1,000 Greatest Drivers: Björn Waldegård
I don't know if I'm ready for this.
After a Championship Week that was right up my wheelhouse because I’ve been following NASCAR longer than any other motorsports discipline, I have three World Rally Champions scheduled for the month of November and this is definitely the most embarrassing gap in my knowledge. Every time I try to write about rally racing, I come off dumb because I’ve never really followed it or watched (admittedly, it has never been very accessible in the American motorsports press and I don’t remember WRC even being mentioned once on RPM2Night, and I watched that show religiously for a while). Since drivers do not compete all at once on the same circuit as in open wheel, stock car, touring car, or sports car series, I’m not sure what advanced statistics to use to evaluate drivesr in this realm, since obviously most of the statistics I do calculate don’t apply here. I am slowly working on a rally drivers model structured after all my other models, but I’ve only completed the champions’ teammate head-to-heads, a few handful of other famous drivers, and the drivers before Harry Bates in the alphabet, so I’ve hardly even begun and there are a lot more drivers to go through here than any of my other models. Rally racing is further complicated by the fact that most of the big WRC stars didn’t run all the races for most of the first couple decades, so certain rallies were more competitive than others. I keep thinking I should push all the rally drivers off until I’m more informed, but admittedly Waldegård is almost certainly the best driver born on November 12 (unless you think the emergent sprint car legend Justin Grant is better, which is a stretch). I will probably list Grant also but he isn’t a lock, so I realize Waldegård is the driver I should do. I’m still worried I’m not ready yet though. And yes, the rally drivers are why I try to list “best drive” instead of “best race”. Even though I’m a novice about this discipline, I know enough that it definitely deserves heavy representation on the list.
