1,000 Greatest Drivers: Tom Chilton
Not as famous as his brother Max, but clearly better.
Chilton is the driver on my list whose birthday is closest to mine, as he was born nine days before me, although the recent World Rally Championship driver Jari-Matti Latvala is also a lock and he was born ten days after me. I guess you can think of Chilton as like the Graham Rahal of touring cars. Big things were expected of them when they became the youngest British Touring Car Championship/IndyCar winners respectively, and they certainly both delivered to some extent and had a number of very good seasons, they also both had a significant number of seasons where they looked hapless or “meh”, and they typically failed to make real championship challenges in the rare seasons they had championship-caliber rides even if they often did better in ostensibly slower cars, resulting in both of them appearing only barely above average in my open wheel/touring car models. Chilton had too many wins to ignore, but even I was a bit surprised he ended up a lock via career compiling when he was never at any point one of the best touring car drivers in the world, and he only even exceeded .125 in my model twice in his 24 seasons (2008 and 2009). Even though he did win races in each of the last three years, I couldn’t rate any of them when he got beaten so badly by his fellow Tom (Ingram), who beat him 81-14 in their head-to-head and 21-4 in wins. Much like Rahal, even if either of them win again (and that’s certainly questionable), I don’t think either of them will ever have a top 200-worthy season again even if they’re both still active full-timers now, so I think it’s safe to get this done now.
After I woke up following only three hours of sleep, I decided to watch the F1 race live after finishing the Louis Wagner column. I’m not going to spoil anything about that race since I am sending this off before I imagine most people have watched it. Maybe I’ll try to sleep for a few more hours before the IndyCar race starts. I probably will not succeed.
College basketball was always my second-favorite sport growing up, but I don’t know if I was really into it for its own sake or just because I grew up in Syracuse where we had one of the most consistent programs. While I liked to follow the bracketology stuff as well as Jeff Sagarin’s ratings and ESPN’s bubble watch I honestly think it was more my thirst for quantitative minutiae than an actual intrinsic interest in basketball. (And I do credit Joe Lunardi’s Adjusted Scoring Margin for inspiring the structure of my open wheel/stock car/touring car models.) After Jim Boeheim became increasingly insufferable his last couple decades as a head coach (which I trace to Carmelo Anthony winning him a title - and let’s be clear - Carmelo won him the title) and then developed a massive ego, followed by the ugly Big East realignment, the NCAA investigations, Boeheim striking and killing a pedestrian and everything, I just couldn’t take it anymore even while I was living here and I kind of lost interest in basketball in general. But I will say I’ve been reading quite a bit about this Miami (Ohio) season where they went undefeated in the regular season before losing in the first round of the MAC tournament. I guess it makes sense this is probably the most interesting sports analytics story of the year. I’m particularly interested in the split between the fans who want them in the NCAA tournament because they were undefeated for so long and the sports analysts like Ken Pomeroy who seem not to because they do poorly by his advanced metrics. As for me, I think they should be in. Metrics can be wrong. My stock car model says Tyler Reddick is a below average NASCAR driver and I certainly know that’s bullshit. You have to know when to ignore your models. It will be interesting to see what the tournament decides. I think 31 wins is too much to ignore. And since when is UMass a MAC team (when I’d be hard-pressed to call Massachusetts Mid-American in any way) and not an Atlantic-10 team? I’ve clearly been away too long…
TOM CHILTON…………………………UK
Born: March 15, 1985
Best year: 2005
Best drive: 2004 British Touring Car Championship Silverstone Race #3
Although he has been overshadowed by his younger brother Max, who was the only Formula One rookie to finish every race and led the most laps at the 2017 Indy 500 but did very little else, Tom Chilton was clearly a far better driver even if the relative obscurity of touring car racing gave him a lower profile. The brothers were sons of Grahame Chilton, co-owner of the Benfield Group insurance company, who received a 77 million pound payout when Aon plc bought Benfield in 2008.
Chilton debuted in the British Touring Car Championship in 2002 just after his 17th birthday; he was the youngest race starter for 11 years. Although he played second-fiddle to superstar Matt Neal at Honda’s factory team in 2003, Honda withdrew much of its factory backing and dropped to one car for Chilton in 2004. Despite this, he amazingly drove from 10th to win at Silverstone, making him the youngest BTCC winner ever, a record he still holds. He remained with the same team, Arena Motorsport, in 2005 but it switched to independent status. That year, he won a career-high four races while also winning at the Nürburgring in the Le Mans Endurance Series and Laguna Seca in the American Le Mans Series in a Zytek with Hayanori Shimoda.
Although his 2006-2008 seasons were rather disappointing, Arena returned in 2009 and rehired Chilton with sponsorship from Aon. After a winless 2009, he won five races in 2010 and 2011 along with the 2010 Independents’ Championship. Arena next moved to the World Touring Car Championship in 2012. After they shut down that year, he remained in the WTCC, winning seven races from 2013-17 for other teams before returning to the BTCC in 2018. He earned his best points finishes of third in both series back-to-back in 2017 and 2018 and also won the WTCC Trophy for Independents in 2017 while driving for Sébastien Loeb, but was increasingly mediocre after that. Nonetheless, while his full-season form diminished, he continued to win as late as 2025.
Despite being the youngest BTCC winner, Chilton never quite became the superstar that observers expected and whenever facing elite teammates (like Fabrizio Giovanardi, Tom Ingram, Yvan Muller, or Neal), they usually dominated him, with the first three of those drivers winning four titles as his teammate while he never won a title, which no doubt explains Chilton’s surprisingly low touring car rating. However, I wouldn’t call him mediocre by any means since he did accrue 18 BTCC wins and 7 WTCC wins while winning in 14 different seasons and earning 17 top ten points finishes in either series. He seemed to do better in poorly-financed cars as evidenced by his two independent titles, but struggled in the #2 role against touring car legends. Although his early trajectory seems to suggest he should have done more, he still had an impressive career, and he’s still pretty clearly better than Max even if Max ended up more famous just because he competed in F1.
Touring car model: #626 of 1676 (.007)
Teammate head-to-heads: 419-362 (16-19 vs. Mehdi Bennani, 3-0 vs. Ryan Bensley, 10-4 vs. Jack Butel, 4-1 vs. Michael Caine, 21-4 vs. James Cole, 9-14 vs. Josh Cook, 9-17 vs. Tom Coronel, 21-5 vs. Michael Crees, 16-2 vs. Gregoire Demoustier, 1-4 vs. Augusto Farfus, 17-4 vs. John Filippi, 13-29 vs. Fabrizio Giovanardi, 2-0 vs. James Gornall, 44-1 vs. Nick Halstead, 17-0 vs. Nicolas Hamilton, 14-81 vs. Tom Ingram, 14-7 vs. Ollie Jackson, 3-0 vs. Erkut Kizilirmak, 9-13 vs. Dan Lloyd, 1-1 vs. Alain Menu, 18-28 vs. Adam Morgan, 8-11 vs. Alan Morrison, 3-16 vs. Yvan Muller, 3-8 vs. James Nash, 2-8 vs. Matt Neal, 16-4 vs. Andy Neate, 27-18 vs. Tom Onslow-Cole, 28-9 vs. Ronan Pearson, 22-15 vs. Senna Proctor, 2-0 vs. Ma Qing Hua, 13-8 vs. Gordon Shedden, 3-5 vs. Aaron Slight, 14-6 vs. Gavin Smith, 12-11 vs. Sam Tordoff, 0-5 vs. Jean-Karl Vernay, 4-4 vs. Dan Zelos)
Year-by-year: 2004: C, 2005: E-, 2006: C, 2008: C, 2009: C-, 2010: C+, 2011: C+, 2013: C, 2014: C, 2016: C-, 2017: C+, 2018: C+, 2019: C, 2020: C-