My follow-up meeting with the gastroenterologist is in a couple hours, but I don’t really have anything else to say right now, so let’s get down to business.
Jon Dooley (17)
Summary: An ‘80s British Saloon/Touring Car Championship driver with 19 career wins and two class titles: the 1981 Class A championship and 1984 Class B championship.
Case for: He has a lot of wins, and he had a multi-win season all but one year from 1980 to 1987. Dooley’s rating of .201 is higher than a lot of champions. Since he had the highest rating amongst BSCC drivers in my touring car models in 1981 and 1985, he’s the only driver to do so twice in the ‘80s.
Case against: Dooley never won an overall race, and usually, I prefer to award overall winners over class winners. However, I realize the series’s bizarre multi-class format incentivized drivers to compete in less competitive classes. It doesn’t help that he has no wins in other major league series, while a lot of British touring car drivers also had significant sports car wins. Despite competing in less competitive classes in the ‘80s (which probably had the shallowest competition in the series in general), he never finished better than third in the series. About the only thing propping him up is his touring car rating, but how impressive is that really? He has a 22-8 teammate record, which consists of a 20-8 record against his main teammate, Rob Kirby. Dooley also had a 2-0 record against teammates other than Kirby, while Kirby had a 5-0 record against teammates other than Dooley, which explains why Dooley ended up so high. Kirby only had three class wins in the BSCC, but also won a Class B championship. Do I find outperforming one obscure teammate significant enough to list Dooley?
Verdict: Drop. The answer is I do not. The teammate comparison is good, and I’m not going to say Dooley’s rating in my teammate model is spurious or something (usually, a rating like that would strongly indicate including a driver on the list), but Dooley competed in the least competitive era in the BSCC/BTCC, didn’t win an overall title, didn’t have any important wins elsewhere, and was not connected to any great drivers. If I’m not going to list drivers like Chris Craft, who at least had a bunch of sports car wins in addition to his BSCC wins, Dooley looks a lot weaker to me now than he once did.
Tony Dron (19)
Summary: Dron won six overall British Saloon Car Championship races, 12 class races, back-to-back Class C championships in 1977 and 1978, the non-points RAC Tourist Trophy in 1974, and six World Sportscar Championship class races in the 1980s, including a class win at Le Mans in 1982.
Case for: Unlike Dooley, Dron competed in a lot more disciplines of motorsports and seems to be better-respected. His Wikipedia page claims he won “hundreds of” races in 24 makes and 41 models of car, but obviously, this is difficult to verify. He even crossed over into rallying a little, making a couple of World Rally Championship starts and earning four class wins in extremely minor rallies. He hit a higher peak than Dooley by winning 10 out of 12 races in 1977 and the first 8 in 1978, giving him an extremely high winning percentage of 18/47, compared to Dooley’s 19/118.
Case against: Unlike Dooley, Dron’s touring car rating of -.189 is abysmal, mainly because he got swept by the one-time winningest BTCC driver Andy Rouse in 1974, although Dron was a rookie and Rouse was in his second year. (Dron didn’t have teammates in his two peak seasons, which is why his rating is so low.) Although he hit a very high peak, he only raced in the BSCC four seasons and was only seriously competitive in two of them. If he truly won hundreds of races, he feels like a no-brainer, but I don’t know how I could possibly verify that, since grassroots British racing results in the ‘70s are difficult to find. His best overall World Sportscar Championship finish amongst his class wins was fifth, five laps down at the 1982 1000 km of Nürburgring. However, his next-best is an eighth-place finish 29 laps down.
Verdict: Keep. Dron feels like a driver I should keep on reputation alone, but I am not entirely convinced. You often hear about drivers who supposedly have hundreds of wins, and look at their actual record, and it’s way off. You always hear about Dick Trickle’s supposed 1200 wins, but Auto Racing Research Associates “only” came up with 741 (still massive, mind you, and easily list-worthy). Jerry Cook has a claimed win total of 342, but he has barely 100 wins verified and I find that number impossible to believe, especially after finding out how many wins he had in his NASCAR Modified title seasons. So am I just gonna buy that Dron actually has hundreds of wins without being able to prove it? No, but there seems to be enough evidence to keep him from being an immediate dismissal.
Robert Droogmans (16)
Summary: Droogmans won the 1990 European Rally Championship and is tied for second with Dario Cerrato and Giandomenico Basso with 26 wins, albeit far behind Patrick Snijers’s 44. I have already discussed Cerrato, Snijers is also in this group, and I suppose Basso (who has five Italian Rally titles from 2007-2025, two ERC titles, and two TER titles) also should be, but I haven’t scored him yet.
Case for: In addition to his ERC record, Droogmans won three Belgian Rally titles in 1986, 1987, and 1992.
Case against: I don’t find Droogmans very compelling at all. His contemporaries or near-contemporaries in minor league rallying, whom I have recently discussed, like Cerrato and Gianfranco Cunico, were both competing in the Italian Rally Championship, and Italian rallying was more significant in the international ecosystem than Belgian rallying. Not only was Italian rally driver Miki Biasion a World Rally Champion in the era these guys were competing, but no Belgian driver won a WRC event until François Duval, a decade after Droogmans’s relevance ended. Droogmans also had a small sample size of comparisons in his teammate record (5-4). He did lose to Cerrato 1-2, which isn’t terrible, and beat Belgian Rally champions Jean-Pierre van de Wauwer and Marc Duez, but van de Wauwer doesn’t belong on the list, and Duez was better as a sports car driver.
Verdict: Drop. The ERC was clearly second-rate compared to the WRC by the time Droogmans was racing and the Belgian rally scene was too weak for me to justify including a driver like him. His level of dominance was not enough to overcome the lack of competition.
John Duff (15)
Summary: Duff was an important sports car pioneer, winning the second running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1924.
Case for: While that one win certainly isn’t enough for consideration (especially since it’s his only major win), I ended up giving him an elite-tier rating in five consecutive seasons from 1921-1925 because he was a dominant driver at the Brooklands Circuit in England, setting numerous all-time speed records there, including a 24-hour record at 95.02 mph with future three-time Le Mans winner Woolf Barnato. He then crossed over to IndyCar racing in 1926, finishing 9th in the Indy 500 and 3rd at Altoona before suffering a career-ending crash at Salem, New Hampshire.
Case against: Basically, all his successes other than the Le Mans win came in informal exhibitions, and I’m not sure how much to take those seriously. I know I’ve decided to include world land speed record-holders, and I know it would probably be more significant to include drivers who set records over longer distances, but I don’t think those sorts of endurance records are viewed as being as significant historically, in part because endurance records have more to do with how long your car lasts than your own brute speed. I think that’s why I’m going to say no.
Verdict: Drop. If I’m going to be stingy enough about this era, where I’m not sure whether I’m going to even include Henry Birkin (who was one of the most dominant sports car drivers of his time), I probably shouldn’t list a driver like Duff whose best performances for the most part came in exhibitions rather than full-length races. I realize this may be somewhat inconsistent with what I did with Louis Disbrow, but even though most of what he did was also in exhibitions and speed trials, I think he had way more volume and way more longevity than Duff did. It’s telling that he didn’t even make the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame until 2006, and that Hall of Fame is not very selective, boasting around 300 inductees.
Mike Eddy (16)
Summary: Eddy is a regional stock car legend with seven American Speed Association titles in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1982, 1989, 1991, and 1992. He also won the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Super Late Model title in 1977, the ASA Gran Marque championship in 1985, and the prestigious Winchester 400 short track all-star race in 1981 and 1983.
Case for: The ASA was a strong regional tour that arguably produced more stock car greats than even the NASCAR Busch Series for a while. Eddy was relevant for almost the entire history of the original series, as his 1974 title came in the series’s second season, and he won his last race in 2004, the last year it was a national series. His seven titles are a series record. Eddy was highly competitive in eras dominated by other stock car greats, as his 1981 and 1982 titles bridge the gap between Mark Martin’s three straight titles in 1978-80, Rusty Wallace’s in 1983, Dick Trickle’s back-to-back titles in 1984 and 1985, and Martin’s fourth title in 1986. If I don’t include Eddy on the list, he would be the only missing ASA champion from 1978 to 1992, so it feels like he belongs. Eddy had more wins than Alan Kulwicki (9-5) and Jimmie Johnson (2-0) in the years they both competed full-time.
Case against: Eddy was also originally offered the Jack Roush #6 car before Martin eventually got it, in one of the most interesting “what could’ve been” stories in NASCAR history. But I do not think he was better than Martin, who beat Eddy 20 wins to 10 and finished higher in points all six years they competed full-time, even though Martin was six and a half years younger. That’s kind of the problem in general, as the times he dominated the series were the times when Martin, Wallace, and Trickle weren’t there. Wallace’s 1983 season was his only full-time season there; Eddy finished 7th in points that year. In the nine seasons Trickle competed regularly from 1980 to 1988, Trickle won 23 races to Eddy’s 14 and beat him seven out of nine seasons in points. You look at it this way, and Eddy starts to look a little second-rate. When comparing him to his chief ASA rival Bob Senneker, who won a series record 85 races (even though he only won one title to Eddy’s seven), there’s no comparison. Senneker actually won more races than Martin (23-20), more races than Wallace (5-3), and more races than Trickle (35-23) when they all competed full-time, even if all those guys won more titles. That’s why Senneker is a lock, and Eddy isn’t.
Verdict: Keep. Still, even if he wasn’t as good a driver as Martin, Wallace, Trickle, or Senneker, snubbing Eddy feels like it would be deliberate. I have all the other ASA champions from 1978 to 1992 as locks except for Butch Miller, and I have Miller in the near-lock category. It feels like it would be rude not to list the driver with the most titles, especially since he was winning titles in the same era as the rest of these guys, even if he was not as dominant as Senneker, and his title years consistently came in seasons with weaker competition. His longevity and number of titles in an era when all those guys were competing suggest that he was close enough that he still should be listed. While I find it a little weird that Roush initially wanted Eddy over Martin, since Martin had destroyed him at a younger age when they were in the ASA together, there’s still a reason why that happened.