Well, the results of my celiac test are already back and just as before, I still don’t have it so I guess it’s regular IBS symptoms. I just finished my IMSA statistical table today and I will have a quick and dirty review of the IMSA season like my earlier IndyCar one tomorrow. I also just finished Murphy Brown and I will probably have a review after that. But here’s a relatively weak crop of bubble drivers.
Harald Ertl (15)
Summary: German touring car driver who won the 1978 Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft championship, the forerunner to today’s DTM. In that series, he won 11 races from 1978-1980 and I have six recorded race wins for him in other series, most notably the 1973 RAC Tourist Trophy, probably England’s most prestigious touring car race.
Case for: DRM was an important championship and I have literally every other champion in the series except for Ertl as a lock. The field he beat in 1978 was quite strong also as I have seven of the top ten drivers as locks, with Ertl, Manfred Schurti, and Markus Höttinger as the only exceptions, and I expect Ertl and Höttinger might also be locks if they hadn’t died young, with Höttinger dying in a crash at the age of 23. Although Ertl benefited from the fact that Class II, where he was competing in 1978, had weaker competition than Class I where many of the drivers were taking wins off each other, he still had to beat three-time champion Klaus Ludwig and the very strong Markus Winkelhock in Class II.
Case against: The rest of Ertl’s career is really bad. His F1 career is terrible, and he wasn’t particularly strong in F2 either. His open wheel rating of -.442 is abysmal, although that is admittedly only based on a small sample size of eight teammate comparisons. Ertl didn’t really have teammates during his DRM heyday, so it’s hard to identify how much was him and how much was the car. He did not have enough teammate comparisons to be eligible for my touring car model, but he only has a 1-3 record against the teammates he did have. He was only relevant in DRM for three seasons before he quit racing in 1981. While attempting a comeback, he died in a plane crash in 1982.
Verdict: Keep. I think he won enough against strong enough competition in DRM that he shouldn’t be an immediate cut, but there’s a reason why he’s the only DRM champion who I don’t have as an absolute lock.
Nasif Estéfano (17)
Summary: Estéfano won the 1973 Turismo Carretera championship posthumously after he died in a crash near the end of the season. He won nine races in the series along with the Turismo Nacional Class D championship in 1965.
Case for: There’s always a certain sentiment where people feel more warmly about drivers who die at their absolute peak, because you can argue “what could have been”. He had a fairly long career as he had made an F1 start as early as 1960 and he also won the rather minor Argentine Formula 1 Mechanics championship twice in 1963 and 1964.
Case against: He was only really relevant in Turismo Carretera two years (1972 and 1973) and those other titles he won were much less prestigious. Although he won a handful of Turismo Nacional races, he went winless in his 1965 title season. He was almost 41 years old at the time he died, so it’s rather likely he wouldn’t have kept up his dominance in my view. I don’t think the early ‘70s were a particularly strong era in the series, since there was a long string of flash-in-the-pan champions. From 1966 to 1973, there were seven different champions in eight years, so I’m not sure anybody dominated enough to be worthy of being listed on an international list. Although Estéfano did win the title posthumously against the four-time champion Héctor Gradassi (who won in 1972 and then again the three seasons after Estéfano died), Gradassi won 10 races to Estéfano’s 8 in Estéfano’s peak seasons.
Verdict: Drop. This is a really close one since he did win a number of minor league titles, but I just don’t think he won enough or had long enough longevity in the series that truly mattered, at a time when the series was at a relative competitive nadir. And yes, I think it was a competitive nadir despite how many different champions there were, because most of those champions didn’t last long and because there seemed to be a major power vacuum after Juan Gálvez died and his brother Oscar retired.
Damien Faulkner (14)
Summary: Cool name. Faulkner finished third in the 2001 Indy Lights championship behind bust Townsend Bell and legend Dan Wheldon before embarking on a sports car career, where he won back-to-back titles in the Porsche Carrera Cup Great Britain in 2005 and 2006, four Porsche Supercup wins and back-to-back second-place finishes in 2007 and 2008, and four American Le Mans Series class wins from 2011-2013, including the 2011 12 Hours of Sebring.
Case for: I rate Porsche Supercup drivers higher than I think practically anyone else in the world does, and usually I’m justified in doing so because many of those drivers do go on to become amongst the best sports car drivers in the world shortly afterward. Excluding some of the recent 2020s champions who have arguably not had complete career arcs yet, I have every Porsche Supercup champion as a lock on the list except for Alessandro Zampedri (I can’t believe that happened). Faulkner’s touring car rating of .219 is quite solid also. He only lost to two-time champion Richard Westbrook, who was great, by six points.
Case against: In Faulkner’s other second-place season, he was demolished by that year’s champion Jeroen Bleekemolen, 192 points to 121. Being competitive against Westbrook suggests he could’ve gone on to a great sports car career, but it didn’t really happen. Yes, he got some ALMS wins, but they came in the relatively shallow GTC class, and Bleekemolen was the only full-timer there who I consider a lock for my list.
Verdict: Drop. The talent was there, but the record wasn’t. Considering he was at least relatively in the same league with Westbrook and Bleekemolen, he possibly could have become an elite-tier sports car racer but it just didn’t happen. I also acknowledge that while the rest of the world underrates Porsche Supercup drivers, I probably overrate them. Let me remedy that here.
Esteban Fernandino II (14)
Summary: Argentine touring car driver with 9 Turismo National Class C wins, 4 Turismo Carretera wins, and 12 TC2000 wins, but he never won a title in any of those series.
Case for: He’s kind of the opposite of Estéfano as he didn’t have as high a career peak, but he had a lot more longevity and relevance, especially in his 30s when Estéfano didn’t do as much. I also think Fernandino faced stronger competition, as he won 12 TC2000 races from 1980-1987, not much worse than the possible Argentine touring car goat Juan María Traverso, who won 17. If you stop it at 1984, Fernandino was actually ahead 11-7. I kind of take him more seriously than other drivers like Oscar Aventín because he won in multiple series and didn’t solely win in Turismo Carretera and he was much stronger than Traverso head-to-head.
Case against: No titles and I don’t think the even Argentine fans consider him to be a legend (they’d probably rather I list drivers like Estéfano or Aventín, even if I think Fernandino’s record is low-key stronger).
Verdict: Keep. I suspect I’m going to drop him eventually when considering my precedents with other drivers who have stronger reputations, but I kind of feel I need to do more research on this one to make the call, since he had more longevity than most of the drivers I rejected and I think he faced stronger competition since he beat Traverso head-to-head over an extended period and a lot of others didn’t. But there is no discipline of motorsports that seems to be harder to research than this one.
Martino Finotto (14)
Summary: Finotto won the 1979 European Touring Car Championship with his co-driving countryman Carlo Facetti. He was a prolific winner with 62 wins across various series, including 11 overall and 5 ETCC class wins, 17 overall wins plus 11 class wins in the Italian touring car championship, where he won a class championship five consecutive years from 1972-1976, five World Sportscar Championship class wins including the 1980 24 Hours of Le Mans, and seven IMSA class wins.
Case for: That’s a lot of wins to dismiss and the European Touring Car Championship was a pretty prestigious touring car championship, even though I kind of view it as more of a sports car championship due to the multi-driver teams.
Case against: When I previously evaluated Finotto and Facetti, I kept finding that the classes they dominated were extremely shallow, and I also find them difficult to distinguish. I think the ‘70s was a weaker decade for ETCC competition than either the ‘60s or the ‘80s were, and neither of them was very high-rated in my touring car model, with Facetti at .042 and Finotto at .027. I think Facetti has the higher reputation as well, but I placed Finotto on the bubble and Facetti outside because Finotto has 62 wins in series I cover to Facetti’s 39.
Verdict: Keep. Yes, the fields he faced were very bad and I think the ‘70s were a down period competition-wise for both sports cars and touring cars globally, but I think he has too many wins and I think not only have I underrated him, I’ve significantly underrated him. I kind of feel that not only Finotto should be on the list, but Facetti probably should be too. They’re probably more career compilers than drivers who hit a massive peak, but even if their competition in the ETCC in 1979 was not top-tier, . I think I downgraded them too much for their model ratings, but how accurate can a model rating be anyway when you’re talking about drivers who mostly competed on multi-driver teams? I think I goofed here.