For whatever reason, it seems like early all the drivers in American motorsports named Ryan were overrated. Whether it’s Hunter-Reay, Newman, Briscoe, or Preece, all these drivers invariably seemed to end up with better performances than their talent levels warranted. Obviously, as last weekend’s Daytona races proved to be a major coming out party for Ryans, with two such drivers thusly named earning their first career wins on NASCAR’s biggest stage. This reminded me of a cheesy slogan for Ryan Phelps Auto Sales that I’m always seeing on Syracuse city buses on days when I visit Mom. I suppose I could’ve gone all in on the Ryan theme and done Briscoe or the not-overrated Dalziel today, but I will go with Olivier Panis and Jean Alesi, two drivers who shared a country, a series, a win total, and a decade. I was planning on doing Panis on his 60th birthday, but I really burnt myself out and was doing anything but writing. I’ve still been doing a heckuva lot of research. I finally finished compiling a list of all the winners from the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie last night. Since this series is the most complicated in motorsports history with around 50 seasons, 10 races per year, 15 or 20 class-winning teams in each race, and 2-4 winning drivers per team, the list of winners consisted of about 10,000 individual driver seasons and now I have to integrate all that into my master driver list and that’s taken me months. I went on a real run and I just did that instead of writing. Since it is the most complicated racing series ever, I did want to finish adding all that stuff before Mom comes also.
Of course all rules must have exceptions and the chief exception to the Ryan Rule in recent years must be Ryan Sieg, NASCAR’s scrappiest underdog of the 2020s. Despite clearly having the speed to win many, many times before in famliy equipment that usualy had no realistic hope of contending for wins, he finally joined Sheldon Creed, Carson Kvapil, Corey Day, and William Sawalich in the first-time winner column. In Creed and Kvapil’s case the wins felt overdue, but Sieg’s arguably felt even more overdue. Since Sieg has technically made Cup Series starts before, he is acually eligible for my stock car model and he has had an above-average rating through every iteration of the model. In my last update, his rating of .076 is just ahead of Joey Logano’s, suggesting that not only is Sieg an above-average O’Reilly Series driver, he’d be above average in Cup as well. Now, I probably don’t actually believe that since my model also spit out that Corey LaJoie was an above average Cup driver and I’m willing to concede now that he wasn’t (even though I still think the Reddit reaction to him was wildly over the top). My model overrated LaJoie because the #7 Spire car clearly was better-prepared than the #77 car back then, and I know that Ryan Sieg’s RSS entries tended to be significantly faster than any of the RSS teams’ other entries, so there’s likely a similar skew here. Nonetheless, if there’s even the remotest possibility that he might have the talent of an above-average Cup driver, it was becoming an injustice that he never won even at the O’Reilly level. He was also arguably the best active driver who had no entry on my master driver list, which currently consists of 32,598 drivers. Because I only list drivers who had a top ten points finish and/or a win in a major league series, a top five finish and/or a win in a top-tier minor league series, 5+ wins and/or a championship in a lower-tier minor league series, or 10+ wins and/or a title in weekly series-type racing and Sieg hadn’t done any of those things yet, it was also becoming kind of an injustice I didn’t have him on tht list when many thousands of inferior drivers are. Also, of course, he seems to be a very nice guy. Now, I’d like to see Brent Crews, Rajah Caruth, and Parker Retzlaff to win in no particular order (I think all of them will someday) and Brennan Poole and Parker Kligerman are certainly more overdue than any of them (but their moment has sadly already passed seemingly).
Preece, on the other hand, I have a much more complicated relationship with. I first heard about him in the mid-2010s when NBCSN was occasionally broadcasting modified races. That was probably the only time in my life I was semi-regularly watching them, so I saw Preece race a lot, and I actually rooted for him then. I also thought the modified play-by-play guy at the time, Derek Pernesiglio, was maybe the best in the business and I wish he’d gotten some real opportunities for the national touring series. So, I was actually kind of pumped when Preece got his first Xfinity Series ride. My fellow RacingStalker Jason Miller, who I have probably talked to about racing more than anyone else ever, kept arguing he sucked mainly on the basis of how badly Ross Chastain outperformed him at JD Motorsports, while I would mildly defend him based on the modified races I watched while acknowledging that Chastain was always better. Not surprisingly, it turned out that we both had a point.
Although Preece did win a couple Xfinity Series races for Joe Gibbs Racing, he did so in an era when the JGR cars were so dominant that they made all their drivers look better than they were, whether it was Erik Jones, Daniel Suárez, Brandon Jones, Harrison Burton, or whoever. Preece kind of lost me when he stuffed Carson Hocevar into the wall at Charlotte in a truck race (nowadays, of course, most people would probably say Hocevar deserved it). For a driver with Cup Series experience to wreck a rising development driver was extremely offputting to me, even before we knew what we currently know about Hocevar. It didn’t help that grassroots fans remained fiercely loyal to Preece regardless of his Cup Series mediocrity. It seemed like he kept failing upward. Most of the people in my circles felt that Stewart-Haas Racing replacing Cole Custer with Preece was a mistake and they convinced me it was too. After all, Custer, Tyler Reddick, and Christopher Bell all looked pretty much interchangeable in the Xfinity Series. Now that the latter two are superstars, it stood to reason that Custer could’ve been as well, especially since he’s the youngest of that trio.
I know many people would find it weird to support a literal nepo baby over a grassroots underdog, but Custer really did look better at that time and besides, many grassroots drivers are some level of nepo baby to some extent anyway due to the exorbitant costs necessary to compete even at the lowest levels. I admit I was wrong now, but it seemed right at the time. And then Preece seemingly failed upward again when RFK Racing hired him. I kind of think RFK’s cars are better than any of their drivers right now (even Chris Buescher) and it seemed weird to me that he was going to be Buescher’s teammate again after Buescher had already destroyed him at JTG Daugherty Racing, in the same way that Felix Rosenqvist’s return to McLaren after they already dumped him does. At least Rosenqvist won the Indy 500 and fought for several road course wins this year to justify his elevated reputation. Preece had nothing like that in his arsenal but just seems to curry favor based on his grassroots image. Watching Preece make the Chase on the basis of a single drafting win (his only finish better than 8th this season, by the way) was rather irritating, especially at the expense of Shane van Gisbergen, who has had way better performances or Chastain, who dominated Preece for years at JDM.
But I’ve come around again on Preece a little bit. He came a lot closer to matching Buescher in his current RFK stint than he did at JTG. With the random bursts of speed he’s occasionlly shown, I was warming to the idea that he deserved to be a Cup Series winner and would eventually get there, especially after his season-opening non-points win at Bowman Gray Stadium. I finally begrudgingly listed him on my top 200 list for the first time last year and I might do so again, but this year feels worse to me. I don’t really think he was the best choice at either SHR or RFK but he hasn’t been as wildly undeserving as I expected he’d be. That much I will admit. I was kind of hoping that SVG and Preece could both make it at Austin Cindric’s expense. Cindric was the worst-performing of these drivers according to me, but I knew that wasn’t likely to happen.
I have developed a reflexive mild antipathy towards drivers with loud Internet cult fan bases or stan armies, and usually these tend to be grassroots drivers. People assume working class drivers are automatically better. I understand people preferring to root for them, but honestly, nepo babies are often better. Having great family resources or connections makes it more likely you’ll get an earlier start in karting and learning your trade at age four or whatever is strongly correlated with future success. So, there was no real chance that Preece would’ve grown up to be as good as Ty Gibbs. Being a nepo bab is only a problem if you develop a sense of entitlement (again, Gibbs) or if your eternal job security causes you to become so complacent that you no longer feel you need to prove yourself (Austin Cindric, Austin Dillon, Marco Andretti, Graham Rahal - I think all these drivers were more talent than they ultimately showed). Since I tend to find that online fans tend to underrate nepotism drivers and overrate drivers with working class aesthetics (whether it’s Preece, Josh Berry, Chase Briscoe, Matt DiBenedetto before they hated him, or especially troll demon Noah Gragson), I often go too far in the opposite direction. Anyway, all that preamble was intended as a partial mea culpa about Preece. I don’t think I was entirely wrong, but I do tend to underrate all of Reddit’s favorites (as I’ve also noticed regarding my opinions on Connor Zilisch, who I still did include in my top 100 the last two years, mind you, but I pushed back for a while because it seemed like he was the only driver you were not allowed to criticize; now I’ve cooled off on this since he’s had so much bad luck and people are criticizing him too much now) and I need to do better at not doing that. But you will never convince that me that Noah Gagson is worth supporting in any way.
I’m going to spare most of my IndyCar discussion for after the Laguna Seca race (I wrote all this before this weekend’s races, but didn’t finish these posts until after), but I had a few thoughts about the Milwaukee doubleheader that I needed to get down. IndyCar’s decision to finish the rain-delayed first race after the conclusion of the second was some goofy officiating, but I guess that was dictated by television. Pato O’Ward becoming the first driver to win both races on the same day in 45 years was impressive even if both races were complete and total buzzkills and I am starting to find O’Ward truly insufferable. He certainly needed a lot of help to pull that off as he inherited the lead in “Race 2” after Will Power sped in the pits and his teammate Christian Lundgaard had a bothed pit stop. Said botched pit stop feels a little suspicious to me because McLaren was spewing all kinds of venom about how Lundgaard couldn’t drive ovals and they’d have had hella egg on their face if he’d won that one after they fired him. Since O’Ward also had a botched pit stop earlier, I’ll probably give them the benefit of the doubt, but if there’s any team capable of such subterfuge and duplicity, it’s McLaren, full stop. And O’Ward just totally lost me after he called Lundgaard “full of shit” for claiming McLaren set up the cars to favor him, and it’s starting to feel like he had something to do with Lundgaard being forced out because his precious ego couldn’t handle finally being challenged for once, and that really bothers me.
Then, of course, David Malukas was running away with “Race 1” until O’Ward retook the lead after Malukas’s mysterious plenum failure on the last restart. Because I’ve been eagerly awaiting Malukas’s first win for so long now and I’m growing tired of O’Ward, I was kind of irritated by the caution for Will Power scraping the wall since he was immediately able to drive into the pits and I kind of expected Malukas to get jumped on a restart, but I didn’t really understand this plenum thing until after the fact, even though I remember that Marcus Ericsson jumped O’Ward for the win at St. Pete for the same reason, so the plenum giveth and the plenum taketh away. Why does Ericsson get to have all the good luck while Malukas has none though?
Hours later, Malukas called out Chevy for the engine misfire, which I suppose could’ve put him in hot water with Team Penske because Roger Penske co-owns Ilmor Engineering, which builds the Chevy engines. Penske has fired people before (Paul Tracy) for criticizing his car packages, so it’s possible Malukas might’ve bit off more than he can chew. On the other hand, he did just clinch being the highest Penske finisher in points in his first season there, so I have a hard time seeing Penske firing him and I think he’s cooled off a bit in terms of firing people for insubordination like in the Tracy and Kurt Busch days. He’s probably still safe…
I put The Treasure of the Sierra Madre instead of Sierra Madre but they gave me that anyway. Never heard of Lady’s Supper, put Venus Flytap for that. Guessed phi for tau but I had no idea that 2 * pi was represented by a Greek letter and I probably should have. I guessed “Pip” for Question 5, which was certainly a really good guess because I knew that was the main character of Great Expectations, which was an autobiographical novel, but I didn’t know that. My opponent expected me to miss the food/drink question because I nearl always miss the food/drink questions, but even though I’ve never eaten there, that’s something that has premeated the culture to such an extent that you don’t have to be a foodie to have heard of it, which is how I feel about a lot of the food questions, but I know most people seem to get them so I always assume they’ll be easier for others. After this round I was 5-0-1 and then I won the next one too, but after that, I lost 12 straight matches to fall from leading to being in position to be relegated before finally earning a forfeit win on Friday. Both those streaks seemed really improbable to me, but the winning streak was probably more improbable than the losing streak.
