1,000 Greatest Drivers: David Leslie

I've now finished a quarter of the entries.

This is my 250th daily driver post. I’m sure I’m going to have to edit several of them, particularly some of the early ones when I either covered current drivers whose entries need an update or alternatively when I frequently went too stat-heavy early on, as opposed to my more recent columns, which I think have had better narrative arcs and a better balance between stats and anecdotes. I did indeed just buy the 2000-2009 edition of the official 24 Hours of Le Mans retrospective historical book series and started reading it today. (No, I didn’t spend $95 on it.) After I finish reading each book, I think I’m going to collect the whole set back to the first 24 Hours of Lemans in 1923, although apparently the 2010s book has not been released yet, if there’s even going to be one. I think this is a good way for me to figure out the best races for a lot of sports car drivers and also determine for instance how much each driver contributed on a factory sports car juggernaut operation.

Finally, I started to get out of my rut. After I was 1-7-2 in my first ten matches, I was sure I was going to be demoted (I was 26th of 28 players in my rundle both before and after this match). I don’t blame anyone for expecting me to miss poison ivy, because that feels like the kind of question I should have missed. Even as someone who’s anti-comic book slop on principle (I don’t think I’ve even watched a comic book movie), I’m quite surprised that my opponent missed Batman Begins, although actually only 64% in the league got it, and the last question was apparently actually the easiest. (Huh?) I put Killarney for the last question, which was the most frequent wrong answer and definitely a good guess. I had never heard of Paccar and I put Grainger just because I thought they might be from Washington ‘cause they sponsored Greg Biffle.

Baffled by how Question 4 had tied for the highest correct response rate for the league at 96% with three other questions (all of which I got… seriously, guys, this is as easy as “Never Gonna Give You Up”?) The vast majority of LearnedLeague players are Americans and I didn’t think anybody talked about cricket whatsoever in this country. I was like Premier League must be soccer becaue I’d never head of, but I admittedly correctly predicted that my opponent would find it the easiest question. No classic rock radio zombie is going to miss #5, but I was way off on everything else. Just blanked on De Beers. I actually wrote in “The company whose slogan is ‘A Diamond Is Forever’.” just to get a laugh. Remembered the slogan, but blanked on the name. I put bas relief for #1, sur for #2, Gobi for #3 (what was I thinking? China isn’t on a peninsula. Hopefully, I forgot where the Gobi was that day…)

Feel bad for this guy. He predicted that I would miss the last question because I had missed every single previous art question in my LearnedLeague appearances, which was a safe assumption even though this was probably the easiest of all those art questions. I had never even heard of the Blue Yeti until I just bought one a couple months ago to potentially record YouTube videos (even though I stopped recording YouTube videos for a while to focus on my work); would have likely gotten that question wrong before that for sure. I overthought the first question and put machine learning; still not a bad guess. I’m surprised he got it wrong too. I put annihilate for #2, flora for #3, and Sri Lanka for #4. Sri Lanka was a really good guess I think since I had just learned that its title was Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte and they seem to repeat a lot of the same really long names over and over. Thailand would’ve also been a good guess.

Okay, Cincinnati was just a guess but I did make the appropriate connection to Cincinnatus. That question and blockbuster took more thought than you might expect, but I still got them. Put DDR for the first question but it’s older and I didn’t realize it was Japanese. So close on the second. I put EdMUND Lear instead of Edward. I guess maybe that should be a lesson to guess the more common name. I had no idea what a zill was, and I put cello for #4.

I suppose #3 is embarrassing for me as a guy who’s trying to do auto racing sabermetrics and I even read a couple Bill James books and a book that sabermetrician and former Washington Nationals consultant Morris Greenberg lent me at the 2014 National Scrabble Championship, but I’m into stats more than I am into baseball, so I don’t think I’d ever seen that spelled out. Remembering that DIPS stood for Defensive Independent Pitching statistics from Moneyball, I guessed Walk Hit Independent Pitching, which isn’t a horrible miss, but I suppose bad for my pedigree. I knew Chet Atkins was a country singer even though I never listened to him. I put the Mongolian Empire for #1, pretty sensibly guessed Moldova for #4 (although maybe I should’ve known if they put Moldavia that that would be there as a red herring), and then I just didn’t keep up on recent pop culture. When I used to look at World Almanacs all the time in the ‘90s, I remembered that A Chorus Line had the most Broadway performances, and I knew Cats broke that record, but I guess I missed that Phantom beat Cats’s record, but I still won this thanks to Tivo. I never even had a Tivo…

DAVID LESLIE…………….……………UK

Born: November 9, 1953
Died: March 30, 2008

Best year: 1996
Best drive: 1996 British Touring Car Championship Race #16 at Silverstone

A successful sports car and touring car veteran, Leslie may have won neither a championship nor a marquee race, but he made a big impact nonetheless, giving both Honda and Nissan their first British Touring Car Championship wins. After winning five Scottish karting championships, Leslie had a relatively undistinguished minor league open wheel career, winning only one race in British Formula 3, but he did upset eventual champion Ayrton Senna for a pole in 1983; Senna believed he was cheating.

In 1985, Leslie made his major league debut in the World Sportscar Championship for Écurie Écosse. While that team won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice in the ‘50s, the ‘80s team was a revival with no real connection to the original team. Ray Mallock was the chief driver and engineer for Écosse’s C2 class cars, but Leslie earned his first wins as Mallock’s co-driver, winning once in both 1985 and 1986 before being upgraded to full-time status in 1987, where they won twice and narrowly lost the drivers’ championship. Despite finishing second in class at Le Mans in both ‘87 with Ecosse and ‘88 with Mazda, he was left in the lurch shortly thereafter.

After Mallock’s retirement as a driver, he entered the BTCC in 1992 with Vauxhall and Leslie. Although he won six poles, he only won one points race at Thruxton in 1993. After a partial 1994 season with Mazda, he spearheaded Honda’s entry into the BTCC. In 1996, he won the team’s first three races and finished fourth in points, before reuniting with Mallock again in 1997, this time with Nissan. He won that marque’s first two races in 1998, but Anthony Reid eventually overtook him and won seven races. 1999 was quite similar as Reid was replaced by Laurent Aïello, who won ten races and the title as a rookie; despite being outmatched, Leslie still earned his best career points finish of second with three wins. After Nissan withdrew its factory backing, Leslie never really recovered. Sadly, he and the bigger BTCC star Richard Lloyd were killed when their plane crashed into a house after a double engine failure.

While Leslie never won a title and most of his success was linked with one car owner, he was better than his record implies. Even if he was less talented than some of his contemporaries, his engineering aptitude and ability to adapt to different chassis quickly gave him an edge. He posted a winning record against every teammate except Aïello in his decade-long BTCC career, even posting undefeated teammate records in both 1992 and 1993. He was also notable as a mentor figure, as Scottish legends including David Coulthard, Dario Franchitti, and Allan McNish all drove for his minor league open wheel team before they became famous. His nine BTCC wins may seem a little paltry, but he competed when that series peaked in international interest. This causes him to fly under the radar a little, but if you do your research, he’s definitely worthy.

Touring car model: #197 of 1676 (.200)

Teammate head-to-heads: 101-44 (5-15 vs. Laurent Aiello, 1-0 vs. Nick Baird, 14-4 vs. Phil Bennett, 1-0 vs. John Clark, 2-0 vs. Paula Cook, 1-0 vs. Chris Goodwin, 1-1 vs. Godfrey Hall, 28-6 vs. James Kaye, 1-1 vs. Peter Kox, 1-0 vs. Tom Kristensen, 3-2 vs. Matt Neal, 2-0 vs. Tiff Needell, 9-0 vs. Harry Nuttall, 2-0 vs. Alex Portman, 16-15 vs. Anthony Reid, 2-0 vs. Gabriele Tarquini, 2-0 vs. Gerrit van Kouwen, 8-0 vs. Bobby Verdon-Roe, 2-0 vs. Nick Whale)

Year-by-year: 1985: C-, 1986: C-, 1987: C+, 1992: C+, 1993: C+, 1995: C-, 1996: C+, 1997: C+, 1998: C, 1999: C+, 2002: C, 2003: C-