1,000 Greatest Drivers: John Bowe
His career down under was hardly anonymous.
I’ve plotted out who I intend to write about for the rest of the year through November 30 based on some combination of the following factors: drivers I consider the most important, drivers I am most informed to write about, and my preference right now is to write about drivers who are not current so I don’t have to do lots of rewrites. I don’t plan on rewriting any of the columns for the current drivers until after all 1,000 entries are done, so I’m going to hold off on some of the drivers I most recently promoted to lock status like Christopher Bell, William Byron, and Lando Norris since it’s possible if not likely that their best performances are ahead of them, not behind them. For the next several months, I want to write about drivers who are either retired or definitely on the downswing of their career for the most part so I have to do less rewriting. There are of course some exceptions. I do have some more theme weeks planned. From May 13 to June 1 in the run up to the Indy 500, I plan on writing solely about Indy 500 legends. I threw in Tony Stewart and Danny Ongais on their birthdays and you can argue they don’t quite count as Indy 500 legends, but I think they still fit the theme weeks. The other 18 drivers I have planned for those days are all Indy 500 winners. I also have a theme week scheduled of Le Mans legends for the week leading up to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, although I plopped Jackie Stewart in there on his birthday, which is June 11th in the same vein. I tried to follow drivers’ birthdays as much as I could, and if I didn’t I picked important days in each driver’s career like the date of their first win sometimes, although I admit for most of the drivers I just added to my November schedule as well as the drivers I originally had scheduled for previous months, I pretty much just slotted them wherever I had a hole, so you can’t totally predict when I’m going to do certain drivers based on their birthdays. I’ve decided to mostly avoid covering rally drivers and South American touring car drivers for the time being since I think I need to do a lot more research in those areas and these tend to be the columns I write more slowly. Even if I do keep up with my tight schedule of one column every day to November 30 (which I probably won’t), that will still leave 136 drivers on my lock list for next year, and that’s not even counting drivers who I do not presently consider locks who might become locks by next year (whether it’s Oscar Piastri or Tyler Reddick or Kirk Kylewood or Oliver Rowland or whoever). Obviously, I still have a lot of work left…
