I managed to get the condensate pump repaired the same day and it was fine, so Mom didn’t go without heating for more than a day. However, the people at the helping agency PACE CNY honestly haven’t been very much help. Although they do shower her and usually wash her hair twice a week, which I greatly appreciate, the meeting that was scheduled for last Thursday, hours after I left the ER, was rescheduled for today. Again, there was some kind of mixup because she was supposed to go there on a bus and I was planning on riding with her today, but when I called the PACE CNY transportation office to ask why they hadn’t picked her up to go to her appointment, they told me they had no record of an appointment. It does not seem to be a particularly well-run organization, but Mom wasn’t really desperate for this appointment as she didn’t want to leave the house anyway, so whatever.
Ivan Capelli (17)
Summary: A Formula 1 driver from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, Capelli came in with a lot of hype after winning the Italian F3, European F3, and F3000 titles in four years from 1983-1986. While he never became a star, he was a sneakily underrated driver for March/Leyton House Racing for five years before a disastrous Ferrari season in 1992 effectively ended his career.
Case for: The three minor league titles in four years obviously indicate he was very talented. While he had no teammate in his 1987 rookie season, he was teammates with Maurício Gugelmin from 1988-1991 at March/Leyton House and he consistently outran him. I have calculated crude average running positions for all historic F1 seasons and each year Capelli beat Gugelmin, usually significantly: 8.85 to 10.68 in 1988, 11.72 to 12.98 in 1989, 10.26 to 12.23 in 1990, and 9.44 to 13.61 in 1991. He also briefly passed Alain Prost for the lead at Suzuka in 1988, becoming the first driver to lead an F1 race without a turbocharged engine in five years, then led the most laps at Paul Ricard in 1990 until Prost overtook him when his engine turned sour with three laps left. Even though Gugelmin somehow made F1metrics’ top 100 list and Capelli didn’t, I don’t think anyone would argue that Gugelmin was better in F1. and my model certainly doesn’t, as it has Capelli at .069 (well above average) and Gugelmin at -.021 (actually below average).
Case against: The problem is that Capelli’s career after Leyton House was absolutely miserable. Although he was Ferrari’s last intended Italian full-time driver hire, Capelli’s 1992 was possibly the worst Ferrari season in my entire lifetime. Although the 1992 Ferrari was not very good, Capelli was the last driver to fail to score a podium for them until Felipe Massa in 2011 (after his injury, while Capelli didn’t even seem to have been affected by a major crash). He was fired before the season ended and never really recovered. While many drivers after falling out of F1 reemerged as major stars in IndyCar, sports cars, or touring cars, that didn’t really happen for him. He raced on and off in the Super Tourenwagen Cup, but never finished better than 11th in points or 5th in a race. His touring car rating of .037 is still above average, but that’s worse than it looks because the average major league touring car driver is worse than the average major league open wheel driver. He won essentially nothing after his F1 career ended, except for 3 wins in the 2006 Italian GT Championship, which might not be enough to even be worth listing.
Verdict: Keep. It basically comes down to whether I think the four seasons he outran Gugelmin and his two great races are enough, since there’s little else there. Some people might argue Gugelmin belongs on the list instead of Capelli for what he did in CART (he did beat his teammates Danny Sullivan and Mark Blundell in points six straight seasons, but Sullivan was washed up and Blundell was injured twice and still beat Gugelmin 3-1 in wins and 18-16 in finishes). I feel since I have Blundell currently off the list, I should have Gugelmin off the list too (but I’ll get to him) and Capelli barely on (I really value his pass in 1988 because he was one of only two non-McLaren drivers to make an on-track pass for the lead all season in the year when McLaren’s Ayrton Senna and Prost won 15 of 16 races). But Capelli’s run was so short that it’s hardly a no-brainer or anything. A very interesting borderline case.
Patrick Carpentier (14)
Summary: Won five races as a CART/Champ Car driver in the early 2000s before making a huge gamble to switch to the IRL for Eddie Cheever’s team in 2005. Although he actually beat Scott Dixon in points to be the highest non-Penske Toyota that year, his career effectively ended when Cheever’s sponsor Red Bull bailed after that season, before he got a brief and goofy reprieve when George Gillett hired him for the former Evernham Motorsports NASCAR team in 2008. Hilariously beat Dario Franchitti for ROTY in CART in 1997, and then beat him in the ROTY battle again in NASCAR, although both of them got their doors waxed by the mighty juggernaut that was Regan Smith.
Case for: Although he was steamrolled by his first Forsythe Racing teammate, Greg Moore (who was almost four years younger than him), which is not a good look, his other teammate comparisons are really solid. He beat Bryan Herta 6-2, Tony Kanaan 4-2 (even though Carpentier’s Mercedes engines were inferior to Kanaan’s Hondas), Alex Tagliani 15-10, and tied Paul Tracy 10-10, even though they were teammates when Tracy won the championship. In the IRL, he beat the underrated Alex Barron 8-5. This gives him a surprisingly high rating of .137 (basically identical to Will Power’s) with a long enough career that it might be difficult to dismiss. He also had three consecutive top five points finishes in CART/CCWS and five consecutive top tens in his last five seasons before his career ended due to lack of sponsorship.
Case against: He kind of was to Gen X what his countryman James Hinchcliffe was to millennials, and I do not have Hinchcliffe presently on the list. No one at any point ever really thought Carpentier was one of the best CART drivers. He never came close to contending for a championship. His passing record is pretty putrid, and his wins are pretty humdrum, also. Despite 5 wins, he only has a 3-6 lead change record, giving him fewer passes for the lead than wins. All three of those passes came in the 2001 Michigan and Fontana Hanford device races, which had 60 and 73 lead changes respectively. Although he did win the Michigan race, he only led three laps, and the driver he passed for the win was Michel Jourdain, Jr., which is… not a big deal. In races where it was not so automatic to pass, he never made a pass for the lead ever. Beat Dario Franchitti out of the pits at Cleveland, won from the pole at Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca, then won again on Laguna Seca, but that time on pit strategy. It doesn’t help that he didn’t finish better than 10th against the stronger CART fields of 1997-2001 and earned all his top five points finishes in 2002-2004 after the fields were rapidly declining. His third-place points finish in 2002 is solid since that field was still strong despite Penske’s departure, but the 2003 and 2004 fields were really gutted. And all his teammate comparisons have asterisks: Moore destroyed him, but Moore is the highest-rated IndyCar driver in my model and as great as he was, I’m not sure that holds up, which means Carpentier should have been hurt more by that comparison than he was; Kanaan won at Michigan and dominated Long Beach before crashing while Carpentier didn’t fight for a win when they were teammates; Carpentier was in seasons 4-6 while Tagliani was in seasons 1-3; even though Tracy and Carpentier tied in their head-to-head, they weren’t close on performance as Tracy won 9 races to Carpentier’s 2.
Verdict: Drop. You know, I thought I was going to say yes, but I wound up in a very different place after weighing all these arguments against each other. For as much as I do value my open wheel teammate model for driving comparisons, I think it breaks down in this case. Carpentier was nowhere near as good as my model thinks he is, and that is proven by his poor passing numbers, which I think override his strong teammate numbers, especially because he didn’t really start his rise until the CART field quality was plummeting. I expected him to be a yes, but now I think he’s a hell no. Sorry, Canada.
Duane Carter (17)
Summary: Father of the better-known dirt racing legend Pancho, Duane was a very good sprint and midget car driver in his own right. However, unlike Pancho, Duane’s greatness might be debatable. He won the AAA Midwest Big Car championship in 1950 and 20 proto-sprint car wins after transitioning out of midgets, where he won 19 AAA and one American Racing Drivers’ Club race. He also won a non-points race in both IndyCar and the AAA Midwest Big Car series and had a single top five points finish in IndyCar (fourth in 1952), along with a string of solid Indy 500 finishes.
Case for: He demonstrated versatility by winning in both sprints and midgets at a time when those series were in their heyday and at their peak of relevance. His career was interrupted by World War II because he won his first major midget races in 1939. He won a rare 500-lap midget race in 1947. He beat a rising Troy Ruttman for the Midwest Big Car title in 1950, the year before Ruttman won the Midwest and Pacific Big Car titles simultaneously.
Case against: In the roadster, pre-formula car era of IndyCar racing, when it was much easier for sprint and midget car drivers to cross over and become major IndyCar stars, Carter didn’t do that, which kind of stands out in that era. The ‘50s were a pretty weak decade for IndyCar competition because drivers were either dirt or pavement specialists, and it feels like almost half the drivers were bad at both disciplines, and very few could master both (Carter certainly didn’t). Although he had five top tens in the Indy 500, including a third and two fourths, he never led a lap, and this third-place and one of his fourth places were shared with Indy 500 winners Sam Hanks and Ruttman respectively, who were clearly better. Although Ruttman and Carter briefly had a rivalry in Big Cars, it’s worth noting that when Carter beat him for the title, he was 37, and Ruttman was 20, and Ruttman still won 10 races to Carter’s 6 that year. I think that’s the deciding factor.
Verdict: Drop. Even though he’s a widely-respected driver as his inductions to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame and the sprint and midget car Halls of Fame attest, he didn’t win a points race in IndyCars when many of the Big Car stars were doing so (despite 45 attempts) and he was more of a career compiler in sprint cars rather than a driver who had an extremely high peak. While Pancho obviously deserves it, I think he can stand in for the entire family.
Eugenio Castellotti (14)
Summary: Castellotti never won an F1 race, but finished 3rd in the points standings in 1955 and sixth in 1956 and won four major sports car races (the 1952 Portuguese Grand Prix, 1956 12 Hours of Sebring and Mille Miglia, and the 1957 1000k of Buenos Aires) before his death in an F1 testing crash at Modena at the age of 26.
Case for: In his heyday, he was hyped as the best Italian driver since Alberto Ascari. His .151 open wheel driver rating arguably backs that up as well. F1metrics claims him (see the Sergio Pérez entry) as the driver with the highest ratio of podiums to his teammates at 4-0. All those sports car races he won were considered very important. At the 1955 Belgian Grand Prix, he was the youngest polesitter for thirteen years until Jacky Ickx in 1968.
Case against: Being the best Italian driver since Ascari’s death doesn’t necessarily mean much, considering his peak season in 1956 was the year after Ascari died. That season, Castellotti went winless and finished sixth in points, which looks a lot less impressive when you realize that his teammates, Juan Manuel Fangio and Peter Collins, combined to win five of the seven non-Indy 500 World Championship races that year. Since Ferrari entered all its drivers in F1 and sports cars simultaneously in the ‘50s and ‘60s, most of them won major sports car races by default. F1metrics’ 4-0 statistic seems to be based only on races where Castellotti and a teammate had the same chassis-engine combination. Perhaps Fangio and Collins had superior car combinations, but they also earned them by outrunning Castellotti in the first place. I’ve already decided the F1 career doesn’t deserve it, so now I have to look at the sports car career. The 1952 Portuguese Grand Prix was a solo drive but there were only two other notable drivers in it (Clemente Biondetti and Felice Bonetto, and both of them were at least age 49 and I’m not listing Bonetto either). His Sebring win was with Fangio, and Fangio probably would’ve won without him. His Mille Miglia win was stronger since he won an eleven-hour race straight up against Collins, Luigi Musso, and Fangio. His Buenos Aires win came with Musso and Masten Gregory, who were probably roughly comparable.
Verdict: Keep. Even though I’ve probably made a stronger case against than case for, this feels like the opposite of Patrick Carpentier to me in that I expected to drop him immediately and am now reconsidering for the moment. Being the youngest polesitter in thirteen years is an important statistic and the fact that he legitimately outran Fangio in an 11-hour sports car race where they both drove solo may somewhat make up for how badly Fangio outperformed him in the shorter F1 races. I suspect if I do more research into that race, I’ll likely find out Fangio had much more significant mechanical problems than Castellotti did, which might cause me to change my mind. I guess my entire ruling on him comes down to how seriously to take that race, but I don’t think I have enough evidence to drop him yet.
Nicky Catsburg (19)
Summary: The first driver ever to interact with me on Twitter when I ranked him in my first top 100 in 2015 (a list which I would now change considerably), Catsburg has had an eclectic career with wins in most of the major endurance races, including the 24 Hours of Spa overall in 2015, the 24 Hours of Nürburgring overall in 2020, and class wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, and 24 Hours of Le Mans three consecutive years from 2021-2023. In 2020, he won what is probably his most prestigious title (the Intercontinental GT Championship) and in his best season of 2023, he won the WEC title in the LMGTE Am class, the Asian Le Mans GT title, another 24 Hours of Nürburgring, and another class win at the 24 Hours of Spa.
Case for: In addition to winning several major races and several major titles, he’s still very relevant today as he and his teammate Tommy Milner combined to finish third in the IMSA GTD Pro championship in 2026. It was a fairly equal partnership (Catsburg was slightly faster while Milner had a better passing record), but he certainly isn’t done. He was also a pretty solid touring car racer, with two World Touring Car Championship wins, a fifth-place points finish in 2017, and a solid if not electrifying touring car rating of .122.
Case against: I’m starting to think there isn’t one, since he is a still-relevant driver who has already won all the major 24 Hours races either overall or in class with a consistently rotating bunch of teammates. He has already exceeded the 17-point threshold, where the 1000th-place driver is ranked currently, and it feels like he is way more likely to become a lock eventually than to fall off the list entirely.
Verdict: Keep. I still likely need to do more research into lap times and passing for some of his sports car and touring car seasons if those data are still available, but I don’t think he’s going to be one of my most likely cuts.