1,000 Greatest Drivers: James Courtney

Trying to get back into the groove...

Sorry, I messed the original post up because I was editing a previous paid post and I was unable to reset it from Paid to Free as a result even though I had shut off my paywall. This one should work. Please ignore the other one.

Finding out which room my mom is living in has gotten to be like keeping up with who’s driving for SS Green Light Racing each week. Mom got moved from Room 419 to Room 402, then they moved her back to Room 419 less than a week ago, and Van Duyn didn’t even tell me either time. I have no idea what the precipitating incidents were, but I presume it was another roommate conflict. After she got over COVID, she was joined by a roommate who also has dementia and believes a doll she is carrying is her baby. She even feeds her and stuff. Because her doll is black, Mom even called her roommate the N-word even though she was white (not that it would be okay under any circumstance). She also seems to think one of the black male nurses who comes in (who I haven’t ever seen) is her boyfriend, and she’s afraid when I’m not around that she’s going to be raped or attacked or something. Many times when I come in, she wants me to help plot her escape. I tell her I can’t do that or else I might be arrested for kidnapping. She believes that wouldn’t happen.

I don’t even get mad when Mom forgets who I am and thinks I’m her dead brother (which she does frequently). I get much angrier at the late-onset racism though because it’s not the person that I thought I knew. I realize she probably had a rougher life than I did. While she had steadier employment than I did until she became too disabled to work and had far more real-life social connections (which I envy), she had also gotten mugged exclusively by black people and Puerto Ricans, and I don’t know how to convince her not to judge entire demographic groups by the actions of their worst members. Admittedly, this seems like a common neurosis that spans all demographic groups and political affiliations, including left-leaning ones. Witness all the man v. bear discourse or all the people who make fun of any men who complain about loneliness and call them all incels. It doesn’t really matter whether someone follows the “mainstream”/TV media or the “alternative”/Internet media, since these platforms both incentivize performative outrage in exactly the same way. Negative news stories get more and more coverage, and as people withdraw into their own little worlds and media bubbles more and more, they’re less likely to interact with people in real life, so their only associations with people in demographics outside their shrinking social circles will be these gross media caricatures of the worst members of any given group. Honestly, I think Mom is saying fewer unhinged things since she stopped listening to NPR, and it’s weird she did listen to NPR and say seemingly 10 times as many racist things as the average FOX News viewer despite also being vehemently anti-Trump even to a greater extent than I was because I didn’t fantasize out loud about all the violent things I wanted to do to him. I don’t know how to convince Mom to stop being fearful and constantly thinking she’s going to be attacked, but as people say, you can’t reason people out of opinions that weren’t rational to begin with. And it doesn’t help that Van Duyn has been investigated for mistreating people while Mom is there.

When she got moved to Room 402, she seemed to have a better relationship with her new roommate, but she had a fall. Her new roommate said she was concerned about being roommates with Mom because she couldn’t help her up if she fell again. I think Mom interpreted that as her saying she didn’t want a roommate at all and didn’t like her even though they’d had many meals together before. I don’t know why she was moved back to Room 419, and that must’ve been part of it, but this is inevitably going to lead to more nasty conflicts, I think. I was never informed when they moved her, even though I visit three times a week, and I had to figure it out based on where her nametag was located.

What frustrated me the most is that after she was moved from 419 to 402, they disconnected her phone in 419, and then when they moved her back, it wasn’t reconnected for a week and a half until today. I’ve been calling her just about every day I don’t come in, and last week through all that I couldn’t. A week ago Saturday, as I was writing the Steve Waid post, I had my worst IBS attack of the year. I had somewhere between six and eight rounds of diarrhea, and then I had the second-worst gas cramps of my entire life Sunday morning. I couldn’t fall asleep until after 8 am, and I was close to thinking I needed to go to urgent care, but I decided not to, and the symptoms did dissipate after I fell asleep. I woke up literally five minutes before the IndyCar race at Road America, and I did complete the post later that evening, but I was angry that I couldn’t even call Mom for comfort during this episode because they disconnected her phone, probably due to what I presumed to be bad behavior on her part. Instead, I wrote to my dad and replied to a letter he had sent me two months ago. I wanted to get that done since it was Father’s Day, but he hasn’t replied to that either. Of course, I suspect he’d likely chide me for my eating disorder. Well maybe if you acted like a man, developed some discipline, and learned how to eat real food, bruh, you wouldn’t be hurting. (Okay, I doubt he’d say bruh.) Very likely true, but not what I need to hear. I’ve just grown more and more withdrawn, increasingly not wanting to talk to anyone. One thing Mom said in earlier decades that I used to disagree with was that online friends weren’t real because they’d seldom be there to help you with your real physical needs. I don’t completely agree with this now, as I can definitely think of exceptions in my life, but I understand this a lot better than I did 20 years ago.

I am still trying to facilitate Mom coming home. Despite having a signed contract for the needed ramp construction and roof repair to be finished by July 7, the work still hasn’t started yet, and I’m starting to wonder if it will ever happen. I finally have money to hire somebody to do a deep clean, which will also be necessary for Mom to be accepted into an in-home car agency so she can come home. I’ve needed to have that done after her hoarding, and I’m finally getting around to it a year later. I do have two cleaners coming to do a home inspection on Wednesday and Thursday so they can tell me what I need to do to prepare. After both inspections, I’ll decide which contractor to hire.

In all this, I lost control over the Substack and fell way behind my desired one driver post per day schedule, so I’m going to try and implement a more structured schedule again, since I do plan on restarting charges on July 8. Even on the days I’m not posting, I’m usually still working on this. My biggest temptation lately has been entering data instead of writing. Since I’m working on archiving the entire history of VLN (now called the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie), which has had 47 seasons, and averages about 10 races per season, and usually around 15 class winners per race and typically multiple co-drivers sharing each class win, archiving this series might take months. A lot of days lately, I’ve been entering VLN winners while watching or listening to something in the background, and I haven’t gotten around to writing. To catch up, I’m going to try to force myself to write first and archive later. I also found myself getting further behind because I was going to try to write a bunch of double posts to catch up, and I put so much pressure on myself that I didn’t even get single posts done. So for the rest of the year, I’m going to try to write one post on days when I visit Mom and two when I don’t until I’ve caught back up again. I’ve also decided to start writing on the bus again. Since it’s a 1.5-hour bus ride both ways to the nursing home, I had been reading through the history of Le Mans books I’ve been buying on the bus, but right now, I think I need to focus on writing first and research second, particularly because most of the drivers I had scheduled to write about this year came from series I am much more informed about since these were drivers I already had on my lock list prior to this year. I’m going to try to work myself back up to my originally planned schedule by the time I turn on paid posts again.

I don’t have much to say about this weekend’s races. Not bad, but just humdrum and middle-of-the-road. I did have to look up yesterday after Tyler Reddick lost the points lead to his boss whether Reddick broke the record for the most consecutive races leading the points to start the season, because I hadn’t seen anyone try to figure that out. Reddick indeed set the modern-era record. By my own crude estimation, this was the second-longest string of races to lead the points at the start of the season in Cup Series history, behind Lee Petty’s 1955 season, where he led the points for 32 races until Tim Flock overtook him even though Flock won 18 races to Petty’s 6. However, I don’t have that statistic officially confirmed because my own race-database.com points leader data were obtained from Greg Fielden’s race recaps in his 40 Years of Stock Car Racing books. While Fielden listed who led the points after quite a few races, and he usually stated when the points leader changed, he didn’t list the points leaders after every race, and I’m still not entirely sure who the points leaders were for each race for any season before 1975 when the Latford points system was introduced, so perhaps we’ll never know.

I have much more to say about the IndyCar silly season. The first domino fell when Felix Rosenqvist announced he was leaving Meyer Shank Racing after his Indy 500 win, making him the first defending Indy 500 winner to change teams since Takuma Sato in 2017. Boy, do I think he’s going to regret that. He’s got a really good thing going at Shank right now because they are a Chip Ganassi satellite and he and Marcus Armstrong definitely seem to both be getting ancillary benefits from having de facto Ganassi cars making both of them look better than they are this year. To their credit, they’ve certainly outrun Scott Dixon, who seems pretty much washed up at this point, which also suggests that perhaps the Shank cars are just as fast as the Ganassi cars. I’m guessing Rosenqvist wants to cash in on his Indy 500 win like his fellow Swede and onetime teammate Marcus Ericsson did. Ganassi wanted Ericsson to bring money while Ericsson wanted a blockbuster salary, which is why he went to Andretti Global, but when he inevitably underachieved there, as anyone could have expected, that left him vulnerable to falling out of the series entirely. I wonder if the same thing might happen to Rosenqvist after he did this, since he pretty much ran the same as Ericsson were both of them were at Ganassi (even though I’ve always thought Rosenqvist was better than Ericsson and my opinion on that has not changed; I have Rosenqvist as a lock on my list while Ericsson’s not even on the bubble yet).

The only teams that would be worth leaving Shank for are obviously Ganassi, Penske, Andretti, and McLaren, so it seems like Rosenqvist’s destination has to be one of those teams. Penske seems unlikely since I think all three drivers will be renewed past this year. At one point, I thought Josef Newgarden was well on his way to being fired, but he’s obviously still got the juice on short ovals even if he’s lost it on most other tracks. Scott McLaughlin’s stock has plummeted in my mind more than any other driver in the past year and a half, but I still think firing him for Rosenqvist would be stupid. Ganassi and McLaren certainly both have unworthy ride-buyers in Kyffin Simpson and Nolan Siegel who do not deserve those rides, and Rosenqvist would certainly be a vast improvement over both, but they are also paying for their rides and it seems Rosenqvist is after a big paycheck. Furthermore, both those teams have already fired him before, and how often do teams rehire someone they previously hired? I’m pretty sure Ryan Briscoe is the only driver Ganassi ever fired and re-hired.

By process of elimination, my guess is Rosenqvist is going to Andretti to replace Ericsson, who is in the last year of his contract. Ericsson is definitely working his butt off more than I’ve ever seen from him this year as he won his first pole and led the most laps for the first time this year, two things I quite honestly never thought he’d do in his career, but there’s no question he was wildly overpaid and will be easy to dispose of. While I do think Rosenqvist is better than Ericsson, I also acknowledge that he’s only barely better, so my guess is that they’re going to go for him because he will ask for less money. Ericsson was (stupidly) viewed as a hot up-and-coming driver while Rosenqvist was always seen as more like a Sato, who had random flashes of brilliance amidst long stretches of mediocrity. (Admittedly, my model has him way above Ericsson and way above Sato, and I think there might be something there that is still untapped.) For these reasons and the fact that he’s leaving Shank instead of Ganassi, his salary expectations will likely be lower, so he’ll get the pay raise he wants while Andretti will likely spend less money on him like they want. I think he’ll perform worse when he gets there just like Ericsson and Will Power did.

The other possibility, I suppose, is that Rosenvist could return to Ganassi since it seems like shockingly, Dixon is leaving. I was sure he’d remain there until he retired, but Marshall Pruett claims he’s already signed a McLaren contract. I don’t exactly get that. Why would you leave Ganassi willingly when they are dominating? I’m starting to wonder if Ganassi is actually firing him. He might still get a strategy win or two, but it does seem like his winning speed has become a thing of the past. However, I’ve predicted him to go winless before, even in seasons like 2018 when he went on to win the championship, so I know I need to discount him at my own peril. Having said that, even if he didn’t make an on-track pass for the lead that year and mostly benefited from how weak that year’s field was and Newgarden’s bad luck, he was a lot faster that year than he is now. At least last year, he still finished third in points despite looking mediocre. This year, Rosenqvist and Armstrong have seemed unquestionably faster, so maybe inspired by Penske dropping Power, Ganassi is willing to cut his losses here. I really thought Ganassi would be more loyal to its most successful driver, but I do get that the performance is falling off a cliff right now. Maybe he’s just being paid too much for his current level of performance. I get it, but that will suck, and I can’t say I have any idea why McLaren wants him now. Just to get back at Ganassi for losing the Álex Palou lawsuit? If it’s to replace Siegel, okay, point taken. But it seems like it might not be.

So maybe Rosenqvist ends up taking the #9 car, effectively getting a promotion for the Indy wi. I could see that, but he was not exactly electrifying in his previous Ganassi stint there, so I can’t see what has changed. While Ganassi has signed a reprehensible number of hapless ride buyers for his other cars, he always expects the #9 and #10 cars to be championship contenders, and he’s cut a lot of drivers off even after good seasons in those cars (Tomas Scheckter, Darren Manning, Dan Wheldon, and even Rosenqvist himself). It seems like returning there would be a huge gamble since Ganassi fires drivers from the #9 and #10 cars pretty quickly once it becomes clear they’re not title contenders. (Okay, I’ve talked myself into believing that Dixon is being fired for performance.) Rosenqvist may be better than Dixon now, but he isn’t the driver to challenge Palou.

Christian Lundgaard might be. He too is in the last year of his contract at McLaren and a lot of people are predicting a Dixon/Lundgaard swap. Lundgaard has certainly been faster than his cars for his entire career, and I’ve always rated him highly. Ganassi hiring Lundgaard would weirdly echo Penske hiring David Malukas this year, as both teams dropped their winningest driver (Dixon/Power) in exchange for a clearly fast but questionably diverse 2022 rookie. I’m seeing a lot of people down on Lundgaard and thinking he doesn’t have star power because he hasn’t really done anything on an oval yet. That’s true, but it could just come down to the cars, as we saw with Malukas. Malukas had never had a top five finish on a road or street course before this season, which is why people were highly skeptical about Penske replacing Power with him despite his undeniable oval speed. Well, as it turned out, Malukas has been the fastest Penske road racer for the entire season. Do we actually know Lundgaard is bad on ovals yet? He drove for a Rahal team that had equipment so slow Graham Rahal even DNQed in the Indy 500. McLaren seemingly should be better on ovals, but Pato O’Ward seems to be having his worst oval season in years, and Lundgaard is pretty clearly at this point the second-best road racer in the field.

I honestly have never been able to decide whether Lundgaard or Malukas is better. Yes, I’ll concede that the leader of their rookie cohort Kirk Kylewood is probably the best of the trio, but I think he’s only barely better than the other two, to be honest. (And probably one of those three is going to be the driver to end Palou’s dynasty; I’m not sure which one, but it won’t be this year.) Kirkwood’s big advantage is that he is more consistent across track types than the other two - or at least he was until this season. Malukas had a reputation of being ovals only, and Lundgaard had a reputation of being road/street only, while Kirkwood was the only one who seemed to be fast at both. I would probably rate Lundgaard above Malukas historically because he has won three races to Malukas’s zero, even though all his cars were probably slower than Malukas’s Penske. On the other hand, Malukas’s career bad luck in races has gotten pretty comical (he seriously could have won like five oval races by now), and I’m tempted to say he’s had more good runs even if Lundgaard has a way higher hit rate at actually winning when he has a good run. Malukas has always been higher in my model, but as far as my book is concerned, Lundgaard has scored 10 cumulative points to Malukas’s 5, so I guess I’d give him the edge. Malukas’s advantage on ovals seems way bigger than Lundgaard’s advantage on road courses, but the road course skew of the schedule evens that out. But I digress. The main point is that Penske replacing Power with Malukas looked questionable at the time and now looks visionary, and I guess Ganassi wants to rip a page from the same playbook. And I’m gonna bet that if Ganassi does hire Lundgaard, he’s going to suddenly have oval speed out of nowhere just like Malukas suddenly demonstrated road course speed out of nowhere once he finally got to Penske.

Over the next several days, I’m going to again post screenshots of my matches in the last LearnedLeague contest as I did a few months ago. I’m not sure whether anybody had any interest in that, but it was a relatively easy and thoughtless content generator for a few days, so I didn’t have to spend hours writing these exceptionally long intros.

JAMES COURTNEY…………AUSTRALIA

Born: June 29, 1980

Best year: 2010

Best drive: 2015 Gold Coast 600 Race #2

Although a gruesome F1 testing crash threatened to end Courtney’s career, he reemerged in Supercars, where he won 15 races and the 2010 championship. After winning numerous karting titles and the 2000 British Formula Ford title, Courtney was leading the 2002 British Formula Three standings at the time of his devastating crash at Monza while testing for Jaguar. A suspension failure sent him into the wall at 306 kph. After a 67G impact, his car ricocheted off the wall at 70 kph. Michael Schumacher saved his life while also testing that day, but Courtney bled from the eyes (briefly losing his vision), initially couldn’t move the right side of his body, and regularly got migraines while walking. Courtney was expected to advance to Jaguar alongside Mark Webber in 2003, but the crash thwarted that plan. Instead, Courtney moved to Japan, where he posted an extraordinary 13-win Japanese Formula 3 title season, then competed in Super GT, where he grew to prefer the wheel-to-wheel action over F1’s more processional races. He turned down an F1 offer from Midland to return home and race in Supercars.

Courtney replaced two-time champion Marcos Ambrose at Stone Brothers Racing in 2006 when Ambrose defected to NASCAR. He got off to a fast start by matching defending champion Russell Ingall, then led my touring car model globally in 2008 when he beat full-time debutant Shane van Gisbergen 24-4. He moved to Dick Johnson Racing in 2009 and unexpectedly won the 2010 title, upsetting Jamie Whincup, who won every other title from 2008-2014. Although title contenders Courtney, Whincup, and Mark Winterbottom had crashed at the penultimate race at Sydney during a thunderstorm, Courtney won the title because his team completed its repair work first.

Oddly, that season was Courtney’s only top five points finish, although he finished 11th or better every year from 2007-2016. He moved to the Holden team in 2011, where he was slightly worse than teammate Garth Tander, but hurt his legacy with nine consecutive winless seasons to end his full-time career. He suffered another horrific injury in 2015 when a metal sign penetrated his chest at Sydney after a low-flying helicopter blew it away, but in a gallant display, he recovered to win at Surfers Paradise with Jack Perkins two races after his return.

Sometimes people dismiss Courtney because he had F1 superstar potential before ostensibly only becoming a middling touring car driver. His extremely high rating in my open wheel model (almost entirely based on minor league seasons) certainly demonstrated his high potential. While he might not have been as good in touring cars, he was still quite impressive in Supercars. Not only was he the only full-time teammate to beat SVG and the driver who interrupted Whincup’s dynasty run, he did so despite freakish injuries and rarely having championship-caliber cars, and his 137-133 record against Supercars champions certainly belies his talent. Courtney stuck around too long, resulting in a lower touring car rating than he deserves, but he’s definitely underrated today.

Open wheel model: #43 of 931 (.259)

Teammate head-to-heads: 32-10 (17-3 vs. Tatsuya Kataoka, 14-7 vs. Andre Lotterer, 1-0 vs. Ryo Michigami)

Touring car model: #266 of 1676 (.165)

Teammate head-to-heads: 414-368 (4-1 vs. Zak Best, 1-3 vs. Ryan Briscoe, 23-4 vs. Aaron Cameron, 0-1 vs. Michael Caruso, 0-1 vs. Will Davison, 2-0 vs. Tyler Everingham, 1-0 vs. Dario Franchitti, 17-4 vs. Declan Fraser, 1-0 vs. James Hinchcliffe, 12-11 vs. Lee Holdsworth, 28-28 vs. Russell Ingall, 2-0 vs. Garry Jacobson, 38-11 vs. Steven Johnson, 0-1 vs. Todd Kelly, 20-7 vs. Jake Kostecki, 29-22 vs. Jack Le Brocq, 17-9 vs. Aaron Love, 7-7 vs. Warren Luff, 2-0 vs. Marcus Marshall, 2-1 vs. James Moffat, 2-3 vs. Nick Percat, 38-42 vs. Scott Pye, 35-22 vs. Thomas Randle, 1-0 vs. Alexander Rossi, 0-1 vs. Mark Skaife, 83-99 vs. Garth Tander, 26-5 vs. Shane van Gisbergen, 19-84 vs. Cam Waters, 2-0 vs. Jonathon Webb, 2-1 vs. Luke Youlden)

Year-by-year: 2000: C-, 2002: C-, 2003: C+, 2005: C-, 2006: C, 2007: C, 2008: E-, 2009: C+, 2010: E, 2011: C, 2012: C-, 2013: C, 2014: C+, 2015: C, 2016: C-, 2019: C-