1,000 Greatest Drivers: Peter Gregg

Still struggling with sports car evaluations...

Actually, I think I’m going to skip the Taylor brothers this week and only write five columns. In preparation for the Taylors’ posts, I started digging back through my archived Excel spreadsheets ‘cause I knew I’d calculated speed percentiles for some earlier IMSA seasons in the mid-2010s but I couldn’t remember which ones. Even though the IMSA post-race data used to be available on imsatiming.com, that site now consists of an under construction page marked as “Web Server’s Default Page” with an orange robotic comic book character smiling at you as if to mock you for having the slightest inclination to believe there might be something called content there. Apparently, after IMSA switched their timing to Al Kamel Systems, they ditched all the data they had previously collected. You can still find links on the Internet Archive. Some of them work but most do not.

However, I found that I had already calculated speed percentiles for the 2013 Grand-Am season and the 2014 and 2015 IMSA seasons, and the changeover to Al Kamel wasn’t until 2016, so I should be able to obtain speed percentiles for all the years after the IMSA reunion, and I already have 2022-2025 so 2017-2021 are the only years I haven’t finished calculating. I thought I’d like to do that before I finish the Taylors. I was already looking at adapting my natural races led/on-track passing data to IMSA as early as 2015 so I do have all the lead changes for all classes for 2015 and 2016 also, hence I should be able to have complete statistical tables for all the categories I track for IMSA after 2014 at some point. Unfortunately, I didn’t go back and collect the lead changes for 2013 and 2014 so now I probably won’t be able to for the GT classes. I do still have all the overall lap leaders for those races previously obtained on race-database.com at the time and at this point, I’m not sure anyone else does because most of the other sites that do list lap times only list what car led each lap and I think I might be the only one who still has driver data listed. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered updating race-database for this reason, but I just stopped thinking it was worth the effort once I knew it would never be profitable. However, it’s obviously going to take me several weeks if not months to complete all those other seasons, so yeah, I should probably skip the Taylors until I can do that. What I can tell you is that my memory at the time was that Jordan was way faster than Ricky, and I have confirmed that. His speed percentiles are vastly faster from 2013-2016 (yes, I know they drove for different teams in 2013) almost to a Palou v. Dixon extent, so maybe Ricky is less of a lock than I thought. However, I believe that Ricky overtook Jordan and then was faster at some point while he was at Penske, but I haven’t done most of those seasons yet and obviously knowing which driver was the bigger contributor in 2017 when they were both dominating all over the place is going to be important for both of their careers so yeah, I should wait.

I’m still finding all sorts of new information that I had missed periodically too. While I was researching Hurley Haywood, I discovered that he had won a title in the IMSA Supercar series in 1991. I had somehow never heard of this and I’m not sure why because I already have a lot of the obscure IMSA and SCCA series fully archived on my master driver list, even the RaceTruck Challenge. This series didn’t seem to have great competition overall, but there were a few great drivers competing in it, mainly Hans-Joachim Stuck and Haywood and to a far lesser extent Randy Pobst and Doc Bundy, who are both hovering right around the bubble right now. If you forced me to go with my gut instinct right now, I would say Pobst will be just barely on the right side of the bubble and Bundy just barely on the wrong side, but don’t quote me on that obviously. But yes, this means what I just wrote about Haywood literally yesterday was wrong as he has more wins and championships than I thought because of this series, and I’m going to have to rate a couple more of Haywood’s and Stuck’s seasons than I thought I would because I didn’t realize they were competing there in the early ‘90s so I think I didn’t rate some of their seasons that I should have.

Because of the multi-driver teams in endurance sports car racing, being unable to determine which driver was doing most of the work is going to be a major problem, but I would really say only for the 2000s American drivers. From the early 2010s on, like I said, I should be able to have complete statistical tables for IMSA and I think the World Endurance Championship and European Le Mans Series and Asian Le Mans Series (if I want to bother with those last two). For the decades prior to the 2000s, there were numerous solo IMSA wins and many of the top American sports car drivers also simultaneously earned solo wins in series like Can-Am, Trans-Am, or other single driver series in addition to their solo IMSA wins. For the European drivers, most of them were big stars in either open wheel or touring car series simultaneously and are therefore I can get a measure of their talent captured in those models. But for the American drivers who strictly competed in sports car racing, it’s much harder because touring car racing was never really a thing here. NASCAR’s popularity proved such an element in the room that it probably prevented a major touring car series from ever emerging, even if NASCAR is not a touring car series itself. So I’m gonna have real trouble determining whether say, Memo Rojas deserves a spot on this list or not or what to do with drivers like Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney because their heydays are too far in the past to be able to capture lap times or on-track lead changes, but they’re also too recent to have won in solo drives so I can’t really distinguish them properly. (Okay, maybe I can if I scour video footage… I do have Grand-Am lap leaders all the way back to 2004 and ALMS lap leaders back to the beginning, but that obviously won’t help me with the GT drivers.)

I also invariably end up finding that I’ve been overrating sports car drivers in general on this list, but maybe that is just me being biased towards drivers who competed in single-driver series. When I’m going through and rating sports car drivers season-by-season, I end up rating their seasons lower than I expected to after I did more research, especially the ones who competed in GT classes and not for overall wins. Some of those classes were very weak so I ended up recently dropping Andy Lally and Robin Liddell off my lock list onto my bubble list (although they’re still on the right side of the bubble) because Grand-Am GT racing was just not very strong, and during the IMSA split, it’s obvious to me that ALMS GT racing was where it was at. I also find that I’ve overrated a lot of the ‘60s era World Sportscar Championship drivers, particularly those who competed for class wins and not for overall wins. There were a lot more classes back then and a lot of those classes ended up having only two or three finishers at times, so I can’t be as impressed with class wins back then as I thought I would be. I think the overall wins were even more important then, not less, particularly because some of the best drivers in the world including F1 superstars were competing for the overall wins, while the sports car-only drivers then were in my opinion much more second-rate than would be the case later. I ended up dropping Raffaele Pinto from my lock list entirely off and he’s now in my near miss category for this reason. I was impressed by Pinto’s combination of sports car wins and his European Rally Championship title, but even though the WRC didn’t exist yet, there was an international rally championship that was sort of a proto-WRC at that time, and I believe that series had overtaken the ERC in talent by then, so I ended up moving a driver from my lock list entirely off the list. Like I said, I get it wrong on sports car drivers a lot. I think I will be doing the same for André Rossignol when I evaluate him today. Rossignol was the first driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice and in back-to-back years, which you’d think should make him a lock, but I don’t think the competition was as strong as either the IndyCar or Grand Prix racing at the time, so I didn’t give Rossignol any top five seasons, which a pre-World War II driver typically needs since I award substantially fewer points to that era, and I think I’m going to have very few if any 1920s sports car drivers on at all. I’ll have to think about that one, but for now, I think he’s off.

Obviously, none of these issues apply to Gregg, so I’m okay writing this one. Gregg was a prolific winner and he had a lot of solo wins in IMSA, Trans-Am, and even IROC, so I feel like I have the narrative arc of his career pretty nailed down and I don’t have to do as much research on him to complete this as I feel I’m going to have to do especially for the 2000s and 2010s American sports car drivers who never competed in single-driver/touring car series, etc… I think I’m starting to figure out what I’m doing with sports car drivers, but there are still a bunch of blind spots. Maybe there will be fewer if/when I complete my post-IMSA merger and WEC statistical tables.