1,000 Greatest Drivers: Bob Wollek

Half of my season rating slots are now filled.

I’m trying to add a little structure to this so I can keep up with the intense schedule I have set for myself. Last night, I already determined the season grades and best seasons for drivers in the next week and I’m going to try to do that each weekend so I can just focus on the writing and selecting best races for each driver on each day. With this batch of drivers, I now have over 50% of my season driver ratings filled. I don’t expect to fill all of them (especially for the pre-World War II period, where I suspect there won’t be 100 worthy drivers most seasons). I used to list each driver I intended to cover for a month. I don’t think I’m going to do that again, but here is my intended schedule for this week and whether I will make each post free or paywalled, which basically comes down to how famous/important I suspect each driver is to my subscriber base:

March 16: Bob Wollek (paywalled)
March 17: Butch Leitzinger (paywalled)
March 18: Timo Glock (free)
March 19: Marcel Tiemann (free)
March 20: Steve Soper (free)
March 21: Fonty Flock (paywalled)
March 22: Terry Borcheller (free)

I watched all three races yesterday (F1 at Shanghai, IndyCar at Arlington, and NASCAR at Las Vegas). As I pretty much expected, Las Vegas race was the best, Shanghai was second, and Arlington was the least good, but I still enjoyed all of them. That moment in Stage 2 in Las Vegas where Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, and Christopher Bell were all battling side-by-side for the lead for three or four laps straight was really fun. I clocked one lap where the trio were separated by 12 thousandths of a second! Has that ever happened on one lap before? Probably only at Talladega.

Nice to see Kimi Antonelli win his first race, especially because it might mean George Russell’s inevitable championship isn’t as much of a foregone conclusion as it seemed like it might be. I wonder if he’ll actually unexpectedly lead the points standings for most of the season like Oscar Piastri did last year when everybody expected Lando Norris to run away with it. The battle between the Ferraris was truly awesome since I’m sure the Ferrari bosses were unhappy that Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton passed each other like ten or twenty times risking the potential for a wreck. The IndyCar race was processional, but admittedly, Kyle Kirkwood making up a 10-second deficit to Álex Palou and then passing him in a turn where people thought passing would be nary impossible was an epic drive. Shades of Alex Zanardi at Laguna Seca, although Kirkwood didn’t have to leave the track service, and obviously Palou is an all-time legend and Bryan Herta is not. I must cry foul about Felix Rosenqvist being dropped from 6th to 20th due to an illegal pass on the final one-lap restart. They should’ve placed him 7th.