1,000 Greatest Drivers: Darren Turner
Now that we've had a Team HTML, what other languages need their own teams? Team Python would actually sound cool...
Forgive the original title. I was going to do Turner and Jack Ingram together, but eventually just did Turner.
Well, I just wrote this bio for the Auto Racing Research Associates member page (I didn’t realize the picture I took at that photo shoot at Bach Photo in North Syracuse was going to come out like that):
I know this was supposed to be the April 13 post and I didn’t finish until April 15. On the night of the 13th, I was yakking it up at the Discord for the Who Cares About the Rock Hall? podcast because that was the night the Rock and Rol Hall of Fame inductees were released on American Idol (I don’t even know why I follow that). However, I go in and out of that Discord and pretty much all the Discords I’ve ever been a member of except usually whichever auto racing Discord I’m currently posting on. To be honest, I’m probably going to leave that one as well soon and use it almost exclusively as a chat platform. I’m getting less and less out of online chat and craving more and more real world connection. I was planning on going to tomorrow’s Neurodivergent Support Group at Unique Peerspectives until I realized it was next week because I thought tomorrow was the second week of the month until I realized it was the 15th.
I wish I could blame my slowness in updating on either that chat or filing my taxes (which I still haven’t done; I mean I almost have them done but I’m waiting until the absolute last possible day because I owe over $1,000 since all my jobs in 2025 were online gig jobs that did not have taxes automatically withheld. And I wasn’t really assigned work at my job today either. No, I was just working on my master driver list most of today and going through every NASCAR Late Model Sportsman and Modified Championship through 1955 to assign season grades to all the drivers based on their win counts, and considering both those series had hundreds of races at the time, it takes a while (even though I’m still only rating drivers who won 5+ races in a season, there are still a lot of them). I think I’ll skip the Ingram post for a bit until I’ve gotten all that done.
My mom finally has a new roommate at the nursing home, but unlike the previous one, she apparently finds her new roommate likable, so that’s good. She apparently vomited a lot today when I wasn’t there and then when I was on the phone with her, the housekeeper yelled at her for vomiting. That was not nice. I’m still waiting on a contractor for the ramp construction/roof repair. I finally got the lien release form to allow me the authority to give my mom’s car away to Habitat for Humanity, but nobody will take it unless I’m able to get it out of the garage and it hasn’t started for six years, so that’s the next big thing I have to think about. After I get that removed, I would like to take all the hard drives out of most of my old computers that are still in the garage (I don’t think we’ve gotten rid of any of them since the early 2000s; again, hoarding issues). It might be nice to see if any of the data is salvageable to see if there’s some content I could repurpose for something else. It might be neat if I can find the computer I had from 2000 where I ran a quirky fantasy game on a NASCAR message board and asked wacky questions every week. But if the data’s lost or I destroy the hard drive after I take it out, that’s fine. I need less stuff anyway.
DARREN TURNER……………………..UK
Born: April 13, 1974
Best year: 2002
Best drive: 2002 ASCAR Race #6
Aston Martin’s longest-tenured sports car driver, Turner won the prestigious Autosport BRDC award as the most promising British open wheel prospect in 1996 over two-time Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon amongst others. That won him a McLaren test driver role, but when his open wheel career stagnated, he pivoted to touring cars, where he was somewhat successful, and eventually to sports cars, where he was significantly more successful.
Turner made his major league debut in Germany’s newly-revived DTM touring car series in 2000, only achieving middling results for World Champion Keke Rosberg’s Mercedes team. However, he first became a star in 2002 in the odd and shortly-lived European NASCAR clone ASCAR, which at the time only raced at Europe’s recently-opened speedways, Rockingham Motor Speedway in England and the Lausitzring in Germany. While he had no oval experience, most of the other drivers didn’t either. Turner drove a Pontiac for the hilariously named Team HTML but proved he was up to code by winning a season-high six races including his debut against a field that also included defending British Touring Car Champion Jason Plato and defending British GT champion Kelvin Burt. Despite only finishing sixth in points due to missing three races, he averaged more points per race than the champion Nicolas Minassian.
Turner next moved to sports cars, earning two class wins in 2003 before Aston Martin hired him for their new factory program in 2005. For Aston Martin, Turner won back-to-back 24 Hours of Le Mans class wins in 2007 and 2008, three American Le Mans Series wins, one European Le Mans Series win, and four FIA GT wins before the formation of the World Endurance Championship in 2012. In that series, he won eight races in the LMGTE Pro class including another Le Mans win in 2017. He occasionally also dabbled in touring cars, winning 5 BTCC races for SEAT in 2007 and 2008, but he was far behind his teammate Plato, who won 14 races. Although he never won the WEC championship, he did win an ELMS title in 2016 before dropping down to part-time status to help develop the Aston Martin Valkyrie prototype.
While Turner wasn’t one of his era’s best sports car drivers, he was an undeniably consistent backbone for Aston Martin, making 15 consecutive Le Mans starts for the team from 2005-2019. What he might have lacked in dominance, he made up for in versatility because he won 44 races in 11 different series and I particularly admire that he’s one of the few sports car greats who also has many wins on ovals. My main reservations about his career are that his DTM and BTCC stints were both rather mediocre, and I value single-driver series performances highly when distinguishing sports car teammates. Nonetheless, he won enough races in enough different series and types of cars to distinguish himself, and being a factory driver for a manufacturer team for over a decade is almost enough to justify a place on the list by itself.
Touring car model: #752 of 1676 (-.033)
Teammate head-to-heads: 27-59 (1-3 vs. Ryan Briscoe, 1-2 vs. Tom Coronel, 4-12 vs. Pedro Lamy, 11-36 vs. Jason Plato, 9-2 vs. David Saelens, 1-3 vs. Garth Tander, 0-1 vs. James Thompson)
Year-by-year: 2001: C-, 2002: E-, 2003: C-, 2005: C, 2006: C, 2007: C+, 2008: C+, 2010: C+, 2011: C+, 2012: C, 2013: C+, 2014: C+, 2016: C, 2017: C-