1,000 Greatest Drivers: Oliver Gavin
Chevrolet's longest-tenured and arguably most successful sports car driver, but I think some of his co-drivers were better.
As usual for sports car drivers of this era, the single-season ratings are very approximate as I would like to find more lap time data before I give his seasons more precise grades. It is difficult to tell how much Gavin was contributing vs. Olivier Beretta, Jan Magnussen, Tommy Milner, and Jordan Taylor, and I may not have been entirely ready to write this as a result. I did obtain a lot of information from a thorough biography of him on the General Motors site, which listed which years he either won the pole or set fastest laps in his class in various marquee races, and that helped me somewhat, but I know for me to more accurately evaluate his seasons, I need to hunker down with the lap times. I believe all the Le Mans lap times going back to the era of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (the predecessor to the World Endurance Championship) are still online back to 2011 (which should cover his Le Mans starts from the second half of his career), but the American Le Mans lap times that used to exist have since been erased and that is where most of his legacy is. I believe the data must still exist somewhere but they are no longer online as a long-term result of the IMSA merger and I didn’t think to download them before they became unavailable. If anyone knows some people who might have access to some of these data, that would be awesome. The biography I linked did provide a lot of worthwhile information, which somewhat helped me determine which seasons were better or worse, but I might alter this a lot.
As a result, I’ve ended up determining each sports car driver’s legacy relative to their teammates based on how much each driver achieved when they were teammates with someone else. This is an uneasy proxy when I don’t have the data I want, but it still seems reasonably effective. The drivers who were able to win races with numerous different drivers like Gavin are great while the drivers who won all their races with one co-driver (like Memo Rojas vs. Scott Pruett) weren’t, but I would like to handle my analysis of sports car drivers with more precision. For a lot of these drivers, I use my touring car model, but that isn’t very helpful in Gavin’s case because he had one full-time touring car season in 1996 that was pretty bad, and then he made a couple of Supercars starts as a guest driver where he swept a lot of different teammates, which gave him a pretty good touring car rating, but I know that the guest drivers on Supercars teams generally weren’t doing as much work as the full-timers, so getting a real read on Gavin is difficult, but I think my letter grades are probably vaguely correct.
tl;dr: I probably wasn’t ready to write this yet, but since it is his birthday, write this I did.
