Bubble Drivers: D/E
Well, my colonoscopy results came out fine but I still had a scare...
I suddenly began feeling a new abdominal pain in the bottom right corner of my stomach on Monday and I began probably irrationally freaking out that I had appendicitis, so after briefly visiting my mom in the nursing home yesterday, I walked over to Upstate Community Hospital, which is basically next door and went to the ER. After not being seen for about eight hours, I left. I really did think it was probably just gas pain because obviously I knew I probably had irritable bowel syndrome and I exhibited literally none of the other symptoms. No nausea, vomiting, fever (in fact, my temperature was consistently 1° below “normal”), loss of appetite. When I pressed down on my stomach and released, I felt no increase in pain. Neither did I have an increase in pain in response to the “jump test” when I read about that at home. Furthermore, when I read later that the pain traditionally starts in the belly button before it moves to the lower right quadrant, that was another telling sign because I’ve never felt pain in the belly button.
I wanted to get home and didn’t stay the night for two main reasons. One: I needed to get back home and feed my cat because with Mom in the nursing home there was no one else to do it, and two: I had a colonoscopy follow-up appointment with the gastroenterologist scheduled for today and I wanted to be sure I was both ready for it and had enough sleep. I figured I could talk to her about my concerns and see what she thought. She told me I do not have either Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis or thankfully anything worse and that it does just seem to be IBS and an inactive hemorrhoid, which to be honest is what I thought. She didn’t think I had anything appendix-related, and to be honest I didn’t really either. I was just typically making myself anxious ocver nothing. Well, I was diagnosed with “depression with anxiety features”. I think these sorts of things are typical with a lot of people who have IBS though. She prescribed me to take some Metamucil so I walked to the grocery store after going to bar trivia tonight and bought some. And I know I need to learn how to eat unprocessed food after forty years of gag reflexes and my undiagnosed ARFID.
Now that Mom’s Medicaid case has gone through, I had a discussion with the social worker last week about Mom being allowed to come home with some additional in-home care from PACE CNY. I was told they would need to do an inspection to confirm it is safe enough for her to return since she originally got locked there against her will due to her hoarding. I did clean the hoard out in March, but by then she was basically trapped. It seems she’s gained a little strength from the spring and has improved. I do need to file some papers in the living room (but I’ve already sorted them) and clear off my bedroom floor, but I think the rest of the house is perfectly navigable and I’m going to focus on the rest of it over Labor Day weekend since the buses probably won’t be running on Labor Day itself so I likely won’t visit her on that day.
I know with all this stuff I’m talking about, you’re probably surrprised I have completed my next column. It’s definitely irrational for me to focus so much on this when much of the rest of my life is in a shambles, but I’m obviously starting to recover now that I went through the colonoscopy (and I was told I wouldn’t need another one for another decade) and I am piecing together a combination of three jobs although I’m behind on one of them and I’m going to be focusing on that tomorrow. But basically my auto racing research and visiting my mom are the only things that are giving me any semblance of joy right now, so I am going to keep doing these. I’m definitely going to limit it to one or two columns a week at this point for a while and I’m also going to continue to focus on these season grade posts because they’re less intensive to write than the individual driver entries I think. Needless to say, I shut off charges and will continue to do so for September.
Additionally, I finished my statistical tables for the NASCAR Cup Series and IndyCar this week. I wanted to do this now both before my mom came home and my responsibilities increased and also because the NASCAR playoffs are starting and the IndyCar season is about to end, at which point I’m probably going to determine my IndyCar letter grades. Then I’ll probably go back and do Formula E because that season is now over before eventually going through the other series. I also updated my stock car model this week through Saturday night’s Daytona race. I don’t think I’m going to post the full results for a while, but I will post this year’s results to date through Daytona. As usual, some of the ratings are a little goofy because honestly, even a full 36-race season is too small a sample size and Austin Dillon is significantly benefiting from Kyle Busch washing up, etc… I’m seriously impressed that Ryan Blaney is not only leading my model this year but leading it by a substantial margin when considering my model’s latent Penske bias that always underrates all the post-Kurt Busch Penske drivers. For him to be on top despite my model’s perennial bias against him is incredibly impressive. These results are based on Cup races only.
Ryan Blaney .300
Austin Dillon .214
William Byron .202
Kyle Larson .200
Corey Heim .154
Alex Bowman .152
Chase Briscoe .146
Daniel Suarez .121
Chris Buescher .108
Ross Chastain .104
Bubba Wallace .082
Chase Elliott .081
Carson Hocevar .065
Christopher Bell .064
Kyle Busch .064
Denny Hamlin .061
Ryan Preece .055
John Hunter Nemechek .023
Michael McDowell .012
Zane Smith -.006
Brad Keselowski -.012
Erik Jones -.018
Ty Dillon -.035
A.J. Allmendinger -.071
Joey Logano -.076
Justin Haley -.083
Tyler Reddick -.100
Ty Gibbs -.103
Todd Gilliland -.126
Noah Gragson -.145
Austin Cindric -.189
Austin Hill -.180
Shane van Gisbergen -.195
Josh Berry -.199
Riley Herbst -.375
Jesse Love -.400
Robert Dahlgren
2004: C
2007: C
2008: C
2009: C-
2010: C+
2016: C
2017: C+
2018: C
2019: C
2020: C
2021: C
Cumulative points: 24
Dahlgren won four titles and 53 races in the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship (and its predecessor the Swedish Touring Car Championship), which I do take fairly seriously although admittedly, the series was fading from its peak by the time he was winning titles and his touring car ratnig of .058 isn’t great.
Wally Dallenbach, Jr.
1985: E-
1986: E-
1988: C
1989: C+
1991: C-
1992: C-
1993: C-
Cumulative points: 18
Obviously, none of his NASCAR stuff is worth rating but I really like his back-to-back Trans-Am titles in 1985; the former year he also won one overall and four IMSA class wins including the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring and the latter year he beat Scott Pruett who had his breakout year that year. Afterward, he had back-to-back 2nd place points finishes in IMSA GTO in 1988 and 1989 with back-to-back class wins at the 12 Hours of Sebring followed by three 24 Hours of Daytona class wins from 1991-1993.
Ryan Dalziel
2004: C-
2008: C-
2010: C+
2011: C
2012: E
2013: C+
2014: C-
2015: C+
2016: C
2017: C
2018: C-
Cumulative points: 29
I used to hype him a great deal in the early 2010s but I feel his career hasn’t aged well and he’s really fallen off in recent years as he is not that dominant in very shallow classes. Nonetheless, I decided he should be a lock because he did some amazing stuff, like winning an overall Grand-Am race with Henri Zogaib (a scammer who defrauded Dalziel of $550,000 and never did anything else in his career), finishing 5th in points in 2010 while his 24 Hours of Daytona-winning teammates João Barbosa and Terry Borcheller only finished 13th in points even though they spent most of the season driving for the powerhouse Action Express Racing while he was driving for the fledgling and kind of shitty Starworks Motorsport. Best of all was his 2012 when he finished second in points and led the most laps for Starworks in Grand-Am while also earning three ALMS class wins and three WEC class wins including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, 12 Hours of Sebring, and the Petit Le Mans. I almost considered him for my top five that year, so I guess that’s enough even though nothing he’s done in recent years has excited me much.
Sammy Davis
1927: E-
Cumulative points: 2
Much like Gérard de Courcelles below, Davis earned one 24 Hours of Le Mans overall win and one class win in the 1920s, but he was an amateur driver and journalist, he crashed in nearly all his Le Mans starts including his win, and I also generally think the American drivers were better than the Europeans in the ‘20s so I gave him no top five seasons and he isn’t even close to being worthy. Obviously not to be confused with the legendary singer.
Lex Davison
1954: C-
1955: C-
1956: C-
1957: E-
1958: C-
1961: C-
1964: C-
Cumulative points: 11
The patriarch of Australia’s third greatest racing family I guess after the Brabhams and the Joneses, Lex won four Australian Grands Prix long before the race became an F1 event, won the inaugural Australian Drivers’ Championship (that country’s most important open wheel title) in 1957 and won three straight Australian Hillclimb championships from 1955-1957. Ultimately, I decided his competition wasn’t strong enough.
Will Davison
2001: C-
2007: C-
2008: C+
2009: E-
2011: C-
2012: E
2013: E-
2014: C-
2015: C
2016: C+
2017: C-
2018: C-
2019: C
2021: C
2022: C+
Cumulative points: 41
Grandson of Lex, brother of Porsche Carrera Cup Australia champion Alex, and cousin of IMSA/World Challenge/NASCAR/IndyCar driver James, Will was the best Davison and probably the only one I will list. Although he’s fading to irrelevance right now and never won a Supercars title, he has 22 career Supercars wins including two Bathurst 1000s. I also rated his 2001 even though Australian Formula Ford is a very minor league series because he won nine races against a field that also included Will Power and Jamie Whincup.
Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat
1897: 2
1898: 2
1899: 2
Cumulative points: 15
Although I probably won’t include more than a couple drivers from the 1800s, I think de Chasseloup-Laubat probably deserves it as he was the first driver to set a world land speed record in 1898 and he set two more in 1899 as he and Camille Jenatzy alternated that record back and forth. Additionally, unlike most of the world land speed record holders, he also won the Marseilles-Nice-La Turbie race in 1897, listed on Wikipedia as the tenth race ever. I think that combination is probably worth recognizing for its historic nature, but if you want to argue the competition was too shitty for this to be recognized, I’m not going to argue with you. For the pre-1905 era, I award 10 points for a first place season, followed by 5, 3, 2, 1 for 2nd-5th and then I award no other drivers points, but at the moment that’s enough for him to make the list.
Gérard de Courcelles
1923: C+
1924: C+
1925: E
1926: E-
Cumulative points: 7
The 1925 Le Mans overall winner and 1923 class winner, he’s better than Davis because he was more of a team leader, made fewer mistakes, and didn’t crash as much as Davis, but I still think I have to say no. With a lot of these sports car drivers, it’s difficult to say which driver on a multi-driver team was doing the work, but I have to figure de Courcelles’s main teammate André Rossignol was better because he backed up his win with 1926 in a different teammate (although de Courcelles did set the fastest lap that year), so if I’m going to recognize this era at all, Rossignol would be the better choice (but I might not even list him either).
Toulo de Graffenried
1948: C-
1949: C
1951: C-
1953: C+
Cumulative points: 7
De Graffenried did earn 7 non-championship Grand Prix/F1 wins from 1948-1954 including the 1949 British GP, but most of the fields he competed against were not good and much shallower than the points F1 races. Additionally, he has a below average open wheel rating of -.020 so I don’t think he should be recognized.
Roger de Lageneste
1960: E-
1966: C
1967: C
Cumulative points: 9
De Lageneste won two European Rally Championship races in 1960 when that was the top tier of rally racing; he also won six World Sportscar Championship races, but only one of them was an overall win and when I looked at some of those wins, I saw that he lost by 3 hours, 7 minutes, 55 laps, and 33 minutes, which suggests he was not exactly that relevant in sports cars despite his occasional class wins.
Nyck de Vries
2018: C-
2019: C-
2020: C-
2021: E
2022: C+
Cumulative points: 18
His Formula E title season seems like something of a fluke, but I’d still rather list him than not especially since he’s relevant in the WEC too. I’ll almost certainly rate him this year since he beat his great teammate Edoardo Mortara in points despite missing two races due to his WEC commitments, but I haven’t gone through this year’s FE season in any real detail yet.
Jorge Omar del Río
1979: C-
1980: C+
1981: E-
1982: E-
Cumulative points: 14
He won three straight titles in TC2000, either the most prestigious or second-most prestigious Argentine touring car series from 1980-1982, but the problem is he fell off so quickly after that that I’m not sure this is worth recognizing.
François Delecour
1991: C
1992: C
1993: E
1994: C+
1995: C+
Cumulative points: 20
A second-tier rally racer with four WRC wins in 1993 and 1994, but I think his 1993 season might be enough for the list since he won thrice against two-time championship-winning teammate Miki Biasion and swept him in their shared races. He also completed a relatively rare trifecta in winning the Tour de Corse, Monte Carlo Rally, and Race of Champions in three consecutive seasons from 1993-1995, but his relevance didn’t last long.
Louis Delétraz
2021: C
2022: C+
2023: C
2024: C
Cumulative points: 9
I know Delétraz is one of the hot up-and-coming sports car drivers with four titles from 2021-2024, but my problem is that three of them were in the European Le Mans Series, which has had extremely shallow competition (to give you some idea, Kyffin Simpson shared in the 2023 title that Delétraz won three times). I could totally see Delétraz playing his way into consideration by the time I’m done though as I acknowledge he’s very good.
Pipo Derani
2016: E
2017: C
2018: C
2019: C+
2020: C-
2023: C+
2024: C
Cumulative points: 23
As with all these sports car drivers, I may adjust some seasons up and down once I have access to more lap time data/lap leader data, and all that stuff does seem to be available for the entirety of Derani’s career so I’ll do that eventually. Like Dane Cameron, he could end up becoming a lock when I do this. I was knocked out by him winning the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring and being team leader in his first two starts, but nothing else has impressed me that much and I didn’t even rate his first title season of 2021 because he was too far behind his co-driver Felipe Nasr in all the data I tracked.
Jorge Descotte
1950: C+
1951: E
Cumulative points: 13
Descotte won six Turismo Carretera races from 1950-1955 including four in his peak season of 1951 when he finished third in points. Considering that was the series at its absolute peak only a few years after Juan Manuel Fangio yet, he’s definitely worth considering but it wasn’t enough wins nor was it a long enough career.
Don Devendorf
1978: C-
1979: E-
1980: C
1982: E-
1983: C+
Cumulative points: 16
Devendorf won 22 IMSA races from 1978-1983, seven of which were overall wins. What gives me pause is the fact that he never won a class win at the 24 Hours of Daytona or the 12 Hours of Sebring (which have much stronger fields than the shallower races that Devendorf won), but why I’m still leaning yes is because 15 of his wins were solo in a time when plenty of the minor IMSA races allowed single-driver teams.
Julio Devoto
1950: C-
1952: C-
1953: E-
1960: C+
1962: C
Cumulative points: 12
Devoto won eleven Turismo Carretera wins and like Descotte, he peaked when the series was near its overall peak with his four-win 1953 season. However, it looks like he wasn’t even remotely a title contender at any point as the only one of those seasons I can even find his overall ranking was 1962, when he finished 25th. This series is niche enough that I don’t think I want to pick anyone from it who didn’t compete for championships.
Luis Rubén di Palma
1964: C+
1967: C-
1969: C-
1970: E-
1971: E-
1975: C-
1980: C
1981: C+
1982: C+
1983: E
Cumulative points: 34
Di Palma won back-to-back Turismo Carretera titles in 1970 and 1971 and 17 overall wins; he had extreme longevity as his last win came in 1998 when he was 53! Additionally, he won the similarly-prestigious TC2000 title in 1983, making him the first driver to win both of Argentina’s two top tier touring car series in his career.
Pierre Dieudonné
1976: C
1977: C-
1979: C
1981: C-
1987: C
1988: C
1989: C-
Cumulative points: 11
When I first looked him up, I had him listed as the 24 Hours of Spa winner in 1974, 1975, and 1981 but upon doing further research, I learned that he did not start those first two races as he was entered but didn’t drive while his main teammate Jean Xhenceval won both with different teammates. Xhenceval and Dieudonné also combined to win ten races and the 1976 European Touring Car Championship title, but since Dieudonné apparently wasn’t viewed as good enough to start the previous two Spa races, I have to give Xhenceval more of the credit. Later on he added lots of wins, including his 1981 Spa win, five more European Touring Car Championship wins, one World Touring Car Championship win, a Japanese Touring Car Championship win, eight World Sportscar Championship class wins including two Le Mans class wins and two more Le Mans class wins that didn’t count for WSC credit. But the more research I did, the less I was impressed. His three straight Le Mans class wins from 1987-1989 came in classes that had only 1, 3, and 1 finisher, and were way shallower than the actual competitive classes. Almost every teammate/co-driver he had was better than he was and it seemed like he coasted off better drivers for most of his career, as indicated by his shaky touring car rating .005. I think I’d rather list Xhenceval, not only because I think he was better but because it would be cool to list a driver for each letter of the alphabet and there are no other “X” choices who are even the least bit deserving.
Jon Dooley
1980: C
1981: E-
1982: C+
1983: C
1984: C
1985: C-
1987: C
Cumulative points: 17
Dooley on the other hand is not as well-known as Dieudonné but was probably better. Dooley won 18 class races in the British Saloon/Touring Car Championship from 1980-1987, had an extremely high touring car rating of .231, and was the highest-rated BSCC driver in my model in both 1981 (when he won the Class A championship) and 1985. He also won a second Class B championship in 1984.
Edgar Dören
1974: C-
1975: C-
1979: C-
1981: C
1985: C
1988: C+
1990: C-
1992: C-
Cumulative points: 12
Dören had a lot of wins but his win count wasn’t as good as that implies. He won two minor league German touring car titles (DRP in 1975 and DRT in 1979; the latter was the less prestigious class within the very prestigious DRM series). He also won an overall WSC win and ten class wins, but a lot of that (including his 24 Hours of Le Mans class win) came in the B class, which was a lot less prestigious than the famed Group C class. Most of his career was spent competing at Nürburgring, where he won 24 VLN races including an upset in the 24 Hours of Nürburgring overall in 1988, but it seems like he won that more because of his car’s reliability as the faster factory cars dropped out than his own speed. Ultimately, I think I decided no because his touring car rating of -.109 seems too bad to recognize.
René Dreyfus
1929: C+
1930: E
1931: C+
1932: E-
1933: C+
1934: E
1935: E-
1938: C+
Cumulative points: 14
Dreyfus was unquestionably one of the top open wheel drivers of the ‘30s, with eight non-points Grand Prix wins from 1929-1938 including the 1930 Monaco GP (the second ever held), the 1934 Belgian GP, and the 1938 Pau GP. He probably deserves to be a lock, but he isn’t because I gave him no top five seasons and I gave the pre-World War II drivers perhaps too few points. However, even though 14 points is where I currently believe my bubble to be, he is not one of the drivers I am looking to cut if/when cuts need to be made.
Tony Dron
1977: E
1978: E-
1980: C
1982: C
Cumulative points: 19
His touring car rating is really bad because he didn’t have teammates in his best seasons, but in 1977 and 1978 he won back-to-back Class C championships in the British Saloon Car Championship, winning 6 overall wins and 12 additional class wins in those years. That really impresses me because in that era, the Class D cars were significantly faster than the Class C cars and routinely earned all the overall wins so he was clearly punching well above his weight to win overall in the weaker class. Afterward, he won six World Sportscar Championship class wins including a class win at Le Mans in 1982.
Arthur Duray
1903: 1
1906: 4
1927: C+
Cumulative points: 21
Duray had an eclectic career that included setting the world land speed record twice in 1903, two Grand Prix wins 21 years apart in 1906 and 1927 and five 24 Hours of Spa class wins from 1927-1933, but he was too far behind the overall winners in most of those for me to feel any of those were worth rating. If I decide to award him less for the land speed record, I may cut him but at the moment I think his eclecticism is probably worth rewarding.
Mike Edwards
1996: C
2009: C+
2010: C+
2011: C
2012: C-
2013: C+
Cumulative points: 14
Edwards dominated over an era of the NHRA that people don’t seem to have much nostalgia for, with 25 of his 40 Pro Stock wins coming from 2009-2013 after the NHRA reduced its standard track length from a quarter mile to 1,000 feet. As a result, it doesn’t seem like anyone in the general racing public seems to mythologize any drivers who came up in this era like they do the ‘80s/’90s drivers like Bob Glidden, John Force, Kenny Bernstein, Joe Amato, Gary Scelzi, and so on. Maybe this lack of hype is why I might’ve downgraded him too much, but I would argue it’s mainly because most of his best seasons came in his fifties.
Maro Engel
2010: C-
2014: C-
2015: C-
2016: C+
2017: C-
2018: C+
2019: C+
2020: C
2021: C
2023: C+
2024: E-
Cumulative points: 28
I continue to think he’s an egotistical blowhard because I can’t get this out of my head and that remains the first thing I associate him with. However, I suspected that last year might have been enough to push him into lock status and it looks that way. Unlike “Larsson” who had periods of dominance, Engel was a career compiler, but I had some real highlights, especially his GT Endurance Cup championship in 2018, his GT Sprint championship last year, his 24 Hours of Nürburgring win in 2016, and his record four Macau GT Cup wins. He has won at least something of relevance every single year since 2014 and has had a plodding, methodical career with numerous good seasons albeit few great ones. Yeah, he’s a lock but I had to think about it.
Christian Engelhart
2011: C-
2012: C
2013: C+
2014: C+
2015: C+
2016: C+
2017: E-
2018: C
2019: C+
2020: C+
Cumulative points: 28
Engel’s similarly-named, one year younger Germanc ontemporary is very similar to Engel as he reliably won some kind of major win every year from 2010-2013 and won a couple of sports car titles (the GT Endurance Cup in 2017 and the German ADAC GT in 2020). Engel seems to have more high-prestige wins than Engelhart, but on the other hand, Engelhart has a vastly higher touring car rataing of .236 to Engel’s -.002. I think those drivers basically cancel each other out and I gave them the same number of points.
Kenneth Eriksson
1986: C
1987: C+
1988: E-
1989: C+
1990: C+
1991: C+
1993: C+
1995: E
1996: E-
1997: C+
2000: C-
Cumulative points: 41
Eriksson is a driver I don’t know a lot about because rally racing isn’t one of my areas of expertise, but as I looked over his sesason-by-season record, I grew very impressed. Typically, he never ran entire seasons in the World Rally Championship in his prime years, which kept him from contesting the championship too significantly. However, he beat a WRC-winning teammate every year from 1988-1991 (Juha Kankkunen, Carlos Sainz, Ari Vatanen, Timo Salonen) and 1995 (Tommi Mäkinen, who won the next four titles) which suggests that maybe Eriksson could have won a title in his heyday if he ran a full schedule. He won six WRC events as well as three Asia-Pacific Rally Championships from 1995-1997.
Harald Ertl
1978: E
1979: C
1980: C+
Cumulative points: 15
After a dismal F1 career, Ertl resurfaced in German touring cars, where he was impressive with 11 wins from 1978-1980 including the 1978 championship. The only question I have about whether he deserves to be on the list or not is whether his career was too short as he didn’t race internationally in 1981 and his attempted comeback in 1982 did not come to fruition when he died in a plane crash.
Nasif Estéfano
1964: C
1972: E-
1973: E
Cumulative points: 17
Estéfano won two Argentine touring car titles: the Turismo Nacional Class D championship in 1965 (although I prefer his 1964 since he had two wins there and none in 1965) and Turismo Carretera posthumously in 1973. I maybe overrated his 1972 and 1973 seasons, but it would almost feel rude to not list a driver who won a title posthumously and likely had a future as he was only 40. I might change my mind on this.
Elfyn Evans
2014: C-
2015: C+
2016: C
2017: C+
2019: C+
2020: E-
2021: E
2022: C
2023: E-
2024: C
Cumulative points: 36
The current World Rally Championship points leader was a pretty obvious lock, but something left me wanting about his career. Maybe it’s that he finished second in points in four of the last five years despite the fact that he was teammates to multiple different champions (Sébastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanperä). Nonetheless, even though those two perpetualaly beat him and I fully expect Rovanperä will beat him for this title, he was probably close enough that he should still be a lock, although I’m far from finished on my rally drivers model and am not willing to pontificate on his career just yet. He does have a couple minor league championships as he won the WRC2 lower class title and the British Rally Championship simultaneously in 2016.