Okay, as someone who’s usually only been watching NASCAR and IndyCar live (although I do plan on blasting through all the F1 races I missed for writing purposes after the NASCAR season ends and I’m finished with Murphy Brown - only eight episodes left), I chose to watch Talladega over Austin. In both races, Kyle Larson and Kimi Antonelli pretty much wrapped up their respective championships with their simultaneous wins. Antonelli’s win and presumptive championship weren’t particularly surprising since they were expected as much, so that’s not as much fun to talk about. Larson’s was kind of a surprise because he had just had a miserable race at Phoenix and had almost lost his points lead, and was now entering a drafting track race at Talladega, a discipline where he had never won before. That changed when the seas parted for him, and he earned a storybook win at Talladega after almost everybody else who had even the slimmest chances of winning the championship crashed, handing him nearly a full-race points lead with two races left.
After the 2009 season had the worst restrictor plate racing of all time, I’ve pretty much ever since expected the worst at all drafting tracks. By setting the bar so low,, I guess I’ve built a glass-half-full attitude that helps me to appreciate any race that exceeds my really low standards, so often I find myself enjoying races other people hate more than I expect to. The ridiculous fuel-saving in recent Talladega races was getting annoying, so I thought it was really funny when only the three RFK Racing cars of Brad Keselowski, Chris Buescher, and Ryan Preece went out to a 30-second lead because only they decided to race at full speed. I initially assumed they were going to have to pit twice while everyone else pitted once in Stage 1. But since the entire field still only needed to pit once, I really have no idea what everyone else was doing. Their sweeping the top three in that stage as a result didn’t really do anything for them in the race overall, but it was amusing just to see something so unexpected, and hopefully that’ll kill the fuel-saving for good. I wish I knew who made that call: was it Brad Keselowski itself or was it my onetime-boss-turned-RFK-analytics-guru David Smith who decided to do that? It makes me wish NASCAR still had all those corny contingency awards in the ‘90s for Mechanic of the Race. That was probably the pit call of the year, whoever made it. Christopher Bell did his best Ryan Briscoe imitation by crashing himself out of the caution in a solo spin on pit road. Although I instantly compared him to Briscoe at the time, I doubt it was the same kind of “jump the shark” moment for Bell, since what really sank Briscoe was Will Power being promoted to full-time status at Penske’s IndyCar team in 2010, and it’s still hard for me to imagine Chase Briscoe or Ty Gibbs genuinely overtaking Bell as Joe Gibbs Racing team leader after Denny Hamlin’s retirement.
After the Big One triggered by some combination of Bubba Wallace, Ryan Blaney, and Joey Logano sent Logano on his roof and eliminated basically all the other title contenders, Larson was running second to Todd Gilliland and was already likely to win since manufacturer team tactics have been happening on these tracks since at least the ‘90s, and most of the remaining cars were Chevies like Larson’s. However, he got forced out of line by Austin Hill and fell to 10th overall before rocketing back to the lead in less than half a lap in the kind of performance I hadn’t really seen before (without everyone crashing). That left a lot of people suspicious because conspiracists assumed that all the Chevies were in cahoots to let Larson win. I neither particularly like nor dislike Larson, so I don’t feel I’m significantly biased either way here, and it seemed no less legitimate than most other Talladega finishes. I don’t think Chevy was ordering everyone to allow Larson past (I think he presumably would have won the title even if he finished 10th, based on where everyone else finished). Maybe I’m just too credulous or something, but it honestly seemed to me a lot of the drivers were really tentative simply because they were trying to avoid a last-lap crash (which seem to happen like routine clockwork these days) more than because they were in the tank for Larson, but I suppose I could be wrong.
I’ve decided to shut down my racermetrics Twitter account due to lack of engagement, not wanting to distract myself, and trying to focus on nothing other than my work, my book project, and caregiving (and often failing at stopping myself from consuming things). I do still have a lurker account through my Gmail account with a fake name just to read things, but I know I should just get off it entirely. I think reading months of people making fun of anyone who complained about being lonely really set me off, although I always chose not to engage. I’m glad I wasn’t on there during this race after a string of shitty drivers who were either accused of domestic violence or publicly made homophobic rants were leading, not to mention the winner, who lots of people will never forgive for what he did in 2020, and I still think that’s (not so secretly) underlying a lot of the backlash for people who want to call him a fake champion.
I really don’t understand why so many NASCAR fans think the driver who had the best season and the champion have to be the same driver. Fans in other disciplines - particularly F1 - understand that a driver can win the championship without being the best driver if the champion’s car advantage was greater than the superior driver’s advantage as a driver. There are extreme examples like 1996, where obviously no one in their right mind thinks either Damon Hill or Jacques Villeneuve were even close to Michael Schumacher, but Ferrari just wasn’t strong enough to compete with McLaren or Adrian Newey at that time. You could even argue Max Verstappen has been better than Antonelli this year, and I expect Verstappen will likely lead my open wheel model again this year since he has swept all teammates this year, while Antonelli has not swept George Russell (but I’ll address that later, and I think I’m rating Antonelli higher this year). But when it comes to NASCAR, fans are so dead set that there must be one best driver, and the best driver is by default whoever scored the most overall points in a season.
I think this is a year where, due to the superior speed of the Toyotas until perhaps recently, the #11 car has certainly been the best team, and Denny Hamlin has reaped the benefits of that. Really, all drivers’ championships should be regarded as teams’ championships since the driver is only one member of the team, albeit the team member who gets the most credit. But what F1 fans get, and NASCAR fans seem not to, is that drivers should be compared to their teammates, or at least other drivers using the same chassis or engine. Hamlin accumulated more overall points than anyone else, both because he was really lucky and because the Toyotas were faster than the Fords and significantly faster than the Chevies. However, when you compare him to the other Toyota drivers and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, I don’t think this has been his best season. He outperformed all three JGR teammates (Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe, and Ty Gibbs) by a larger margin in 2025 than in 2026 in my opinion, and the same goes for Tyler Reddick, who drives for his team. Hamlin was unambiguously the best Toyota driver in 2025 when some of those other guys were slumping, but this year, I’d say he was only barely better than Bell and Reddick overall, and if you ranked either of them over Hamlin, I wouldn’t laugh. That’s pretty bad, considering both how unlucky Bell was and the fact that he even had an injury this year, yet his numbers improved significantly more than Hamlin’s did. I’d still say he’s the best Toyota driver and I’d take him third overall, but I think people have been overrating him all season just because he led the overall points (just as they were probably overrating Reddick when he was leading the points), and that had more to do with Toyota’s advantage than their advantage specifically.
I guess it’s just venerating what people believe to be the glory days, but the problem is the Latford points system sucked, and a lot of people didn’t like it when it was around. Darrell Waltrip was upset he was nowhere near the title chase in 1984 when he dominated that season in terms of wins and laps led, and to his credit, when he won the 1985 title, even though Bill Elliott grossly outperformed him, he acknowledged that Elliott should have won the title over him also. Even my late, lamented hidebound traditionalist hero Matt McLaughlin hated it. Yet a lot of fans who were only barely alive for the traditional points format seem to think that’s how we should measure drivers ever? The best driver is whoever has the best average finish automatically, but even the Latford system wasn’t that extreme. Mark Martin had the best average finish in NASCAR three times (1990, 1997, and 2002), won none of those titles, and he’d probably admit he didn’t deserve any of those titles, and I actually think his best season was a third-place points finish (1993), not one of his five seconds. You have to do more than look at the box scores to evaluate a driver when an inferior driver can have a car advantage that is greater than the superior driver’s driver advantage. I’m puzzled why NASCAR fans still can’t see this.
I get that Hamlin is the sentimental favorite even from people who hated him because he’s never won a title before, and his father just died, and people are sick of repeated champions like Larson (and even though I can’t prove it, I have to figure a lot of people are still pissed about either his gamer moment or him claiming he’s a better driver than Verstappen, which is stupid, and these are the main reasons people feel such schadenfreude when something happens to him like they do for few other NASCAR drivers). He’s never been the best driver in a season, and he never will be. Sure, a number of drivers worse than Hamlin, like Kurt Busch, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, and Bobby Labonte, were arguably never the best driver in a season and lucked to the titles, but you always need to have a little luck, and Hamlin just never had enough to overcome the fact that someone was always better. And the Chase was favorable to him because it had a lot of intermediate tracks when the Toyotas were dominant on the intermediates and because it had no road course races and he still underachieved. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that Hamlin deserved the championship for his full-season performance if you want, but I don’t think that makes him the best driver. I think Bell, Briscoe, and Gibbs have been way too close to him to call Hamlin the best driver, even though I’d still rate him highest of the four.
The real question is whether Larson or Blaney has been better. For most of the year, I’ve been saying Blaney, but even though Larson had more unforced errors in the regular season, Blaney absolutely has in the Chase. I don’t think he was the main cause of either the Bristol or Talladega wrecks, but he was certainly a partial contributor to both, while Larson has been clean. Of course, you can say that avoiding DNFs is where it’s at, and that’s how you get people who act like Chris Buescher is a great driver when it now looks like Ryan Preece is legitimately on the verge of overtaking him, and Buescher should be embarrassed by that. But here’s the point: if the drivers were actually racing under a points format where every race counted the same, I’m sure Larson would be vastly more conservative in the regular season races and not swing for the fences in a way that results in crashes. Larson’s rookie season was in 2014, the first year of the knockout playoffs, so he was raised in a win-and-in environment where winning is everything, and nothing else matters in the first 26 races. I genuinely think if he needed to points race, he’d be able to do it (and this Chase is arguably proving it), but his high-volatility strategy is what works in this format. I believe Larson was better than Blaney this year, not only because he rose to the occasion and Blaney didn’t, but also because Larson has arguably never outperformed his teammates, William Byron, Chase Elliott, and Alex Bowman as much as he did this year, while Blaney has outperformed Joey Logano worse in other years, in my opinion. For Larson to stand a chance of becoming the first Chase driver to clinch the championship a race early in a year when Chevy has been absolutely horrible is pretty remarkable. Sure, perhaps in a full-season championship format, Hamlin would have still pointed his way to the top (although I’m sure Larson would have crashed less in a full-season format - which I’d still prefer by the way, just not this one), but even if Hamlin had scored the most points overall in a full-season format, that still wouldn’t have made him the better performer.
Another former David Smith writer, Chris Mitchell at NASCAR Probabilities, had a great piece yesterday about Casey Atwood to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his pole at Phoenix. Even though I was reading Jayski updates every day during the period of Atwood’s relevance, I’d somehow forgotten how many near-miss opportunities he’d had with other teams and how close he was to potentially ending up in the marquee rides that Kevin Harvick and Jimmie Johnson rode to superstardom. I personally don’t think he was ever going to be as good as them, but I do think it was ridiculous that Ray Evernham fired him for Jeremy Mayfield, the most overrated NASCAR driver of his generation, after he had beaten Kurt Busch in the points standings (who Roush Racing did not fire the year before he blew up to 3rd in points, and Atwood was a couple years younger than Busch even! I do kind of think he had a low ceiling, and if he’d had the decade-long career he’d deserved, I think he would have been around Jamie McMurray or something, but that’s still not bad. If Evernham had replaced Atwood with Johnson, that would be one thing. But for Mehfield? Yuck.
Atwood’s story resonates with me a lot because, like him, I feel like I had a lot of raw talent I never properly harnessed because I lacked many other things I needed to be successful. When I was in high school, I was recruited heavily by colleges. I was surprised by this since I genuinely didn’t know that colleges recruited anyone for academics, because all you ever hear about in the media is athletic recruiting. But colleges were borderline fighting over me back in the day. I received pamphlets from like 60 or 70 colleges, including half the Ivy League and either Oxford or Cambridge (I don’t remember which). That’s not to say I would’ve gotten into all of those colleges, but there was interest. Washington University in St. Louis, probably the most prestigious American college I’d never heard of, and Johns Hopkins seemed to want me the most. Because I always had very sloppy handwriting and I tended to dangle my lowercase a’s to make them look like g’s, UCLA thought my name was Sean Wong after I filled out one of their postcards. (Bet I’d have struggled more to get in then!) Growing up at the weird cross-section between elitism and trailer trash as the son of two Mensa members who both dropped out of college, I had zero financial know-how, and now I realize I should have used my leverage to see who would’ve given me a free ride. I bet someone would have bitten. It kills me now that almost the elite colleges give everyone free rides now, and Cornell started giving everyone from households less than $75,000 a free ride almost immediately after I graduated. Of course, my test scores were slightly below average for Cornell, well below average for the other Ivy Leagues, and by the time I would’ve benefited from this, I might not have been able to get in. But after I initially targeted Syracuse University (probably just ‘cause I was a fan of their sports teams? Cringe), I got more ambitious and targeted Cornell simply because it was the most prestigious school close to me, and pretty much all the schools recruiting me knew that was likely my eventual target. Cornell sent me some stuff too, but they didn’t really try very hard since I think they knew they already had me.
And what did I get out of it really? A lot of successful projects that were impossible to monetize, basically no real world connections to successful people (since almost nobody there wanted anything to do with me), over $100,000 in debt, bone-crushing loneliness, a jagged career trajectory and failure to launch, decaying health, a constantly shrinking social sphere, and utter depression. At least Atwood seemed to bounce back and find happiness someday. I hope one day I may find the same.
Wally Dallenbach, Jr. (18)
Summary: The son of five-time IndyCar winner and long-time CART chief steward Wally Dallenbach, Sr., Wally, Jr. is best known for his career as a NASCAR driver and announcer but his real legacy came in sports car racing, where he won back-to-back Trans-Am titles in 1985 and 1986 and 9 wins. He also won 4 overall IMSA races and 12 more in class. He earned three consecutive 24 Hours of Daytona class wins from 1991-1993, back-to-back 12 Hours of Sebring class wins in 1988-1989, and he won both races in class earlier in 1985 as well.
Case for: Dallenbach was the youngest Trans-Am champion at the time, winning back-to-back titles at age 22-23. He was instrumental in Roush Racing’s rise to powerhouse status in sports car racing, as his 1985 Trans-Am title was Roush’s first of six titles in that series, and he successfully defended his title in 1986 even though he defected to the Chevy Camaro team, Protofab Racing. Roush never forgot what Dallenbach did for him and re-hired him for IMSA in 1989, which ultimately resulted in him landing the #16 NASCAR Cup Series car in 1992. Although Roush fired him in 1993, Dallenbach elected to remain in NASCAR rather than returning to sports cars. He never really learned oval racing, but he probably got more longevity than he deserved in NASCAR due to his road course performances, as he earned five top fives at Sonoma and Watkins Glen, including second-place finishes at Watkins Glen to Mark Martin in 1993 and 1995, both of which were arguably stolen from him. Even the Martin biography I own (Bob Zeller’s Mark Martin: Driven to Race) heavily implies that as Martin was driving up through the field, Roush ordered Dallenbach to let Martin past before he eventually inherited the lead after Kyle Petty and Dale Earnhardt crashed, although I can see no evidence of this on the video footage. The 1995 race was even more egregious, as Dallenbach was running away with the race before a caution for oil on the track that many fans felt was bogus allowed Martin to catch up; if Dallenbach had been allowed to win, it would have been Bill Davis’s first. He was obviously still very strong on road courses even after he gave up on sports car racing despite never really figuring out ovals. His low-key legendary announcing career also gives me warm feelings towards him as an intangible. Three of Dallenbach’s IMSA wins came in solo drives.
Case against: I obviously think he belongs on the list on vibes at the very least, but the big question is whether he did enough in his sports car career before he pivoted to NASCAR, where I’m sure he made a lot more money and fame despite a downturn in performance. Trans-Am was pretty weak in 1985 as Dallenbach and his Roush teammate Willy T. Ribbs combined to win 12 of 15 races that year, and obviously, both of them were very bad in their CART and NASCAR starts, although at least Dallenbach had some success as effectively a full-season road course ringer for years, while Ribbs never got that chance, presumably due to racism in the NASCAR garage. Ribbs is obviously historically more significant as well, since he was the first of a grand total of two black drivers to start the Indy 500, which makes him probably more interesting to write about. I think they both deserve it, but their poor crossovers make it questionable. Dallenbach also never won an IMSA title, but I think his four 24 Hours of Daytona wins and 12 Hours of Sebring wins matter far more than his never winning a title.
Verdict: Keep. My only question here is whether I thought he did enough in sports cars before his NASCAR pivot. I can’t really convince myself that he didn’t, even if none of his NASCAR seasons are worth rating (although I do think his 1992 and 1993 are probably worth rating due to his three-year Daytona streak). It’s utterly bizarre he’s one of the few drivers to drive for both Jack Roush and Rick Hendrick, though - I get Roush hiring him at the time, but what did Hendrick see in 1998?
Jonathan Davenport (19)
Summary: Davenport is one of the greatest dirt late model drivers of his generation, and I admit that’s been a major blind spot for me for a long time. I was really too dismissive of grassroots late model stuff, and I’m trying to rectify that now. I’ve had Davenport on top 200 lists before, just like I’ve had Brandon Overton, Bobby Pierce, and Shane Sabraski on lists, too. However, I now realize I should’ve been having drivers like that on my list at least somewhere every year, and I haven’t been diligent about that yet, but I’m starting to improve in that regard.
Case for: Davenport’s primary series is the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt series, where he won three titles in 2015, 2018, and 2019 (including 12 wins in both his 2015 and 2019 championship seasons). He has a staggering 98 wins in that series alone, having recently overtaken Scott Bloomquist’s 94 for the most all-time, and I definitely have him as a lock. He has also won many other titles including the Wild West Shootout three times, the Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals twice, and the XR Super Series once. His five wins in the late model World 100 all-star race at Eldora rank second to Billy Moyer’s six. Across all series that The Third Turn covers, he has 315 wins. And I’m sure they’re missing stuff.
Case against: It only comes down to whether I think the competition wasn’t strong enough to justify his inclusion. I don’t find that argument convincing.
Verdict: Keep. If I already have Davenport with more points than the vast majority of other drivers in this bubble group, and I’m openly acknowledging that I historically did not give enough respect to the dirt late model scene, it’s likely I’m going to be bumping several of Davenport’s seasons up, so he’s far more likely to attain lock status by the time I’m done than to be off the list entirely. And you can pretty much Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V that for when I get to Bobby Pierce, who has 276 wins even though he’s thirteen years younger.
Jean-Philippe Dayraut (15)
Summary: Dayraut won the 2001 French Supertouring Championship after the sries no longer really mattered much, but his main legacy is his dominance in the Andros Trophy ice-racing championship in France.
Case for: Although the Andros Trophy was obscure outside of France, it was a significantly underrated part of the French racing ecosystem, as plenty of great French touring car drivers and rally drivers competed there, with four-time World Touring Car Champion Yvan Muller winning it ten times and even Alain Prost winning it thrice long after his retirement. Dayraut is tied for second with Jean-Baptiste Dubourg with six championships, but Dayraut is the all-time leader with 59 wins to Muller’s 48, Prost’s 38, and Dubourg’s 31. Considering how great Muller and Prost were, I might end up considering Dayraut is a lock once I’ve done more research. Considering how dangerous racing in the rain is, racing on ice is probably even worse, so these drivers have balls.
Case against: Even though this series had better competition than you’d think, it no longer exists and seemed to attract very little interest or reporting from outside the Francophone world, and few non-French drivers ever competed there, so this could be viewed as rather niche. While Muller certainly was in his heyday when he competed there, Dayraut was admittedly Prost’s rival there (with the duo winning nine consecutive titles from 2006-07 to 2014-15) at a time when Prost was in his 50s, which could suggest perhaps Dayraut was rather second-rate.
Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, the competition seems to have been strong enough with enough French rally and touring car champions competing there that being the winningest driver in this series should be worth something, even if nobody cared about it outside of France. This whole ecosystem of drivers seems to be weirdly disrespected as Jean-Pierre Malcher and Dany Snobeck, who both won multiple French touring car titles (Malcher also won a Porsche Supercup title and Dany Snobeck also won a French rally title) somehow don’t have English language Wikipedia pages despite the fact that they both won 5+ Andros Trophy races. But just because these drivers’ press coverage does not properly reflect their legacy does not mean they should not be listed, and I think the same applies to Dayraut. However, I might draw the line at Dubourg and not list him, as I think the series was running on fumes by then (before it was literally canceled due to climate change because France no longer had enough ice to race on).
Andrea de Adamich (16)
Summary: De Adamich was the first driver to win the European Touring Car Championship twice in 1966 and 1967. Admittedly, he did so at a time when there were three different ETCC champions a year. However, his touring car run was a little short with only 9 overall wins and 2 class wins, and 1 World Sportscar Championship win and 6 class wins. He also had a pretty abysmal F1 career.
Case for: Being the first driver to win multiple championships in any major league series seems like it should be an automatic lock. He was significantly faster than his 1966 co-driver, Teodoro Zeccoli, and he beat Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx for ETCC wins that year, but it’s worth noting that Stewart had a 45-second lead before he had to make an extended pit stop, and Ickx was not yet even a Formula 2 driver really, and neither of them would peak until years later.
Case against: The original European Touring Car Championship had some prestige, but I think it was not as highly regarded as touring car championships today, being viewed as roughly on the Formula 2 level, and in practice, it operated more like a sports car championship with multi-driver teams, but probably didn’t have the prestige of the elite modern-day touring car championships or the World Sportscar Championship. His open wheel rating of -.302 is terrible, as his teammate record of 6-20. Even though he won a number of World Sportscar Championship races in class, none of them were especially prestigious.
Verdict: Keep. However, I don’t have much enthusiasm for him, as I really find the case against to be stronger than the case for, but not enough to eliminate him yet. I suspect de Adamich is a driver I will eventually drop.
Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat (15)
Summary: De Chasseloup-Laubat was the first driver to set an official world land speed record in 1898 (63.15 kph), then the first to set this record two and three times (70.31 kph and 92.78 kph) in 1899, alternating the record with the Belgian Camille Jenatzy three times. He also won the Marseille-La Turbie race in 1897 in a steam car, which Wikipedia lists as a proto-Grand Prix.
Case for: If I’ve decided I’m listing world land speed record holders, which I am, de Chasseloup-Laubat is extremely important as a pioneer in that endeavor, and his and Jenatzy’s three world records rank tied for third behind only Malcolm Campbell’s nine and Craig Breedlove’s five (albeit tied with a bunch of other drivers: Henry Segrave, George Eyston, John Cobb, and Art Arfons, so this isn’t exactly that exclusive of a club.) I gave him three consecutive #2 seasons from 1897-1899.
Case against: The first decade of auto racing, from 1894-1904, was entirely amateur, and there was minimal competition at all. There’s a reason I only award the top five drivers points from those seasons, and I award them way fewer points than any later era. Lots of the early drivers were winning in cars of their own construction and one could argue this era of motorsports entirely consisted of engineering exercises with no strategy at all (I would argue Léon Thery was the first actually strategic driver). I don’t really feel the competition level pre-1905 was strong enough to justify including any of these drivers, since there was hardly any “competition” to speak of at all and it was really a bunch of rich kids screwing around (de Chasseloup was literally an aristocrat and even Henry Ford set a world land speed record significantly later than this in 1904 so how competitive could it have really been?) I currently have de Chasseloup-Laubat’s mani rival Jenatzy off the list too.
Verdict: Drop. As the first driver to set a world land speed record, he’s historically important, but my vibe-based opinion here is that the competition was too shallow. I don’t really think any drivers from this era deserve it unless they remained competitive in the post-1904 period (which Felice Nazzaro, Arthur Duray, Théry, and Victor Heméry did, but most others didn’t.)