1,000 Greatest Drivers: Nick Tandy

Named after the first computer I used as a kid! (No, not really.)

As with last Sunday’s driver Oliver Gavin, the driver who Tandy replaced as Tommy Milner’s IMSA teammate for Corvette Racing, I may have to alter a lot of his single-season letter grades once I figure out what his lap times were like relative to his teammates each year. I should be able to do that for almost the entire period of Tandy’s relevance since Tandy didn’t break out internationally until around 2014 and IMSA still has lap times available for all races going back to 2016 (even though I haven’t downloaded all of them yet). IMSA’s website has had prior years available in the past as I had already collected all the lap times for 2015, which I still have in a spreadsheet somewhere. This is how I can report that he was substantially faster than Patrick Pilet because I remember from my calculations back then that he was, which is partially why I rated him a possibly absurd 4th in my top 100 list that year. However, I’ve decided to drop him out of my retrospective top five for that year. I’ve since gone more thoroughly through every year since 1960 to determine my top five drivers globally for each year. I left Vettel at 1st, Hamilton at 2nd, and Ogier at 5th for that year, but I replaced third-place André Lotterer and fourth-place Tandy with Philipp Eng (who I previously had 68th) and José María López (who I previously had 6th) respectively. I promoted Eng so highly because he won both the Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany titles that year along with a class win at the 24 Hours of Nürburgring, giving him 12 wins overall. I was clearly massively underrating Porsche Supercup all along and my touring car model proved that to me. Not that my higher esteem for this series hurts Tandy at all as his Porsche Supercup record was so impressive despite not winning a title there that he ranks 11th overall in my touring car model.