1,000 Greatest Drivers: Stuart Graham

Playing catch-up on the drivers I skipped.

This article was supposed to come out on January 9 but I was still working on my top 200 list at the time so I’ve decided to put it off until now. Initially, I had the legendary Argentine touring car brothers Juan and Oscar Gálvez scheduled for March 2 and 3, but I wasn’t ready to cover that scene, so I need to do more research. In addition to my decision to stay away from current drivers as much as possible so I don’t have to keep writing and rewriting their entries, I think I’m going to skip writing about rally racers, Argentine touring car drivers, and drag racers since I don’t feel informed enough to do any of them justice, as my dud of an Antron Brown entry yesterday proves. Even these restrictions still give me hundreds of options though. I didn’t think I’d be able to even get 500 words out of Graham considering how short both his career and his Wikipedia page are. Wikipedia has him primarily listed as a motorcyclist, but I happen to think he’s more important as a driver.

I suppose I should say something about Iran. I don’t really want to and I don’t feel like I’m informed enough to. I didn’t even know Iran had had only one ayatollah reigning continuously after Ayatollah Khomeini died, so I probably shouldn’t be covering this. Nonetheless, I kind of feel obliged to. It frustrates me so much that I felt way better informed about current events as a kid back in the ‘90s/early 2000s when I was watching World News Tonight with Peter Jennings every night and I don’t even know who I should possibly be trusting for news now (and sure, I admit that I was probably credulous to even trust him). I will say I fell down a bit of a leftist rabbit hole while also being a culture war centrist who tends to hate both the maximalist liberal and conservative culture war stances (sure, I typically hate the conservative culture war stances more), so there aren’t many people who speak to me these days. I feel like the only person younger than 50 who still believes civility is a virtue.

Most of the people I respect have been vehemently anti-imperialist, so my knee-jerk reaction is that we shouldn’t have been meddling there to begin with. I was an Iraq War opponent in 2002 when it wasn’t cool, although I did nothing whatsoever to protest and I fell for Afghanistan at the time. I half-listened to Colin Powell’s speech about the “weapons of mass destruction” and didn’t believe a word of it because it was immediately obvious to me after the “Axis of Evil” speech that Bush was going to invade Iraq under any pretext. I couldn’t believe all the Democrats fell for it, and I can’t believe that David Frum, auteur of the “Axis of Evil” speech now is one. I tried to keep myself from bursting out laughing when my tenth-grade English teacher read to us from Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech as if it was great literature; I didn’t quite succeed. Sure, Reagan’s the last President who had memorable speeches, but that doesn’t mean they were actually good. And I was ranting about how the US military budget should be reduced and how deregulation was evil and how there should be more spending on the poor at a time when most of my classmates did not care about politics; now as a middle-age man, I feel like I care vastly less than people who used to be way more apathetic than I was in high school. And of course I was blissfully unaware how most of the dismantling of the welfare state actually happened under Clinton until I was much older.

I’ve already mentioned repeatedly that the post-9/11 military bombast is what caused me to stop watching NASCAR, and the fact that all my Cornell classmates utterly rejected me is what got me back into it. The early 2000s environment felt very grotesque. You had John McCain parodying “Barbara Ann”: ♪ Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran ♪ and actually thinking he was funny. Well, I guess McCain finally got what he wanted. And it really frustrated me how most of these anti-Trump Republican weasels pretty much took over the Democratic establishment to the point that Kamala Harris was celebrating America having the “most lethal fighting force”. I can almost see why people got hoodwinked into thinking Trump was a candidate for peace. I never bought it for an instant, of course, but almost the only thing I could ever stomach about him was his occasionally isolationist rhetoric and now that’s gone too.

I certainly don’t think the Ayatollah Khamenei was a good man, but I’d be hard-pressed to say basically any leader is. I get that he was oppressing his people, too, but again, what government doesn’t? (I still think rule by corporations is worse than rule by governments though…) I know the reason the Ayatollah Khomeini dethroned the Shah in the first place in 1979 was because Eisenhower had installed the Shah and overthrown their previous leader in 1953. You live by the sword and you die by the sword and even though my knowledge of Iran in my lifetime isn’t much (because our media was so preoccupied about Iraq and talked about Iran much less), it feels like this is simply repeating the same mistake. But I also feel like that I’m just shooting my mouth off about something I’m not informed enough about, and I don’t even know what news sources to trust…

Anyway, I figured I’d pair this with a more obscure driver since tomorrow, I will be discussing a household name driver who is probably worse.

STUART GRAHAM…………………….UK

Born: January 9, 1942

Best year: 1974
Best drive: 1975 British Saloon Car Championship Race #3 at Oulton Park

The son of inaugural Grand Prix motorcycle racing 500cc champion Leslie Graham, Stuart initially followed in his father’s footsteps after he died in the 1953 Isle of Man TT by finishing third in points in both the 50cc and 125cc classes in 1967, winning a race in both classes, including the 50cc class at the Isle of Man TT. After retiring from motorcycle racing in 1970, he and his engineer brother Chris started going to Group 1 races at Oulton Park in 1973, where they helped engineer seven-time British Saloon Car Championship class winner Les Leston’s extremely poor-handlng Chevy Camaro and Leston dominated the next race. When Leston couldn’t get to the track in time for a subsequent race, Graham filled in and won from the pole.

This Group 1 series was absorbed into the BSCC in 1974 and Graham was immediately dominant, earning eight overall wins in a Camaro including his first four races consecutively. Despite earning over half the overall wins and winning the Class D championship, he only finished third overall because Bernard Unett and Andy Rouse dominated their classes by larger margins. 1975 offered more of the same as he again earned eight overall wins and the Class D championship but lost a three-way tie for the championship because Rouse and Win Percy won 12 and 10 races respectively.

Graham also won the RAC Tourist Trophy, the most prestigious British touring car race both years. While most teams used multiple drivers, Graham drove alone and lapped the field both times to join Freddie Dixon as the only person to win the major 2-wheel and 4-wheel tourist trophies. He even became the last BSCC driver to lap the field in a 40-minute race at Oulton Park. He credited his success to his lightweight frame and his ability to conserve his equipment and tires. Overall, he won 19 British Saloon Car Championship races, seven French Touring Car Championship races, one Belgian Touring Car Championship win, and 1 European Touring Car Championship class win in his short career before retiring in 1981.

After retiring, Graham set up a successful Honda dealership, founded the Silverstone Festival for historic racing, and directed the British Racing Drivers Club. As a result, he seems to be better-known as an ambassador for British racing than as a driver, but his driving career was no slouch. Much like Gordon Spice, it seems unfair Graham never won an overall BSCC title simply because other drivers dominated less competitive classes by a larger margin, but he has a strong legacy, even if it’s kind of swept under the rug in retrospect. He isn’t frequently cited as one of the world’s best touring car drivers, but he should be as he was one of the few BSCC drivers who really stepped out of his comfort zone by competing and winning in other countries’ series. More importantly, he managed to avoid severe injury in either discipline, and was universally admired with not a hint of controversy in his career.

Touring car model: N/A

Teammate head-to-heads: 3-0 (1-0 vs. Jonathan Buncombe, 1-0 vs. Richard Lloyd, 1-0 vs. Vince Woodman)

Year-by-year: 1974: E, 1975: E, 1977: E-, 1978: E-, 1979: C