1,000 Greatest Drivers: Martin Tomczyk

So, I just went through a bunch more grassroots drivers...

I wasn’t pumped to write this one because not a lot has really been written about Tomczyk and he had a rather boring career. It was a challenge to even make this one interesting, to be honest, but I tried.

Instead, I expended far too much effort into rating drivers’ seasons today (well, yesterday). I went through all the drivers who had win lists posted on Auto Racing Research Associates and awarded an E grade to all drivers with 50 or more wins at the grassroots level, an E- for 35-49 wins, a C+ for 25-34 wins, a C for 20-24 wins, and a C- for 15-19 wins. If a driver won a championship or a marquee minor league race like the Chili Bowl or the Race of Champions or something, I sometimes accepted a lower threshold for each win count. I also accepted lower thresholds in general if a driver was primarily competing in an established series like the NASCAR Modified Tour or the World of Outlaws or something rather than just in grassroots standalone races on local tracks. I also went through all the drivers who ranked in the top ten on The Third Turn’s all-time win list. After doing this, I have a bunch more new locks for my list: Will Cagle, Stewart Friesen, Brett Hearn, Doug Hoffman, Alan Johnson, Danny Johnson, Bob McCreadie, Billy Moyer, Dennis Nyari, Billy Pauch, Fred Rahmer, Shane Sabraski, Matt Sheppard, and Al Tasnady. I know most of these guys are regional legends and they got lots of attention in their local papers even if you might not have heard of them in the national press. For the record, I grew up in Syracuse so I certainly knew who Hearn and the Johnson brothers and McCreadie were because they were from my region and they raced and won at the Syracuse Mile a lot when I was a kid, but that made me unsure whether my own nostalgia is causing me to overrate them. Still, Hearn has 913 wins verified on ARRA, second only to Steve Kinser’s 926 and ahead of Dick Trickle’s 741, although they are all behind Sabraski’s 1,003 verified wins on The Third Turn. That seems to be too much to ignore.

Friesen I’ll admit is the one I have qualms about. On the message boards and Discords where I posted, Friesen was frequently the butt of jokes, none of the posters liked him, and he was mocked mercilessly. As a result, it was always harder for me to take him seriously than perhaps it should have been. But I looked up his record on the ARRA, saw he had 435 verified wins, which isn’t super far off from Richie Evans’s 518 or Donny Schatz’s 491, and ahead of Ray Hendrick’s 415, and he’s the winningest NASCAR driver ever. I convinced myself I guess I’ve got to go for it, but I know many of the people I hung out with on previous Discords and even my current one will probably be laughing at me, so I worry that listing him will cause me to not be taken seriously. Granted, the people on The Third Turn’s Discord are a lot more knowledgeable about grassroots racing, and when I was talking about it with them, one of the posters on there reminded me that he was an owner-driver in his 40s, so in a way, you could regard this as kind of analogous to how Dick Trickle and Butch Miller made their NASCAR moves rather late in their career as they were starting to decline so a lot of people were ignorant of the fact that they were regional legends. Granted, everybody knows that about Trickle, but there are probably a lot of people who incorrectly regard Miller as a mediocre truck driver also when he was so much more than that (I don’t think he quite did enough to make the list though). And even if Friesen’s truck career has been mediocre, which I think it has been, that does not erase what he did elsewhere, much like how Dario Franchitti’s terrible NASCAR career doesn’t mean he shouldn’t make the list for his IndyCar successes. And I have J.J. Yeley on the right side of the bubble because I do think his USAC career was dominant enough for me to ignore his decades of NASCAR mediocrity (he would have been a lock if he’d remained in USAC instead of becoming a bad NASCAR driver though). I think I’ve talked myself into it.

With these additions as well as additions to my bubble tier, the bubble is now officially a bubble as I now have 733 locks and 282 bubble drivers for the list of 1,000. When you look at some of the mediocre major leaguers I have on the bubble like Dick Brooks, Mauricio Gugelmin, Dave Marcis, Jamie McMurray, Roberto Moreno, and so on, I think I’d rather take a regional legend with hundreds of wins over any of those guys. Even though all those guys certainly all had solid NASCAR/IndyCar careers, I would say Brett Hearn definitely had more greatness than them even if others like Friesen and Jimmy Horton would probably be much harder sells for people because their NASCAR failures are more famous than their grassroots successes.

I went on The Third Turn Discord tonight and asked if anybody could make me a list of all the drivers who had 100+ career wins on the site and/or 15+ wins in a given season in any series. The webmaster Timmy Quievryn was able to get the list of all drivers with 100+ wins on his site done for me in barely an hour, and I thank him for that. This definitely contained a bunch of names that I didn’t have on my main spreadsheet, where I am evaluating each driver’s case, and now I’ve got a bunch more to look at; I’m also continuing to go through all the locks I already had. I’m still going to have to figure out how to weight each driver’s region. Like 50 wins in some regions aren’t necessarily the same thing as 50 wins in others. If I record Shane Sabraski’s 1,003 wins (including a record 80 in 2012!) according to my general grassroots scoring rubric, that’s going to be giving him lots of E grades, perhaps too many. I think I need to probably adjust the formula down for more recent drivers because I still continue to think the grassroots drivers of the ‘50s-’80s were better than the grassroots drivers in decades since, because there was a lot more money in minor league series before major league TV money started swamping everything in the ‘90s. It would feel a little silly to me to give Sabraski an E grade every year considering how weak I think his competition probably was, but he definitely belongs on the list. It’s probably going to be a while before I start writing the entries on these sorts of drivers since I definitely need to do more research.

I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow. One of my high school friends is going to help me try to push my mom’s car out of the garage, I finally got an assignment from my boss after weeks when he had hardly assigned anything, and I also received an assignment from my counselor to record a list of all the traumatic incidents in my life, which I will be scribbling the night before it’s due like a less conscientious student than I actually was because I was doing all this shit, but at least I have made it a source of income.

Oh, and I found that column I referenced in the Harry Hartz entry about how kids lost their self-sufficiency. I forgot that it was in the right-wing journal American Affairs, but it was Isaac Wilks’s The Zoomer Question. While I don’t support everything on that site by any means, I thought that article was good, but if you don’t want to give them a click, I don’t blame you.

MARTIN TOMCZYK………….GERMANY

Born: December 7, 1981

Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2011 DTM Race #7 at Brands Hatch

Although Tomczyk spent most of his career as a support driver for Audi’s factory DTM team Abt Sportsline, he managed to escape his teammates’ shadows and earned an improbable championship in a three-year old car. The son of Hermann Tomczyk, a former driver, FIA vice president, Formula 1 race steward, DTM race director, and sports president for ADAC (Europe’s largest automobile club), Martin had witnessed every aspect of the sport. While his father’s connections no doubt helped facilitate his auspicious debut, he made the most of it.

Despite never winning a major European open wheel ladder race, Tomczyk nonetheless landed a DTM ride with Abt Sportsline’s junior operation in 2001, making him the series’s then-youngest starter. However, he quickly proved to be no mere nepo baby by finishing second in his third start in a qualifying race at the Nürburgring, then finished fourth in the championship race. The next year, he won the season-opening qualifying race at Hockenheim. It’s unclear whether this should count as a DTM win, so sources differ as to whether he has seven or eight wins. His first full championship race win wouldn’t come until 2006 at the Circuit de Catalunya.

Initially, Tomczyk typically played a support role for teammates Laurent Aïello, Mattias Ekström, Tom Kristensen, and Timo Scheider, and he often had to yield in team orders scenarios. Nonetheless, he was renowned for fair play, neither complaining nor exhibiting uncouth behavior. He had some very real strengths, particularly building up a reputation as one of the best race starters. However, despite back-to-back wins in 2007 and another in 2009, Audi relegated him to their Phoenix Racing satellite for 2011, which only had a 2008-spec chassis. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as Phoenix Racing’s cars were allowed to be 25 kilograms lighter and therefore faster, allowing Tomczyk to win the title and three races while his teammate Rahel Frey finished last in points. His biggest statement win came at Brands Hatch, where he ran down Mike Rockenfeller in the rain. However, he subsequently left Audi and switched to BMW, going winless before he retired in 2016. He made occasional sports car starts for BMW afterward, earning an IMSA class win at Laguna Seca in 2017.

Since the revival of DTM in 2000, Tomczyk is the lowest-rated champion in my touring car model and the only championship with a losing teammate record other than Maximilian Götz, who was widely regarded as one of the biggest travesties of a champion ever. It’s easy to conclude that Tomczyk simply got faster cars than he deserved due to his father’s connections, but I would argue he beat those allegations in 2011. He’s not any kind of all-time great, but he was always widely respected. It should come as no surprise that he followed Hermann into the business side of the sport, where he now serves as the motorsports director of Abt Sportsline. His career might have been rather bland and run-of-the-mill, but it was nonetheless deserving.

Touring car model: #316 of 1676 (.136)

Teammate head-to-heads: 127-163 (13-14 vs. Christian Abt, 4-19 vs. Laurent Aiello, 25-47 vs. Mattias Ekstrom, 11-15 vs. Antonio Felix da Costa, 5-2 vs. Heinz-Harald Frentzen, 10-0 vs. Rahel Frey, 6-1 vs. Joey Hand, 4-5 vs. Oliver Jarvis, 14-22 vs. Tom Kristensen, 3-0 vs. Katherine Legge, 0-4 vs. Allan McNish, 3-2 vs. Miguel Molina, 5-1 vs. Andy Priaulx, 7-23 vs. Timo Scheider, 6-3 vs. Bruno Spengler, 1-2 vs. Peter Terting, 9-3 vs. Karl Wendlinger, 1-0 vs. Markus Winkelhock)

Year-by-year: 2001: C, 2002: C, 2004: C, 2006: C+, 2007: E-, 2008: C-, 2009: C+, 2010: C-, 2011: E, 2012: C+, 2014: C+