1,000 Greatest Drivers: Leonel Pernía

One of the few great drivers to also play a "stick and ball sport" professionally.

Obviously I learned a lot about Argentinean touring car racing while I was building my touring car model, but this still feels like a blindspot for me and I continue to think I have underrated the Argentinean drivers on my previous lists. I realize that Agustín Canapino and some of his fans really embarrassed themselves during his IndyCar stint, but as I revealed in my Canapino column, I think Canapino had so much fervent support from his diehard fan base in part because the ignorant ugly (North) American fans assumed he was an unrepentant hack just because the Argentinean touring car series were far off their radar, even though José María López (who was only barely better than Canapino and Pernía if he was even better at all, which is debatable) won three straight World Touring Car Championships not long afterward, which were much less competitive than the Argentinean series were. As I do more research, I’m continuing to crank the season grades up more and more. I only ranked Pernía 56th for 2022 and 37th for 2023, which would correspond to C+ and E- according to my letter grades, but I’ve decided to bump both of these seasons up to E because I don’t think I took his Turismo National success seriously enough, and even if you exclude that series he had seven wins in the Argentinean major league series in both 2022 and 2023. When you consider that he is pretty much tied with Shane van Gisbergen in my model (who I do consider one of the greatest drivers in the world right now, and who I actually am choosing to rank first for 2016 because he won multiple major league championships), I think I’m forced to conclude that Pernía was also one of the greatest drivers albeit for a shorter time. I’m not gonna give him SVG kind of grades because I do realize the competitive depth was less than Supercars, but maybe by not as much as the layman may think, even though Scott McLaughlin performed in IndyCar and Canapino didn’t. (I might add that McLaughlin was significantly higher-rated than any of these guys in my model not to mention the car difference, so maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.)

And yes, I wrote soccer instead of football. I know I have a largely American audience.