1,000 Greatest Drivers: Luigi Chinetti/Dick Thompson

Possibly American sports car racing's greatest owner-driver and greatest amateur.

After back-to-back posts waxing nostalgic for the ‘90s (and let’s face it, 2000 was still the ‘90s), it’s time to return to this millennium and talk about last weekend’s Atlanta race (I wrote this before the North Wilkesboro race, but just didn’t finish the driver posts until afterward). Ryan Blaney posted one of the most dominant drafting wins in a long time. Indeed, Blaney’s 171 laps led were more than any driver in a drafting race since Richard Petty’s 184 in the 1964 Daytona 500. This is admittedly not that surprising since Atlanta’s 248-lap races last longer than the standard 200-lap or 160-lap Daytona races and the 188-lap Talladega races. I wouldn’t call this the most dominant drafting win ever or anything because he did have to fight for it, because there were 30 lead changes, including 22 on track. However, in the races when somebody led all day (like the 1997, 2001, or 2005 Pepsi 400s), there wasn’t necessarily as much passing in the field overall as there was last Sunday (okay, I’m probably wrong about 2001) so if you adjusted dominance by the level of competition in the field in general, this might’ve been one of the best drafting races ever.

While Blaney has pretty consistently been the top Ford driver since the start of 2023 and you could even make a case for 2022 despite his teammate Joey Logano having his least undeserving championship, Logano and Austin Cindric were usually every bit the match for Blaney in recent drafting races even if they weren’t even close anywhere else. Not so this time. Even though Logano and Cindric were right behind Blaney for most of Stage 1, they fell off hard in the last two stages, and neither of them even led a lap. The other Fords were significantly worse. The RFK Racing cars were mediocre, although Chris Buescher (as per usual) eked out a finish better than how he ran. Josh Berry and Front Row Motorsports were astonishingly terrible. I really expected Zane Smith to be a low-key contender given the general Ford speed, four straight top tens in his last four starts, and his significant improvement in recent months. However, he was nowhere in the race, but still faster than his teammates. Really, Blaney was the only Ford who was fast at all, which both surprised and impressed me, even relative to his own high standards. I wasn’t sure whether to rate Blaney, Denny Hamlin, or Tyler Reddick higher overall for the season before last weekend, but now I am.

After freebasing hundreds of Matt McLaughlin columns in my halcyon days, I have an instinctive aversion to anything that smacks of artificiality. I need to get over this. While I acknowledge that the Atlanta Motor Speedway was badly in need of a repave, I don’t understand why they felt like they needed to raise the banking. I had grown so sick of restrictor plate racing by that point that the last thing I wanted to see was more drafting races. This explains why I haven’t enjoyed many of the races at Nu-Atlanta as much as I should’ve. While they were certainly consistently better than the Next Gen Daytona and Talladega races (that goes without saying), my millennial heart will always think Atlanta should race as it did at the turn of the millennium. I prefer for drivers to be able to complete slingshot passes as in the classic 1999-2001 races to the current style of racing that features a lot of aero push while sidedrafting, which is fairly new. I’m sure most people will blame the Next Gen car, which is universally despised, but honestly I like it much more than the COT or the Gen 6, and I always have. (Yes, the short track and road course racing has sucked, but I’m glad they’re trying things to remedy the short track racing and does the road course racing actually suck or is it just that one driver is arguably better than the rest of the field combined?)

What I did really like about the race was that the quality of equipment seemed to matter less than on most intermediate superspeedways, as most of the good drivers in slow cars were fast (Shane van Gisbergen, Ross Chastain, Erik Jones, Carson Hocevar) and at least there weren’t many major crashes. Maybe throttle response doesn’t matter as much as it once did at Atlanta, but you can’t say either the race or its finishing order were very unrepresentative of the quality of the fields, and that’s a big plus. Although Blaney’s pit crew is notoriously slow, it seems like his luck is finally starting to balance out other than that, as his eight straight races with a top ten finish now match his career best. He probably still won’t win the regular season championship, but his chances have dramatically increased.

LUIGI CHINETTI……………………...USA

Born: July 17, 1901
Died: August 17, 1994

Best year: 1949
Best drive: 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans

The second three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, but better known as the first Ferrari salesman in America and the owner of the North American Racing Team, Chinetti joined Alfa Romeo as a mechanic in 1917, where he met another young mechanic named Enzo Ferrari. Despite being raised in Italy, he fled to Paris during World War I as Mussolini rose to power.

While in France, he began regularly entering the 24 Hours of Le Mans, winning on his Le Mans debut with Raymond Sommer in an Alfa Romeo, but he only drove three hours due to a fever. In 1933, he finished second at Le Mans and won his first 24 Hours of Spa with Louis Chiron before becoming a team owner in 1934. That year, he earned his second Le Mans win with Philippe Étancelin by 13 laps; they successfully covered up their leaking fuel tank with chewing gum. In 1940, he joined Lucy O’Reilly Schell’s Écurie Bleue crew to help engineer René Le Bègue and René Dreyfus’s Indy 500 entry, then stayed in the country as Hitler took over France, eventually becoming an American citizen.

Although he never lived in Italy again, he reunited with Ferrari in 1946 after the war, convincing him to build his own road cars and race cars, which Chinetti would sell, making him the first foreign distributor of Ferraris in both the US and France. He also resumed his racing career, winning the 12 Hours of Paris solo in 1948, then peaking in 1949 with his third Le Mans win and Ferrari’s first; his co-driver Peter Mitchell-Thomson, a British lord, only drove 72 minutes. Chinetti also won that year’s 24 Hours of Spa with Jean Lucas despite running into a house with two laps to go after swerving to avoid a woman who ambled onto the track. After earning Ferrari’s first Sebring class win in 1950 and winning the Carrera Panamericana in 1951, he primarily focused on his career as a car owner. In 1958, he formed the North American Racing Team, which won numerous sports car races (most notably the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans). In this role, he introduced future World Champion Phil Hill to Ferrari. When Ferrari withdrew from the last two F1 races in 1964 due to a sports car homologation dispute, John Surtees technically won the World Championship in a NART car.

Although popularizing Ferrari internationally remains Chinetti’s main legacy, his driving career too often gets downplayed. Few European drivers managed to be relevant both before and after World War II, but Chinetti is an exception. Indeed, I think his postwar career was better. In the ‘30s, he often co-drove with Grand Prix stars, while in later years, he was the unambiguous team leader and often drove either solo or with clearly inferior co-drivers. Most impressively, nearly all his greatest successes came for his own team, which remained relevant long after his retirement. Between engineering, driving, owning, and marketing, he pretty much did it all.

Year-by-year: 1932: E-, 1933: E-, 1934: E, 1935: C+, 1938: C+, 1939: C+, 1948: C+, 1949: 3, 1950: C+, 1951: C-, 1952: C-, 1953: C-

DICK THOMPSON……………………USA

Born: July 9, 1920
Died: September 14, 2014

Best year: 1957
Best drive: 1957 SCCA National at Eagle Mountain National Guard Base

Possibly the greatest amateur driver of all time, Thompson was the only driver to win seven SCCA National Sports Car Championship titles. This championship, which ran from 1951 to 1964, offered no cash prizes but still offered some of the strongest competition in American road racing for much of that period. As a result, most drivers needed to be independently wealthy from another source. Thompson gained his nickname “The Flying Dentist” from his Washington, D.C. day job. Although some SCCA drivers transitioned into pro careers, Thompson wasn’t interested in doing so yet still proved to be one of the top sports car drivers of his time in addition to popularizing the Chevy Corvette.

After buying an MG in 1950, he went to a race at Watkins Glen in 1951, where he and William Kinchloe learned about the next year’s 12 Hours of Sebring. On a whim, Thompson and Kinchloe drove their MG to Sebring and raced it, finishing eighth overall even though neither driver had any experience; Thompson returned to his dental office the next day. He shared the SCCA F Production class championship with Art Bunker in 1954, but he would become best-known for his exploits in Corvettes. In 1956, he won the Corvette’s first SCCA Championship race in Pebble Beach.

In the 1957 Eagle Mountain SCCA National, Thompson convinced his mechanic, former NASCAR champion Red Byron, to adjust the car’s rear axle in anticipation of heavy rain, then lapped all but one of the 19 other starters during a torrential downpour, making both him and the Corvette a star. He won eight races that year to win the B Production title, then won five more titles consecutively (the D Production in 1958, C Modified in 1959 and 1960, B Production again in 1961, and A Production in 1962, another year he won eight times). He also occasionally raced internationally, earning class wins in the 1957 12 Hours of Sebring, the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans, and three at Daytona at various lengths. He finally won his only overall WSC race at the 1000 Kilometers of Spa with Jacky Ickx in 1967. In 1958, he co-authored The Corvette Guide.

I need to be careful about how I rate Thompson because the SCCA series he dominated was fully amateurized, so the competition likely wasn’t as strong as the United States Road Racing Championship, Can-Am, or even Trans-Am, but his record six straight championships in four different classes in a series where hundreds of drivers competed each year still push him over the line. In 1957, SCCA was still the top tier of American road racing, so I don’t think I should penalize him for remaining there and spending little time in the more prestigious series that emerged afterward, especially because he continued to maintain a full-time career. He certainly proved his mettle enough internationally to indicate that he could’ve become a pro if he’d wanted to, but he understandably felt maintaining his dental practice would be a better bet.

Year-by-year: 1954: C, 1956: C+, 1957: E, 1958: C+, 1959: C-, 1960: C+, 1961: C+, 1962: E, 1963: C+, 1967: C-