1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jack Sears
Come see the faster side of Sears.
When I called my mom at the nursing home today, she told me she had just given bith. Man, that’s rough. And she’ll probably forget all about it when I come to visit her tomorrow. Sometimes she’s thought our cat was in the room of the nursing home with her. She’s forgotten that she’s almost never let any of our cats out of the house for 50 years as I guess she’s emotionally back in childhood when she lived in a small town and they had a farm and let the pets roam. Sometimes she offers me some of her meals that she doesn’t eat, things she used to know I didn’t eat because of my ARFID. She often asks me when I arrive how I found her because I think she’s forgotten she’s been in the same place although she changed rooms. And sometimes she thought she was either in an airport terminal or a bus terminal or thinking the things that were on TV shows that her previous roommate in the nursing home were watching were actually happening to her. Dementia is rough, although I’m glad it looks like Trump’s dementia didn’t lead to a nuclear war tonight.
Got a lot of nagging paperwork done today. I had to talk to the company handling Mom’s homeowner’s insurance after we just got dropped because I couldn’t get the roof repair done in time although it looks like it is going to happen soon. As it turned out, since Mom isn’t living in the home currently, she would need to get landlord’s insurance for the property and I would have to get tenant’s insurance for my possessions inside the property apparently. I had honestly never heard of either of those. I also filled out my paperwork verifying my new job to New York State of Health because I needed to know when I’m going to be kicked off Medicaid so I can hopefully schedule a physical, which my counselor recommended as the first step to treating my eating disorder. It looks like I won’t be kicked off until January so it looks like I should be able to schedule the physical and find a new doctor, even though I’m making too much money for it now. And I renewed my student loan recertification and walked down to the photography studio where I did a photo shoot in 2021 right after publishing my book. All the pictures in my album had watermarks, but apparently I’d already bought the rights to use one of them digitally at that time, and I wanted to use that for my biography for Auto Racing Research Associates. I mentioned them in the Ray Hendrick entry and they’ve agreed to take me on. Fred Voorhees, the head of that group, is even talking about grooming me to take over the site if something happens to him. It won’t pay anything, but it might help me make connections and that matters more to me. It would also give me a preferable alternative to doomscrolling.
I also finally got access to Forix, the much-ballyhooed statistical archive. Honestly, it does not have nearly as much original content on it as I thought it would. The main thing is that it does have a bunch of laps led counts for certain open wheel and touring car series where I’m missing data, but apart from that, I really don’t see very many things on that site that aren’t available elsewhere, although admittedly, not a whole lot of sites other than that and The Third Turn cover so many different series all in one place, but I think overall I probably prefer The Third Turn’s coverage to FORIX and that’s a free Wiki-based site. Still, I’ll make sure to eventually notate all the lap leader data they’ve got for Formula E, BTCC, DTM, Porsche Supercup, and series like that so hopefully I can expand my statistical season tables back a decade or two at least, which should help me measure drivers’ passing ability, which was one of the things I explicitly said I was interested in doing in the abstract. But I’m gonna stop writing this now and work on my ARRA biography.
And yes, Sears and 1961 BSCC champion John Whitmore actually tied for a class win as Lotus teammates, so I had to give them both a half win each for that…
JACK SEARS……………………………UK
Born: February 16, 1930
Died: August 7, 2016
Best year: 1963
Best drive: 1964 Ilford Films Trophy Race at Brands Hatch Circuit
The first champion and two-time champion of the British Touring Car Championship, Sears showed the ability to fight with and beat the world’s greatest Formula One drivers at his peak in the mid-’60s. After dabbling in rallies and speed trials for a decade, Sears and Tommy Sopwith won the first two British Saloon Car Championship (now BTCC) races on Easter Monday in 1958. They overwhelmingly dominated the season and ended up typing in points with Sopwith winning eight out of nine overall wins in his self-owned Equipe Endeavor Jaguar while Sears won seven of eight class wins in his self-owned Austin Westminster. A coin flip was considered to determine the champion, but both drivers were opposed. They instead raced two five-lap tiebreaker races swapping identically prepared cars. Although they split the races, Sears beat Sopwith by 1.6 seconds in elapsed time.
Sopwith retired afterward and Sears took over his Jaguar mostly part-time, earning four overall wins through 1962. In 1963, Sears drove for John Willment, alternating between a Class B Ford Cortina and a Class D Ford Galaxie, scoring three overall Class D wins and five Class B wins. This was the peak of international interest in the series as that year’s Class D winners also included Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Dan Gurney, and Jack Brabham. Sears beat Hill straight up once and also earned a 24 Hours of Le Mans class win with Mike Salmon. In 1964, Sears delivered his best performances against F1 drivers, but I rated his 1963 higher because he was less consistent. He actually beat Clark three times for overall wins, although Sears’s 7-liter Galaxie was vastly more powerful than Clark’s 1.6-liter Cortina. In a non-championship Brands Hatch race, Sears was black-flagged for starting on the wrong row of the grid but recovered from 9th to pass Jackie Stewart for the lead, winning by 5 seconds.
Sears switched to Lotus in 1965 and Clark swept him, but he still won a Silverstone race that Clark skipped in favor of Indy 500 qualifying. Sears added another Le Mans class win before retiring after a nasty post-season testing crash at Silverstone. In later years, he helped Sopwith organize the London-Sydney Marathon rally, managed the British Racing Drivers Club, and inspired the Jack Sears Trophy for the best new BTCC driver. His son David won two BTCC races, finished third at Le Mans, and won sixteen minor league open wheel titles as a team principal, most notably Formula 3000 titles for Juan Pablo Montoya and Sébastien Bourdais.
Despite Sears’s negative teammate record, he proved he could legitimately compete with F1 superstars when his contemporaries often couldn’t so I regard him very highly. I’m less impressed with the first title as I think Sopwith was clearly better as he won more races overall than Sears won in class, but he maintained longevity into the international crossover era while Sopwith didn’t. Universally respected for his gentlemanly behavior just as Clark was, he deserves a bigger reputation outside of Great Britain.
Touring car model: #269 of 1676 (.164)
Teammate head-to-heads: 8.5-10.5 (0-1 vs. Gawaine Baillie, 0-5 vs. Jim Clark, 1-0 vs. Keith Greene, 1-0 vs. David Haynes, 1-0 vs. Bob Olthoff, 4-4 vs. Mike Parkes, 1-0 vs. Mike Spence, 0.5-0.5 vs. John Whitmore)
Year-by-year: 1958: E-, 1959: C, 1960: C+, 1961: C-, 1962: E-, 1963: 5, 1964: E, 1965: E-