1,000 Greatest Drivers: The Vanthoor Brothers

Hot take: Dries is the second-best Vanthoor driver.

Although I didn’t finish this post after midnight, I was planning to write about Laurens Vanthoor yesterday on his birthday (May 8) so since I didn’t have anybody specific planned for May 7, I slotted his brother Dries right before him. Obviously, they are both two of the most successful drivers on the international sports car scene right now, but to the general race fan public they are probably most famous for the meme of that one guy who later deleted his Twitter post shitting all over the Penske WEC lineup, “Past Prime Estre 80 Year Old Lotterer Second-Best Vanthoor” before they went on to win the title. I do think lately Dries has been better than Laurens but at this point, I still think Laurens has had the greater career, which is one of the many reasons that meme/copypasta was stupid. He is admittedly seven years older than Dries, but he has won six sports car championships in five different series, while Dries only won one unique championship although he did win it three consecutive years with his teammate Charles Weerts and he was clearly the leader of the operation. Laurens also still has slightly more major league sports car wins than Dries as well (48-40). Now there are a lot of fans online who seem to have the fallacy that just because one driver has been better than another historically that they’re still better now and shouldn’t be criticized, which I definitely don’t agree with. Lewis Hamilton, Kyle Busch, and Scott Dixon are the leading active winners in their respective series and although they are all still decent, they are also for sure all showing some signs of being washed up at this point (yes, I know Hamilton won a sprint race, but who cares about sprint races?) So I’m not going to say Laurens is automatically better just because he has more wins (especially since Dries has almost caught him and is seven years younger). But I personally think I am still more impressed with Laurens’s career to date mainly because he was much more prolific in winning championships in different series and with a wider array of teammates. While I acknowledge Dries will probably overtake him when their careers are said and done, they’re certainly at least close, right? I’d sort of compare them to Chase Elliott and William Byron where Dries/Byron is better now but Laurens/Elliott was better historically, but in both cases, that could totally flip back at some point and I would not be surprised. (As opposed to Dixon, who will never be better than Álex Palou again…) I know I’m making too much of a stupid meme that everybody was making fun of, but if you’re going to make potshots, at least let them be accurate potshots. It’s not a no-brainer which of these drivers is better at all, although both are great. One thing I will take back is ranking Laurens higher in 2021. I will admit that was probably a mistake because I found it too difficult to find lap times information about the SRO series but since it was in the middle of his three straight titles, I elevated that to E- in retrospect.

I didn’t write the Dries post last night because I randomly decided to go to a bar trivia contest after visiting my mom in the nursing home, eager for any semblance of real world socialization although I still socialized with no one. I wouldn’t have gone if it cost anything, but it is free and I wasn’t required to buy anything although they did hand me a couple glasses of water and chicken fingers for free. (I don’t drink, but they also didn’t pressure me to, which is cool.) I was just one guy competing against a bunch of established teams with multiple players, so I didn’t expect to win and I was not surprised I was in last place for most of the night. However, I ended up beating one other team after I got the equivalent of the Final Jeopardy! question right and the other team got it wrong. I competed as Arena Snow just like it was a typing contest or something. I don’t know if I’ll ever come back, but that was maybe the most fun I had in a while. Arguably paid for it today with six bouts of diarrhea though.