1,000 Greatest Drivers: The Nakajimas

Man, this has been a rough spring...

Note: I wrote much of this Saturday morning/afternoon, so a bunch of it about this weekend’s races probably didn’t age well. I’ll discuss this weekend’s races in my next column.

After Alex Zanardi, Kyle Busch, and Ned Jarrett all died in barely a month’s time, the racing community lost legendary reporter Steve Waid, who ran NASCAR Winston Cup Scene for 28 years, taking it from a niche publication with only 9,000 subscribers housed in a country store to a mainstream periodical with 150,000 during his tenure as executive editor. Since 2019, he’s been better-known as the co-host of The Scene Vault podcast with Rick Houston, which has been my favorite auto racing podcast to follow for years. I tend to primarily listen to music podcasts and TV and movie podcasts to a lesser extent, so I never quite finished listening to all the Scene Vault episodes, and in fact, I think I’ve listened to very few of them since the tail end of 2022, but I think I’m going to try to catch up pretty soon.

Typically, Houston and Waid interviewed a driver, crew chief, or engineer from the ‘70s to the ‘90s when Winston Cup Scene was in its heyday, although they occasionally interviewed people who fulfilled other roles or from other periods. I didn’t agree with their views on everything - I don’t think the Winston Cup points system was good, I don’t think Mark Martin was robbed of either the 1990 championship or the 2007 Daytona 500, and I especially don’t think Randy LaJoie should’ve been on the 75 Greatest Drivers list or considered for the Hall of Fame, but I’ve always loved to listen to them and learned a lot from them. It has helped me with certain columns here. If they hadn’t interviewed Steve Hmiel, I might not have known that Terry Labonte won the first race at Rockingham in 1986 with a show car. I had no idea what to pick for his best race before listening to that, but afterward, it was entirely obvious.

I was definitely more influenced by the online racing columnists than the NASCAR print media at the time. I primarily read the columnists that Jayski linked in the ‘90s and 2000s. Matt McLaughlin was my favorite. Although best known as a Frontstretch writer, his best work was for the earlier websites speedworld.net (which hosted the first message board I posted on in the year 2000, then turned into SpeedFX and RacingOne later) and RaceComm (a site oddly run by Matt Kenseth’s future spotter Mike Calinoff). His most iconic articles were “Dale Earnhardt’s Greatest Hits” after Bristol 1999, “Blood on Their Hands” after his death, and “Racers Race” after Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s injury in an ALMS crash in 2004, before he was fired at the end of that season for being too critical of NASCAR after NASCAR bought RacingOne. I didn’t read Waid much because McLaughlin’s columns were free and Waid’s were not, but they were obviously of the same school, and I’m sure Waid influenced McLaughlin, which made him an indirect influence on me nonetheless.

I did pick up a few copies of Winston Cup Scene in the ‘90s. There was a short-lived racing hobby shop in the village of North Syracuse (or maybe it was in the Carousel Center mall that became Destiny USA in Syracuse; that would make more sense, but I don’t remember). It must’ve only existed for about two years or something, but in 1997 and 1998, I made a number of purchases there, including my first books, periodicals, and probably diecasts. I bought the 1997 Official Directory for the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, NAPA Almanac of Stock Car Racing, some periodical called Racing 97, and the 1998 NASCAR Preview and Press Guide. The Official Directory contained a lot of articles reviewing the 1996 season, box scores and the top ten in points for each race (although they excluded North Wilkesboro because it was removed from the schedule), places to enter the top ten finishers and the top ten in points for each race in 1997, along with information on how to join fan clubs and even lists of hotels and restaurants near each track. The NAPA Almanac had a list of the top 50 points finishers for every Cup Series and Craftsman Truck Series season (for some reason, they didn’t do the Busch Series) along with winnings leaders, Rookies of the Year, all-time wins (they had Bobby Allison at 85 even back then), and lists of races by year and track, and lists of races won by driver. This was like manna from heaven for me as a young fan, because at this time, there were no box scores for Winston Cup races available anywhere online before 1994 until a year or two later, when TNN’s country.com website digitized the information from Greg Fielden’s books and entered results for all modern era races, but then, they took it down after TNN lost coverage in 2000 and I still don’t think there were box scores for any NASCAR races prior to the ‘90s online until racing-reference.info launched in 2003 (then as racing-reference.com). I asked my dad for the Fielden books one Christmas and he didn’t get them ‘cause they were out of print, but if I’d had them and if somebody whispered in my ear to learn SQL (which I had never heard of until college), I probably could’ve even beaten racing-reference to the punch. But starting race-database.com in 2007 was too late for me to ever make that profitable, although in retrospect, I’m not sure how much money even Alan Boodman ever made from racing-reference in the first place.

The NAPA Almanac was probably the biggest influence on me. Like a proto-Daniel Céspedes but without the data visualization talent, I gutted it for all kinds of information that at that time was available nowhere. I did enter all the top 50 points finishers into a Microsoft Access database along with average points per race, winning percentages, top five percentages, and top ten percentages, most of which doesn’t interest me that much today. I was jotting down wins by track type, wins by month, career wins across all series including the regional touring series once I had the Press Guides, and lots of other arcane stuff. One time, I made a list of the highest points finishers by year who had never been the highest points finisher before. I didn’t put most of this stuff online. I had a Geocities website Frontrow Racenet (I have no idea why I combined four words into two) but I didn’t use it as an outlet for this kind of thing until I launched race-database in 2007.

Anyway, I did buy a few issues of Winston Cup Scene at this same shop as well and enjoyed them. They were very slick and well-produced, especially the photography, which was better than anything I’d seen anywhere else. I believe the first issue I bought was for the spring Darlington race weekend in 1997. I don’t remember the coverage for the Winston Cup race, but I really remember enjoying the Busch Series write-up, which must have been written by Houston, but I didn’t read it nearly often enough to recognize Waid or Houston by name. Although I did subscribe to Inside NASCAR magazine later, I never thought of subscribing to Winston Cup Scene, probably because I knew I couldn’t afford to, so I ended up usually only reading online columnists (which is obviously what did in Winston Cup Scene in the end), but I definitely respected it when I did read it, and I will really miss Waid for sure.

In my old age, I kind of see this childhood obsession as a waste, even if it did ultimately lead to this. Like a lot of aftergifted former academic whiz kids, I’ve come to realize in my adulthood how little value there is in it. Why couldn’t my autistic special interest have been learning how to not gag unprocessed food, how to manage the logistics of a household, how to socialize in the real world, DIY handiwork, or even how to drive? I know it’s practically an autistic cliche to have a “spiky profile” where you can be exceptional at a handful of hobbies that are difficult to monetize while being largely inept in the activities of daily living, but at this point, I realize I likely made some wrong choices. I still plan on finishing this book. I’ve gone way too far to stop, and I realize I have a small subscriber base that could turn into something, but there is this nagging voice in my head that I want to get offline entirely if/when I finish.

Jesse Love was just hired to replace Josh Berry in the #21 Wood Brothers car. It makes sense, but I’m still underwhelmed by this. In the last update of my stock car model, Josh Berry’s rating of -.154 was actually higher than Love’s (-.175), although they were both certainly a lot higher than Harrison Burton’s -.231. Further, bear in mind that my model considers modern Wood Brothers drivers to be Penske drivers and is so biased against modern Penske drivers that is Ryan Blaney as only a barely-above-average Cup Series driver, which suggests Berry probably should be higher in my model than he is. While I’m sure Love overtook Berry this year since he is regularly beating Austin Hill while Berry has had a miserable season, I don’t think this is as much of an improvement as most others seem to. Obviously, Love is still young enough that he has room to grow, while Berry does not, so it makes sense. I don’t think Love will ever be as bad as Berry has been this year, but I also think he has a low ceiling, and I’m not convinced he’ll ever be much better than Berry was last year.

Even at the time, everyone, including me, considered Love’s Xfinity Series title last year to be highway robbery when Connor Zilisch won 10 races to his 2. Ryan McCafferty predicted that Love might have a trajectory similar to Tyler Reddick’s, much like how Reddick had a wildly undeserved title in 2018 before backing it up with a deserved one in 2019 and becoming a Cup Series star. That made sense at the time and I kind of agreed with it. The only problem is… Love’s 2026 sure as hell isn’t Reddick’s 2019. Reddick won six races against a field that also included Christopher Bell, who is far better than anyone racing in the O’Reilly Series this year, while Love isn’t even coming close to challenging Justin Allgaier. Most people have already written off Hill as kind of a hack, but although Love has certainly overtaken Hill, Hill still has a winning record over Love in the races both of them finished, and a lot more wins to boot. Zilisch was certainly outperforming Allgaier to a vastly greater extent than Love has ever outperformed Hill, who is not as good as Allgaier. I realize Love has already led more than he did the previous two seasons, but he’s on pace for both fewer wins and poles, which suggests his speed at least hasn’t really increased that much, even now that he no longer has to regularly compete against Zilisch. And the fact that Zilisch has had such a miserable season is also giving me pause. I know it’s primarily because Trackhouse is vastly underachieving, and I know nobody except Shane van Gisbergen has learned this car quickly (because it was based on the Supercars chassis he already had vast experience with). However, even I (who have had more skepticism about Zilisch than most) didn’t expect SVG to outperform Zilisch on the ovals this year. I assumed Zilisch would be second to Chastain on ovals and second to SVG on road courses, and that hasn’t really happened. I’m not saying Zilisch should be replaced or move down to the O’Reilly Series; he clearly advanced for a reason and should be given time to grow, and if he replaced Alex Bowman in the #48 car now, I wouldn’t be against it. However, the fact that he dominated Love so thoroughly last year definitely gives me pause about Love’s potential, particularly when I always kind of felt Love had a low ceiling to begin with (although he’ll be more consistent than Berry and still an improvement). I’m also kind of let down that Berry was fired before Noah Gragson. I know Gragson outperformed Berry when they were JRM teammates and is younger, but Berry has been better in Cup, and he is more likable. It really bothers me that Gragson is so popular despite sucking as a driver and a person, and I would have much rather seen him be replaced instead.

I’m not saying Berry shouldn’t be replaced. That makes sense, but I think the correct replacement should’ve been Scott McLaughlin. SVG proved to be the only driver to learn the Next Gen car quickly because of his Supercars experience, and McLaughlin not only has that, but he also vastly outperformed SVG when they were in Supercars together. I think he could win Cup road course races for sure by his second year and would have a higher ceiling than Love. Furthermore, McLaughlin’s IndyCar career right now is rapidly turning into a bit of a wet fart at this point. I really thought that either he or Pato O’Ward, if not both, would overtake Álex Palou soon, but that has not happened - if anything, the reverse has happened as he’s pulled away from them even more. David Malukas and Christian Lundgaard now look much closer to overtaking McLaughlin and O’Ward respectively (if you think they haven’t already) than either McLaughlin or O’Ward are to Palou, and I did not have that on my scorecard. I had McLaughlin as my 2025 championship favorite, and he hasn’t won since. He’s coming dangerously close to looking like yet another Ryan Briscoe/Alexander Rossi/Graham Rahal type who had two or three hot seasons before fading into oblivion, and I really didn’t expect that from him. Yes, he’s still better than them, and the 2020s IndyCar fields have been vastly deeper than the 2010s fields, so I’d still rate him higher, but I’ve been really shocked by Malukas outrunning him everywhere in his first season and I think he might need a change of scenery. I think in the #21 car he might actually both win more and make more money than he will in his IndyCar future. I once thought McLaughlin was a future IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner. I’m not gonna say either isn’t going to happen, but I would now bet against both. But if he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to, and I guess that’s it.

I am really loathing every aspect of this NASCAR weekend in San Diego. Okay, the racing is fine, and I get wanting to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but the militaristic jingoistic bullshit is really pissing me off. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the main reasons I stopped watching NASCAR in 2003 and the first half of 2004 was because I was against the Iraq War before it started. When I became a fan in the ‘90s, the ESPN and CBS broadcasts were professional and had appeal for everyone, but in the 2000s, it felt like the FOX broadcasts were for rednecks only and intentionally designed to alienate the yuppie fans they had picked up in the ‘90s. The biggest example of this was the post-9/11 bombastic military pageantry rooting our troops going off to war, kicking ass, and taking names, and it was that big a turnoff for me. If you were against the Iraq War, NASCAR didn’t want you as a fan, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, since this was the same moment when country radio canceled the Dixie Chicks for that, and NASCAR and country music were obviously historically linked. They chased an exclusively neocon audience in the 2000s, which led to a short-term gain and a long-term loss, particularly amongst my fellow millennials. Lots of my high school classmates were casual NASCAR fans in the ‘90s of them, and many of them wouldn’t admit it in retrospect because the brand got too toxic. Think about the difference between Days of Thunder and Talladega Nights (both bad movies; at least I always assumed so on Talladega Nights, which I haven’t seen), but the former made NASCAR look awesome and the latter turned it into a butt of jokes, which makes sense since Adam McKay is a dirtbag leftist who was obviously going after an easy target. Even if the ratings were peaking in the 2000s, it became culturally unacceptable for educated people to be fans in the 2000s in the way it wasn’t in the ‘90s, and the Iraq War boosting was a large part of it in my opinion.

This is why I don’t have as much nostalgia for 2000s NASCAR as most others seem to. Yes, I can acknowledge with the benefit of hindsight that a lot of the racing was good, that the competition was never better, and I would even probably say 2001 had the highest average racing quality in history. But the presentation, especially in the years immediately following 9/11, was so toxic that it poisoned the brand for an entire generation and led to NASCAR’s decline once George W. Bush lost his popularity (I insist it’s that and not even the Chase or the GWC or the lucky dog, etc…) It always shocks me when so many younger fans who are usually way to the left of the “NASCAR mainstream” in the 2000s now talk about the 2000s as the golden days. Probably it’s because they’re just looking at the racing and not all that baggage that I struggled to ignore at the time. Honestly, as much as most people say they hate the racing in the 2020s, I’m enjoying it more because it’s been seemingly more chill, the drivers are on average more likable, it’s no longer trying to compete with the NFL and failing, and most of that political garbage was gone, so this 2003 throwback is really making me vomit.

I’m not boycotting this weekend like I did a lot of 2003 and 2004 or 2017 after the Trump endorsement, but I do have to ask why do we as a culture seem to think “celebrating our country” and “celebrating the military” are the same thing. Maybe I’m just too Howard Zinn-brained (I did read A People’s History of the United States once) but why do so many of us celebrate troops and only troops as our “nation’s heroes”? Why are they seen as more heroic than (for example) firefighters (yeah, they got their due in 2001 but only really then), paramedics, people who work for suicide hotlines and food banks, etc…? All those guys are fulfilling a 100% unambiguous good, while I think most of us can agree that our military does lots of awful things, no matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power. Why do all our holidays grow increasingly more militarized over time? Like Memorial Day was always a military holiday, but I remember in my youth that people also used it to honor their deceased family members even if they weren’t veterans, and then that really went away after 9/11. So, I was against racing on a military base to begin with and hearing everyone in the Craftsman Truck booth arguing yesterday about how this was such an “awesome event”. Oh, gag me with a spoon. And Pete Hegseth giving the command makes this even worse. People are arguing that, of course, Hegseth should be doing this because we’re racing on a military base. Fine, I get that. Why do racing series think the only way to celebrate our country’s anniversary is either NASCAR racing on a naval base or Trump commissioning an IndyCar street race himself (that’ll be even worse)? We need to stop treating our country and our military as synonyms, but I will now get off my soapbox because few will want to hear this.

My mom got briefly moved from room 419 to 402 at Van Duyn after a conflict with her roommate, and then she got moved back to 419 a day or two ago, and nobody even told me. She seems to be raising a stink about every single roommate, and I thought she was actually getting along with the 402 roommate so I don’t even know what that was about. The 402 roommate did say she didn’t want to be Mom’s roommate, but not because they were fighting or anything. She was just worried Mom would fall and that she couldn’t do anything about it from what I heard, but she got moved back anyway. I think my mom is the instigator and the common denominator for all her issues with her roommates, and that’s also really frustrating. I’m still trying to get her out, but there are still no updates on the ramp construction, even though it’s supposed to be done by July 7.

I had a weird encounter with a homeless person on Monday when I was visiting Mom on the bus. He asked me for a pen. He's an artist who makes some kind of fractal-type art. Lots of drawings of geometric objects. He apparently got a lot of this from the movie Stargate and expected me to understand everything he was talking about even though I’d never seen that movie (I guess I look like the kind of person who would’ve seen that movie). He was talking about how one of his drawings represented the Fibonacci sequence. I didn't get it. He then was talking about how he was going to smoke some crack in the pen I gave him. He seemed to belong to some kind of cult and was mildly proselytizing and stuff. He was saying the kind of "open-minded" things that don't really make sense to someone who isn't high. Told me he lived in a hole. Uttered a few racial epithets. Offered me $1 for the pen. After I'd predicted earlier in the conversation that the bus would arrive at the transfer hub 8 minutes late because it passed one of the other stops 8 minutes late, he took the dollar back from me. I was being really quiet. He hit me on the left knee. It hurt on and off for a few days. Then he just left at the transfer hub. Will probably never see him again. I don’t know what to make of that. I’d like to get him some help though if I ever do see him again.

I didn’t write anything for a while because I needed to catch up on some of my paid work and I did just finish a big part of my current assignment a couple days ago before starting to work on this and I’m going to try to start catching up with my drivre profiles. Additionally, after my massive list update in my last column, I’m going to try to finish archiving all the other series I haven’t archived yet on my master driver list, which I would like to finish by the end of the year. Right now, I’m working on NLS, the sports car series that only races at the Nürburgring (which for most of its history was called VLN), which is probably the most prestigious series I haven’t covered yet. It’s too important not to cover (even Max Verstappen has been entering races there lately), but it will certainly be exhausting since every race has 15-20 different class winners, there are on average 10 races a year, and almost all class wins are split between two or three different drivers. It will definitely take me weeks to finish this series alone, but thankfully, I don’t think there are any other individual series left that will be that intensive.

SATORU NAKAJIMA…………….JAPAN

Born: February 23, 1953

Best year: 1985
Best drive: 1981 J.A.F. Grand Prix at Suzuka International Racing Course

Despite a mediocre F1 career, Nakajima is nonetheless regarded as one of the greatest Japanese drivers for his dominance in Japanese Formula 2, the series now known as Super Formula, where he became the first driver to win five titles and 21 races; his five championships still rank second to Kazuyoshi Hoshino’s six. Having grown up on a farm that his family had owned for 300 years, he raised money to race while working for his brother’s gas station.

After finishing fourth in the 1976 Fuji Grand Champion race, Nakajima landed a ride with Heroes Racing, which won back-to-back F2 titles with Hoshino in 1977 and 1978, Nakajima’s first two seasons. He actually would’ve beaten Hoshino in 1978 if he hadn’t been stripped of his points in two races for briefly holding a British racing license. He won his first title for i&i Racing in 1981 after the team switched from BMW to Honda. In the Suzuka season finale, he beat future F1 winner Thierry Boutsen by over 19 seconds. He remained with Honda through 1986, winning the 1982 title with Team Ikuzawa and three consecutive titles for a team co-owned by Heroes and his own Nakajima Racing from 1984-1986.

In 1987, Lotus F1 switched from Renault to Honda engines, and Nakajima came as part of the deal. After his teammate Ayrton Senna outqualified him by an average of 5 seconds per race, most observers believed Nakajima was wildly out of his depth. However, behind the scenes, his engineers and teammates highly respected him for his great technical knowledge, testing, and setup abilities. Senna was replaced by Nelson Piquet in 1988, but Lotus never won again. Nakajima DNQed five times in 1988 and 1989, but had two noted highlights, a gritty qualifying performance where he tied Piquet in Suzuka qualifying immediately after his mother’s death, and a wet drive from last to fourth at Adelaide in 1989, where he set the fastest lap, Lotus’s last and the first for an Asian driver. After two mediocre seasons for Tyrrell in 1990 and 1991, he retired. He continued as a Super Formula owner to the present day, winning four more titles from 1999-2009, and even discovered Álex Palou, who gave the team its best points finish since then as a rookie. He also had a Japanese pop hit, “Sad Hydrofoil”, in 1990. His son Kazuki became a two-time Super Formula champion and three-time Le Mans winner but never drove for his team.

While Nakajima’s F1 career looked awful on the surface, paddock insiders generally acknowledged his racing fundamentals and argued that he struggled because he had a very small frame and lacked the arm strength to manhandle that era’s steering and wide tires. It didn’t help that he started his F1 career much later than most of his contemporaries. However, I’m listing him for his domestic racing career. His teammate record looks terrible because he didn’t have any teammates during his Japanese F2 dynasty run, but he’s definitely better than his reputation.

Open wheel model: #566 of 931 (-.119)

Teammate head-to-heads: 3-30 (0-2 vs. Jean Alesi, 1-8 vs. Kazuyoshi Hoshino, 0-6 vs. Stefano Modena, 1-6 vs. Nelson Piquet, 0-8 vs. Ayrton Senna, 1-0 vs. Noritake Takahara)

Year-by-year: 1977: C-, 1978: C+, 1979: C-, 1980: C+, 1981: C+, 1982: E-, 1983: C+, 1984: E-, 1985: E, 1986: C+, 1989: C-

KAZUKI NAKAJIMA……………..JAPAN

Born: January 11, 1985

Best year: 2012
Best drive: 2012 6 Hours of Fuji at Fuji Speedway

The son of former Formula One driver Satoru Nakajima, Kazuki was a Toyota factory driver for his entire career, where he had a disappointing F1 career for Williams before reemerging in the 2010s as a star in Super Formula and the World Endurance Championship. Although Satoru had primarily raced for Honda, Kazuki wanted to carve his own identity apart from his father, winning the Formula Toyota championship in 2003, then finishing fifth in GP2, the then-top F1 feeder series in 2007, where he failed to win but was the highest-finishing rookie.

Nakajima made his F1 debut in the 2007 season finale at Interlagos after Alexander Wurz abruptly retired after the penultimate race. He had the difficult job of competing against the then-drastically underrated future World Champion Nico Rosberg. Although he never came close to Rosberg’s pace, he only finished two positions behind him in the 2008 standings, but lost his ride after failing to score a point in 2009. He briefly signed with Stefan GP, which procured Toyota’s old equipment and attempted to enter the 2010 F1 season, but their entry was rejected.

In 2011, he signed with Toyota Team TOM’S as André Lotterer’s teammate in both Super GT and Formula Nippon, which became Super Formula in 2013. Although Lotterer dominated the 2011 season and generally had the measure of Nakajima, he skipped one race due to a Le Mans conflict, and Nakajima won in his second start at the Autopolis circuit from 13th. He then won the 2012 and 2014 titles while also joining the new WEC as a Toyota factory driver. At Fuji in 2012, he won Toyota’s second race at Fuji with Wurz and Nicolas Lapierre, and he did most of the work, including winning the pole and posting the fastest lap times despite a grueling triple stint. He won the pole at Le Mans in 2014 and 2018 and was leading at Le Mans in 2016 until a power failure on the final lap. He avenged this loss by winning three consecutive Le Mans wins from 2018-2020 and the overall WEC title with Sébastien Buemi and Fernando Alonso in 2018-2019 before retiring in 2021.

Despite his lackluster F1 career, Nakajima proved to be one of Toyota’s best drivers with 17 WEC wins, 9 Super Formula wins, and 8 Super GT wins from 2011-2021. Although he wasn’t quite a match for Lotterer, losing to him 28-18 in shared finishes and 15-9 in wins, he actually beat him four out of seven seasons in the championship at a time when Lotterer himself earned three Le Mans wins, demonstrating his potential. In his sports car career, he became the first Japanese driver to win overall at Le Mans in a Japanese car, and he certainly played a big role in elevating the team, as evidenced by his current position as the vice chairman for Toyota’s WEC team. Although Satoru was probably better domestically, Kazuki’s prolific winning in Super Formula, Super GT, and WEC simultaneously gives him the edge historically.

Open wheel model: #442 of 931 (-.044)

Teammate head-to-heads: 55-99 (7-10 vs. Richard Antinucci, 0-1 vs. Andrea Caldarelli, 3-7 vs. Nick Cassidy, 1-1 vs. Katsuyuki Hiranaka, 4-10 vs. Kohei Hirate, 1-0 vs. Takuto Iguchi, 18-28 vs. Andre Lotterer, 1-1 vs. Ritomo Miyata, 3-13 vs. Joao Paulo de Oliveira, 7-19 vs. Nico Rosberg, 4-1 vs. James Rossiter, 6-8 vs. Sakon Yamamoto)

Year-by-year: 2008: C-, 2011: C, 2012: E-, 2013: E-, 2014: E-, 2015: C+, 2016: C-, 2017: E-, 2018: E-, 2019: C, 2020: C-, 2021: C-