1,000 Greatest Drivers: Kamui Kobayashi

The best Japanese driver of the 21st century.

I still need to do some research here because it is often difficult to determine which driver on a sports car powerhouse team is doing most of the work. Although I have calculated complete lap times and full statistical tables for a number of WEC seasons, I haven’t yet fully archived all of them so maybe I was not entirely ready to write this yet, especially the individual season ratings. You can’t just necessarily figure out which seasons Kobayashi was doing more of the work and which seasons Mike Conway and José María López were. I know that Kobayashi is easily the best of those drivers in general (especially when considering his adaptability since he also had his successful IMSA crossovers and had the best open wheel career of the three), but I also know that most of the Toyota drivers were fairly evenly matched and they all had races where they were fastest, and I did rate Conway as the best Toyota driver of 2022 even though I rated Kobayashi highest in both 2021 and 2023. My guess is Kobayashi was also the best in 2019 and 2020 (especially when considering his Daytona wins), but I have not looked up the lap times or lead changes for those years so if I do so and discover that Conway was faster those years, I might still tinker with a lot of his season grades. These definitely aren’t set in stone and won’t be until I look at all the earlier WEC lap data. Unlike many series, I do think the WEC does have complete lap data for every year since the series started in 2013, so I will at some point do that, but maybe I wasn’t ready to write this just yet. I still decided to since it’s his birthday and I just made it before midnight.