1,000 Greatest Drivers: Glenn Seton
Competitive typing on Jeopardy! (No, it wasn't me.)
Well, this is goofy. Competitive typing got what had to be its first mention on Jeopardy! Tuesday night on a $200 clue, no less:
I talked to him before when I was briefly doing a “This Day in Typing History” series that I ended up giving up on because I didn’t think the number of views I was getting was worth the effort I was putting into it. Also, I had already published my book, so I had stopped enjoying a lot of that stuff to begin with, as I wanted to pivot towards this book. I think if I remember right, I wanted to include his birthday on my calendar of events, and then I just gave up on it. He didn’t really emerge in a big way until after I finished my book, although Josh Hu (who is actually the best typist today, not Rocket) was just beginning to break out in the last year or so before I published, and I did mention him a couple of times. We talked only once really, but I did step out of retirement to compete on the site Keymash in the summer of 2023 when I was very broke after my previous job got automated the previous year. I was hoping to win a nominal cash prize, and then Rocket swept me in round 2 before I got eliminated in the losers’ bracket because I got a tougher draw after that. This was basically the last time I competed, although I got hoodwinked into making a few videos on the rising site TypeGG a couple months ago, but I didn’t really enjoy them. I was trying to pivot to racing content on my YouTube channel, but that didn’t do well either, and I effectively killed my channel both through the long strings of inactivity, pivoting from typing content that I didn’t want to make but all my fans expected to what I actually wanted to make (uploading home videos and racing content). I still have 6,000 subscribers from years ago, but I have now faded into irrelevance. I prefer this platform anyway because I’m better at writing than I am at anything visual or artistic.
After venting too much and going into way too much personal detail last week, I knew I should be venting to my peer group and/or my counselor instead of a bunch of Substack subscribers who don’t need to hear it. So, I went down to Unique Peerspectives on Tuesday to go to their men’s group again. Canceled. They had a Cinco de Mayo party instead, when what I needed was to talk deeply, not to party. Oh well. At least I got to vent at my counseling session today instead of on here.
I ended up bumping Seton’s 1997 up from just a plain E to #4 once I read that he had a ten-win season despite losing his sponsorship due to the anti-tobacco legislation. I still don’t think I can take him over Michael Schumacher, Laurent Aïello (who had the highest touring car rating globally at .569 in his 11-win French Supertouring Championship season), or Jacques Villeneuve, but I could be talked into elevating him to 2nd or 3rd place. I think I’m going to hold off because Craig Lowndes had 16-win and 14-win seasons the year before and after, suggesting the competition was not great that year, especially because Lowndes made a failed attempt to climb the F1 ladder in 1997 by competing in the Formula 3000 series, where Juan Pablo Montoya steamrolled him so effectively that he was back to the ATCC in no time flat. Had Lowndes been there that season, he presumably would have won three straight titles. However, I did place Seton over Alain Menu (who I previously had #4) and Colin McRae (who I previously had #5). Menu did become the first driver to win 12 races in a season in the British Touring Car Championship, a record Ashley Sutton would later tie in 2023, but Menu was also driving for Williams’s BTCC team that was just as dominant as their F1 team at the time and Menu’s rookie teammate Jason Plato finished third in points immediately, so I guess you have to say Seton did more with less. And McRae didn’t win the WRC title, even though I think he outperformed Tommi Mäkinen that year, so I feel comfortable dropping him.
GLENN SETON………………AUSTRALIA
Born: May 5, 1965
Best year: 1997
Best drive: 1990 Sandown 500 at Sandown Raceway
The last owner-driver champion in Australian touring cars, Seton would be one of the most dominant Australian Touring Car Championship drivers of the ‘90s, with 36 of his 40 wins coming during that decade. The son of 1965 Bathurst 500 winner Barry Seton, Glenn first co-drove at the Bathurst 1000 with Barry in 1983. The next year, he joined Howard Marsden’s factory Nissan operation, where Barry joined as an engine builder. Seton primarily focused on endurance racing in those years and typically didn’t run the entire ATCC schedule. After another former Bathurst 500 winner, Fred Gibson, bought the team, Seton finished second in ATCC points in his first full-time attempt in 1987, beating his teammate George Fury. Fury and Seton also combined for three Australian Endurance Championship wins in 1986, including Seton’s first Sandown 500, but I give Fury more credit since he was significantly faster that year.
In 1989, Seton formed his own team, and Barry again followed. He switched to Ford for the remainder of his full-time career and retained his sponsorship from cigarette manufacturer Peter Jackson, but went winless in his first three ATCC owner-driver seasons. In the AEC, he was more successful, winning another Sandown 500 with Fury. After sweeping the Symmons Plains round in 1992 for his first ATCC wins since 1987, he struck pay dirt when Barry developed a new Ford Falcon that dominated the sport for the next half-decade.
Seton would be teammates with Formula One World Champion Alan Jones from 1993 to 1995, but he only won four races to Jones’s 20, although Jones was admittedly past his prime. Seton won his first title in 1993, but the team struggled for funding after Australia banned tobacco sponsorships and was forced to drop to one car in 1996. Nonetheless, Seton had his most dominant year in 1997, winning ten races and the championship. Even though Ford eventually pitched in with more factory backing, the team never really recovered, and Seton only won two more races through 2000. He was particularly snakebitten at the Bathurst 1000, which he never won despite leading with nine laps left in 1995 before blowing an engine. In 2002, he was forced to sell his team to Prodrive, and he switched to Dick Johnson’s team in 2005, but he was fired after one year and never competed full-time again.
While drivers winning championships as owner-drivers is by no means unheard of in the ATCC, Seton was the last to do it, and his not only winning the championship but also dominating for an unsponsored family operation is something we’ll likely never see again. My touring car model doesn’t truly capture his greatness because he had no teammate in 1996 and 1997, his poor late-career seasons in the 2000s dragged him down, and Jones’s negative touring car rating ignores his World Championship past. Nonetheless, as one of the last great grassroots successes before the series became monopolized by factory teams in the Supercars era, Seton’s career is something to celebrate.
Touring car model: #485 of 1676 (.064)
Teammate head-to-heads: 161-108 (2-0 vs. Neal Bates, 0-2 vs. David Besnard, 2-0 vs. Geoff Brabham, 0-1 vs. Dean Canto, 39-14 vs. Neil Crompton, 2-0 vs. Will Davison, 1-0 vs. Taz Douglas, 3-0 vs. Rodney Forbes, 6-7 vs. George Fury, 2-0 vs. Allan Grice, 1-0 vs. Darren Hossack, 2-0 vs. Russell Ingall, 9-22 vs. Steven Johnson, 39-13 vs. Alan Jones, 0-1 vs. Owen Kelly, 0-1 vs. Rick Kelly, 0-2 vs. Todd Kelly, 10-22 vs. Craig Lowndes, 2-0 vs. Adam Macrow, 1-0 vs. Alain Menu, 15-1 vs. Wayne Park, 4-0 vs. David Parsons, 0-1 vs. Nathan Pretty, 1-0 vs. Drew Price, 1-0 vs. Tony Ricciardello, 0-1 vs. Jim Richards, 11-16 vs. Steven Richards, 2-0 vs. Gary Scott, 3-1 vs. Terry Shiel, 1-1 vs. Mark Skaife, 0-1 vs. Garth Tander, 0-1 vs. Dale Wood, 2-0 vs. Luke Youlden)
Year-by-year: 1986: C-, 1987: E, 1990: C, 1991: C, 1992: C+, 1993: E, 1994: E, 1995: E, 1996: C+, 1997: 4, 1998: C, 1999: C, 2000: C+