1,000 Greatest Drivers: Pedro Rodríguez/Carlos Reutemann
A two-for-one after I missed yesterday...
Yeah, I missed the Rodríguez entry yesterday. I was in a bit of a depressed funk and had some work to do yesterday also. I did finish entering all the series I considered relevant from the Super Touring Register into my master driver list yesterday, so that just leaves the two sports car sites, the Formula 2 Register, Will White’s Auto Racing Records, and a handful of loose ends elsewhere before I’m done with this. Hopefully, I will be done with everything I’m going to include on the master driver list by the end of the summer. Here are my planned posts this week:
April 12: Carlos Reutemann (paywalled)
April 13: Darren Turner (free)
April 14: Jack Ingram (free)
April 15: Pietro Bordino (free)
April 16: Harry Hartz (free)
April 17: Riccardo Patrese (paywalled)
April 18: Paul Tracy (paywalled)
I was going to do Irv Hoerr on April 14, but I swapped him out for Ingram because as with John Morton, I realized I do not think Hoerr did enough to qualify for lock status, although both of those guys are tentatively on my list. I hadn’t scored Ingram’s seasons yet and every time I visit the Third Turn to look up seasonal win counts in either the NASCAR National Modified Championship (before the current tour started in 1985) or the Late Model Sportsman tour (before it became the Busch Series in 1982), the number of wins for each driver per year often change. I realized I was rather inconsistent with regard to how I was evaluating drivers in those series, so I added more structure to it today. In general, I gave any pre-Busch Late Model Sportsman drivers and any pre-Whelen Modified Tour modified drivers a C- if they won 5-9 confirmed races, a C if they won 10-14, a C+ if they won at least 15, but I typically require either 25+ wins or 20+ wins and a title for an E- grade. After I did Ingram, I went back and adjusted some of his Late Model Sportsman contemporaries like Sam Ard, Harry Gant, Darrell Waltrip, and so on now that I’ve added more structure to this and am going off vibes less. I did allow for certain seasons with fewer wins than those thresholds if a driver had a strong points finish. I started going back through a bunch of Late Model Sportsman drivers to look at their complete win counts and I’ve decided to move Butch Lindley and Glen Wood to the right side of the bubble. I didn’t have them in the 1,000 before but now I do. There might be a couple more drivers from the Late Model Sportsman ranks that I might do that for, but it would probably indeed only be at most a handful more I think…
