2025 TCR World Tour Year in Review

This could ruin the tour.

Okay, as usual I was one year late with the Justin Timberlake joke, a step behind the times forever and for always. You will notice that for this series I don’t have any fastest race or speed percentile data. This is not my fault as ever since they stopped doing in-house timing at some point amidst this series’s many changes of names and sanctioning bodies (from the World Touring Car Championship to the World Touring Car Cup to the TCR World Tour), they’ve had different officials and/or websites doing the timing for them at the track. While I believe there were lap times available for the Australian round at The Bend because Australia’s auto racing timing agency NATSOFT provides lap time for all races and I was able to find them for Macau as well, I didn’t bother with those categories since I couldn’t find them for any other races. I did tentatively calculate touring car ratings for all the full-time drivers based on each driver’s current ratings at the end of 2024 but I have no intention of updating my touring car model until all the touring car races this year are finished (which should be circa December 14). I did list the tentative ratings in driver entries here, but I’ll have to edit those entries if/when I fully update the model, and that will take several days or even a week with that model since it is my most extensive one. I couldn’t calculate a rating for Josh Buchan this year yet because his teammate Ryan Macmillan isn’t in my model yet. Nonetheless, Buchan was obviously pretty damn good since he did better than Will Brown did in the same car a year after Brown’s Supercars title. Granted, Brown was not that impressive this year but he still somehow beat his teammate Broc Feeney in points. Oh, I will get to that. You best believe I will get to that. Now that the Supercars Championship is finished, I guess that’s what I’ll do next, then F1, then DTM, then BTCC. Then finally I’ll get all the sports car data and plug in all the other drivers from random other disciplines that I’ll be including like rally racing, rallycross, Super Formula, the various other touring car series and the Porsche system series, drag racing, dirt, and so on. (Not to mention the minor leaguers from series I’ve already covered like Connor Zilisch, Corey Heim, and Dennis Hauger who clearly deserve it as well.)

I didn’t get the loan money for the roof. That is what I expected, although I called my mom’s homeowners’ insurance company back and they said they’re still not going to drop the policy until April, so I still have some time. I contacted another contractor who I think might be willing to charge less today, so maybe I should call the bank back and see if they’d be willing to loan me a smaller amount of money to cover that. I finally completed all the documentation the people at Onondaga County Community Development need to see if a ramp can be constructed so Mom might be able to come home, but there’s no way I can see that happening before the spring either, especially since snow season has begun. I did another YouTube livestream on Friday where I shared a video of me touch-typing from a Dr. Seuss book during the Christmas 1991 holidays when I was six. Towards the end of the video, I also did a bunch of trivia games on Sporcle and Geoguessr. If you jump to near the end of that video (I think about 30 minutes from the end), I zipped through Sporcle quizzes for all the F1, NASCAR, and IndyCar champions (all of which I have memorized) and freaked some people out. I also did all the Indy 500 winners, but I missed one Daytona 500 winner. I totally forgot about Ricky Stenhouse. Makes sense. That was annoying race and he didn’t lead much, but it also wasn’t shocking since despite his general mediocrity, he’d been strong at Daytona and Talladega for years so it certainly don’t stick in the head like Derrike Cope or Trevor Bayne do.

I’m still trying to make more friends and connections in the real world. I went back to bar trivia for the first time in months on Wednesday and after all those other weeks when I was competing by myself, I got invited to join one of the other teams (Bartenders Always Right) finally. I’m definitely feeling less hard on myself that I wasn’t able to win single-handedly against all those multi-player teams, particularly when I learned last week that apparently the bartender occasionally feeds them answers, lol. I did know some answers that they didn’t. Every week, there’s a numeric question called The Impossible Question where whoever comes closest to guessing the exact number of the answer wins bonus points. Last week, it was “How many days ago was the Bill of Rights signed?” Now, I knew that it was 1789 (but I guess I was wrong about that as it wasn’t ratified until 1791) so I was trying to calculate 236*365 in my head without a calculator or scratch paper. I didn’t have any paper with me and one of my teammates was hogging his but between all the conversation and the noise and the music, I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why I didn’t think to just round it to 240*360, which would have been nearly exactly correct, but I didn’t and I’m embarrassed. I feel like I could have easily done it in the ninety-second timeframe in my youth if somebody asked me to do that in the high school halls. Too much hubris from my halcyon days of math league glory. But we still worked our way back into the lead after the final round of regulation before losing on the final question, so at least that isn’t why we lost. I also went over to the North Syracuse tabletop gaming store Dame Games and chatted with one of the guys there a few minutes before they closed. Even though I was never interested in most of those kinds of things as a kid and my interest in geek culture (i.e. anime, cosplay, sci-fi, fantasy, even gaming really except for Scrabble and typing games) was seemingly far less than most other nerds as my interests were usually much more academic (yes, there were some sci-fi/fantasy/video games I liked, but they were pretty aggressively normie for the most part), I kind of feel I need to cultivate an interest in this stuff that I don’t really have just to socialize with anyone since I’m too weird to socialize with those deficient in autism anymore. They are pretty welcoming, so I guess I’m gonna have them teach me how to play Magic: the Gathering, just so I have anyone who gives a shit about me in real life.

Finally, for how broke I am, this was really stupid, but I decided to buy myself a custom-made t-shirt for Christmas. I’ve never done this before, but I decided to put the Racermetrics logo on a t-shirt to promote myself. I don’t know, could come in handy if I ever meet any racing people in real life. Not that I am in any way lacking in nerd-themed apparel, what with my three math league shirts, my two Ultimate Typing Championship shirts, my spelling bee shirt, my National Scrabble Championship shirt, an M.C. Escher shirt, and two Cornell sweatshirts, most of which I have worn far more often in my real life than I should have. Well, I was marginally less uncool when I owned it than I was in middle school when I was in denial of my nerdhood but just as big a weirdo. Maybe I’ll post a selfie here when I get it…