1,000 Greatest Drivers: Emanuele Pirro
I suppose my typing fans will be unhappy...
As I mentioned yesterday in the Thierry Tassin column, I ported my Substack to my eponymous domain name seanwrona.com yesterday so if you’ve ever visited my Substack by entering the domain name you can just enter seanwrona.com instead of seanwrona.substack.com to access it. The emails should not be affected. I realize due to my past typing fame, I am probably more famous than my writing is, and I kind of want that to change. I know a lot of typing people visited my main website, but I hadn’t updated it in years since I was a relevant typist, I hadn’t even promoted my Substack here, and my visual style was always horrific as I never really outgrew my childhood Geocities aesthetic (Redditors even made fun of me for it), and I still prefer that era of the Internet to this one, honestly. At least this looks more professional and I want to be taken more seriously, and I’ve pretty much lost my interest in typing. If you still want to look up my old pages on seanwrona.com, you can go on the Internet Archive or something. Maybe I’ll post them again somewhere someday, but I’m not in a rush to do that.
This one took me a while to complete, just because it took me forever to decide what to choose for his best race. I know for most people, Pirro is primarily known as a sports car racer and since he was instrumental in Audi’s rise (maybe even more than Frank Biela and Tom Kristensen were, although they were all there at the outset of their sports car dominance), I thought I should pick a sports car race but I was again really struggling to find details on a lot of those Le Mans wins to know who the team leader was. I think it might have been Pirro since even though Kristensen won Le Mans nine times and Pirro and Biela only won five, Pirro was the winningest of all the Audi Le Mans winners and by far the highest in my touring car model (Pirro: .297, Timo Bernhard: .263, Kristensen: .192, Mike Rockenfeller: .192, Biela: .178, Marcel Fässler: .160, Marco Werner: .159, Rinaldo Capello: .102, Loïc Duval .013, Allan McNish: -.013 wtf). While nearly all these guys had really good touring car ratings as you would expect (there’s a reason Audi picked them; a few of the drivers like André Lotterer never made any touring car starts), Pirro was waaaay ahead of his main teammates Kristensen, Biela, and Werner. I think based on this, I definitely like Pirro over Kristensen because Kristensen unlike Pirro and Biela never won a touring car title while both of them won four. Picking between those two is harder, but my inclination right now is to rate Biela higher because even though he’s lower in my model, his titles generally came in more prestigious series. It’s obviously very close though: they were literally tied 17-17 in their touring car head-to-head. I suppose a lot of this differentiating between similarly-placed sports car drivers would be much clearer to me if I just shelled out the money for some of those Le Mans: The Complete History books and I might well do that at some point.
After 20 winless weeks, I won my second straight bar trivia yesterday after I turned in the correct answer for the final round before the host had even entirely finished reading it and none of the other teams got it. I think tomorrow, I’m going to review Stefan Fatsis’s book Unabridged, and that is also the last day for my first participation in LearnedLeague since 2016. I think for the next week after that, I might review that contest and go through my the LearnedLeague answers, but maybe I’ll change my mind on that…
