1,000 Greatest Drivers: Matt Neal
The Blur to Jason Plato's Oasis (or did I get that backwards)?
I didn’t provide a schedule last week because I was setting up my little April Fool’s prank and I used my LearnedLeague recaps as an excuse, but here is my schedule for this week:
April 5: Matt Neal (paywalled)
April 6: Tommy Hinnershitz (free)
April 7: Jack Sears (free)
April 8: Rick Kelly (free)
April 9: Frank Stippler (free)
April 10: Kasey Kahne (paywalled)
April 11: Pedro Rodríguez (paywalled)
As with fellow British Touring Car Champion Chris Hodgetts yesterday, I plugged Neal and Sears in here because those are the anniversaries of their first wins, and Neal’s first win on this date in 1999 was widely considered the best BTCC drive ever as he became the first independent/privateer to win a race since 1988. I couldn’t figure out who the last one was, because that was still at the end of their multi-class period and I couldn’t precisely tell the factory teams apart from the privateer teams, but I think it was Roland Ratzenberger, better known for dying the same weekend as Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. The independent teams typically had older cars and inferior chassis, engines, and tires but there was a major change in 1999 where the independent teams suddenly had access to the same tires that the factory teams did and afterward, they were a lot faster. Although Neal lost out on the factory Nissan ride in 1999 to one-and-done champion Laurent Aïello even though Neal offered to drive for free while Aïello was paid £700,000, he got a major assist when both of the factory Nissans retired from his first win and he certainly benefited from the fact that Aïello and his teammate David Leslie dominated the season and had fast enough cars to finish 1-2 in points. Neal’s cars were obviously slower, but fast enough to facilitate his breakthrough. While I find his actually dominant period overrated and he was actually one of the lowest-rated BTCC champions in my model, he certainly deserves props for building a dynasty out of a team that was pretty godawful when he debuted.
But his pretty dickish rivalry with Jason Plato overshadowed both of their entire careers quite honestly as it’s the first thing anyone will think about with regard to either of them, especially if they weren’t actually fans of the series and only knew about them in passing. They acted like Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, but they were really more like Sébastien Bourdais and Paul Tracy in that their numbers really overstated their greatness due to a lack of competition, the feuds were mostly one-sided as Tracy and Plato were really the main aggressors (but the main difference is that Plato was both the better driver and the main aggressor, while Bourdais was the better driver and Tracy was the aggressor in that feud), and Tracy and Neal both became renowned for reactionary politics in their post-retirement years. At least I’m better able to appreciate Neal from a distance because he gets no press on this side of the Atlantic while Tracy remains a Western Hemisphere annoyance who is difficult to avoid, although less so after he’s been finally extricated from the broadcast booth. And yes, he’s coming up soon too.
