1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jason Bright
Frequently lived up to his name.
I don’t think I’m going to sign up for Apple TV tonight to watch the F1 season opener. I need to get some of my paid work done and after already adding YouTube TV, I don’t think I can justify subscribing to a bunch of other pltaforms. I assume the Middle Eastern F1 races might be canceled due to the war in Iran, so if I do sign up for it, maybe it will be at that point. I suspect the race will be boring anyway, patricularly after they removed the DRS.
The IndyCar race was way more entertaining than I thought it would be, since the last run of IndyCar Phoenix races were pretty awful. I know he didn’t get a finish, but Christian Rasmussen kind of amazed me. He’s basically the IndyCar equivalent of Carson Hocevar: very fast but also willing to rough anybody up at any time, which is obviously way more dangerous in an IndyCar. He had either three or four on-track passes for the lead, which is a huge amount for an IndyCar short oval race, depending on whether he actually passed Will Power on track before their crash (I couldn’t quite tell). He really is what the booth thinks Santino Ferrucci is. While everybody goes on and on about how Ferrucci is a dangerous driver, I’ve never really felt so and honestly think his driving style is really boring, and people just hate on every aggressive move he makes as an excuse to hate on him for his politics, which is fair. I also hate on him for his politics, but he drives like Oriol Servià. Rasmussen is way wilder. As a Malukas fan, I’m kind of bummed because I was hoping he was going to overtake Newgarden as the dominant short oval driver for a while but now it looks like Rasmussen is going to jump him. At least Malukas has better racecraft now, and the race was great (probably the best IndyCar race since 1995), even though Newgarden winning was a huge buzzkill.
I was a bit equivocal about the War in Iran a couple days ago, mainly because some of the people I talk to online who are normally anti-imperialist were defending the assassination and I didn’t think I was informed enough to object, even though my kneejerk reaction was to be against it. But now I’m vehemently against it, what with Pete Hegseth saying on 60 Minutes, “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live”, the U.S. blowing up an elementary school a couple days ago, and the fact that the Strait of Hormuz being closed is probably going to lead to a major economic recession, although this last is obviously the least important. At least I’m pleased to see that both the NASCAR and IndyCar media have been ignoring it even on FOX and they’re not gearing us up for war like the NASCAR media definitely did in 2003, which is again why all the early millennials except for me stopped watching NASCAR I guess…
Unlike Paul Morris yesterday, I didn’t even really think Bright’s owner-driver stint was even worth mentioning because he went winless in all four of his owner-driver seasons and never finished better than 19th in points, although I did rate one of them (2007), mainly because he significantly outperformed his teammate Alan Gurr who finished 53rd in the championship to his 21st and he also contended to win the Bathurst 1000.
JASON BRIGHT…………….AUSTRALIA
Born: March 7, 1973
Best year: 2004
Best drive: 2006 Betta Electrical 500 at Sandown Raceway
One of the top Supercars drivers of the 2000s, Bright never really threatened for championships, but he was a prolific winner with 20 wins in a twenty-year career. Bright had an exceptional minor league career, winning the 1995 Australian Formula Ford championship and the 1997 Australian Drivers’ Championship, Australia’s top open wheel series where he beat future 7-time Supercars winner Jason Bargwanna and future 6-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon for the title.
Bright debuted in the ATCC full-time in 1998. Although he didn’t win that year, he and Steven Richards won the Bathurst 1000 in a dramatic upset from 25th, the first major win for Stone Brothers Racing. In 1999, the ATCC was renamed V8 Supercars as Bathurst and Sandown were added to the schedule, and Bright earned his first win at Darwin. Clearly recognized as a rising star, he switched to Indy Lights in 2000 (where he won one race at Portland) and made a single CART start at Surfer’s Paradise before returning to Supercars the next year. Bright joined the Holden Racing Team in 2001, which was dominating the sport at the time. He was teammates with Mark Skaife when he won both the 2001 and 2002 titles, but he wasn’t even close as Skaife won 24 races to Bright’s 5.
Bright began to improve when he moved to Paul Weel Racing in 2003. The team was a satellite of HRT and their cars were originally constructed at the same Clayton shop where the HRT cars were. He earned a career highlight by winning the Bathurst 24 Hour that year, but earned no points wins. 2004 was significantly better and the highlight of his career as he won four times and finished third in points as the highest-finishing Holden driver when Skaife only finished 12th. Afterward, Bright switched to Ford, where he dominated Greg Ritter in 2005 before meeting his match in future champion Mark Winterbottom, who beat him in the 2006 championship even though Bright won five races to Winterbottom’s two; they shared a win at the Sandown 500, which was probably Bright’s greatest drive as he passed eventual champion Rick Kelly to win. He significantly fell off after that, but earned five more wins from 2011-2014 for Brad Jones Racing even though he wasn’t really a consistent contender anymore.
It’s hard to argue Bright was ever the best Supercars driver at any point, which makes him look fairly disappointing compared to his auspicious minor league career. He doesn’t have an awesome rating in my model because he had a long string of mediocre seasons at the end of his career, but if I stopped at 2011, his rating of .183 would look borderline championship-caliber. Indeed, he was about as good as a Supercars driver could have without a title. Not only is he the fourth-winningest non-champion, he is one of only five drivers with wins in the Bathurst 24 Hour, Bathurst 1000, and Sandown 500. Despite never winning a championship, he undeniably had a worthy career.
Touring car model: #434 of 1676 (.080)
Teammate head-to-heads: 252-215 (11-6 vs. Jason Bargwanna, 2-0 vs. David Besnard, 4-1 vs. David Brabham, 2-3 vs. Aaron Cameron, 46-90 vs. Fabian Coulthard, 13-1 vs. Alan Gurr, 3-0 vs. Matt Halliday, 2-0 vs. Russell Ingall, 1-0 vs. Steven Johnson, 3-0 vs. Andrew Jones, 1-0 vs. Owen Kelly, 21-1 vs. Rick Kelly, 1-0 vs. Tony Longhurst, 27-2 vs. Marcus Marshall, 3-0 vs. Iain McDougall, 4-0 vs. Cameron McLean, 1-0 vs. Tomas Mezera, 1-0 vs. Nathan Pretty, 2-0 vs. Shane Price, 9-13 vs. Jason Richards, 0-1 vs. Jim Richards, 17-3 vs. Greg Ritter, 5-1 vs. Paul Romano, 0-1 vs. Allan Simonsen, 18-35 vs. Mark Skaife, 8-17 vs. Tim Slade, 0-2 vs. Garth Tander, 0-3 vs. Ashley Walsh, 30-8 vs. Paul Weel, 1-0 vs. Matthew White, 15-18 vs. Mark Winterbottom, 1-9 vs. Luke Youlden)
Open wheel model: #755 of 931 (-.260)
Teammate head-to-heads: 6-10 (2-5 vs. Townsend Bell, 4-5 vs. Casey Mears)
Year-by-year: 1997: C-, 1998: C-, 1999: C-, 2001: C, 2002: C+, 2003: C+, 2004: E-, 2005: C+, 2006: E-, 2007: C, 2011: C, 2013: C