1,000 Greatest Drivers: Larry ten Voorde

The best active driver you've never heard of. (Okay, some of you have heard of him.)

This guy is pretty hard to research because he remains very obscure despite how dominant he has been and it’s difficult to even find interviews about him or people writing about him simply because Porsche Supercup does not seem to have its own grassroots fan base because it is paywalled and tours with F1. Nonetheless, his greatness should be beyond dispute if you look at his teammate records and the like. He has just announced his retirement from Porsche Supercup after the 2024 season. It remains to be seen what he will do next, although I assume he’s either going to switch to WEC or DTM, where many of the recent stars from those series go (Morris Schuring, who ten Voorde has already obliterated, is emerging as a star in WEC although admittedly Schuring’s earliest successes came at a much younger age, Thomas Preining won a DTM title after previously winning a Porsche Carrera Cup Germany title, etc…) While I think I’m going to stand by what I said yesterday when I said that Pascal Wehrlein is the most underrated driver this decade as many people tend to dismiss him as an F1 bust when he actually isn’t, ten Voorde may be the driver who is the most unfairly obscure. Those who know who he is know that he is great, but Porsche Supercup does not seem to have the infrastructure to produce international stars (much like the British Touring Car Championship or to a lesser extent Formula E) so drivers can have great performances in these series and not get the props for them. But trust me, I give ten Voorde his props. While I have not yet listed him on a global top five, I came very close to doing so in 2021 and I think I will finally put him in my top five this year, especially since almost all the major league racing series this year have been pretty shallow and had considerable parity at the top level. I might have even listed him #1 this year if he had won the Porsche Supercup, PCC Germany, and PCC Italy titles simultaneously. It looked like he was going to do that for most of this year, but he ended up kind of choking PCC Italy to Keegan Masters, so that’ll likely keep him out of the #1 position. I don’t know what his exact position in the top five will be, and I haven’t updated my touring car model since May (all the races since then are not included in his teammate comparisons), so I will likely wait until I do that before I determine where specifically I will rank him. Also, even though I originally put him in the C tier in 2022, I upgraded that to C+ now.