Before I get to both my LearnedLeague post and my driver post(s), I wanted to mention that I just finished updating my open wheel model. I typically do this three times: at the end of the Formula E, IndyCar, and F1 seasons, but I usually only update my stock car model and touring car model after all races have ended. I may use an intro soon to review the just completed 2025-26 Formula E season, but I’ll need to do more research to complete my statistical table for that series. I’m going to post the entire list of active drivers, and let me know if there’s a current driver I forgot. I included all drivers who made at least one F1, IndyCar, Formula E, or Super Formula start in 2026, and I threw in both the veterans from other series dabbling in F2 (Colton Herta and Ritomo Miyata) as well as Théo Pourchaire (since he’s been signed to a 2026-27 FE ride) and Yuki Tsunoda (since he is currently rumored to be replacing Felix Rosenqvist at Michael Shank Racing). I will be posting the ratings changes for all active drivers without comment, and probably won’t analyze the open wheel model results until after the season has ended.
Max Verstappen: .471 → .477
Luke Browning .414 (NEW)
Fernando Alonso: .421 → .412
Taylor Barnard: .418 → .366
Charles Leclerc: .352 → .354
Lewis Hamilton: .311 → .304
Álex Palou: .258 → .276
George Russell: .260 → .263
Edoardo Mortara: .240 → .244
Mitch Evans: .234 → .233
Pato O’Ward: .246 → .232
Ayumu Iwasa: .128 → .224
Colton Herta: .232 → .214
Scott Dixon: .223 → .210
Pascal Wehrlein: .216 → .205
Josef Newgarden: .218 → .188
Lucas di Grassi: .181 → .186
Oliver Bearman: .052 → .185
António Félix da Costa: .190 → .182
Kyle Kirkwood: .149 → .180
Nyck de Vries: .177 → .175
Joel Eriksson: .181 → .175
Sho Tsuboi: .155 → .173
Jean-Éric Vergne: .184 → .169
Alex Albon: .163 → .164
Théo Pourchaire: .148 → .163
Lando Norris: .165 → .160
Nico Müller: .145 → .152
Rinus VeeKay: .139 → .152
Kimi Antonelli: -.006 → .151
Will Power: .179 → .149
Liam Lawson: .139 → .149
Carlos Sainz, Jr.: .133 → .136
Isack Hadjar: .146 → .135
Nico Hülkenberg: .139 → .134
Sébastien Buemi: .123 → .132
Esteban Ocon: .122 → .131
David Malukas: .094 → .129
Zane Maloney: .164 → .126
Lance Stroll: .126 → .125
Felix Rosenqvist: .134 → .120
Sergio Pérez: .118 → .119
Pierre Gasly: .121 → .116
Valtteri Bottas: .127 → .115
Tomoki Nojiri: .107 → .111
Gabriel Bortoleto: .102 → .109
Alexander Rossi: .107 → .103
Jake Dennis: .102 → .098
Scott McLaughlin: .128 → .093
Oliver Rowland: .081 → .092
Romain Grosjean: .086 → .081
Maximilian Günther: .070 → .072
Igor Fraga: .032 → .072
Santino Ferrucci: .063 → .065
Christian Lundgaard: .039 → .051
Nick Cassidy: .038 → .050
Marcus Ericsson: .045 → .043
Kenta Yamashita: .039 → .042
Graham Rahal: .033 → .038
Ritomo Miyata: -.025 → .034
Ryan Hunter-Reay: .037 → .031
Roman Staněk: .021 (NEW)
Dan Ticktum: .012 → .014
Sena Sakaguchi: -.020 → .007
Oscar Piastri: .002 → .006
Toshiki Oyu: -.007 → .005
Kamui Kobayashi: .014 → .003
Yuki Tsunoda: -.023 → -.011
Arvid Lindblad: -.027 → -.030
Ren Sato: -.061 → -.035
Christian Rasmussen: -.043 → -.048
Conor Daly: -.057 → -.056
Pepe Martí: -.221 → -.064
Marcus Armstrong: -.078 → -.067
Mick Schumacher: -.057 → -.072
Nobuharu Matsushita: -.076 → -.080
Louis Foster: -.105 → -.080
Franco Colapinto: -.125 → -.087
Takuma Sato: -.097 → -.089
Sacha Fenestraz: -.114 → -.093
Norman Nato: -.082 → -.094
Dennis Hauger: -.157 → -.101
Ed Carpenter: -.119 → -.121
Zak O’Sullivan: -.145 → -.125
Caio Collet: -.124 → -.134
Felipe Drugovich: -.139 → -.135
Ukyo Sasahara: -.161 → -.140
Charlie Wurz: -.160 (NEW)
Jack Harvey: -.161 → -.164
Kyffin Simpson: -.237 → -.173
Giuliano Alesi: -.179 → -.173
Nolan Siegel: -.190 → -.184
Kakunoshin Ohta: -.255 → -.193
Tadasuke Makino: -.193 → -.204
Syun Koide: -.258 → -.211
Sting Ray Robb: -.208 → -.213
Jacob Abel: -.311 → -.285
Rikuto Kobayashi: -.514 → -.421
Juju Noda: -.424 → -.423
Katherine Legge: -.436 → -.445
Seita Nonaka: -.549 → -.526
I suppose one of the odd things about me is that I think I like reading criticism more than appreciating art, although I do like plenty of music, movies, and TV shows, mind you. This creates a certain insufferable pretentiousness where oftentimes I have heard of something without having heard or watched it. I’ve read enough music criticism to understand Uncle Tupelo’s importance but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song. Works great for trivia, but still kind of cringe. Macbeth was a gimme. I ended up putting the most common wrong answer for #3, putting citric acid because I focused on the “tangy” part rather than the “yogurt” part. I was surprised my opponent thought I’d be least likely to get the American history question because he knew it and American history is my best category (I’ve gotten 73.9% of questions right there to 73.3% for pop music). I’ll take it. I guess Uncle Tupelo was objectively the hardest question (it’s the one the fewest players got) but I thought the hardest was easily Question 5. I could hardly name like ten American software companies and I certainly couldn’t name any German ones. I knew it had to be three letters since most stock symbols are, but I had no idea what to put, so I just made up DKK for “Deutsche Komputer Kompany”. Did I really think that was it? Of course not, and I’m betting that’s not how you say "computer company" in German either. Never heard of SAP. I put the most common wrong answer Mt. Olympus for Question 6, thinking that was the most obvious answer for a geographical feature. I certainly knew it was a real mountain and that Styx was a fake river, so if I figured out that the answer had to be mythological rather than something that existed in real life, I’d have probably gotten that, I bet.
I blew off driver posts this week because in addition to updating my open wheel model at the end of the Formula E season, I also decided to complete my Formula E statistical table for the 2025-2026 season, and that took longer than you might think because there were so many lead changes to go through. I know, that’s a good problem to have. Most of the lead changes were actually “legit” this time. What I mean by that is unlike previous seasons, very few of them took place when one of the drivers was going into “attack mode”, but admittedly in most cases, drivers intentionally let each other past to save energy, but I count passes like that in NASCAR races at Talladega or Indy 500s, don’t I? I suppose I should do the same thing here. I will probably share that table at some point over the next week and share some early thoughts, but I probably won’t do too much of an analysis yet. One wild statistic: every single driver in the 20-car field had an on-track pass for the lead! Also, all but one driver had a speed percentile in the very narrow range from 37 to 64!
Another reason I was slow this week is that I was planning a double Bob Glidden/Shirley Muldowney post and then I ended up abandoning it when I saw that Glidden especially had a bunch of IHRA wins and I think Muldowney does too but I can’t confirm that yet. There was a while, particularly in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, when the IHRA was not much less prestigious than the NHRA. So I went down a rabbit hole during the middle of last week trying to find lists of past IHRA points standings and winners. I definitely found some of them, but a lot of them have never been properly archived online. Even when digging into the Internet Archive, some of the standings pages weren’t accessible because they were initially accessed through pull-down menus and the Internet Archive never archived those since they weren’t accessed through links. I realize the IHRA has bigger problems now as it just canceled its Stock Car Series, but it’s definitely annoying to see that its site once had an archive of every championship result back to 1999 and now a lot of that isn’t accessible. This still doesn’t help me for drivers like Glidden or Muldowney who predate that era, so I decided to postpone all entries for drag racers and rally racers, since I still need to do more research in those areas.
That clears up a lot of the drivers I’m behind on. I’m going to try to do double posts every day I’m at home and not visiting Mom, at least if I don’t have any paid work. Right now, I don’t have a work assignment and the buses don’t run on weekends, so I could do it today. I also finished a lot of my other projects, including the archive of all my online material last week, and I’ve also finished all the work I needed to finish on the house and am just waiting for the woman at the in-home care agency and the social worker to allow for Mom to be discharged back home, although the former was on vacation so there was nothing I could do about that this week, which is frustrating. I should have more time to catch up on the drivers I skipped having finished all of that stuff. I do want to try to group the drivers thematically for as much as I can. For example, Huff was originally scheduled for August 22 since that was the date of his first BTCC win (although I didn’t quite get it done then), so I paired him with his Chevy teammate WTCC Alain Menu (who was originall scheduled for August 9.) For the record, I covered the third driver in that triumvirate (and probably the best of them) Yvan Muller a long time ago. At least I got some funny anecdotes for Huff (that magazine interview is priceless). Even I think the Menu post is kind of boring, but I think it’s the best I could do.
I am going to choose to pretend tomorrow’s IndyCar race does not exist and all I’m hoping is that none of the American drivers win. Yeah, I’ve made no secret that David Malukas is my favorite driver since his breakout Gateway race in 2022. Even though he’s well overdue for a win at this point, America - and Penske especially for hyping this as a generational event - deserves to lose this one. I don’t want to rant like I did in the lead up to the Coronado race (although it really depresses me that there will be another one), but at least the actual race was good. That D.C. race will suck. But that’s hopefully my last word on this. I think I’m going to put a moratorium for me talking about anything political for the time being, at least until my review of Murphy Brown (I’m two episodes away from being finished with five of the ten seasons).
ROB HUFF………………………………UK
Born: December 25, 1979
Best year: 2011
Best drive: 2024 BTCC Race #9 at Snetterton Circuit
One of the steadiest touring car presences for two decades, Huff won 45 major touring car races, including a record 11 in the prestigious Macau Guia Race. Coming from a working-class background, Huff initially worked at a car wash before improbably working his way into the cockpit after winning numerous successive scholarships to climb the racing ladder without having to expend family resources. The last of these came when his 2003 SEAT Cupra Championship landed him a SEAT seat in the British Touring Car Championship alongside the series’s eventual all-time winner Jason Plato.
After winning twice in 2004, Huff’s car owner Ray Mallock left the BTCC to launch a factory Chevrolet World Touring Car Championship team in 2005. He almost lost his ride before he started after jokingly stating in a magazine interview that he would light a Vauxhall Nova (another GM brand) on fire but managed to extinguish those flames. Chevrolet’s original Lacetti model was slow, causing Huff and his teammates Nicola Larini and Alain Menu to go winless, but the Chevy Cruze, its 2009 replacement, was significantly faster.
In 2011 and 2012, Chevy won 41 of 48 races and swept the top three positions in points both years. Huff tied his new teammate Yvan Muller (Larini’s replacement) with eight wins in 2011, but narrowly lost the title by three points despite becoming the first driver to sweep both Macau Guia Races. He got his revenge in 2012 after Muller slid into Menu at the penultimate Shanghai round and handed Huff the win and eventually the title. However, Chevy withdrew after 2012 and Huff never quite had a championship-caliber ride again. In 2014, he gave the obscure Russian manufacturer Lada its first two wins. When considering both wins in WTCC and its rival series TCR, Huff won all but two seasons through 2023, but made an unusual pivot to the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship, winning the 2020 title in his sole attempt. In 2024, he bookended his career with his second BTCC season for Toyota. At Snetterton, he drove from 14th to 1st in nine laps and set the record for the longest timespan between wins. In 2025, he was named Touring Car Ambassador for the historic racing organization Motor Racing Legends in 2025, effectively indicating his career is over.
Huff was modest about his accomplishments, habitually referring to himself as a journeyman. His 36 WTCC/WTCR/TCR World Tour wins, 4 BTCC wins, 2 STCC wins, 2 TCR International Series, and 1 TCR China win demonstrate his versatility and tell a different story. While he never led my model, his season-to-season consistency was remarkable. Although Muller had an advantage over Huff with two titles to Huff’s one and 20 wins to 16 when they were teammates, their 33-31 head-to-head suggests it was only slight, which is very impressive since Muller’s four WTCC titles are a record. Huff might not be one of the all-time greats of touring car racing, but he was certainly one of the best of his era.
Touring car model: #192 of 1676 (.205)
Teammate head-to-heads: 428-259 (2-0 vs. Toshi Arai, 2-1 vs. Rodolfo Avila, 3-4 vs. Mikel Azcona, 18-2 vs. Marc Basseng, 29-12 vs. Mehdi Bennani, 8-0 vs. Bence Boldizs, 2-0 vs. Caca Bueno, 2-0 vs. Jack Butel, 2-0 vs. Martin Cao, 2-3 vs. Nicky Catsburg, 6-20 vs. Josh Cook, 4-2 vs. Tom Coronel, 2-0 vs. Michael Crees, 5-0 vs. Viktor Davidovski, 1-0 vs. Daryl DeLeon, 2-0 vs. Denis Dupont, 8-2 vs. John Filippi, 6-1 vs. Jordi Gene, 1-0 vs. Kevin Gleason, 11-2 vs. Mikhail Kozlovskiy, 13-11 vs. Johan Kristoffersson, 3-1 vs. Nicolas Lapierre, 38-31 vs. Nicola Larini, 19-3 vs. Benjamin Leuchter, 0-2 vs. Dan Lloyd, 66-58 vs. Alain Menu, 8-11 vs. Norbert Michelisz, 2-0 vs. Ryo Michigami, 11-10 vs. Aiden Moffat, 8-9 vs. Tiago Monteiro, 1-0 vs. Gianni Morbidelli, 2-0 vs. Adam Morgan, 31-33 vs. Yvan Muller, 17-0 vs. Rene Munnich, 8-0 vs. Daniel Nagy, 4-0 vs. Manabu Orido, 1-0 vs. Hoover Orsi, 0-2 vs. Dexter Patterson, 5-1 vs. Kobe Pauwels, 9-11 vs. Jason Plato, 2-2 vs. Maxime Potty, 1-0 vs. Senna Proctor, 2-0 vs. Vincent Radermecker, 1-1 vs. Rickard Rydell, 14-1 vs. James Thompson, 4-1 vs. Jaap van Lagen, 1-6 vs. Jean-Karl Vernay, 16-6 vs. Frederic Vervisch, 16-9 vs. Andrew Watson, 1-0 vs Sunny Wong, 3-0 vs. Frank Wrathall, 2-0 vs. Andy Yan, 3-1 vs. Zhendong Zhang)
Year-by-year: 2003: C-, 2004: C, 2005: C-, 2006: C, 2007: C, 2008: E, 2009: E-, 2010: E-, 2011: E, 2012: E, 2013: E-, 2014: C+, 2015: C+, 2016: C, 2017: C, 2018: C, 2019: C+, 2020: C+, 2022: C+, 2023: C+, 2024: C
ALAIN MENU……………SWITZERLAND
Born: August 9, 1963
Best year: 1997
Best drive: 2006 Race of UK #2 at Brands Hatch
The only driver to win multiple British Touring Car Championship titles in its peak Super Touring era, Menu became one of his generation’s greatest touring car drivers despite a relatively late start and a middling minor league open wheel career. His 1992 BTCC rookie season was interrupted by a season-ending quadbike crash at Knockhill; despite only starting eight races, he still finished ninth in points. In 1993, Menu joined the new Renault team alongside defending champion Tim Harvey. Unexpectedly, Menu nearly doubled Harvey in points and scored his first win at Donington Park. While the Renaults were slow that year, they improved significantly in subsequent years, especially after the then-dominant F1 team Williams bought the team in 1995. Menu finished second in the championship three straight years from 1994-1996 before winning 12 races en route to the 1997 title.
Much like fellow Williams driver Jacques Villeneuve, Menu fell off in 1998, but unlike Villeneuve, he still won three times before switching to Ford Team Mondeo in 1999. Ford wasn’t very competitive that year, but they dominated in 2000 with Menu winning a second title. Menu competed in the BTCC when the series arguably had its greatest fields as plenty of top foreign drivers competed there in the ‘90s. However, after a rules change removed its Super Touring status in 2001, most of the non-British drivers left afterward, and Menu struggled during a three-year winless DTM stint, but he did earn a class win at the 2003 Petit Le Mans.
Menu’s comeback came in 2005 when the new World Touring Car Championship was announced. He signed with Ray Mallock’s upstart Chevy operation and gave the team its first win at Brands Hatch in treacherously wet conditions after leader Andy Priaulx (in the middle of his three-peat) drove off the track. Although he never won a WTCC title while his teammates Rob Huff and Yvan Muller did, he tied Huff’s 23 wins and his 12 wins from 2008-2010 weren’t super far behind Muller’s 20, even though he was older than his teammates. Chevy shut down its touring car operation after the 2012 season. While Huff and Muller bounced back, Menu didn’t because teams weren’t clamoring for a 49-year-old’s services.
Menu’s 36 BTCC and 23 WTCC wins came when both of those series were at their absolute height in competition. I am more impressed by his BTCC career because not only did he win more races and titles there, he also led BTCC drivers in my model three times (1994, 1996, 1997) and only did once in the WTCC (a winless 2005). This makes him the only BTCC driver to lead my model three times other than Ashley Sutton. His overall rating makes him look worse than he was because he had more mediocre seasons than his teammates. I’d probably still take Muller higher, but I think Menu definitely had a higher sustained peak than Huff. Menu was one of three drivers along with Muller and Gabriele Tarquini to successfully bridge both eras.
Touring car model: #249 of 1676 (.174)
Teammate head-to-heads: 282-226 (0-1 vs. Mariano Altuna, 2-0 vs. Toshi Arai, 1-1 vs. Caca Bueno, 1-1 vs. Tom Chilton, 0-1 vs. Christian Engelhart, 0-1 vs. Norberto Fontana, 0-3 vs. Fabrizio Giovanardi, 16-6 vs. Jack Goff, 0-1 vs. Mikhail Grachev, 15-5 vs. Tim Harvey, 8-5 vs. Hubert Haupt, 1-1 vs. Altfrid Heger, 1-1 vs. Eric Helary, 26-7 vs. Will Hoy, 58-66 vs. Rob Huff, 1-0 vs. Andrew Jones, 32-33 vs. Nicola Larini, 2-0 vs. JJ Lehto, 0-1 vs. Craig Lowndes, 2-0 vs. Annette Meeuvissen, 1-0 vs. David Muffato, 23-38 vs. Yvan Muller, 4-2 vs. Yves Olivier, 4-0 vs. Manabu Orido, 1-0 vs. Hoover Orsi, 26-11 vs. Jason Plato, 2-0 vs. Vincent Radermecker, 15-12 vs. Anthony Reid, 4-1 vs. Manuel Reuter, 1-0 vs. Jim Richards, 1-0 vs. Tommy Rustad, 7-8 vs. Rickard Rydell, 11-2 vs. Warren Scott, 0-1 vs. Glenn Seton, 4-1 vs. Tim Sugden, 2-1 vs. Gabriele Tarquini, 10-14 vs. Aron Taylor-Smith, 0-1 vs. Colin Turkington)
Year-by-year: 1993: C+, 1994: E-, 1995: E, 1996: E-, 1997: 5, 1998: C+, 1999: C, 2000: E-, 2002: C, 2003: C, 2005: C, 2006: C, 2007: E-, 2008: C+, 2009: C+, 2010: C, 2011: C+, 2012: E