1,000 Greatest Drivers: Antron Brown

Where my knowledge that I need to include drag racers conflicts with my lack of drag racing knowledge...

I still don’t quite know what I’m doing with drag racers. While I insist on including them, this remains a major blind spot for me. When I grew up watching RPM2Night, the NHRA certainly got a lot of play. Drag racers always made ESPN’s various greatest driver lists, frequently were nominated for ESPYs, and drag racing results were posted right alongside F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR results in newspapers all the time. Drag racres routinely make American auto racing Halls of Fame. I know this is a largely American discipline and the rest of the world doesn’t care (even less than they care about NASCAR, for instance), and many general racing fans consider it to be entirely an engineering exercise that takes no real skill (I think this is wrong, but I’m probably not knowledgeable enough to explain why). But I know American motorsports fans care, even though I’ve never been that into it myself. And also, I admit that it helps make my list at least marginally more diverse and that is something I desire. There aren’t many black drivers who qualify for the list because auto racing is an expensive sport and black drivers often lack the financial resources needed to go racing. At least including Brown brings it to three along with Lewis Hamilton and Willy T. Ribbs. Wendell Scott is important but I just don’t think the numbers are there. Bubba Wallace’s case I actually like better than Scott’s, and he could definitely be worthy of consideration by the time I’m done. Including drag racers also provides me the opportunity to include more women, which is also something I want. Because I honestly think Michèle Mouton might be the only woman worthy of making the list otherwise.

Buy obviously comparing drag racers to circuit racers is apples vs. oranges, and I do get the sense that the NHRA has lost a great deal of prestige since I grew up in the ‘90s. It doesn’t feel like any of the drag racers from this century is an icon the same way that Bob Glidden, John Force, or Kenny Bernstein were, no matter how successful they were. Some of this is the collapse of the monoculture (you could say that about NASCAR drivers too), some of it is probably that the mainstream American public stops talking about many sports once ESPN is no longer covering them (this also happened with the NHL), and some of it is that NASCAR’s dominance crowded out all discussion of other forms of American racing. But still, it seems like most of the drag racing fans I did know on other message boards did not take recent Top Fuel racing seriously both because of the Countdown (their imitation of NASCAR’s Chase) and the fact that Top Fuel races were reduced from 1/4 mile to 1,000 feet after Scott Kalitta’s death in 2008. I do see people hyping Brown some, but I rarely see anyone hyping Steve Torrence even though he won four consecutive Top Fuel titles and had an even more dominant peak than Brown did. It seems drag racing isn’t as important as it used to be, and that’s why I’m ranking the current drivers lower than drivers with comparable or even worse stats in the period when it captured the cultural zeitgeist. But maybe you could say this is unfair because you could argue IndyCar collapsed harder and I don’t do that with IndyCar drivers. On the other hand, I find their drivers easier to evaluate, probably because I actually follow it in a way I never really followed NHRA. I think with drag racers, I tend to go by reputation and media hype more than numbers sometimes, and I need to find a way to evaluate them more rigorously, so I don’t think this is my best work. After realizing Brown was driving for his own team (which was something I didn’t even know), I decided to upgrade his 2022 season to C- and 2024 to E-, so I’ll have to figure out which drivers to drop later.

I don’t have much to say about either the IndyCar or NASCAR Cup Series races today. My knee-jerk reaction is the IndyCar race was bad and the Cup race was good, but neither overwhelmingly so. As far as the IndyCar race, Ryan McCafferty nailed it with this tweet:

Yeah, Palou has an effective style but I agree that he has drained any entertainment value out of IndyCar on the road courses. He pretty much is what everyone accused Jimmie Johnson of being in his NASCAR heyday, although I liked the Christian Lundgaard and Kyle Kirkwood runs. The battle between Tyler Reddick looking to become the first driver to win the first three races of the NASCAR season and Shane van Gisbergen looking to tie Jeff Gordon’s six straight road course wins was more compelling. I kind of thought Reddick would win once he was on the pole when SVG qualified that badly, but by the time Shane actually got up there, I thought he would do it. It was quite an impressive drive for Reddick, and since he is my favorite NASCAR driver right now, I’m happy. Maybe Michael Jordan can become the second black owner to win a major league racing championship, although I’m still not convinced Reddick is the favorite yet.

I just started reading Stefan Fatsis’s latest book Unabridged, where he embedded himself at Merriam-Webster to learn about the process of how dictionaries are made, hw words are selected for them, and the like. Fatsis previously wrote Word Freak, which was an important influence on me, so I know I’ll like this too. Word Freak didn’t get me into Scrabble. My mom did. I’ve probably talked about this before here, but she was one of the top three players in the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail Special Interest Group in the ‘70s along with Ken Clark (supposedly the first person to ever play a 15-letter word in a game) and Tom O’Bannon. She also set the second-highest game score of 718 in Scrabble-by-Mail in the ‘90s after she rejoined. At that point, non-Mensans were allowed to join. I never wanted to join Mensa but I wanted to join the Scrabble group, and my mom encouraged it because she got pissed when I found a better play than she did at that point. I was eight, and I was the youngest player ever in the group. One of my fellow opponents there, Judy Yavner, told me about Word Freak so actually being in the group got me into the book, while for most of my millennial peers, it was the book that got them into Scrabble tournaments. I already knew tournaments existed, but there was just no way I could’ve ever gotten to one as a kid. In college, my first class was a Freshman Writing Seminar called "The Anthropology of Imaginary Subcultures”. We were studying the Society for Creative Anachronism, Star Trek fans, and (if I recall correctly) comic book fans. For 2003, this was ahead of its time. I convinced the professor to let me write my final paper about tournament Scrabble culture and I used Word Freak as my main source. And later, it was one of the three main influences on my previous book Nerds per Minute, so yeah, I knew I needed to read this…

ANTRON BROWN…………………...USA

Born: March 1, 1976

Best year: 2015
Best drive: 2024 In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals at Pomona Dragstrip

The first African-American motorsports champion driver and car owner, Brown began racing motorcycles on his family’s farm in Chesterfield Township, New Jersey, at age six. His father was an amateur drag racer and Brown was heavily involved with his father’s operation from the ground up, doing much of the mechanical work himself. A multi-sport athlete who played soccer, baseball, basketball, and football, he was most successful as a track star. While at Mercer County Community College, he posted a fast enough time to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Team in 1997. Although Long Island University offeered him a full track scholarship, Brown turned it down to go racing.

Brown entered his first serious drag race as a high school senior. His major league career began when his cousin-in-law Troy Vincent, a then NFL cornerback who now serves as the league’s Executive Vice President of Football Operations, decided to start an NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle team. While I don’t consider motorcycle racing performances for my list, this is an important part of his legacy. From 1998 to 2007, Brown won 16 Pro Stock Motorcycle races, finished in the top ten in points every season, and earned two second-place points finishes, but he moved on to even better things when he switched to cars.

Brown switched to the top-tier Top Fuel division in 2008, winning the pole on his car debut and winning in only his (third) start. From then on, he has placed in the top ten in points every season and won at least one race every year but once. In 2009, he won six races for the first of six times, including three of his championship years in 2012, 2016, and 2024. His peak came in his other championshsip season of 2015, when he won seven times. From 2009-2015, he set two speed records and four elapsed time records. In 2022, Brown started his own team, AB Motorsports. His win in the 2024 NHRA Finals allowed him to overcome a 44-point deficit to Justin Ashley to win the championship, making him the first black car owner to win a major league championship. His 65 Top Fuel wins rank second all-time to Tony Schumacher’s 88.

For all Brown’s success, I’m a bit reluctant to rank him as highly as some similarly dominant drag racers of the past. The NHRA seemed to be at its peak in the cultural zeitgeist in the ‘90s and seemingly lost a lot of prestige by the time Brown entered Top Fuel. Between the unpopular Countdown playoff format and the fact that Top Fuel races were reduced from 1/4 mile to 1,000 feet in distance during his rookie season there, it seems drag racing purists don’t take this era as seriously as the ‘80s or the ‘90s so that is why I regard the drivers of the John Force/Kenny Bernstein era more highly, but this is not one of my areas of expertise so perhaps I should be rating drivers like Brown and Steve Torrence higher.

Year-by-year: 2008: C-, 2009: C+, 2011: C+, 2012: E-, 2013: C, 2014: C, 2015: E-, 2016: C+, 2017: C, 2022: C-, 2024: E-