Arc obviously represented the more rural regions of France, while Louis obviously lived closer to Paris, and that threw me off, even though I thought Louis was probably the better answer. Oh well. Still won.

And finally, I made a Billy Joel joke since “Movin’ Out” famously mentioned Cadillac and I will be covering both of Cadillac’s F1 drivers today. The team really does seem to be a big waste of money right now in every regard, but who knows, maybe that could change. I felt it was safe to do both Pérez and Bottas today since I think most people would say they’ve been washed up for years and it would be hard to imagine either of them ever posting a top 200 season again. Admittedly, until this year, I would’ve thought Colton Herta would’ve genuinely been an improvement over either of them and now I definitely don’t…

I wrote most of this on Friday and Saturday and it just took me that long to finish the Pérez and Bottas posts (which I was trying to do for Bottas’s birthday on August 28). I’ll cover last weekend’s races whenever I write my next post. I also spent the last couple days calculating my IndyCar statistical table so I could finish that right after the Laguna Seca finale.

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On Day 4, I suddenly took over the lead despite only getting one question right. I expected to miss that question since I don’t drink and my opponent definitely expected me to miss the question since I had only gotten 2 out of 27 food/drink questions right before that, but I got it based on the English woman clue. I did take physics once in ninth grade, not in college, and I don’t remember us talking about strain at all (I put work, which wasn’t a bad guess). For Question 2, I put Velcro, also not a bad guess (although I didn’t realize that word was always supposed to be capitalized until Google Chrome spell check told me so). I know nothing about conventional video games, especially post-Nintendo. I couldn’t afford that hobby and I just had no interest in the first-person shooters that dominated the market and didn’t really spend much time trying to find the more obscure games in other genres that I would have liked (besides Scrabble and typing games, which I imagine most gamers would say don’t count as “real games”), so while I know all these modern gaming companies are massive, I certainly couldn’t tell you who made which game. I guessed Blizzard, which again wasn’t a bad guess. I put condor for Question 5 because I knew that the Californian condor has been extremely endangered for a while. I considered horse but I rejected it because I assumed the reason an animal would be difficult to photograph would be because of its rarity, not because it ran so fast. And I had obviously never heard of the book in Question 6 and couldn’t even think of a stupid guess. Literary fiction is far from being in the cultural zeitgeist these days, I always preferred nonfiction anyway, and I imagine most people - even most intellectuals these days - haven’t heard of most recent Pulitzer Prize winners. What’s the last one I can think of? Oscar Wao? (I didn’t even like that book.) Still, I think all four of my posted wrong answers were solid ones. However, after improbably winning two matches in the first week despite only getting one question right, my luck as expected caught up to me and I’ve now lost my last four matches to fall to seventh. Hopefully, I banked enough points to not get relegated. I probably did, and I’ll probably still have more wins after this.

The woman at the in-home care agency is finally back from vacation and scheduled another housing inspection for Friday morning to assess whether the house is ready for my mom to come back home. I think that it should be now that I had the roof repaired, the ramp installed, the car removed, the deep cleaning finished, and paths cleared through all the spaces where she is likely to walk or need to have a wheelchair pass through. But I imagine there are still going to be weeks more of paperwork and runarounds.

Here’s another twofer as I’m trying to keep up with my originally desired pace and I haven’t gotten an assignment at day job yet. When trying to decide what driver to pair with Roger McCluskey, who was originally scheduled for yesterday, I could have gone in a bunch of different directions. Maybe I should’ve just grouped him with George Follmer (scheduled for tomorrow), a contemporary of his who also won in a bunch of different series, but even though McCluskey won an IndyCar championship, I honestly think his greatest legacy is in USAC Stock Cars, where he so thoroughly dominated his teammate/car owner Norm Nelson in his 1969 and 1970 seasons to become the #1 highest rated driver of all time in my stock car model. Sure, you can argue Nelson was maybe a little washed up by then since he was 7.5 years older, but Nelson wasn’t that far from his peak since he himself had won back-to-back titles (his second and third) in 1965 and 1966, and Nelson was actually blowing out Richard Petty and David Pearson when they briefly competed in the USAC Stock Car Series at the start of 1965 after the Chrysler boycott kept them out of NASCAR races that season, so I don’t think McCluskey’s #1 rating is as spurious as you might think. Because I consider McCluskey’s stock car career as the most significant part of his record and not his overrated IndyCar career, I decided to group him with Don White (originally scheduled for June 24?) because White was the winningest driver in USAC Stock Car history, even if he is now obscure due to his relative lack of success in NASCAR and USAC dropping out of major league competition. He wasn’t that unsuccessful in the Cup Series, mind you, with 7 top fives (including three seconds - two of them in his own equipment) and 12 top tens in 24 starts, but he certainly wasn’t successful enough for NASCAR fans to realize he was a great driver elsewhere without this additional context.

ROGER MCCLUSKEY…………………USA

Born: August 24, 1930
Died: August 29, 1993

Best year: 1966
Best drive: 1972 Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono International Raceway

The only driver other than his fellow Texan A.J. Foyt to win USAC’s IndyCar, sprint car, and stock car championships, McCluskey started racing stock cars in Tucson in 1948 before transitioning to USAC sprint cars in 1959. Although McCluskey was highly versatile on all track types, he was probably best on dirt, as evidenced by his 23 USAC Sprint wins, four USAC Midget wins, and two USAC Sprint titles in 1963 and 1966 over Foyt and Mario Andretti respectively in their IndyCar title seasons.

As an IndyCar driver, McCluskey was quite impressive in 1966, when he won his first race at Langhorne and posted the best lead change record of 4-1 that year. However, most of his IndyCar seasons were rather middling. Admittedly, he seldom had top-notch cars, spending most of his career driving for the forgotten Lindsey Hopkins. In 1972, Hopkins procured a drastically superior McLaren chassis, which helped McCluskey win the 1972 California 500. In 1973, he ran out of fuel on the last lap at Pocono to hand Foyt the win, but then won the next race at Michigan, which along with three second-places handed him a highly improbable title. His fifth win came in his final start against a lackluster field at Milwaukee in 1979, as he remained loyal to USAC during the CART/USAC split.

However, his USAC Stock Car career has heretofore been relatively unacknowledged even though I think he was at his best in stock cars. McCluskey is the all-time highest-rated driver in my stock car model thanks his astonishing 20-3 record against his three-time championship-winning teammate and car owner Norm Nelson. He won his fourth start at Mosport in a race both Foyt and Richard Petty entered. Demonstrating comparable strength on road courses, dirt, and pavement, McCluskey went on to win the 1969 and 1970 championships and 23 races, 20 of them from 1968-1972 alone. His biggest win came at the 1972 Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono, which was originally a USAC race before the track switched its affiliation to NASCAR. McCluskey led 180 of 200 laps, won by four laps, and was in front of Petty before he suffered an oil line failure.

McCluskey is frequently criticized for his weak IndyCar record for a sries champion. He only won five times, only led seven laps and never finished on the lead lap at the Indy 500, and his title resulted from consistency rather than dominance. On the other hand, he gave Hopkins his only title and certainly proved capable of beating all the major IndyCar and NASCAR stars in other races. McClusky was renowned for his ability to defuse feuds between drivers, owners, and sanctioning bodies. As a result, he served as USAC’s executive vice president competition director, and chief operating officer, most notably instituting the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Rookie Orientation program. The shutdown of the USAC Stock Car Series caused much of his legacy to be lost. Nonetheless, even if his IndyCar and NASCAR careers weren’t exceptional, his overall career certainly was.

Stock car model: #1 of 319 (.520)

Teammate head-to-heads: 20-3 (20-3 vs. Norm Nelson)

Open wheel model: #234 of 931 (.080)

Teammate head-to-heads: 35-11 (2-0 vs. Gary Bettenhausen, 1-1 vs. Tom Bigelow, 3-0 vs. Wally Dallenbach, 1-0 vs. A.J. Foyt, 4-2 vs. Elmer George, 0-1 vs. Dan Gurney, 1-0 vs. Janet Guthrie, 1-1 vs. Jim Hurtubise, 10-0 vs. Mel Kenyon, 6-1 vs. Lee Kunzman, 2-3 vs. Joe Leonard, 1-0 vs. Larry McCoy, 2-1 vs. Lloyd Ruby, 1-1 vs. Bentley Warren)

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

DON WHITE………………………….USA

Born: June 24, 1926
Died: April 29, 2016

Best year: 1967
Best drive: 1967 State Fair Century at Indiana State Fairgrounds

Arguably the best stock car driver you’ve never heard of, White was the first of four major stock car stars to emerge from the small river town Keokuk, Iowa, White, his brother-in-law Ernie Derr, Dick Hutcherson, and Ramo Stott combined at least 583 of 897 races and win all but two titles in the International Motor Contest Association’s stock car tour from 1953-1971. White started out painting and taking on construction and erosion control jobs before beginning racing in 1948. Derr initially helped prepare White’s cars, but ultimately became his rival. From 1950 to 1958, White won at least 90 IMCA races and the 1954, 1955, and 1958 titles, giving him the edge over Derr’s 58 wins and one title. He also notably won at every track on the IMCA schedule.

In 1959, White began racing in both MARC (the forerunner of today’s ARCA) and the USAC Stock Car Series. He won the title in his first full-time USAC season in 1963. After running as an independent in 1964 and 1965, he landed a factory-backed Dodge ride with Ray Nichels from 1966-1970 and won 36 races over that timespan while many IndyCar stars simultaneously competed there; he was even nicknamed the “Richard Petty of the North”.

The manufacturers dropped out of both NASCAR and USAC in the early ‘70s, leaving White as an owner-driver. He still won occasionally and finished with a record 53 wins, including 14 at the Milwaukee Mile, the most of any driver at the track in any series. At the Indianapolis State Fairgrounds, he led IndyCar stars Parnelli Jones and Al Unser in 1-2-3 finishes in both 1967 races, passing Jones for the win both times. He was noted for a smooth driving style, charging only when necessary to conserve his equipment the finish, and A.J. Foyt praised him for his fairness and clean driving.

History is written by the winners, so NASCAR winning the stock car war caused USAC’s Stock Car Series to be forgotten. White wasn’t a bad NASCAR driver with seven top fives including three second-place finishes in 24 starts, but that’s not his main legacy. Even if he was the Petty of the north, he never won Petty’s recognition and seldom found sufficient funding after Chrysler withdrew. He believes this is because he frequently criticized USAC, Goodyear, and many of the other power players in the sport. Additionally, the IndyCar stars who frequently competed in USAC Stock Car races tended to monopolize the sponsorships and attention, leaving the stock car-only drivers fighting for scraps. The best way to understand White’s career is to compare him to Foyt. From 1962-1969, White won only one fewer race (22-21) in races they both started and he actually beat him 54-42 in finishes. White obviously couldn’t match Foyt’s versatility, but as a stock car racer, he was pretty close. When considering Foyt won 7 of 128 Cup Series races, White probably could’ve become a fairly prolific NASCAR winner as well… if he’d been given the chance.

Stock car model: #96 of 319 (-.011)

Teammate head-to-heads: 8-10 (1-0 vs. Mario Andretti, 1-0 vs. Larry Frank, 0-4 vs. Paul Goldsmith, 0-1 vs. Skip Hudson, 0-1 vs. Jim Hurtubise, 1-2 vs. Sam McQuagg, 0-1 vs. Fireball Roberts, 0-1 vs. Lloyd Ruby, 1-0 vs. Fred Lorenzen, 4-0 vs. Dick Rathmann)

Year-by-year: 1953: C+, 1954: E-, 1955: C+, 1956: C-, 1957: C-, 1958: E, 1959: C+, 1960: E-, 1961: E-, 1962: C+, 1963: C+, 1964: C, 1965: C+, 1966: E, 1967: E, 1968: E, 1969: E, 1970: C+, 1972: C+, 1974: C, 1975: C

As you can tell, this series currently has more parity than any other in the world, as evidenced by the fact that every single driver who made a start not only led, but made an on-track pass for the lead, which makes analyzing this series particularly messy since you could more or less argue that almost everyone in the series was decent (indeed, 17 out of 20 drivers were rated as having above-average seasons, which definitely won’t happen in IndyCar this season and might not even in F1). There were 11 different winners, 12 different drivers with the most lead changes, 10 different drivers who led the most laps, 9 different polesitters, 9 different drivers with fastest laps, and 13 different drivers with fastest races, which is pretty remarkable considering there were only 20 drivers and 17 races. Normally the driver with the highest speed percentile has a speed percentile of over 80%, but this time defending champion Oliver Rowland’s speed percentile of 64.47% is probably the lowest I’ve ever seen to lead a series. Even more astonishingly, this year’s champion Pascal Wehrlein only had barely above average speed, although he led most of the other categories. Granted, it would be easy to argue all the incessant lead changes were rather gimmicky as drivers continually handed each other the lead to save energy, but I do think you can still draw conclusions by comparing teammates to each other.

Seven of the 20 drivers made noteworthy crossovers in endurance sports car racing, with Sébastien Buemi, Nick Cassidy, António Félix da Costa, Norman Nato, and most notably Nyck de Vries (who won overall at Le Mans alongside Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi in addition to his two Formula E wins this year) competing full-time in the World Endurance Championship, Jake Dennis competing full-time in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, and Nico Müller making a one-off at Le Mans and finishing second in his class. I’m going to ignore all those drivers for the time being and wait until the end of their respective sports car seasons before rating them, but I thought it was time for me to try and nail down my placements for the other thirteen.

Even though Wehrlein’s speed percentile was a curiously low 51.73, he did win the title and lead the majority of statistical categories, so he probably should get an E. His teammate Müller finished ninth in points and was behind him in every single category, but he did still rate fairly highly relative to the field, ranking 7th in lead shares and 5th in CRL. Feels like a C. I will be ignoring Dennis, who finished 2nd in points, but his teammate Felipe Drugovich was 14th; he clearly shouldn’t be listed as evidenced by his miserable -.152 season rating along with getting crushed by Dennis in all statistical categories. I was rooting for Evans to win the title this year because he was the highest-rated Formula E driver for most of my open wheel model’s history and hasn’t won a title yet, but he didn’t really deserve to this year. While he had the best lead change percentage and finished third in points, his teammate da Costa who finished sixth led all drivers in natural races led and crushed him in dominance even though Evans beat him in points, speed, and narrowly in my teammate model. Evans feels like a C+ since I typically care more about dominance than consistency and in that regard, da Costa had the edge.

Even though Rowland failed to defend his championship and only finished fourth, I’ think I’m going to give him an E because he was the fastest driver in the series while his teammate Nato was the second-slowest. Not unlike last year when Rowland clinched the title early while Nato finished 20th in points, this time Nato was only one position better, which means for the second year in a row Rowland beat his teammate by the most positions in the championship. I don’t think anything Nato did in WEC this year will make me want to list him in spite of that. Mortara finished fifth in points while de Vries was seventh. Mortara’s 7-4 defeat of de Vries actually made him the highest-rated Formula E driver in my model (although Taylor Barnard would have been if I threw out the one race from 2025, which obviously won’t be relevant for my 2026 ranking). Even though he didn’t win and de Vries won twice, they were pretty close in all statistical categories otherwise and it honestly looks like Mortara was more dominant while de Vries was more clutch. When considering he won Le Mans and was one of the most dominant drivers in Formula E this year, de Vries is probably an E (but don’t quote me on that until the WEC is finished) and Mortara an E-.

Cassidy has been a perennial title contender for years and actually his eighth-place points finish is his worst since 2021-2022. Although Vergne’s 12th-place points finish wasn’t too far behind, when you look at the satistical table, Cassidy looks substantially better overall and honestly, Vergne is low enough in most statistical categories that he should probably be off. Buemi finished 10th in points while his teammate Joel Eriksson was 16th. Although Eriksson actually won the head-to-head this year, his statistics are too poor otherwise to list him. Barnard was in my top 50 last year and he remains the highest-rated active Formula E driver in my model. With his win at the London season finale, he became the youngest winner (he was already the youngest points scorer, polesitter, podium finisher, front row starter, leader, and driver to set the fastest lap). Although he only narrowly beat his teammate, 7-time winner Maximilian Günther in most statistical categories, he nearly tripled him in points and finished 11th to Günther’s 18th. I think another E- is in the cards for Barnard and Günther should be off. Weirdly, Pepe Martí finished higher than his teammate Dan Ticktum in points (13th-15th) in his rookie season and was way faster in races with a massive 62.48-40.13 gap in speed, but it was Ticktum who was one of only two drivers along with Dennis to have multiple poles, and he also won a race and factored for other wins while Martí really doesn’t for a Kiro team that still isn’t great. I’m thinking they should both get C-s. Finally, past champion Lucas di Grassi utterly destroyed sophomore Zane Maloney, who had a pretty lousy season, easily the worst in all statistical categories except for rating. Maloney obviously shouldn’t be listed. di Grassi did win in a pretty weak car that finished 17th in points and he keeps delivering highly-rated seasons in my model as well as Yamaha’s first win, but I think he’s drowned out by too many other drivers to rank him in the top 100. I’m thinking C.

So as I continue to work through each series, I’m going to try to construct a jigsaw puzzle to work on my top 200 list as the season progresses so hopefully it won’t be as late this time. Here is how it stands based on the FE drivers I feel comfortable rating.

E: Oliver Rowland, Pascal Wehrlein

E-: Taylor Barnard, Edoardo Mortara

C+: Mitch Evans

C: Lucas di Grassi, Nico Müller

C-: Pepe Martí, Dan Ticktum

definitely top 200 but more information needed for their exact placements: Sébastien Buemi, Nick Cassidy, Nyck de Vries, Jake Dennis, António Félix da Costa

probably not: Norman Nato (unless he was way faster than his WEC co-drivers)

not rated: Felipe Drugovich, Joel Eriksson, Maximilian Günther, Zane Maloney, Jean-Éric Vergne

I might have missed Question 1 without my NASCAR fandom. The main Syracuse cable company has gone by many names over the years: Newchannels begat Adelphi, which begat Time Warner, which begat Spectrum, but I’m not sure whether I remembered the Charter/Spectrum connection, because I personally had switched to Verizon Fios in the interim. However, I certainly remembered Xfinity due to NBC’s silly self-promotional stunt by acquiring the rights to NASCAR and then simultaneously sponsoring its second-tier series under the Xfinity name. (That must have been what gave FOX the idea to buy a share of the IndyCar Series in exchange for putting all the races on FOX proper.) Prozac was easy. For Benin, I put Mali (that was really hard). Juggernaut and Devil’s Island were educated guesses I wasn’t 100% sure on but sounded like the best possible answers for those questions. I had never heard of Parma and put Salami, but it’s not a ham and also not a city. Oh, well. I didn’t know.

I kind of thought Sunday’s NASCAR race was the most enjoyable of the season for me. It prety much captured everything I like about the sport and few things I didn’t. It was a little annoying when all those cautions led to there being 30 cars on the lead lap, which sometimes in other races has led to demolition derby type races where the box score looks like it got run over by a random number generator, but that didn’t happen this time. Eventually, most of those guys who got lucky to get their laps back got lapped again, and I definitely prefer the wave-around rule to cars being on the tail end of the lead lap, which is one of NASCAR’s few recent gimmicks of the last 20 years that works. Ryan Blaney pretty much earned the win, and it was cool to see his pit crew giveth just as it had earlier taketh away in one race. After Josh Berry tapped Bubba Wallace to take the lead and then Wallace did the same thing to take it back, I was worried that was going to escalate into an all-out feud after the race, especially as Berry was chasing down Wallace for second, but it didn’t and that was cool. It was nice to see the Toyotas weren’t unbeatable for once, although the Chevies were still just as slow (and unlucky) as ever. And okay, after doubting whether Berry should still be in the Cup Series, he’s convinced me that he probably should. I’d welcome him to replace Austin Hill in the #33 or Ty Dillon in the #10 easily.

Here are two noted DTM champions and contemporaries, one of whom had his 43rd birthday Sunday and the other of which I skipped on his own birthday, July 14.

BRUNO SPENGLER…………….CANADA

Born: August 23, 1983

Best year: 2012
Best drive: 2012 DTM Race #10 at Hockenheimring Baden-Württemberg

The only North American champion of Germany’s Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters series, Spengler was nicknamed “The Secret Canadian” because he primarily raced in Europe and was simultaneously famous abroad while obscure at home. Born in France but raised in Quebec, he was so dominant in karting locally that he began commuting to Europe at age 12 to race. After winning the Formula Renault 2.0 Fran-Am championship in 2002,. While he went winless in the highly competitive Formula 3 Euro Series, Mercedes saw his potential and signed him to their Persson Motorsport DTM team in 2005.

Although Jamie Green utterly dominated Spengler that year when both were rookies, both were promoted to Hans-Werner Aufrecht’s perennial championship-contending HWA Team for 2006, replacing Jean Alesi and Gary Paffett alongside Bernd Schneider and two-time World Champion Mika Häkkinen. While Schneider won his fifth and final title, Spengler was the breakout star with a series-high four wins en route to a second-place points finish. After another runner-up in 2007, Spengler went winless in both 2008 and 2009 but led the championship for much of 2010 and 2011 before Paul di Resta and Martin Tomczyk overtook him respectively. Mercedes offered the 2011 Force India F1 ride to whichever driver won the 2010 DTM title; di Resta got it instead.

In 2012, Spengler abruptly left Mercedes to become a BMW factory driver. The marque was reentering DTM after a 20-year absence and hired Spengler as Schnitzer Motorsports’ lead driver. Improbably, Spengler won in his second start, then went on to win the championship. Entering the Hockenheim season finale three points behind Paffett, he qualified third behind Augusto Farfus and Paffett before taking the lead on Lap 1 in one of the greatest ever clutch drives. However, Spengler’s last seven seasons from 2013-2019 were much shakier, as he only won three races, finished outside the top ten in points four times, and bounced from one BMW team to another. BMW transitioned him into sports cars in 2020, where he earned his last major win in IMSA with Connor de Phillippi at Road Atlanta. His driving career wound down when he was named Bugatti’s “Pilote Officiel” in 2025.

The fact that Spengler was a star in Europe and utterly anonymous elsewhere gave him an odd legacy. Despite narrowly missing out on F1 opportunities, Spengler’s 14 DTM wins and his head-to-head records against Häkkinen and Ralf Schumacher suggest he was talented enough to be an F1 winner. Since di Resta’s F1 career was pretty anonymous in its own right, I don’t think Spengler has many regrets that he remained in DTM. His Mercedes performances were pretty amazing and he was the highest-rated DTM driver of 2011, but as great as his 2012 was, I find his BMW stint overrated. Nonetheless, the transition to European racing is typically difficult for North American drivers and he was one of the very few drivers of his era to make it internationally. He deserves better than being seen as a footnote in Canada’s racing heritage.

Touring car model: #89 of 1676 (.272)

Teammate head-to-heads: 197-139 (11-3 vs. Tom Blomqvist, 14-14 vs. Paul di Resta, 10-7 vs. Philipp Eng, 9-8 vs. Joel Eriksson, 7-5 vs. Augusto Farfus, 5-1 vs. Luca Filippi, 16-15 vs. Timo Glock, 24-19 vs. Jamie Green, 11-6 vs. Mika Hakkinen, 5-16 vs. Maxime Martin, 16-13 vs. Gary Paffett, 18-10 vs. Bernd Schneider, 23-3 vs. Ralf Schumacher, 3-6 vs. Martin Tomczyk, 5-1 vs. Giovanni Venturini, 15-3 vs. Dirk Werner, 5-8 vs. Marco Wittmann, 0-1 vs. Alex Zanardi)

Year-by-year: 2006: E-, 2007: E-, 2008: C+, 2009: C+, 2010: E-, 2011: E-, 2012: E, 2013: E-, 2015: C, 2019: C-, 2020: C-

MATTIAS EKSTRÖM…………..SWEDEN

Born: July 14, 1978

Best year: 2004
Best drive: 2009 Race of Champions

Possibly the 21st century’s most versatile driver, Ekström was primarily noted as a touring car driver, but he also won in rallycross, sports cars, off-road racing, while dabbling in numerous other series. Like many Scandinavians, he seemed to respect rally racers most, but he first drew attention in touring cars, where he won the Swedish Touring Car Championship in a privateer Audi at age 21 in 1999. That same year, he entered the World Rally Championship’s Swedish Rally; he eventually won his class in the same event in 2004, but that pales compared to his other accomplishments.

Audi signed Ekström as a factory driver in Germany’s Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters in 2001. He drove for the perennial championship contenders Abt Sportsline through 2017 and was sponsored by Red Bull starting in 2002, a year he won three times. He led Audi in the 2003 championship despite going winless, then won four races en route to the 2004 title. He was rather nonplussed about his accomplishment, saying he felt empty because he didn’t know what he would do next. He added another title in 2007 despite only winning once and finished tied for third with 23 wins.

However, his try-anything-once ambition was reflected in a myriad of other accomplishments. His unmatched ability to learn cars quickly resulted in him winning the Race of Champions four times (second-most behind Sébastien Loeb), most notably in 2009 when he defeated Tom Kristensen, current F1 champion Jenson Button, and Michael Schumacher to win. He won the 2011 24 Hours of Spa, then pivoted to rallycross racing late in his career, winning the 2016 World Rallycross Championship title over past World Rally Champion Petter Solberg in his own equipment, along with 12 wins overall. He next moved into electric cars, winning the first electric touring car championship in 2021 and two wins in the electric off-road Extreme E in 2023. Although it was a minor blip in his illustrious career, he and Jan Magnussen became the first Scandinavian NASCAR Cup Series starters at Sonoma in 2010 thanks to Ekström’s Red Bull connection.

Ekström was modest about his accomplishments, believing he was less talented than the F1 and WRC stars, but I don’t know about that. Reaching the pinnacle in an elite world championship usually requires single-minded dedication to one discipline, so Ekström’s decision to speedrun numerous side quests simultaneously may have prevented him from being a goat in any single discipline, but his versatility made him a lot cooler. This isn’t to say said side quests weren’t worthwhile, as Ekström believed his greatest strength was never using more grip than his tires could take, a skill he likely acquired from rallying. Although he was never the highest-rated DTM driver in my touring car model, he ranked fourth globally in both 2004 and 2005 despite being far more than just a touring car racer. Fans who regard F1 as the only relevant series may not respect him enough, but people who understand the global motorsports landscape definitely do.

Touring car model: #63 of 1676 (.300)

Teammate head-to-heads: 354-174 (27-15 vs. Christian Abt, 13-25 vs. Laurent Aiello, 2-3 vs. Mikel Azcona, 4-2 vs. Tom Blomqvist, 1-0 vs. Kelvin Burt, 0-1 vs. Paul Dumbrell, 1-4 vs. Heinz-Harald Frentzen, 7-0 vs. Rahel Frey, 1-1 vs. Robin Frijns, 10-1 vs. Jordi Gene, 5-3 vs. Jamie Green, 15-2 vs. Oliver Jarvis, 30-14 vs. Tom Kristensen, 4-0 vs. Katherine Legge, 0-1 vs. Craig Lowndes, 0-1 vs. Warren Luff, 8-0 vs. Allan McNish, 35-8 vs. Miguel Molina, 14-13 vs. Edoardo Mortara, 18-10 vs. Nico Muller, 5-0 vs. Daniel Nagy, 8-3 vs. Jan Nilsson, 1-1 vs. Kris Nissen, 7-3 vs. Mike Rockenfeller, 31-26 vs. Timo Scheider, 30-9 vs. Adrien Tambay, 7-0 vs. Peter Terting, 47-25 vs. Martin Tomczyk, 22-2 vs. Karl Wendlinger, 0-1 vs. Jamie Whincup, 1-0 vs. Markus Winkelhock)

Stock car model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 0-2 (0-2 vs. Scott Speed)

Year-by-year: 1997: C, 1999: C+, 2000: C+, 2001: C+, 2002: C+, 2003: E-, 2004: 5, 2005: E, 2006: C, 2007: E-, 2008: E-, 2009: C+, 2010: E-, 2011: E, 2012: C+, 2013: C+, 2014: E, 2015: E, 2016: E, 2017: E, 2018: C, 2020: E-, 2021: E-, 2022: C+, 2023: C+

Max Verstappen: .471 → .477
Luke Browning .414 (NEW)
Fernando Alonso: .421 → .412
Taylor Barnard: .418 → .366
Charles Leclerc: .352 → .354
Lewis Hamilton: .311 → .304
Álex Palou: .258 → .276
George Russell: .260 → .263
Edoardo Mortara: .240 → .244
Mitch Evans: .234 → .233
Pato O’Ward: .246 → .232
Ayumu Iwasa: .128 → .224
Colton Herta: .232 → .214
Scott Dixon: .223 → .210
Pascal Wehrlein: .216 → .205
Josef Newgarden: .218 → .188
Lucas di Grassi: .181 → .186
Oliver Bearman: .052 → .185
António Félix da Costa: .190 → .182
Kyle Kirkwood: .149 → .180
Nyck de Vries: .177 → .175
Joel Eriksson: .181 → .175
Sho Tsuboi: .155 → .173
Jean-Éric Vergne: .184 → .169
Alex Albon: .163 → .164
Théo Pourchaire: .148 → .163
Lando Norris: .165 → .160
Nico Müller: .145 → .152
Rinus VeeKay: .139 → .152
Kimi Antonelli: -.006 → .151
Will Power: .179 → .149
Liam Lawson: .139 → .149
Carlos Sainz, Jr.: .133 → .136
Isack Hadjar: .146 → .135
Nico Hülkenberg: .139 → .134
Sébastien Buemi: .123 → .132
Esteban Ocon: .122 → .131
David Malukas: .094 → .129
Zane Maloney: .164 → .126
Lance Stroll: .126 → .125
Felix Rosenqvist: .134 → .120
Sergio Pérez: .118 → .119
Pierre Gasly: .121 → .116
Valtteri Bottas: .127 → .115
Tomoki Nojiri: .107 → .111
Gabriel Bortoleto: .102 → .109
Alexander Rossi: .107 → .103
Jake Dennis: .102 → .098
Scott McLaughlin: .128 → .093
Oliver Rowland: .081 → .092
Romain Grosjean: .086 → .081
Maximilian Günther: .070 → .072
Igor Fraga: .032 → .072
Santino Ferrucci: .063 → .065
Christian Lundgaard: .039 → .051
Nick Cassidy: .038 → .050
Marcus Ericsson: .045 → .043
Kenta Yamashita: .039 → .042
Graham Rahal: .033 → .038
Ritomo Miyata: -.025 → .034
Ryan Hunter-Reay: .037 → .031
Roman Staněk: .021 (NEW)
Dan Ticktum: .012 → .014
Sena Sakaguchi: -.020 → .007
Oscar Piastri: .002 → .006
Toshiki Oyu: -.007 → .005
Kamui Kobayashi: .014 → .003
Yuki Tsunoda: -.023 → -.011
Arvid Lindblad: -.027 → -.030
Ren Sato: -.061 → -.035
Christian Rasmussen: -.043 → -.048
Conor Daly: -.057 → -.056
Pepe Martí: -.221 → -.064
Marcus Armstrong: -.078 → -.067
Mick Schumacher: -.057 → -.072
Nobuharu Matsushita: -.076 → -.080
Louis Foster: -.105 → -.080
Franco Colapinto: -.125 → -.087
Takuma Sato: -.097 → -.089
Sacha Fenestraz: -.114 → -.093
Norman Nato: -.082 → -.094
Dennis Hauger: -.157 → -.101
Ed Carpenter: -.119 → -.121
Zak O’Sullivan: -.145 → -.125
Caio Collet: -.124 → -.134
Felipe Drugovich: -.139 → -.135
Ukyo Sasahara: -.161 → -.140
Charlie Wurz: -.160 (NEW)
Jack Harvey: -.161 → -.164
Kyffin Simpson: -.237 → -.173
Giuliano Alesi: -.179 → -.173
Nolan Siegel: -.190 → -.184
Kakunoshin Ohta: -.255 → -.193
Tadasuke Makino: -.193 → -.204
Syun Koide: -.258 → -.211
Sting Ray Robb: -.208 → -.213
Jacob Abel: -.311 → -.285
Rikuto Kobayashi: -.514 → -.421
Juju Noda: -.424 → -.423
Katherine Legge: -.436 → -.445
Seita Nonaka: -.549 → -.526

I suppose one of the odd things about me is that I think I like reading criticism more than appreciating art, although I do like plenty of music, movies, and TV shows, mind you. This creates a certain insufferable pretentiousness where oftentimes I have heard of something without having heard or watched it. I’ve read enough music criticism to understand Uncle Tupelo’s importance but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song. Works great for trivia, but still kind of cringe. Macbeth was a gimme. I ended up putting the most common wrong answer for #3, putting citric acid because I focused on the “tangy” part rather than the “yogurt” part. I was surprised my opponent thought I’d be least likely to get the American history question because he knew it and American history is my best category (I’ve gotten 73.9% of questions right there to 73.3% for pop music). I’ll take it. I guess Uncle Tupelo was objectively the hardest question (it’s the one the fewest players got) but I thought the hardest was easily Question 5. I could hardly name like ten American software companies and I certainly couldn’t name any German ones. I knew it had to be three letters since most stock symbols are, but I had no idea what to put, so I just made up DKK for “Deutsche Komputer Kompany”. Did I really think that was it? Of course not, and I’m betting that’s not how you say "computer company" in German either. Never heard of SAP. I put the most common wrong answer Mt. Olympus for Question 6, thinking that was the most obvious answer for a geographical feature. I certainly knew it was a real mountain and that Styx was a fake river, so if I figured out that the answer had to be mythological rather than something that existed in real life, I’d have probably gotten that, I bet.

I blew off driver posts this week because in addition to updating my open wheel model at the end of the Formula E season, I also decided to complete my Formula E statistical table for the 2025-2026 season, and that took longer than you might think because there were so many lead changes to go through. I know, that’s a good problem to have. Most of the lead changes were actually “legit” this time. What I mean by that is unlike previous seasons, very few of them took place when one of the drivers was going into “attack mode”, but admittedly in most cases, drivers intentionally let each other past to save energy, but I count passes like that in NASCAR races at Talladega or Indy 500s, don’t I? I suppose I should do the same thing here. I will probably share that table at some point over the next week and share some early thoughts, but I probably won’t do too much of an analysis yet. One wild statistic: every single driver in the 20-car field had an on-track pass for the lead! Also, all but one driver had a speed percentile in the very narrow range from 37 to 64!

Another reason I was slow this week is that I was planning a double Bob Glidden/Shirley Muldowney post and then I ended up abandoning it when I saw that Glidden especially had a bunch of IHRA wins and I think Muldowney does too but I can’t confirm that yet. There was a while, particularly in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, when the IHRA was not much less prestigious than the NHRA. So I went down a rabbit hole during the middle of last week trying to find lists of past IHRA points standings and winners. I definitely found some of them, but a lot of them have never been properly archived online. Even when digging into the Internet Archive, some of the standings pages weren’t accessible because they were initially accessed through pull-down menus and the Internet Archive never archived those since they weren’t accessed through links. I realize the IHRA has bigger problems now as it just canceled its Stock Car Series, but it’s definitely annoying to see that its site once had an archive of every championship result back to 1999 and now a lot of that isn’t accessible. This still doesn’t help me for drivers like Glidden or Muldowney who predate that era, so I decided to postpone all entries for drag racers and rally racers, since I still need to do more research in those areas.

That clears up a lot of the drivers I’m behind on. I’m going to try to do double posts every day I’m at home and not visiting Mom, at least if I don’t have any paid work. Right now, I don’t have a work assignment and the buses don’t run on weekends, so I could do it today. I also finished a lot of my other projects, including the archive of all my online material last week, and I’ve also finished all the work I needed to finish on the house and am just waiting for the woman at the in-home care agency and the social worker to allow for Mom to be discharged back home, although the former was on vacation so there was nothing I could do about that this week, which is frustrating. I should have more time to catch up on the drivers I skipped having finished all of that stuff. I do want to try to group the drivers thematically for as much as I can. For example, Huff was originally scheduled for August 22 since that was the date of his first BTCC win (although I didn’t quite get it done then), so I paired him with his Chevy teammate WTCC Alain Menu (who was originall scheduled for August 9.) For the record, I covered the third driver in that triumvirate (and probably the best of them) Yvan Muller a long time ago. At least I got some funny anecdotes for Huff (that magazine interview is priceless). Even I think the Menu post is kind of boring, but I think it’s the best I could do.

I am going to choose to pretend tomorrow’s IndyCar race does not exist and all I’m hoping is that none of the American drivers win. Yeah, I’ve made no secret that David Malukas is my favorite driver since his breakout Gateway race in 2022. Even though he’s well overdue for a win at this point, America - and Penske especially for hyping this as a generational event - deserves to lose this one. I don’t want to rant like I did in the lead up to the Coronado race (although it really depresses me that there will be another one), but at least the actual race was good. That D.C. race will suck. But that’s hopefully my last word on this. I think I’m going to put a moratorium for me talking about anything political for the time being, at least until my review of Murphy Brown (I’m two episodes away from being finished with five of the ten seasons).

ROB HUFF………………………………UK

Born: December 25, 1979

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2024 BTCC Race #9 at Snetterton Circuit

One of the steadiest touring car presences for two decades, Huff won 45 major touring car races, including a record 11 in the prestigious Macau Guia Race. Coming from a working-class background, Huff initially worked at a car wash before improbably working his way into the cockpit after winning numerous successive scholarships to climb the racing ladder without having to expend family resources. The last of these came when his 2003 SEAT Cupra Championship landed him a SEAT seat in the British Touring Car Championship alongside the series’s eventual all-time winner Jason Plato.

After winning twice in 2004, Huff’s car owner Ray Mallock left the BTCC to launch a factory Chevrolet World Touring Car Championship team in 2005. He almost lost his ride before he started after jokingly stating in a magazine interview that he would light a Vauxhall Nova (another GM brand) on fire but managed to extinguish those flames. Chevrolet’s original Lacetti model was slow, causing Huff and his teammates Nicola Larini and Alain Menu to go winless, but the Chevy Cruze, its 2009 replacement, was significantly faster.

In 2011 and 2012, Chevy won 41 of 48 races and swept the top three positions in points both years. Huff tied his new teammate Yvan Muller (Larini’s replacement) with eight wins in 2011, but narrowly lost the title by three points despite becoming the first driver to sweep both Macau Guia Races. He got his revenge in 2012 after Muller slid into Menu at the penultimate Shanghai round and handed Huff the win and eventually the title. However, Chevy withdrew after 2012 and Huff never quite had a championship-caliber ride again. In 2014, he gave the obscure Russian manufacturer Lada its first two wins. When considering both wins in WTCC and its rival series TCR, Huff won all but two seasons through 2023, but made an unusual pivot to the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship, winning the 2020 title in his sole attempt. In 2024, he bookended his career with his second BTCC season for Toyota. At Snetterton, he drove from 14th to 1st in nine laps and set the record for the longest timespan between wins. In 2025, he was named Touring Car Ambassador for the historic racing organization Motor Racing Legends in 2025, effectively indicating his career is over.

Huff was modest about his accomplishments, habitually referring to himself as a journeyman. His 36 WTCC/WTCR/TCR World Tour wins, 4 BTCC wins, 2 STCC wins, 2 TCR International Series, and 1 TCR China win demonstrate his versatility and tell a different story. While he never led my model, his season-to-season consistency was remarkable. Although Muller had an advantage over Huff with two titles to Huff’s one and 20 wins to 16 when they were teammates, their 33-31 head-to-head suggests it was only slight, which is very impressive since Muller’s four WTCC titles are a record. Huff might not be one of the all-time greats of touring car racing, but he was certainly one of the best of his era.

Touring car model: #192 of 1676 (.205)

Teammate head-to-heads: 428-259 (2-0 vs. Toshi Arai, 2-1 vs. Rodolfo Avila, 3-4 vs. Mikel Azcona, 18-2 vs. Marc Basseng, 29-12 vs. Mehdi Bennani, 8-0 vs. Bence Boldizs, 2-0 vs. Caca Bueno, 2-0 vs. Jack Butel, 2-0 vs. Martin Cao, 2-3 vs. Nicky Catsburg, 6-20 vs. Josh Cook, 4-2 vs. Tom Coronel, 2-0 vs. Michael Crees, 5-0 vs. Viktor Davidovski, 1-0 vs. Daryl DeLeon, 2-0 vs. Denis Dupont, 8-2 vs. John Filippi, 6-1 vs. Jordi Gene, 1-0 vs. Kevin Gleason, 11-2 vs. Mikhail Kozlovskiy, 13-11 vs. Johan Kristoffersson, 3-1 vs. Nicolas Lapierre, 38-31 vs. Nicola Larini, 19-3 vs. Benjamin Leuchter, 0-2 vs. Dan Lloyd, 66-58 vs. Alain Menu, 8-11 vs. Norbert Michelisz, 2-0 vs. Ryo Michigami, 11-10 vs. Aiden Moffat, 8-9 vs. Tiago Monteiro, 1-0 vs. Gianni Morbidelli, 2-0 vs. Adam Morgan, 31-33 vs. Yvan Muller, 17-0 vs. Rene Munnich, 8-0 vs. Daniel Nagy, 4-0 vs. Manabu Orido, 1-0 vs. Hoover Orsi, 0-2 vs. Dexter Patterson, 5-1 vs. Kobe Pauwels, 9-11 vs. Jason Plato, 2-2 vs. Maxime Potty, 1-0 vs. Senna Proctor, 2-0 vs. Vincent Radermecker, 1-1 vs. Rickard Rydell, 14-1 vs. James Thompson, 4-1 vs. Jaap van Lagen, 1-6 vs. Jean-Karl Vernay, 16-6 vs. Frederic Vervisch, 16-9 vs. Andrew Watson, 1-0 vs Sunny Wong, 3-0 vs. Frank Wrathall, 2-0 vs. Andy Yan, 3-1 vs. Zhendong Zhang)

Year-by-year: 2003: C-, 2004: C, 2005: C-, 2006: C, 2007: C, 2008: E, 2009: E-, 2010: E-, 2011: E, 2012: E, 2013: E-, 2014: C+, 2015: C+, 2016: C, 2017: C, 2018: C, 2019: C+, 2020: C+, 2022: C+, 2023: C+, 2024: C

ALAIN MENU……………SWITZERLAND

Born: August 9, 1963

Best year: 1997
Best drive: 2006 Race of UK #2 at Brands Hatch

The only driver to win multiple British Touring Car Championship titles in its peak Super Touring era, Menu became one of his generation’s greatest touring car drivers despite a relatively late start and a middling minor league open wheel career. His 1992 BTCC rookie season was interrupted by a season-ending quadbike crash at Knockhill; despite only starting eight races, he still finished ninth in points. In 1993, Menu joined the new Renault team alongside defending champion Tim Harvey. Unexpectedly, Menu nearly doubled Harvey in points and scored his first win at Donington Park. While the Renaults were slow that year, they improved significantly in subsequent years, especially after the then-dominant F1 team Williams bought the team in 1995. Menu finished second in the championship three straight years from 1994-1996 before winning 12 races en route to the 1997 title.

Much like fellow Williams driver Jacques Villeneuve, Menu fell off in 1998, but unlike Villeneuve, he still won three times before switching to Ford Team Mondeo in 1999. Ford wasn’t very competitive that year, but they dominated in 2000 with Menu winning a second title. Menu competed in the BTCC when the series arguably had its greatest fields as plenty of top foreign drivers competed there in the ‘90s. However, after a rules change removed its Super Touring status in 2001, most of the non-British drivers left afterward, and Menu struggled during a three-year winless DTM stint, but he did earn a class win at the 2003 Petit Le Mans.

Menu’s comeback came in 2005 when the new World Touring Car Championship was announced. He signed with Ray Mallock’s upstart Chevy operation and gave the team its first win at Brands Hatch in treacherously wet conditions after leader Andy Priaulx (in the middle of his three-peat) drove off the track. Although he never won a WTCC title while his teammates Rob Huff and Yvan Muller did, he tied Huff’s 23 wins and his 12 wins from 2008-2010 weren’t super far behind Muller’s 20, even though he was older than his teammates. Chevy shut down its touring car operation after the 2012 season. While Huff and Muller bounced back, Menu didn’t because teams weren’t clamoring for a 49-year-old’s services.

Menu’s 36 BTCC and 23 WTCC wins came when both of those series were at their absolute height in competition. I am more impressed by his BTCC career because not only did he win more races and titles there, he also led BTCC drivers in my model three times (1994, 1996, 1997) and only did once in the WTCC (a winless 2005). This makes him the only BTCC driver to lead my model three times other than Ashley Sutton. His overall rating makes him look worse than he was because he had more mediocre seasons than his teammates. I’d probably still take Muller higher, but I think Menu definitely had a higher sustained peak than Huff. Menu was one of three drivers along with Muller and Gabriele Tarquini to successfully bridge both eras.

Touring car model: #249 of 1676 (.174)

Teammate head-to-heads: 282-226 (0-1 vs. Mariano Altuna, 2-0 vs. Toshi Arai, 1-1 vs. Caca Bueno, 1-1 vs. Tom Chilton, 0-1 vs. Christian Engelhart, 0-1 vs. Norberto Fontana, 0-3 vs. Fabrizio Giovanardi, 16-6 vs. Jack Goff, 0-1 vs. Mikhail Grachev, 15-5 vs. Tim Harvey, 8-5 vs. Hubert Haupt, 1-1 vs. Altfrid Heger, 1-1 vs. Eric Helary, 26-7 vs. Will Hoy, 58-66 vs. Rob Huff, 1-0 vs. Andrew Jones, 32-33 vs. Nicola Larini, 2-0 vs. JJ Lehto, 0-1 vs. Craig Lowndes, 2-0 vs. Annette Meeuvissen, 1-0 vs. David Muffato, 23-38 vs. Yvan Muller, 4-2 vs. Yves Olivier, 4-0 vs. Manabu Orido, 1-0 vs. Hoover Orsi, 26-11 vs. Jason Plato, 2-0 vs. Vincent Radermecker, 15-12 vs. Anthony Reid, 4-1 vs. Manuel Reuter, 1-0 vs. Jim Richards, 1-0 vs. Tommy Rustad, 7-8 vs. Rickard Rydell, 11-2 vs. Warren Scott, 0-1 vs. Glenn Seton, 4-1 vs. Tim Sugden, 2-1 vs. Gabriele Tarquini, 10-14 vs. Aron Taylor-Smith, 0-1 vs. Colin Turkington)

Year-by-year: 1993: C+, 1994: E-, 1995: E, 1996: E-, 1997: 5, 1998: C+, 1999: C, 2000: E-, 2002: C, 2003: C, 2005: C, 2006: C, 2007: E-, 2008: C+, 2009: C+, 2010: C, 2011: C+, 2012: E

This has really been a common trend throughout all my competitive pursuits and probably even my coursework. I was always a lazy studier, so I tried to work around having to study by developing killer strategies. I coasted on my rapid arithmetic abilities as a boy to brute-force solutions to more difficult mathematicl assignments rather than finding more efficient solutions and coasted on my typing abilities for many years to simply enter data rather than learning how to program a method to do it more meticulously. In typing itself, I concocted my wild strategy of deviating from the home row and figuring out a way to probabilistically center my fingers around the most frequent letters almost on instinct in a way that was years ahead of my peers. As a Scrabble player, I literally had the lowest average bingo probability of any player even though I was far from the worst player in the data set, meaning I had only studied the most frequent words, but I clearly outperformed my lack of word knowledge in tournaments because my strategy was much better. This also explained why I was so much worse in online Scrabble games: because all the stronger players only wanted to play three-minute games where you automatically forfeited if you went more than one minute over, that nullified my strengths and accentuated my weaknesses. Players who drill all the words into their heads are going to be able to instantly see good plays, while people who have to rely on their strategy to compete with opponents with greater word knowledge don’t have as much time to formulate strategies in three-minute online games as twenty-five minute tournament games. Since almost all the good players wanted to play almost entirely blitz games, I convinced myself I was worse than I actually was since most of my games were like that rather than tournament games where I was better because I could develop more iterative strategies (it didn’t help that I couldn’t really justify afford going to tournaments either).

So, this has been a running theme in my life. Don’t study and then try to work around my incapacity to make myself study with killer strategies. I don’t think I even noticed this until the last year or so (well after I quit tournament Scrabble). It really explains a lot. Why I was so smart but so undistinguished professionally, why I was amazing at arithmetic but kind of incompetent at theoretical math once it finally reached a level of capacity that you can’t brute-force the answers anymore, why I never developed a programmer, why I dominated at typing for a decade and now a bunch of zoomers are blowing my doors off because they have both learned from the typing strategies I developed and often layered their own additional strategies on top of mine, and so on. I’ve been trying to figure out very recently what my stumbling block is that makes me so averse to this kind of effort or discipline (which can especially be seen in my career failures), and I’m starting to get there, but if I talk about that, I’ll save it for another day.

Anyway, despite the fact that my ability to strategize has always exceeded my ability to study in nearly every aspect of my life (although admittedly, I’m a very diligent researcher when it comes to all my book projects as you have seen), I’ve been on a ridiculous hot streak at both this form of trivia as well as bar trivia in recent weeks. Not only have I had this bizarrely unexpected undefeated first week in LearnedLeague, but my Bartenders Always Right team has won four weeks in a row at the Heritage Hill Bar I’ve been going to every Wednesday (I don’t drink and I’m only there for the trivia). We have just about clinched winning the summer tournament, which will qualify us to compete against the winners at all the other Syracuse bars at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown (formerly the Hotel Syracuse) in a couple weeks, but admittedly, the competition level at our bar has seemed to be weaker than any of the other ones as our cumulative score is way behind all the other leading teams and we were in fact the only team to show up for the tournament every week so far. I want to go after we probably win, even though I know it’s throwing money away since I know we’ll get our doors blown off. I have basically overtaken my teammate Bill as the team leader. I write all the answers, hand them in, and make all the wagers. I seem to be one of the only people anywhere in Syracuse doing Jeopardy!-style betting to win by 1 point at a time, while everybody else seems to bet the maximal amount possible every time. That could bode well, but I just don’t think I’ll know enough stuff ultimately to compete with the other teams. I dominate the music questions, but I’m bad at a lot of the other categories, especially food, animals, current events, and the picture rounds.

The question I suppose is how seriously I want to go with this. I’m having fun, but I am definitely not yet doing well enough to get on Jeopardy! and do I want to throw myself more seriously into something like this similarly to Greg Shahade who went from being in a lower rundle than I am at almost exactly the age I am now to taking down Jamie Ding in less than five years? Makes me wonder if I should try repeating his feat, but I’d probably never actually make myself do it (especially when I should be doing this instead as well as a lot of more important things than this), and the opportunity cost for that to probably not even get on a game show in the first place because it’s so competitive would likely not make it worth it. But it’s been enjoyable.

Okay, Day 1. I really expected to lose this game after I only got one question right, which is not the only time this happened last week. However, I had a knack of answering questions correctly that my opponents didn’t expect me to get. You do get to see your opponent’s record on each type of question next to the form where you fill out your answers, but I’m starting to wonder if most players even use this information at all (maybe they don’t and that’s why I dominate on defense). I’ve been surprised that I’m great at American history and kind of bad at world history, which is probably why my opponent thought I’d get that wrong. My first thought was Robin Hood, but then I thought, “no, that’s English” and eventually worked myself there because my knowledge of mid-’90s movies is pretty good as I was reading the ads for almost all the movies that were coming out in ‘95 and ‘96 like no other year before or since (those were probably the years I was most diligently reading newspapers in general) and I remembered the Rob Roy movie from back then even though I never watched it.

I put Bermuda for question #2 which at least is sonically close to correct, if not actually. I don’t think I realized Bermuda wasn’t actually in the Caribbean, but aside from that, it wasn’t a bad guess. I figured out that the last two words of #3 had to be “of labor” but could not figure out what the first word should be. I put “time of labor”, which again wasn’t very far off. I know nothing whatsoever about mascots. I watched a lot of sports as a kid but I don’t know if I could even name any except for Otto the Orange, just because I was a Syracuse Orange fan in my youth (yes, cringe). That’s something I’m not sure would be even worth studying. I made up “Peter Pigeon”, and at least I got the initials right. Oh, wait. Did I say my knowledge of mid-’90s movies was great? Yeah, I couldn’t figure out whether #5 was looking for Braveheart or Showgirls. Those were the only movies that came to mind. The kilt obviously made me think of Braveheart, but I rejected that because I didn’t think there would be two clues fundamentally about Scottish history in one game. The emphases on dresses really made Showgirls seem like the correct answer to me, but I probably should’ve figured they wouldn’t have had a question about a NSFW NC-17 movie probably. Clueless never came to mind even though I have watched that a long time ago (even watched the short-lived Clueless TV show on TGIF) and I never watched those other movies. But obviously, I was not the kind of person to even notice fashions. And then for question #6, I put bassoon (which I forgot isn’t a brass instrument, and I also incorrectly remembered that it was played by the left hand). Won this entirely on strategy and honestly didn’t deserve to, but I’ll take it.

The big lesson from this weekend’s races is not to write a driver off too soon, I suppose. Both the Richmond and Markham races were honestly better than I expected (I kind of didn’t expect the Markham race to happen at all given what a debacle the first couple of days were, and again, I felt IndyCar deserved it for their hubris considering what’s coming up next week). However, I was convinced Joey Logano’s dominance at North Wilkesboro was going to be a one-off because he tested there, and I didn’t realize that it would apply to other tracks. I really never expected Logano to ever dominate a race to something comparable to that extent again, but the dude’s still only 36 so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he wasn’t done yet even though a mere month ago, he looked borderline washed up. I know David Smith always used to say drivers peak at 39 and I definitely think he’s wrong about that as I think the peak age for a driver is closer to 34, but admittedly, most drivers who were as good at Logano won’t wash up that young either and I shouldn’t have been that surprised. I still don’t believe his dominance only in even years means anything though. Just a bizarre coincidence.

Marcus Ericsson, on the other hand, has surprised me substantially more mainly because I always struggled to take him seriously to begin with. He didn’t even impress me that much at Chip Ganassi Racing when he had his diabolical triumvirate of sixth-place poins finishes as it seemed like he was incapable of winning or even leading without inheriting the lead due to some wacky hijinks (even in the 2022 Indy 500, he won that because Ganassi had the dominant cars and Álex Palou got penalized for pitting when the pits were closed then Scott Dixon sped). So, I have to say, where the hell did this come from? Andretti has always been a competitive team, but it’s hard to say they’ve ever been as good as Ganassi at any point after 2007. Ericsson proved that in his earlier years there as he honestly did even worse in 2024 and 2025 than I thought he would (yes, I expected Kyle Kirkwood and Colton Herta to consistently outperform him, but I also expected him to be… closer). However, this year he’s consistently had speed and delivered better performances than he ever did at Ganassi all season long. His first pole at Arlington, leading the most laps at Gateway and driving through the field despite qualifying mid-pack, and now dominating out of nowhere at Markham to such an extent where his fastest lap was 1.3 seconds faster than anyone else. He’s been closer to Kirkwood than Will Power has been to him all season. All I have to say is what? I get that he was really trying harder than he has in years because it looked like he was about to lose his ride to Dennis Hauger, but it’s weird to see a guy who looked like a barely above average driver at Ganassi (like what Santino Ferrucci would be like in a fast car or something) suddenly deliver the best drives of his life in a car that is ostensibly slower. This is the mystery of the season. It was funny to see him have to pass Romain Grosjean, the driver he replaced at Andretti, for the win especially because of the viral oft-memed moment where Grosjean’s engineer erroneously claimed “Ericsson hit us”. At the time, I felt Andretti replacing Grosjean with Ericsson was a mistake, but I guess I was wrong. Admittedly, he’s three months younger than Logano, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he still has vitality left. I’ve got to learn to stop writing drivers off too soon…

Anyway, several days too late, here are two drivers who arguably both had their big breakouts in 1986 when one of them literally replaced the other in the #27 car owned by Raymond Beadle (a three-time NHRA Funny Car champion who may or may not make my list) as the other famously moved to Hendrick Motorsports.

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So, the IMSHoF is the best we’ve got in terms of inducting people from all disciplines of motorsports because Indianapolis is one of the few tracks where F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR have all competed, and at least unlike the IMHoF, it has actually inducted Michael Schumacher. The IMSHoF has decided that non-IndyCar drivers count, so in addition to Schumacher, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt, and Tony Stewart have also been inducted, primarily for their Brickyard 400 success (Stewart wouldn’t deserve it if just counting his IRL career at Indianapolis IMO). In my opinion, this makes NASCAR drivers the biggest snubs because there are four eligible drivers with multiple Brickyard wins who have not yet been inducted, while there is only one eligible Indy 500 winner, and quite frankly, Takuma Sato does not measure up to any of those four Cup Series drivers.

Furthermore, even though the Brickyard 400 became a joke amongst NASCAR fans and I get it, there was a period of time during the early IRL years when it was actually bigger than the Indy 500. I was trying to look up which years the Brickyard 400 had higher attendance, but I was really struggling with that, particularly because NASCAR hasn’t been reporting attendance for over a decade now (I didn’t even know that) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway never officially reported attendance either (only when there were sellouts), and obviously not all sellouts have the same attendance either. So after maybe an hour or two of trying to figure that out, I gave up.

The IMSHoF inducts two people a year, a driver and a non-driving contributor. Obviously, coming up with a driver list wasn’t hard, but the other list very much was. The problem is that in terms of IndyCar racing, very few people talk about anybody besides the drivers and the car owners these days. Unlike NASCAR where the crew chiefs are celebrities in the context of the sport, IndyCar’s equivalents really aren’t and I think I understand why. IndyCar does not have a single crew chief role and the three things NASCAR crew chiefs do are split into three different roles: chief mechanic, strategist, and engineer. As a result, while the NASCAR crew chiefs are talked about constantly, you can watch every IndyCar broadcast and be completely unable to name any of their equivalents. I know there were certain IndyCar chief mechanics who were famous back in the day like George Bignotti and A.J. Watson, but none of their equivalents get any screen time at all and I know that’s where a lot of the snubs here will be, so I’m flying blind on this one.

I couldn’t even tell you whether the chief mechanic, the strategist, or the engineer role is more important and I’ve watched almost all the IndyCar races since the start of the split. It seems like in IndyCar racing, the strategist role is where the household names are, and it’s not like I haven’t heard of any of them. I know Mike Hull has been Scott Dixon’s strategist for freaking ever, and Barry Wanser is with Álex Palou (and he was also with Dario Franchitti, which I think explains why the #10 car always seemed to have better strategy than the #9, not that the #9 car didn’t also seem to have better strategy than the rest of the field, mind you). Penske and Ganassi themselves were strategists for some of their cars for a while. Tim Cindric has oscillated between Hélio Castroneves, Will Power, and Josef Newgarden, and after he was fired and re-hired he’s now with Scott McLaughlin, and for being Penske’s ex-President and reviving the team’s fortunes in 2000s and all, I honestly never thought he was all that good a strategist to begin with (and maybe that’s part of why McLaughlin now suddenly looks like Ryan Briscoe 2.0). Kyle Moyer won the Indy 500 and CART title as chief mechanic for Jacques Villeneuve in 1995 and also as strategist for Simon Pagenaud in 2019 (he’s now Christian Lundgaard’s strategist). David Faustino was Will Power’s engineer and is now David Malukas’s strategist; I probably won’t forget that for a while just because I think it’s funny he shares a name with Bud Bundy’s actor. The Bretzman brothers, Ben and Eric, were Scott Dixon and Simon Pagenaud’s engineers respectively at their peaks, and they got written about a fair bit a long time ago just because having two great engineering brothers was unusual.

So, it’s not like there aren’t some big names and important figures in these fields. But the issue is you have to be a serious, hardcore IndyCar fan to have even heard of any of these people. You can watch every race and have all this blow by you since these people aren’t talked about constantly like NASCAR crew chiefs (probably because NASCAR crew chiefs handle all three of these roles simultaneously), even though as you can tell, a lot of them are actually very important (yes, Wanser is understandably getting a fair bit of press now, and rightfully so, since I’m tempted to say he’s even better at strategizing than Palou is at driving). It seems to me that the strategist is the most important role since those are the guys you hear about, but I could be totally wrong about that. Nonetheless, those are the people I went with for the second category, by and large, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are a lot of important figures I just haven’t heard of who will be inducted. Anyway, I looked up every winning chief mechanic as well as every winning engineer and strategist back to 2001 (I couldn’t find any of those people before that and I think maybe the chief mechanic did encompass all those roles in earlier years) to try to help me, but I’m sure there’s a lot I missed here.

There is a rule for the IMSHoF that inductees can be nominated twenty years after they started in professional auto racing, regardless of whether they retired or not. The question is what counts as professional auto racing; that can be truly vague. Since it was already announced that Scott Dixon and chassis designer Giampiero Dallara were inducted for 2026, I’m considering anyone who started their major league career by 2006 as a snub, but that is pretty vague. That means Will Power, who started his first Champ Car race in 2005, and 2006 IRL Rookie of the Year Marco Andretti should be just becoming eligible with Simon Pagenaud becoming eligible next year, but obviously, I don’t think any of these guys are top ten yet (Power may be a top ten IndyCar driver of all time, but his Indy 500 record is pretty blah compared to everything he did everywhere else and his win itself seemed to require less driving skill than any other win I can think of in the past 20 years tbh; it was all strategy). I tried to only judge by importance to the Speedway in general, not treating it as a general IndyCar Hall of Fame. Obviously, there are great drivers who should make an IndyCar Hall of Fame who shouldn’t make this one, like Alex Zanardi, Greg Moore, and Cristiano da Matta (because they never started an Indy 500 due to the CART series boycott) or probably Sébastien Bourdais and Paul Tracy (as great as they were, the Indianapolis records aren’t there; even if you do consider Tracy the rightful Indy 500 winner in 2002, his other finishes were abysmal and he had zero laps led there aside from the controversial finish).

If you look at the past inductees at the IMSHoF, they have typically been very open to inducting people who didn’t win the Indy 500 if they had contended to win several times, won poles, set track records, or even simply made a lot of starts/been around a long time/had a lot of friends on the committee. However, now that the Hall of Fame has to consider performance in multiple different series and there are so many different races to win, I don’t think I’m going to be putting non-winners very highly on my snub list even if some of them were better than some winners (I definitely think Marco Andretti had a better Indy 500 record than Ryan Hunter-Reay even if RHR won and Andretti didn’t, but neither are high on my snub list yet). Non-winners like Marco, Roberto Guerrero, Scott Goodyear, Carlos Muñoz, etc… probably all would have gotten in easily under the old standards, but the standards seem to be higher now that IndyCar drivers have to compete against drivers from other series. Would it surprise me if they got in someday? No.

Drivers

1. Jimmie Johnson: Okay, I know he had an extremely hit-or-miss career at the Brickyard 400 to say the least and a lot of people consider his win in 2008 to be the worst race in NASCAR history (it isn’t, for the record, there are plenty of Brickyards that have been worse actually; this was just the most embarrassing one except for maybe 2017). But his four Brickyard 400s still rank second to his “boss” Jeff Gordon’s five and since Johnson also won an IROC race at Indy in 2003, that means he is tied with Gordon for the most stock car wins there behind Kyle Busch’s six. I’m not going to say they were wrong to induct Scott Dixon first even though he only won the Indy 500 once since he is the all-time lap leader in the Indy 500 which Johnson isn’t at the Brickyard, but none of the other Indy 500 drivers come even close to matching honestly even any of the top four Brickyard 400 drivers here. Hell, his attempted three-wide pass with a blown engine of 2017 may be worthy of induction by itself.

2. Dale Jarrett: I admit that Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick both have stronger records than him, but I think Jarrett made a bigger impact at Indianapolis. Not only did he introduce the “kissing the bricks” tradition that crossed over to the Indy 500, his two Brickyard 400 wins in 1996 and 1999 came at the height of the CART/IRL split when the Brickyard was generally considered the more prestigious race and got higher attendance, while Busch and Harvick’s period of dominance occurred years after the race arguably no longer mattered. This makes him a bigger deal in my opinion even if the record is worse. But arguably his Brickyard that impressed me the most was 1998, when Todd Parrott ran him out of fuel and cost him the race while he was leading to receive the $10,000 halfway bonus for leading and Jarrett lost four laps under green before making up each of them on successive restarts and eventually finishing 16th in a race when it was almost impossible to pass.

3. Kyle Busch: With two Cup Series wins and four Nationwide/Xfinity Series wins, Busch is the winningest NASCAR driver at Indianapolis, and he became the second driver after Johnson to win the Brickyard in back-to-back years in 2015 and 2016. His 149 laps led in 2016 were the most ever recorded (and sorry, 2008 haters, that was the worst race in Brickyard history, even over the last two.) Furthermore, in the wake of his death, he will clearly be a sentimental favorite for any Hall of Fame induction he is up for. If they want to skip ahead of the line and induct him over Johnson or Jarrett, I don’t have a problem with that.

4. Kevin Harvick: Harvick became the third and final driver to win back-to-back Brickyard 400s after Johnson and Busch, but he also won in 2003 before it became clear how great he would eventually become. This also made him not only the third three-time winner after Gordon and Johnson, but only the second to win the Brickyard with multiple teams (Richard Childress Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing). His 389 laps led are only second to Gordon’s 528, but while he was always consistent at Indianapolis, with an extremely good average finish of 8.6 (the best of all time not counting Corey Heim and Christopher Bell), he wasn’t really a major factor for race wins until the Stewart-Haas period at a time when the race had mostly stopped mattering. As with Busch, I understand delaying him for dominating an era in a race that was fading to irrelevance.

5. Gil de Ferran: De Ferran’s Indy 500 record is drastically underrated as you can argue he could have easily won three consecutive Indy 500s if he hadn’t had bad luck. He did win the 2003 Indy 500 after passing his two-time defending-race-winning teammate Hélio Castroneves for the win, which was one more pass for the lead than Castroneves himself made in 2001 or 2002. In 2001, Castroneves illegally changed lanes to take the lead in the pits under caution while de Ferran correctly did not change lanes. Afterward, Castroneves was penalized and forced to drop behind Tony Stewart, but he was allowed to remain in front of de Ferran. This ultimately decided the race after Stewart pitted, so one can argue that de Ferran should have led Penske’s comeback 1-2 at Indianapolis and if he had, I think both of them would be viewed very differently now. Then in 2002, de Ferran left the pits second on his final pit stop after Tomas Scheckter crashed. He was about to inherit the position directly behind Castroneves and Felipe Giaffone when he lost a tire that wasn’t properly attached, which ruined his race. Tracy then inherited the third spot and we all know what happened next. If his tire had been properly secured, could he have passed Castroneves sooner? He was a better Indy driver than Tracy… Also, as with Busch there is a sentimental factor after his death. He deserves to be the next IndyCar driver inducted, although I’d still take the NASCAR guys first. I get that the Hall hasn’t wanted to touch the IndyCar split really. All the drivers from that era who were inducted either won 500s before (Arie Luyendyk) or after (Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti, Hélio Castroneves, Dan Wheldon, Tony Kanaan) the split. It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off the split era.

6. Takuma Sato: The overall record may be mediocre, but the Indianapolis record is not. Sato’s Indy 500 wins in 2017 and 2020 make him the only two-time 500 winner not in the Hall, and those weren’t his only good runs at the track by any means. Famously, he was every bit the equal of Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti as they jostled for the lead in the second half of the 2012 race and constantly exchanged the lead with each other before Franchitti made a nasty move to cut Sato off, triggering his last-lap spin. I don’t really blame him for doing that since it was the last lap, and he was doing this for a Rahal team that wasn’t amazing. Probably a lot of people could have won for Andretti in 2017, admittedly (much like how Muñoz had the best drive in the same car the year before), since all their cars were fast that day and he got lucky that several of his teammates blew engines, but he still had to pass Castroneves to do it. Then in 2020, he even more impressively won the Indy 500 everyone forgot since it was delayed to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In that race, he outdueled Dixon for the win in his last title season for a Rahal team that was even often quite slow on ovals. Dixon did kind of get screwed by the race-ending caution as it seemed he had the correct instinct about when to make the final pass if the race finished under green, so one could argue that finish was kind of a buzzkill, but cautions are part of the game and he got lucky with the timing there. The most successful driver of his generation at Indy and the most successful in general: he outdueled them both. And even as late as 2025, he led the most laps in a part-time entry. Sato might not have been a great driver in general, but he was at Indy, and I’m assuming he’s eligible since his F1 career started over 20 years ago even if his IndyCar career didn’t. And if he didn’t have those Indy 500 wins, I probably wouldn’t even be including him in the 1,000 but those wins move him to the right side of the bubble.

7. Sam Hornish, Jr.: Hornish, de Ferran’s replacement at Team Penske after his retirement, is the only one of the six great late-period IRL split drivers (you could almost argue they were the only good drivers for some of that time) who has not been inducted yet, as the other five all were (Castroneves, Dixon, Franchitti, Kanaan, and Wheldon). What makes him different, of course, is that all those guys won Indy 500s after the split ended and proved their mettle against the full post-split fields while Hornish ran off to NASCAR. Additionally, his Indy 500 finishing record is… kind of bad. Until his win in 2006, he had never finished on the lead lap there since he couldn’t stop crashing, but that is not to say he ran badly. Although Hornish had his only finish worse than 6th in his 2001 title season at Indy, where he had an early crash, he actually set the fastest lap in the race after the crash. He also ran 6th in 2003 with five laps to go with a severely underpowered Chevy when all the other Chevies were lapped or out, then led 77 laps from the front row in 2005 before finally winning from the pole in 2006. Although you can sort of argue the win was handed to him on a silver platter because he was able to stay out of the ptis when both Wheldon and Kanaan, who had dominated the race, were forced to pit on a late caution, he still needed to pass both Andrettis to win and successfully passed Marco Andretti for the win in a storybook ending by becoming the first driver to make a last-lap pass for the win. He’s essential eventually, but there are other priorities first. Still, the fact that all five of his main contemporaries are in makes this is a bigger priority.

8. Jacques Villeneuve: He couldn’t have possibly had a better start to his Indy 500 career after finishing 2nd and 1st in his first two starts, even if he only inherited the lead in his win in 1995 because his countryman Scott Goodyear passed the pace car on the final restart. Villeneuve won the race at the moment when international interest in IndyCar racing was at its greatest height in the wake of Nigel Mansell’s crossover but before the series’s split-induced decline. He also had one of the more impressive crossovers between the Indy 500 and the Indianapolis Grand Prix in F1, as his near-podium in 2000 for an underpowered BAR team might have been one of his most impressive drives. He then followed that up with a terrible Brickyard 400 in 2010, making him one of the few drivers to start all three of the major races, although his 2014 return to the Indy 500 twelve years after his last good season makes one wonder why he bothered. His brazen outspokenness, trash-talking drivers well after he was washed up himself, and especially Jeffrey Epstein associations caused fans to turn on him en masse, but unfortunately, I still think he deserves it.

9. Valentino Rossi: Now, I do not consider MotoGP riders for my 1,000 greatest driver list because they are riders, not drivers. But I suspect actual Halls of Fame will disagree on this distinction because a lot of publications consider motorcycle racers to be spiritually similar to auto racers. If they’re going to acknowledge the F1 drivers (and I agree they should), they probably should acknowledge MotoGP also. Marc Márquez is the only three-time winner there, but he hasn’t met his 20 years of eligibility yet. Dani Pedrosa, who won twice to Rossi’s once has, but Rossi won the first MotoGP race in 2008, and I think that should carry more weight than Pedrosa’s two wins later, especially since Rossi is frequently cited the greatest motorcycle racer ever. You can think that doesn’t matter, but obviously it helps with Hall of Fame inductions. Dale Earnhardt obviously isn’t one of the three best drivers in Brickyard 400 history, yet he was one of the only three NASCAR drivers to get in so far. The same should apply here.

10. Wolf Henzler: I could have gone for earlier Indy 500 winners (it’s weird that René Thomas isn’t in) or some of the other F1 winners (obviously Rubens Barrichello should never get in since his win is a joke and Lewis Hamilton might not be eligible yet, but Mika Häkkinen is. However, Henzler is who I landed on even though he will never happen. During the years when F1 hosted in the United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis, the one-make sports car series Porsche Supercup, which typically held races on the Saturdays of European F1 weekends, decided to hold double-headers annually at the Indianapolis round. In this series, Henzler won four times, more than any other driver has won on the road course except his own countryman Michael Schumacher. I actually think this is a stronger case than anyone else does because I have typically found that Porsche Supercup drivers have been the most underrated drivers overall for years, but I imagine a lot of IMS partisans don’t even remember that series raced there or even existed (since it gets basically minimal press coverage), so this will never happen. But I kind of think it should.

Contributors

1. Dean Sicking: It’s weird that NASCAR has retconned things so much that people think they discovered all the safety innovations that they later embraced when it is now forgotten that the research leading to the construction of the SAFER barrier was originally funded by Tony George and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with Arie Luyendyk offering the first test case for the technology when he crashed in the 1998 IROC race into a makeshift proto-SAFER barrier. IMS was the first track to introduce the SAFER barrier and it was very much an IMS project that got adapted to other tracks once it proved so successful (it’s arguably one of the few positive things George did), and the IMSHoF should be embarrassed that they let NASCAR induct this guy first. Taking credit for other people’s innovations as per usual, but it was an innovation that proved useful to any form of oval racing anywhere, so he should obviously be inducted here also.

2. Rick Hendrick: If they’re going to decide NASCAR drivers are eligible, they should obviously also consider NASCAR contributors. Even though the Brickyard 400 has existed for only a relatively small percentage of the time as the Indy 500, Rick Hendrick’s 11 Brickyard wins (5 with Jeff Gordon, 4 with Jimmie Johnson, 1 with Kasey Kahne, and 1 with Kyle Larson) are way more than any car owner other than Roger Penske (the owner who Hendrick literally modeled his NASCAR team after) has had in the Indy 500 itself (even Chip Ganassi only has either 6 or 7, depending on whether you count 1989 after he had bought a share of Pat Patrick’s team before he assumed majority control the next year) and this should be recognized.

3. Tim Cindric: I feel weird about this one for several reasons. It would certainly be a very glad-handed pick, what with Penske owning both IMS and the IndyCar Series and Cindric being team president for so long before he was fired in the team cheatin’ scandal than quietly re-hired as Scott McLaughlin’s strategy amid much controversy. All the bad blood from the attenuator scandal makes it hard for me to consider his career as a whole, but when I do that, his career is obviously deserving. Cindric famously brought Team Penske back from the dead after the worst period in their IndyCar team’s history (1996-1999) and immediately won back-to-back CART titles with Gil de Ferran, then spearheaded Penske’s first 1-2 finish in 2001 with Castroneves and de Ferran (even if I feel the wrong guy won that day), which led to him becoming Team President. I think he gets too much credit because I think Penske switching from its inferior Penske-Mercedes-Goodyear package to the dominant Reynard-Honda-Firestone package and replacing Al Unser, Jr. at the height of his alcoholism and a rotating cast of randos with the two future stars were bigger factors in his success, so sometimes I wonder if it was more that Cindric was there when it happened than actually instrumental in Penske’s revival. Regardless of how you feel about that, he was obviously an important figure in keeping Penske relevant, even if I don’t actually think he was an amazing strategist. He consistently gave his drivers good setups, sure, but in IndyCar, the strategists aren’t the engineers unlike in NASCAR where the crew chiefs kind of handle both. He first came to fame, remember, with Max Papis and Team Rahal in 1999 and although Papis did finish an uncharacteristic fifth in points, people’s sole memory of him that season was Papis running out of fuel on the last lap at Michigan while leading. Cindric’s strategy was always a little shaky with Castroneves, Power, or with Newgarden. I used to get down on Castroneves for not winning a title, but nowadays, I feel he always called the wrong strategies while the Ganassi strategists Mike Hull and Barry Wanser much more often called the right ones, leading to so many races where some Penske driver would dominate and then some Ganassi driver would win in the pits at his expense. I am convinced that Castroneves, Power, and Newgarden would all have more wins and titles now if they’d had either of those guys as strategists (and what he’s doing with McLaughlin now isn’t impressive either), and Dixon, Franchitti, and Palou would all have fewer with Cindric. Yet, he still remained relevant for a quarter of a century, which is hard to do, and presided over five Indy 500 wins as strategist (the first three of Castroneves’s, two of which admittedly were highly controversial, and both of Newgarden’s, and even those wins were controversial). So, I’m in a weird place with him. Obviously he deserves induction with as much of a conflict of interest as it is, but it feels to me like he has a worse record than everybody else thinks.

4. Mike Hull: While I think Barry Wanser’s strategies have been better than Hull’s as I think typically Franchitti and Palou’s strategies with the #10 car have been typically better than Dixon’s with the #9 and Wanser now has three Indy 500 wins (two with Franchitti and one with Palou) to Hull’s one, I am not so sure whether the Hall would actually consider Wanser to be eligible at this point since I’m not sure when they would argue his professional career started, so I’m going to argue with Hull instead. Hull was obviously a better strategist than Cindric and that goes without saying, as Dixon kept winning races and even championships on strategies at Penske’s expense, but then Franchitti won titles multiple times on strategy (2007, 2009) at Dixon’s expense. Hull is probably the second-best strategist of the 21st century after Wanser, but Wanser still reads as too new and Hull doesn’t, which is why I don’t have Wanser on this list yet. I think he might have been Juan Pablo Montoya’s strategist in his 2000 win too, but I can’t yet confirm that. Hull played effectively the same role as Cindric at Ganassi as GM and Team Manager, and I only ended up placing Cindric higher because Cindric was better at Indy, but Hull was certainly better on the rest of the schedule and no slouch at Indy since he guided Dixon to the most laps led there of all time.

5. John Menard: Okay, he was very successful as an IRL car owner but his Indy 500 finishing record was really shaky when considering Tony Stewart’s frequent mechanical breakdowns and Greg Ray’s crashes. His teams ended up rarely getting finishes despite dominant equipment year after year and maybe it feels weird I’m listing him and not the vastly more successful Newman-Haas team, whose cars even led more laps at Indy in a more competitive era. I kind of think there was more value added here though. He had a third-place finish at Indy with Al Unser in 1992 the week before his 53rd birthday, which is kind of unheard of. He won back-to-back poles at the Indy 500 with Scott Brayton, who was not good. After Brayton’s death in post-qualifying practice in 1996, Stewart inherited the pole as a rookie. Then, he was a qualifying juggernaut with Greg Ray, even turning that fundamentally mediocre driver into an IRL champion immediately after Stewart’s switch to NASCAR. Meanwhile, Newman-Haas kept dominating and not winning with drivers like Michael Andretti, Mario Andretti, and Nigel Mansell. Those guys presumably would have had just as much success with a variety of other teams, while I suspect most of those Menard drivers would have done worse with anyone else. Plus, of course from an Indy perspective, he was instrumental as one of the few people alongside A.J. Foyt who gave the IRL initial cred. I may not like the early IRL personally, but it’s hard to deny his influence in that role. And even though he never won the Indy 500 as a car owner, he did eventually win both Indy and the Brickyard as a chief sponsor, making him I believe the only sponsor to do that, what with Simon Pagenaud at Indy in 2019 and his hapless nepo baby at the Brickyard in 2011.

6. Jim McKay: The IMSHoF has decided announcers count, as they have already inducted Paul Page and Bob Jenkins. Now, what both of those guys have in common is that they were lead announcers for both the Indy 500’s radio and television coverage while McKay was only the play-by-play guy for television coverage, but he was the Indy 500’s first play-by-play TV guy on television and his 14 years in that role (1971-1974, 1976-1985) match Page’s for the longest in history; if you count his two years as host in 1986 and 1987 after that, he had a longer tenure than anyone on television. He might not be an obvious choice for most people, but he is a deserving one.

7. Henry Bock: Bock was the director of medical services at IMS from 1982-2006 and the IRL from 1996-2006. He often gets co-credit for the SAFER barrier in a lot of corners and he did help modernize the Speedway’s safety teams. My slight qualm here is that I honestly think CART’s safety team was better, more professional, and more modern than his was, but I am trying to go just based on impact on the Indy 500 itself.

8. Rick Galles: What sets him apart from a lot of his contemporary CART owners who either won the race like Jim Trueman or were vastly more successful and didn’t like Newman-Haas is that his win with Al Unser, Jr. in 1992 marked the only time that a team other than Penske won an Indy 500 in a chassis of their own construction. The Galmer chassis named for its two creators, Galles and ex-March engineer Alan Mertens, delivered a monumental upset that year due to its remarkable reliability. Although Michael Andretti obviously dominated the shit out of that race, Unser won in what was then the closest finish in history after the faster Fords dropped out because the car managed to survive probably due to its slower horsepower and this is definitely more of a credit to the team than the driver (indeed, Unser actually failed to have any DNFs this year, which was extremely rare at that time). This double feat of winning as car owner and constructor gives him the edge over a lot of owners in my opinion, and of course Unser nearly won again with him in 1989, etc…

9. Chad Knaus: I could have gone with a lot of Indy 500 chief engineers like Rick Rinaman, Kyle Moyer, Matt Jonsson, Richard Buck, Clive Howell, Denis Daviss, etc… but I’m going with this. NASCAR crew chiefs are more important than IndyCar chief mechanics, strategists, and engineers at this point, particularly because NASCAR crew chiefs handle all three of those roles and the IndyCar guys don’t. Yes, I think Cindric and Hull have greater impact at Indianapolis because they also managed the Penske and Ganassi teams for darn near a quarter century in addition to being strategists and Knaus didn’t quite do that. But his four wins are certainly still the most of any NASCAR crew chief, putting him at least in something pretty close to the same league as the great Indy 500 chief strategists in days of yore like George Bignotti and A.J. Watson in my opinion. I ended up going with him over a lot of successful IndyCar guys just because the NASCAR crew chief role is more versatile.

10. Bryan Herta: I didn’t expect to list him, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind with regard to Herta is either his mediocre driving career (particularly Alex Zanardi passing him in the hairpin turn on the last lap at Laguna Seca in 1996) or his son’s ostensibly mediocre driving career (c’mon guys, just because Colton sucks in Formula 2 doesn’t mean his IndyCar career, where he frequently trounced F1 alumni like Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean, and Alexander Rossi and contended for the title a mere two years ago, sucked). Bryan’s Indy 500 record is actually overall better than Colton’s with a third in 2005 and a fourth in 2004, but the reason he deserves induction is what he did after that. In 2011, his eponymous team Bryan Herta Autosport delivered the upset of the decade by winning the Indy 500 with a part-time Dan Wheldon, only one of three part-time Indy 500 winners in my lifetime. Five years later, he served as the strategist for Rossi’s Indy 500 win in 2016 as a rookie, and obviously if you will recall, that was a fuel mileage win so you could argue that Rossi won that entirely on strategy. He was the first true rookie to win at Indy since George Souders in 1927 (I don’t think Graham Hill exactly counts since he was already an F1 champion, and I don’t think Juan Pablo Montoya and Hélio Castroneves count because Montoya was already a CART champion and Castroneves was a veteran who already had four wins before his Indy 500 win). For lightning in a bottle to strike twice for Herta in delivering what one could argue were the two most unexpected Indy 500s of the 21st century, he belongs in. And since he’s Kyle Kirkwood’s strategist right now, there’s a solid chance he isn’t done. I could have done Michael Shank here instead for a very similar reason, but he reads as too new.

The deep cleaners arrived to clean the house last Wednesday, but due to years of collected dust and debris from my mom’s hoarding, the motor on their vacuum actually burnt up while servicing the living room, so they said they’d come back on Saturday after they got a replacement part, but that’s been put off until this coming Friday. I felt bad about that and offered to pay to replace their vacuum even though I had already paid them. They asked me to pay for half the cost of the replacement part and I agreed to do so. Construction on the ramp started today and it’ll probably be finished either tomorrow or next week. I’ve started trying to arrange things between the fourth floor social worker and the woman at PACE CNY to arrange in-home care to allow for Mom’s discharge, but the problem here is that each social worker seems to only stay there for a few months before leaving (okay, one of them was promoted). The social worker I was talking with a couple weeks ago has already left and is in the process of being replaced, but the woman who is about to become the fourth floor social worker is still on the seventh floor, so there’s still a lot of bureaucracy to navigate.

I have not much to say about either this weekend’s NASCAR or IndyCar races frankly. I watched the Cup Series at Iowa and IndyCar at Portland simultaneously in different windows, just switching which race I had on mute. Neither of them was very good and it was annoying they were both won entirely on strategy, but I saw an awful lot of people trashing the Iowa race and the Portland race gave me real perspective. Portland was so godawful that it made Iowa seem somewhat good in comparison.

Finally, LearnedLeague Match 110 just started on Monday, and I’m going to start going through each day’s past results after this. It gives me some easy content for these intros, allowing me more time to focus on the driver entries and other stuff. Trying to do a major driver like Button at the same time as an ambitious IMSHoF snub ranking was too much, but I should be able to keep up better if I’m just doing LearnedLeague content again instead of snub lists that took me far longer than I expected. Even better, you don’t have to hear my annoying, repetitive culture takes. Admittedly, since I intend to do both Tim Richmond and Rusty Wallace tomorrow, that might take a while, too.

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

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

Modern Era Ballot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pioneer Ballot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEO KINNUNEN……………….FINLAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER COLLINS………………………..UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCAS LUHR………………….GERMANY

Born: July 22, 1979

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

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

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

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

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

Touring car model: N/A

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

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

PANCHO CARTER……………………USA

Born: June 11, 1950

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUIGI CHINETTI……………………...USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DICK THOMPSON……………………USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SpeedWorld (1997-1998)

SpeedWorld (1998-1999)

RaceComm (1999)

SpeedFX (2000-2001)

RacingOne (2002-2004)

RacingStalkers (2005)

RacingStalkers (2006)

Frontstretch (2007-2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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