1,000 Greatest Drivers: Tim Richmond/Rusty Wallace

This is hilarious. I just started LearnedLeague 110 and am now leading my rundle after five games of 25 as the only undefeated player even though I have answered a mere 12 questions correctly, only one more than my opponents. How? Because of my uncanny knack at knowing which questions my opponents will know. There is a strategic element to this where you award 0 points to the question you think your opponent is most likely to get correct, 1 point for the questions you think your opponent is 2nd and 3rd most likely to answer correctly, 2 for the 4th and 5th most likely questions, and 3 for the question you think your opponent is least likely to answer correctly. I’ve developed quite the knack for this, as my defensive efficiency (DE), which measures the ratio of the number of points your opponent would have scored with perfect defense to the number of points they actually scored, is tied for the second-highest at .905, my unforced points allowed are tie for the lowest at 2, and my points per correct answer against are tied for the lowest at 0.73. Even though my trivia knowledge has remained a little shaky since I never properly “studied”, my strategy has been amazing, but this also very much seems unsustainable. When I see a player like Zimmerman who has 23 correct answers to her opponent’s 12 (and I’ve already lost to her before), I know I am not likely to remain in the top three and advance from Rundle D to Rundle C, but at least that should give me enough cushion so I won’t almost be relegated like I was the last two times.

This has really been a common trend throughout all my competitive pursuits and probably even my coursework. I was always a lazy studier, so I tried to work around having to study by developing killer strategies. I coasted on my rapid arithmetic abilities as a boy to brute-force solutions to more difficult mathematicl assignments rather than finding more efficient solutions and coasted on my typing abilities for many years to simply enter data rather than learning how to program a method to do it more meticulously. In typing itself, I concocted my wild strategy of deviating from the home row and figuring out a way to probabilistically center my fingers around the most frequent letters almost on instinct in a way that was years ahead of my peers. As a Scrabble player, I literally had the lowest average bingo probability of any player even though I was far from the worst player in the data set, meaning I had only studied the most frequent words, but I clearly outperformed my lack of word knowledge in tournaments because my strategy was much better. This also explained why I was so much worse in online Scrabble games: because all the stronger players only wanted to play three-minute games where you automatically forfeited if you went more than one minute over, that nullified my strengths and accentuated my weaknesses. Players who drill all the words into their heads are going to be able to instantly see good plays, while people who have to rely on their strategy to compete with opponents with greater word knowledge don’t have as much time to formulate strategies in three-minute online games as twenty-five minute tournament games. Since almost all the good players wanted to play almost entirely blitz games, I convinced myself I was worse than I actually was since most of my games were like that rather than tournament games where I was better because I could develop more iterative strategies (it didn’t help that I couldn’t really justify afford going to tournaments either).

So, this has been a running theme in my life. Don’t study and then try to work around my incapacity to make myself study with killer strategies. I don’t think I even noticed this until the last year or so (well after I quit tournament Scrabble). It really explains a lot. Why I was so smart but so undistinguished professionally, why I was amazing at arithmetic but kind of incompetent at theoretical math once it finally reached a level of capacity that you can’t brute-force the answers anymore, why I never developed a programmer, why I dominated at typing for a decade and now a bunch of zoomers are blowing my doors off because they have both learned from the typing strategies I developed and often layered their own additional strategies on top of mine, and so on. I’ve been trying to figure out very recently what my stumbling block is that makes me so averse to this kind of effort or discipline (which can especially be seen in my career failures), and I’m starting to get there, but if I talk about that, I’ll save it for another day.

Anyway, despite the fact that my ability to strategize has always exceeded my ability to study in nearly every aspect of my life (although admittedly, I’m a very diligent researcher when it comes to all my book projects as you have seen), I’ve been on a ridiculous hot streak at both this form of trivia as well as bar trivia in recent weeks. Not only have I had this bizarrely unexpected undefeated first week in LearnedLeague, but my Bartenders Always Right team has won four weeks in a row at the Heritage Hill Bar I’ve been going to every Wednesday (I don’t drink and I’m only there for the trivia). We have just about clinched winning the summer tournament, which will qualify us to compete against the winners at all the other Syracuse bars at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown (formerly the Hotel Syracuse) in a couple weeks, but admittedly, the competition level at our bar has seemed to be weaker than any of the other ones as our cumulative score is way behind all the other leading teams and we were in fact the only team to show up for the tournament every week so far. I want to go after we probably win, even though I know it’s throwing money away since I know we’ll get our doors blown off. I have basically overtaken my teammate Bill as the team leader. I write all the answers, hand them in, and make all the wagers. I seem to be one of the only people anywhere in Syracuse doing Jeopardy!-style betting to win by 1 point at a time, while everybody else seems to bet the maximal amount possible every time. That could bode well, but I just don’t think I’ll know enough stuff ultimately to compete with the other teams. I dominate the music questions, but I’m bad at a lot of the other categories, especially food, animals, current events, and the picture rounds.

The question I suppose is how seriously I want to go with this. I’m having fun, but I am definitely not yet doing well enough to get on Jeopardy! and do I want to throw myself more seriously into something like this similarly to Greg Shahade who went from being in a lower rundle than I am at almost exactly the age I am now to taking down Jamie Ding in less than five years? Makes me wonder if I should try repeating his feat, but I’d probably never actually make myself do it (especially when I should be doing this instead as well as a lot of more important things than this), and the opportunity cost for that to probably not even get on a game show in the first place because it’s so competitive would likely not make it worth it. But it’s been enjoyable.

Okay, Day 1. I really expected to lose this game after I only got one question right, which is not the only time this happened last week. However, I had a knack of answering questions correctly that my opponents didn’t expect me to get. You do get to see your opponent’s record on each type of question next to the form where you fill out your answers, but I’m starting to wonder if most players even use this information at all (maybe they don’t and that’s why I dominate on defense). I’ve been surprised that I’m great at American history and kind of bad at world history, which is probably why my opponent thought I’d get that wrong. My first thought was Robin Hood, but then I thought, “no, that’s English” and eventually worked myself there because my knowledge of mid-’90s movies is pretty good as I was reading the ads for almost all the movies that were coming out in ‘95 and ‘96 like no other year before or since (those were probably the years I was most diligently reading newspapers in general) and I remembered the Rob Roy movie from back then even though I never watched it.

I put Bermuda for question #2 which at least is sonically close to correct, if not actually. I don’t think I realized Bermuda wasn’t actually in the Caribbean, but aside from that, it wasn’t a bad guess. I figured out that the last two words of #3 had to be “of labor” but could not figure out what the first word should be. I put “time of labor”, which again wasn’t very far off. I know nothing whatsoever about mascots. I watched a lot of sports as a kid but I don’t know if I could even name any except for Otto the Orange, just because I was a Syracuse Orange fan in my youth (yes, cringe). That’s something I’m not sure would be even worth studying. I made up “Peter Pigeon”, and at least I got the initials right. Oh, wait. Did I say my knowledge of mid-’90s movies was great? Yeah, I couldn’t figure out whether #5 was looking for Braveheart or Showgirls. Those were the only movies that came to mind. The kilt obviously made me think of Braveheart, but I rejected that because I didn’t think there would be two clues fundamentally about Scottish history in one game. The emphases on dresses really made Showgirls seem like the correct answer to me, but I probably should’ve figured they wouldn’t have had a question about a NSFW NC-17 movie probably. Clueless never came to mind even though I have watched that a long time ago (even watched the short-lived Clueless TV show on TGIF) and I never watched those other movies. But obviously, I was not the kind of person to even notice fashions. And then for question #6, I put bassoon (which I forgot isn’t a brass instrument, and I also incorrectly remembered that it was played by the left hand). Won this entirely on strategy and honestly didn’t deserve to, but I’ll take it.

The big lesson from this weekend’s races is not to write a driver off too soon, I suppose. Both the Richmond and Markham races were honestly better than I expected (I kind of didn’t expect the Markham race to happen at all given what a debacle the first couple of days were, and again, I felt IndyCar deserved it for their hubris considering what’s coming up next week). However, I was convinced Joey Logano’s dominance at North Wilkesboro was going to be a one-off because he tested there, and I didn’t realize that it would apply to other tracks. I really never expected Logano to ever dominate a race to something comparable to that extent again, but the dude’s still only 36 so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he wasn’t done yet even though a mere month ago, he looked borderline washed up. I know David Smith always used to say drivers peak at 39 and I definitely think he’s wrong about that as I think the peak age for a driver is closer to 34, but admittedly, most drivers who were as good at Logano won’t wash up that young either and I shouldn’t have been that surprised. I still don’t believe his dominance only in even years means anything though. Just a bizarre coincidence.

Marcus Ericsson, on the other hand, has surprised me substantially more mainly because I always struggled to take him seriously to begin with. He didn’t even impress me that much at Chip Ganassi Racing when he had his diabolical triumvirate of sixth-place poins finishes as it seemed like he was incapable of winning or even leading without inheriting the lead due to some wacky hijinks (even in the 2022 Indy 500, he won that because Ganassi had the dominant cars and Álex Palou got penalized for pitting when the pits were closed then Scott Dixon sped). So, I have to say, where the hell did this come from? Andretti has always been a competitive team, but it’s hard to say they’ve ever been as good as Ganassi at any point after 2007. Ericsson proved that in his earlier years there as he honestly did even worse in 2024 and 2025 than I thought he would (yes, I expected Kyle Kirkwood and Colton Herta to consistently outperform him, but I also expected him to be… closer). However, this year he’s consistently had speed and delivered better performances than he ever did at Ganassi all season long. His first pole at Arlington, leading the most laps at Gateway and driving through the field despite qualifying mid-pack, and now dominating out of nowhere at Markham to such an extent where his fastest lap was 1.3 seconds faster than anyone else. He’s been closer to Kirkwood than Will Power has been to him all season. All I have to say is what? I get that he was really trying harder than he has in years because it looked like he was about to lose his ride to Dennis Hauger, but it’s weird to see a guy who looked like a barely above average driver at Ganassi (like what Santino Ferrucci would be like in a fast car or something) suddenly deliver the best drives of his life in a car that is ostensibly slower. This is the mystery of the season. It was funny to see him have to pass Romain Grosjean, the driver he replaced at Andretti, for the win especially because of the viral oft-memed moment where Grosjean’s engineer erroneously claimed “Ericsson hit us”. At the time, I felt Andretti replacing Grosjean with Ericsson was a mistake, but I guess I was wrong. Admittedly, he’s three months younger than Logano, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he still has vitality left. I’ve got to learn to stop writing drivers off too soon…

Anyway, several days too late, here are two drivers who arguably both had their big breakouts in 1986 when one of them literally replaced the other in the #27 car owned by Raymond Beadle (a three-time NHRA Funny Car champion who may or may not make my list) as the other famously moved to Hendrick Motorsports.