1,000 Greatest Drivers: Peter Collins

Fear not! No Controversial Content today!

After yesterday’s overwrought and deeply annoying intro, I figured I’d make this one lighter. After the roof repair was finished a couple weeks ago, the contractor tore up the stairway into our front door to prepare for the roof to be installed in its place this week, although it rained pretty heavily today so they didn’t start yet. The deep cleaning is scheduled for Wednesday, so I have begun preparing for this by moving things around to rooms that aren’t being cleaned to make the rooms that need to be cleaned (especially the living room) more accessible for the cleaners. Hopefully after this, Mom will be allowed to come home since she never wanted to be in the nursing home in the first place.

I forgot to pay my life insurance - again - and my policy was suspended - again - so I had to apply for reinstatement - again. Second time in the last year this has happened. The issue is that I used to have a file where I stored all my credit card payment due dates with my insurance payment due dates and then all my credit cards went into default, so I never built up a good habit to remind myself to pay my life insurance policy on time. I am starting to wonder what I’m keeping it for since the odds of me either getting married or spreading my seed as a virginal 41-year-old are at this point unbelievably remote. However, I suppose I should keep it in case I outlive either of my parents. After that, maybe I’ll look for the right charity. Pretty soon, I know I also need to find a new family doctor and figure out whether my Medicaid has expired since I got my current job so I can have a physical as my counselor recommended. That’ll be pretty cumbersome, but at least it feels like most of my real-life obligations over the past year and a half will be finished after that except for continuing to clean stuff out of the house to prepare for when I lose it after Mom’s death.

My bar trivia team (Bartenders Always Right at Heritage Hill North in North Syracuse took the lead in the bar’s summer tournament after our second consecutive win. It certainly helped that the team we were chasing, Super Awesome Team, didn’t show up. Every week there are six regular rounds with five questions each. The first two rounds award 10 points per question, the next two award 20, and the final two 30. At the halfway point, there is an “Impossible Question”, which has a precise numeric answer that the trivia host, Nick, assumes no one will know the correct answer to. Whoever comes closest to the correct answer earns 30 points. I actually got it exactly correct once; that was really exciting! The fifth round has a hidden theme, where you have to guess what the theme is for 30 points and the sixth is a round where you have to identify things based on their pictures. I’m typically terrible at this, but during the picture round, there’s also an “under the covers” question where Nick (who also serves as the DJ for the bar during trivia hours) simultaneously plays a cover of some famous pop song and you have to identify the original artist who recorded it. I usually focus on that and let my teammates focus on the pictures since I almost never miss the songs and I usually miss the pictures.

Pop music is typically my best category and I think I’ve gotten the last 20 questions or so related to this category right. I joked to Nick when he played The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” that he should have asked who played that, probably correctly stating that I’m the only player who would’ve gotten that. There were so many of those pseudo-alternative one-hit wonders where the song was bigger than the band. Them, Nine Days, The Calling, Evan and Jaron, Blessid Union of Souls (I hate that this is the correct spelling of their name), Vertical Horizon, etc… I guess those last two weren’t one-hit wonders, but what they all share in common is that the songs were famous but the bands weren’t. But even if I consistently ace the pop music questions (unless they’re from like the last two years) and I usually also do well in more academic-leaning categories, I tend to suck at any categories having to do with animals, food, or current events. Obviously, my arfidiocy explains the second and I’ve stopped following the news for a while, so that explains the third. I have no good explanation for the first. Thankfully, my main teammate Bill does still follow the news so he can help me with that. I’m basically our team’s leader at this point but the bartenders occasionally feed us answers since they’re technically on our team (hence the name), without which we wouldn’t have won either round. Two weeks ago, the picture round was about identifying fish. I would have gotten exactly zero of them but the bartender pretty much single-handedly swept that round for us by herself. Then last week, she whispered the answer to the game-ending physics question and we were the only team to get it, which I likely would’ve gotten wrong. Because Super Awesome Team didn’t show up last week, I bet conservatively to make sure we took the lead in the tournament even if we got the question wrong and we accidentally won. Every week, a picture of the winning team is uploaded to Instagram. I’ve worn my custom-made Racermetrics shirt several times, so if you dig, you can find me decked up in racing analytics-branded gear at least one of the weeks we won. I will not be linking that since I do not wish to have an Instagram account. Facebook is bad enough; that’s even worse.

I’m presumably going to have to quit bar trivia, going to mass, or probably socializing with anyone in real life again if/when Mom comes home because I’ll have to watch over her so she doesn’t fall, but it’s been fun and I plan on showing up for all the remaining weeks in the summer tournament at least. If we win the Heritage Hill tournament, we’ll be eligible to compete at the city-wide finals, which I believe is held at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown (formerly the Hotel Syracuse). It has a fairly hefty cash entry fee since there are cash prizes. I think we’d likely be way outclassed by several of the teams at the other bars, but if we qualify, I’ll want to enter.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I wound up becoming a bar trivia regular once I learned that existed several years too late. I’d been regularly watching Jeopardy! since I was four or six or something, but I stopped sometime in college. In the wake of Ken Jennings’s original run, it seemed to me that Alex Trebek increasingly started using his podium as a platform for a terrible standup comedy routine. The more he started telling dirty old man jokes about threesomes or whatever (which was becoming an increasingly annoying tendency of his as the 2000s progressed), the less desire I had to watch and I didn’t really start watching consistently again until this year. But I guess I was always into trivia from boyhood. Trivia was my favorite experience in my humanities class, I literally joined the RacingOne née speedworld.net message board to compete in a trivia contest, and when I went to the 2014 National Scrabble Championship in Buffalo, I honestly enjoyed the trivia contest (and Morris Greenberg lending me his advanced sabermetrics book, without which Racermetrics wouldn’t have been possible) more than the Scrabble. It was always part of me I suppose, and now I’m finally embracing it. At least it gives me one more social experience than I had a couple years ago. Demented and sad, but social.

Tomorrow, I will be covering probably the most famous retired driver I haven’t covered yet as he finally turns old enough to rent a senior apartment!

PETER COLLINS………………………..UK

Born: November 6, 1931
Died: August 3, 1958

Best year: 1956
Best drive: 1955 Targa Florio at the Circuito delle Madonie

The only driver to voluntarily relinquish a World Championship, Collins, the son of a garage owner and haulage merchant, caught his big break when Aston Martin boss John Wyer met him at a party in 1951. Wyer invited him to a sports car test at Silverstone, where HW Motors also tested their Formula 2 car. Both teams offered him contracts simultaneously, so Collins would race sports cars for Aston Martin and F2 for HWM; this included F1 races since F1 used F2 cars in 1952 and 1953.

Although Collins scored no point in 13 F1 starts from 1952-1955, he immediately impressed in sports cars, winning the 1952 Goodwood 9 Hours and 1953 RAC Tourist Trophy. His turning point came in 1955, when he won his first F1 non-championship race, earned his first of back-to-back Le Mans second-place finishes, and most notably won the Targa Florio with Stirling Moss in a Mercedes. Moss crashed into a ditch before some spectators rescued their car. Collins recovered into the lead and accidentally climbed a stone wall with his wheels catching air, yet somehow managed to shift into reverse and won by four minutes over Juan Manuel Fangio and Karl Kling, making him an instant star.

After Mercedes’s withdrawal, Collins signed with Ferrari in both F1 and sports cars alongside Fangio in 1956. He won back-to-back at Spa and Reims and was in position to win the championship at Monza after Fangio’s steering broke, but handed Fangio the car, arguing he didn’t want to win the title due to Fangio’s bad luck. With Moss winning, Fangio and Collins splitting points dropped him to third. After a lackluster 1957, all three Ferrari drivers, Mike Hawthorn, Collins, and Luigi Musso, had blinding speed in 1958, but this ultimately became Ferrari’s most tragic year. Although Collins won the 12 Hours of Sebring, Enzo Ferrari fired him after Le Mans, believing he intentionally damaged his clutch but relented when Hawthorn, his best friend, refused to race without him. Musso was killed at Reims, but Collins earned a flag-to-flag win at Silverstone despite starting sixth. Two weeks later, Collins was killed at the Nürburgring when he flipped at Pflanzgarten, was ejected from the car, and struck a tree. Collins’s death triggered Hawthorn’s retirement after winning the championship, but he too died months later in a road accident.

Collins’s reputation is confusing due to many conflicting stories. Brits praise his sportsmanship for sacrificing his championship, yet Musso’s girlfriend reported that Collins and Hawthorn laughed after his death. There seems to be evidence both for and against Collins intentionally grenading his clutch, and while Brits considered him a relatively mistake-free driver, he had a very high crash rate. It’s hard to know what to believe. Regardless, he was obviously a transcendent talent in both open wheel and sports cars. If he had lived through Ferrari’s arguably most dominant season in 1961, he likely would’ve won that championship in a cakewalk and it’s undeniable he had many wins left in his future.

Open wheel model: #70 of 931 (.212)

Teammate head-to-heads: 26-18 (5-0 vs. Eugenio Castellotti, 0-1 vs. Alfonso de Portago, 1-0 vs. Jack Fairman, 1-3 vs. Juan Manuel Fangio, 1-1 vs. Paul Frere, 1-0 vs. Olivier Gendebien, 4-1 vs. Yves Giraud-Cabantous, 0-1 vs. Jose Froilan Gonzalez, 1-0 vs. Duncan Hamilton, 4-2 vs. Mike Hawthorn, 2-2 vs. Lance Macklin, 3-5 vs. Luigi Musso, 1-0 vs. Cesare Perdisa, 1-0 vs. Andre Pilette, 0-1 vs. Tony Rolt, 1-1 vs. Wolfgang von Trips)

Year-by-year: 1952: C-, 1953: C-, 1954: C-, 1955: C+, 1956: 4, 1957: C+, 1958: E-