Because of my whacked-out sleep schedule, I haven’t been watching F1 races for a while because I’ve been going to bed at 4 or 5 AM and getting up between 11 and noon, and obviously most F1 races are held during those hours and I tend to not get around to them after they have finished. I know this week’s Italian Grand Prix was an all-time classic and I will try to catch up on the races I’ve missed soon, since I have typically only been watching NASCAR and IndyCar live for the most part. The Southern 500 was definitely better than most NASCAR Darlington races lately, but I don’t have much of anything interesting to say about it. The IndyCar race at Laguna Seca was pretty much just as boring as expected (and certainly much worse than Monza) but I thought I’d focus on that since I did finish my IndyCar post-season statistical table. After I finished calculating everything, I decided to nail down my IndyCar rankings and where I will be placing all the drivers on my top 200 list. As I was working on this, I kept a running log of my thoughts on each IndyCar driver’s performance in real time, and I thought I’d share this thought process so you can see how mind works and where my evaluations come from in real time before I’ve converted them into either pretty prose or more detailed driver entries. If this is a hit, maybe I’ll do so for other series as they finish later this year.
This is the first time Palou led my teammate model at the time, but I’m pretty sure he now leads it last year as well since he was barely behind Power, Simpson just shot up based on his performance vs. Dixon this year and Newgarden and McLaughlin both fell this year a lot.
Palou’s current rating for last year was .411, so yes, higher.
Power is at .356 now, so in retrospect Palou has jumped Power, which is correct.
And as I suspected, last year better.
2025 was also way better in terms of passing for Palou than 2026, while this year, he was back to jumping people in the pits as per usual (both the aforementioned Rosenqvist poles at Long Beach and Portland as well as Nashville where Malukas and Newgarden outran him but he benefited from pit strategy as well).
Yes, he beat Dixon significantly worse, but I think that’s more because Dixon fell off a cliff than because Palou improved.
Last year, I had Palou at #1. This year, it obviously looks like Antonelli should be. Palou probably still top five but not a serious contender for #1 this time.
All right, 2nd-5th. I kept thinking it was going to be a hard decision between Kirkwood, Lundgaard, Malukas, and O’Ward, but I think it is less hard now.
Kirkwood obviously second. Although I think Andretti had the second best cars, he thoroughly outperformed Ericsson and Power in speed and passing, but I do think Ericsson and Power’s pretty good advanced numbers are inflated, which is why I think they had the second best cars.
The teammate model swayed me that he should also be E.
Okay, now it’s a debate for 3rd-6th between Lundgaard, Malukas, O’Ward, and VeeKay, who I kinda think I should throw in there now.
When a certain IndyCar team that shall remain nameless interviewed me, the interviewer told me when I advised him he should hire VeeKay that he wasn’t convinced because he felt VeeKay kinda had a low ceiling. I admit, I kind of agree. Prior to this year, he finished 12th-14th in points every year, but 10th for Juncos is pretty insane. And he was fast on both ovals (with a pass for the lead at Milwaukee) and road courses (somehow having the fastest race at Mid-Ohio). I’m still not necessarily sold that he’d be winning or dominating in faster cars though.
Lundgaard and O’Ward is kind of a wash. Not only were they battling each other, alternating who was ahead in points, and feuding all season, they were almost exactly tied in my teammate model. Lundgaard had a significant speed advantage, but O’Ward had a passing advantage. Granted, that’s counting things like O’Ward’s pass on Malukas with the failing plenum. I think I have to go Lundgaard over O’Ward because they clearly didn’t want him there.
Lundgaard outdueled Malukas at the Indy GP and then came from last to win at Road America, which are both more impressive than O’Ward winning at Mid-Ohio just because Lundgaard made a mistake and then sweeping Milwaukee because Power sped in the pits, Lundgaard had a botched pit stop, and then Malukas had the failing plenum.
That also convinces me Malukas should be over O’Ward too honestly. Beat him in my teammate model, significantly beat him in speed. And the advanced numbers were comparable too even though O’Ward was very lucky and Malukas was very not.
Lundgaard vs. Malukas is significantly harder. Malukas was a first-year driver at Penske so being faster than his teammates from day one is impressive, but Lundgaard being faster than O’Ward when they didn’t want him there is too. It might come down to whether I think Malukas’s oval advantage was greater than Lundgaard’s road course advantage.
I have to do Lundgaard. He beat O’Ward in points while Malukas was the only Penske driver to go winless. But they’ll be very close to each other on the list.
Now, where to place VeeKay relative to those three? This is almost a case of wild mass guessing.
VeeKay was only barely slower than O’Ward (54.83 to 59.61) and that’s wild to me.
Okay, I’m gonna dock O’Ward for his luck here.
E
1. Alex Palou
2. Kyle Kirkwood
E-
3. Christian Lundgaard
4. David Malukas
C+
5. Rinus VeeKay
6. Pato O’Ward
7. Felix Rosenqvist
8. Scott McLaughlin
9. Marcus Ericsson
C
Josef Newgarden
Will Power
C-
Marcus Armstrong
Christian Rasmussen
VeeKay, Rosenqvist, Armstrong, and Rasmussen are the ones I’m shakiest on for sure.
Rosenqvist had the dominant leading numbers but an abysmal teammate rating. Armstrong had a good teammate rating but Rosenqvist crushed him in points worse than last year (Armstrong dropped from 8th to 14th, but he ran better). Although normally somebody with Armstrong’s lead share numbers I would not list, they obviously ran closer since Armstrong was faster and won the teammate head-to-head. And I’m gonna swing to doing it both because he was going to win Road America before the engine failure (don’t think Lundgaard would’ve caught him) and also because he was leading the Indy 500 entering the final restart (if they had officiated that like they used to without the endless red flags, he might’ve won).
I do think I really want to stick my neck out for the Sultan of Sketch even though his consistency was awful. He was faster than Rossi and you can say it was only two races but both those races (Phoenix and Gateway) were definitely electrifying, and 0.80 lead shares is a lot for a crap-ass Ed Carpenter Racing team.
Does anybody else even have the least bit of a case? I suppose I could argue for Ferrucci, Foster, and Grosjean but none of those cases I find very convincing and they were all inflated by having rookie teammates.
If it was two standout races for Grosjean maybe I’d do it, but it was just one...
No worthy Indy NXT drivers so that probably finishes it unless I decide to move any of those four around (which in Rasmussen’s case would certainly mean leaving him off the list entirely, but I think I do wanna stick my neck out for him).
Actually, lemme swap McLaughlin and Rosenqvist. Rosenqvist easily could have won both oval and road course races, and I don’t think McLaughlin was really threatening to win any oval races that closely. Plus, Indy.
Until Sunday, I was going to have Newgarden top 100 and McLaughlin not, so maybe that’s jumping him up too high.
If there’s anybody I’m choosing not to list who I would change my mind on possibly, it’s Grosjean.
The thing that still stands out in my mind is that for half the season when it looked like Hauger was outperforming him, I kept thinking, “Why is he still here?” and I’m not sure he did enough to overcome that.
It would be like listing Allmendinger, who I forgot was still in Cup half the season, even though his season is pretty decent too. So, I think both those guys are nos.
I think I remember CBS losing NFL coverage to FOX at the time even though I wasn’t a football fan. It was that big a deal culturally and really cemented CBS as the “old person’s network” until Survivor and CSI revived it, two major phenomenons that seem much less significant in hindsight. Funnily enough, I just watched a Murphy Brown episode about that very subject a couple days ago, but that was weeks after this match. Christie was a safe guess. The two seas were an educated guess but I honestly expected to miss that. I never played Dungeons and Dragons but I did remember that Gygax created it (you see that name once and you likely won’t forget it). Well, I remembered that Herschel discovered a planet, but I knew there were three consecutive elements on the periodic table named after consecutive planets or then-planets: uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. Most people have heard of uranium and plutonium. My guess is most people have never heard of neptunium, so I thought that was easy enough to rule out. I was pretty sure Pluto wasn’t discovered until the 20th century and I correctly assumed that uranium was more common than plutonium. And then for the last question, I was thinking it had to be one of the cities that Paul wrote an epistle to in the New Testament, so I guessed Ephesus. Not a bad guess… This was my last win until my string of 12 straight losses, and I think I’ll blast through those days several at a time pretty soon.
I have a long, more personal intro post that I’m planning and that’s one of the reasons for the delay, but honestly, the main reason is that I’m working on updating my never-ending ultimate driver list. There were 10,000 lists of driver wins per season from the VLN/NLS Nürburgring Endurance Series and I’ve steadily over the past week and a half entered 2/3 of them and that’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing, but it will likely help me write later posts. I’m also starting to catch up on entering a lot of national-level rally series results from the past couple years and I’m trying to find the date of the last race for pretty much every one of 600+ racing series so I can finish updating this year’s data for my ultimate driver list to help me select some of the more obscure drivers for this year’s top 200 list, and I have the Syracuse downtown trivia contest scheduled for tomorrow, although I suspect I’m going to be playing by myself since none of my other teammates will likely show up, but I wanted to do this before my mom came home.
Here’s a driver who sneakily did a vast array of interesting things but never really got his due, probably because he went winless in both his F1 and CART careers.
STEFAN JOHANSSON…………SWEDEN
Born: September 8, 1956
Best year: 1984
Best drive: 1989 Grande Prémio de Portugal at Autódromo do Estoril
Despite going winless in F1 and CART, Johansson was one of his era’s most underrated drivers and a real Renaissance man who displayed great versatility and eclecticism in both his career and life. He first attracted notice by winning a come-from-behind British Formula 3 championship in 1980 while driving for Ron Dennis’s Project Four Racing. Johansson’s F1 debut came in 1983 with Spirit Racing, which was spearheading Honda’s return, but he lost that ride when Honda switched to Williams. In 1984, he won the 12 Hours of Sebring and three Japanese Formula 2 races.
He made a few F1 starts for Tyrrell and Toleman before Ferrari shockingly fired René Arnoux after the 1985 season opener and replaced him with Johansson. Although he was initially hired as Michele Alboreto’s #2 driver, he unexpectedly led at Imola until running out of fuel with three laps to go in his second start for Ferrari, then earned back-to-back second-place finishes later that season. The next year, Johansson actually beat Alboreto in points and earned a career-best fifth-place points finish, but he was nonetheless unceremoniously dumped.
Johansson reunited with Dennis at McLaren alongside two-time defending champion Alain Prost, but the 1987 McLaren was much slower in 1987 and he correctly foresaw that Senna would replace him. He earned five podiums that year but never led. He spent the rest of his F1 career in backmarkers, but improbably finished third at Estoril in 1989 for an Onyx team that DNQed over half its attempts. After his F1 career fizzled out, he moved to Tony Bettenhausen, Jr.’s underdog CART team, giving Bettenhausen his four best points finishes from 1992-1995, even finishing third on his debut. However, his CART career was entirely overshadowed by triggering Jeff Krosnoff’s fatal crash at Toronto in 1996. As Johansson pulled out to pass Emerson Fittipaldi, he cut across Krosnoff, unaware he was trying to pass Johansson. Spooked by the incident, he retired from CART, but continued in sports cars, sweeping Sebring and Le Mans in 1997. He also became an Indy Lights owner (where he discovered and eventually managed Scott Dixon) and a winning CART owner. Most notably, he became a serious artist, designing watches and painting in the hyper-realist, abstract, and urban pointillist styles; he’s even had exhibitions.
Johansson may seem pretty borderline since he led only three laps in F1 despite having multiple winning rides, but besides his sports car accomplishments, I’m listing him for his solid open wheel rating, his 12 podiums (the then-most for a non-winner), and most impressively, his 193-66 overtake record, which ranks fourth since 1984 behind only Max Verstappen, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Prost. However, what stands out most is how he stood out as something of a racing throwback. He raced for the love of it, often not even being paid by fledgling teams, but he also had a rich life outside of racing like the pre-World War II drivers. I think the unusual balance between his athletic and artistic careers impresses me most.
Open wheel model: #170 of 934 (.128)
Teammate head-to-heads: 30-20 (4-0 vs. Kenny Acheson, 2-6 vs. Michele Alboreto, 1-0 vs. Tony Bettenhausen, Jr., 3-6 vs. Thierry Boutsen, 1-0 vs. Martin Brundle, 1-0 vs. Ivan Capelli, 1-0 vs. Robbie Groff, 1-0 vs. Emanuele Pirro, 2-7 vs. Alain Prost, 0-1 vs. Ayrton Senna, 1-0 vs. Scott Sharp, 1-0 vs. Toshio Suzuki, 7-0 vs. Kenji Takahashi, 5-0 vs. Kunimitsu Takahashi)
Touring car model: #1234 of 1676 (-.223)
Teammate head-to-heads: 11-23 (1-4 vs. Jean Alesi, 1-0 vs. Kaj Bornebusch, 0-6 vs. Johnny Herbert, 1-0 vs. Shunji Kasuya, 1-3 vs. Marchy Lee, 3-1 vs. JJ Lehto, 0-1 vs. Volkert Merl, 0-1 vs. Maurizio Micangeli, 1-5 vs. Gianni Morbidelli, 1-1 vs. Jacques Villeneuve, 0-1 vs. Bob Wollek, 2-0 vs. Alex Yoong)
Year-by-year: 1980: C, 1981: C-, 1983: C, 1984: E-, 1985: C-, 1986: C+, 1987: C, 1989: C, 1992: C, 1993: C, 1994: C, 1995: C, 1996: C-, 1997: E-, 2001: C+, 2003: C-