1,000 Greatest Drivers: Ralph DePalma

I just finished rating all the seasons for all the active drivers who are not currently on my list. I spent way too many hours doing that instead of writing, although that should help facilitate the writing process in the near future as I am now beginning to sort out which drivers are on the bubble and which won’t quite make it. Today, I just started going through all the drivers who were in my near-miss category alphabetically and I’ve now done everyone through Raul Boesel. I ultimately decided Boesel was a lock because what ultimately separates him from the other near-miss IndyCar drivers like Roberto Guerrero, Darren Manning, Bobby Marshman, Vitor Meira, and other drivers like that is that he had major accomplishments outside of IndyCar (a World Sportscar Championship, a 24 Hours of Daytona win, 3 Stock Car Brasil) wins and the others did not. Also, he was relevant at least somewhere pretty continuously for like 20 years and none of those others really matched his longevity either. I also upgraded Diego Aventín, Michael Bartels, and Gary Beck from my near-miss category to my lock category in today’s work. I also made Andrea Caldarelli a lock (bad oversight) and Erik Carlsson and Tom Trana locks after I saw they also had some Swedish touring car titles in addition to their international rallying successes.

After going through a combination of the current drivers as well as the near-miss drivers from the A’s and B’s who I had underrated, I am now upgrading all the following to the bubble: Rico Abreu, Jack Aitken, Gunnar Andersson, Facundo Ardusso, Richard Attwood, Julian Bailey, Andreas Bakkerud, Warwick Banks, Jason Bargwanna, Kevin Bartlett, Whit Bazemore, Jack Beckman, Bernard Béguin, Dave Blaney, Maximilian Buhk, Nicky Catsburg, Anton de Pasquale, David Gravel, Ayhancan Güven, Matt Hirschman, Shawn Langdon, Austin Prock, Davide Rigon, Luca Stolz, and Frédéric Vervisch.

This means I now have 731 locks and 324 bubble drivers. That leaves 471 drivers for me to go through, which should include nearly all the likely contenders except for rising active drivers. Most of these drivers in my near miss category probably belong in that category or lower. I tend to find that the drivers I’m overrating most are sports car or rally drivers with marquee race wins but not many overall wins in total, while the drivers I’m underrating the most I think are pre-World War II sprint and midget racing drivers (which was a much more important era for those series, midget racing especially, than the drivers who emerged post-World War II).

Technically, this now means the bubble should be 15 points, not 14, which means a lot of the guys I felt instinctively didn’t really deserve it have now fallen off, but there are others who I will still want to retain. I still have even more years “overextended” obviously as I have more than 200 drivers listed for a lot of years and I’m going to have to reduce them. As a result, I’m not going to shift the bubble up from 14 points until I’ve nailed down the top 200s for those overextended years, and that might take months.

Anyway, here are the current point totals for the active drivers who have points but are not yet deserving of being on the list (although some of them will no doubt make it) through the year 2025, which does not consider anything from this season yet:

13: Maximilian Götz, Hayden Paddon, Jordan Pepper, Ricky Thornton, Jr.
12: Julien Andlauer, Philip Ellis, Ricardo Feller, Jules Gounon, Buddy Kofoid, Jan Kopecký, Matt Payne, Alexander Sims, Kenta Yamashita
11: Chris Buescher, Luca Engstler, Antonio Giovinazzi, Andre Heimgartner, Harry King, Norbert Kiss, Dylan Pereira, Nick Yelloly
10: Laurin Heinrich, Hiroaki Ishiura, Oliver Jarvis, Christian Lundgaard, Kevin Magnussen
9: Klaus Bachler, Alex Bowman, Matteo Cairoli, Ed Carpenter, Louis Delétraz, Alessandro Ghiretti, Maximilian Günther, Kevin Hansen, Liam Lawson, Alex Lynn, Brandon Overton, Bobby Santos III, Lance Stroll, Santiago Urrutia, Charles Weerts
8: Connor de Phillippi, Tom Dillmann, Sam Hafertepe, Jr., Jack Hawksworth, Carson Macedo, Robert Renauer, Mick Schumacher, Adrien Tambay
7: Robert de Haan, Marcus Ericsson, Robby Foley, Erik Jones, Bubba Pollard, Aaron Reutzel, Alex Riberas, Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., Yuki Tsunoda, Bubba Wallace, Ye Yifei
6: Taylor Barnard, Chase Briscoe, Paul-Loup Chatin, Danny Dietrich III, Ferdinand Habsburg, Callum Ilott, Daniel Juncadella, Anthony Macri, Miguel Molina, Ryan Preece, Morris Schuring, Madison Snow, Jaap van Lagen, Rinus VeeKay, Connor Zilisch
5: Kimi Antonelli, Robert Ballou, Dmitry Bragin, Bastian Buus, Santino Ferrucci, Jochen Hahn, Côme Ledogar, David Malukas, Daison Pursley, Matthieu Vaxivière
4: Oliver Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto, Charlie Eastwood, Sacha Fenestraz, Ty Gibbs, Isack Hadjar, Loek Hartog, Corey Heim, Carson Hocevar, Jens Klingmann, Théo Pourchaire, Bryan Sellers, Robin Shute, Robert Shwartzman, Ryan Timms
3: Kai Allen, Justin Allgaier, Eduardo Barrichello, Josh Berry, Austin Cindric, Jaxon Evans, Nirei Fukuzumi, Ross Gunn, Harri Jones, Tadasuke Makino, Martin Ragginger, Joel Sturm, Lukas Sundahl
2: Yazeed Al-Rajhi, Ricky Collard, Austin Dillon, Dennis Hauger, Trent Hindman, Arvid Lindblad, Tim McCreadie, Norman Nato, Kakunoshin Ohta, Freddie Slater, Daniel Suárez, Nicolás Varrone
1: Marcus Armstrong, Ben Barnicoat, Cole Custer, Louis Foster, Michael McDowell, Paul Menard, John Hunter Nemechek, Ma Qing Hua, Christian Rasmussen

I know there are current drivers who I’ve rated who aren’t on the above list, but that’s at least the vast majority of them. (Franco Colapinto and Zane Smith are currently at 0 points although I expect both of those to change soon.) Let me know in my chat feature if there is anyone you think I should have rated higher or lower based solely on performance before 2026 or if there are any current drivers I have not listed there who you would like me to evaluate.

Obviously, including this year changes quite a bit. Barring a generational collapse, Antonelli will certainly be in my top 25, which is an E (10 points) and moves him onto the bubble, and if I list him 4th place or higher that’s at least 20 points and he attains lock status. Heinrich will probably also be an E and will jump to 20 points. Matt Payne will likely crosses the threshold as well. Some of the others at 11-13 stand a shot of making the bubble this year. Malukas and Lundgaard are probably both sitting at E- right now, which is 5 points. That would move Lundgaard to the bubble (15) and Malukas closer to it (10). Gibbs I’d be a little harsher (C+/3 points) because while he’s much improved, he is not the JGR team leader while Malukas and Lundgaard have been at Penske/McLaren. I suspect those two will do a lot better in my open wheel model this year than Gibbs will in my stock car model. Malukas beating Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin and Lundgaard beating Pato O’Ward is worth a hell of a lot more than Gibbs only beating Briscoe (who, as indicated above, doesn’t really excite me historically yet, although he stands a slight chance of making it).

Today’s DePalma entry raises another issue. One thing I’ve become more aware of recently is that there was actually a fair amount of racing going on during the two World Wars. The Indy 500 may have stopped, but aside from that, AAA championship racing continued on as scheduled throughout the US and DePalma actually won eight races in 1918; it’s his winningest year. Most sites like ChampCarStats and Racing Reference will tell you he only won six because apparently those were the only races that were marked as “championship races”. ChampCarStats acknowledges the two non-points wins. I say they were all non-points wins. All respected IndyCar historians acknowledge that there were only two championships (1905 and 1916) prior to the year 1920, so all eight of DePalma’s non-points wins should count as wins to me. This raises the question: if this is the season when he won the most races, should I rate it? I think the answer is no. For the most part, racing shut down globally in 1917 and 1918 and most of these races were scrimmages lasting less than a half hour. While racing entirely shut down globally in 1943 and 1944, one thing I learned relatively recently was that there was a lot more racing than I thought in 1942 and 1945. There were a lot of midget series that ran in 1942 as well as in the US in 1945 after the war ended, and there was some South American racing in 1942 as well. Again, I think there wasn’t enough racing globally for me to feel comfortable rating those years, although once again, I will take that stuff into consideration to a slight degree when calculating drivers’ career dominance or longevity or whatever once I start ranking those categories after I’ve decided on the 1,000.

Obviously, for 1915, 1916, 1940, and 1941 I’m making a different decision though. I realize Europe shut down all its motorsports activities during the two World Wars, but the US had everything running as usual in those years and so did South America prior to World War II. Obviously, those top fives will be shallower since they almost completely exclude European drivers and will mostly be dominated by IndyCar drivers, but Juan Manuel Fangio won both the 1940 and 1941 Turismo Carretera titles and Luigi Villoresi won the 1940 Targa Florio, one of the last races in Europe before the war, so actually both of those seasons have a bit more international flavor than you might expect. I will not be adjusting the points structure for those years, although I obviously won’t be completely filling all my tiers for those years since there simply won’t be enough deserving drivers. Your loss for your imperialist tendencies, Europe.