1,000 Greatest Drivers: Speedy Thompson
It doesn't bother me that he doesn't have the legacy that he deserves.
This is one of the drivers I wasn’t really looking forward to writing about. Normally, I’m the guy who likes to hype the underdog drivers who have been erased from history and Thompson’s definitely one of those. His stats are stellar with a 10% winning percentage, four straight third-place finishes in the points standings, a championship-caliber teammate rating, and a lot of Modified wins to boot. I decided he was a lock last year, but I wasn’t happy about it. For all his success, he’s been basically erased from racing history because he intentionally wrecked and nearly killed Herb Thomas, NASCAR’s winningest driver in the Cup Series at the time, to help Buck Baker, his teammate at Carl Kiekhaefer’s team win the championship. Kiekhaefer signed pretty much every top driver of that era at one point and Thomas indeed drove for Kiekhaefer in the middle of the 1956 season before leaving because he felt Baker and Thompson were getting better equipment and that he would be better off driving for himself. Thomas had no business winning that title for the record. Baker won 14 races, Thompson 8, and Thomas 5, and three of Thomas’s wins came in West Coast races against shitty competition that Baker and Thompson didn’t enter just because Kiekhaefer decided to enter him in those races solo to continue his record streak of consecutive wins. Having said that, nobody deserves to have something like that happen to them under any circumstance, even though as it turned out Thomas survived the near-fatal wreck and actually outlived Thompson by over a quarter-century.
Well, I was finally contacted by a contractor to replace the roof and install a ramp so hopefully Mom will be able to come home, although there’s still some paperwork I’ll need to sign before that proceeds. I’m also making headway on getting her car that hasn’t been running since 2020 out of the garage and donating it to Habitat for Humanity. I had to go to the bank today to deposit her Social Security money that gets automatically deposited in the nursing home, and while I was there I asked them to file a lien release statement because I needed to do that in order to facilitate the giveaway, even though the car loan was fully paid off right around the same time the car stopped running, so I guess I’m making progress at a lot of things…
