Didn’t write a column yesterday because I had to go to the bank to deposit my mom’s Social Security money into a new representative payee account I set up then. Had to walk both ways, it took like three hours, and I was drained, especially since I also had some IBS attacks. I arranged for Mom’s mortgage to be automatically withdrawn from her bank account as it was before and direct deposits will be made into the account starting in January. So, all I should need to do now as far as that is concerned is to walk the December deposit over to the bank or mail it and then that’s all set. About the only paperwork that’s left is for me to get a new homeowner’s insurance company and get Mom’s tax exemption back to lower the mortgage back to the $500 it was before instead of the over $1,000 it was after she got forced into the nursing home. Once all that is taken care of, I can start saving up to prepare for when I must give up the home after Mom dies.
I have another followup appointment with the gastroenterologist tomorrow to be tested for SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth). It’s very weird that anyone would schedule an appointment at a clinic for Veteran’s Day when I thought most clinics (as opposed to emergency rooms or urgent care offices) would be closed. I’ve never been tested for that before and it’s definitely a possibility. I already had been tested for celiac once before the test a couple weeks ago, so I’m not surprised that came out negative again. I will have to fast starting at midnight, but I expect as with all these other tests, even though my bowel issues are continuing to worsen, this test will likely come out as normal, too. At which point I would probably rather see a dietician than a gastroenterologist to try and come up with more “real” food I won’t gag to finally overcome my eating disorder once and for all.
As I was walking back from the bank, I picked up some IBgard peppermint oil capsules at the nearby drugstore and I tried to take one. Could not swallow it. Even as I drank up a lot of water to get myself to gulp, my throat just would not do it. I spat out both pills like four times with the water until I finally managed to swallow them. I’ve always had a lot of weird issues with my nasal passages as I’ve never been able to blow my nose or whistle. I think I struggle to breathe through my nose and only breathe through my mouth. I almost never vomit and there’s this gag reflex when I try to eat unfamiliar food. I think some of that has to come down to various autism-adjacent features, like how I expect I have dyspraxia even if I’ve never been diagnosed for that. Some of this stuff can be kind of weird, but I got the capsules down eventually. I don’t think they helped at all and I don’t think I’ll be trying to take them again any time soon.
I finished compiling my NASCAR driver table right after the race on Sunday, including calculating all my statistical categories as well as my post-season teammate ratings for each driver. I will do a full season wrap-up at some point probably in the next week, and then I’ll do a WEC article sometime after that. I’m not going to spoil any of that NASCAR data right now publicly until I actually write that article, but if you want to contact me privately about it, you can do that.
Jean Guichet (19)
Summary: ‘60s sports car driver with four World Sportscar Championship wins including the Tour de France Automobile, 24 Hours of Le Mans, and 12 Hours of Reims in consecutive years (1963-1965) along with seven more class wins, including the 1961 and 1962 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Case for: Guichet’s back-to-back Le Mans class wins came in a privateer Ferrari owned by his co-driver Pierre Noblet, and they were more competitive than most class winners since they finished third in 1961 and second in 1962, which explains why Ferrari took him on as a factory driver briefly, which culminated in his overall win in 1964 with Nino Vaccarella.
Case against: Almost everything I read about Guichet lists him as a “gentleman driver”, the then-polite term for a ride-buyer because he started out raising enough money to race from his day job running a shipyard in Marseille. Obviously, if he became a Ferrari factory sports car driver, he had talent but it didn’t seem like he sustained it very long since all his wins came from 1961 to 1966. The big question is whether Guichet or Vaccarella was faster in their Le Mans win and I don’t have that information right now. However, I do know Vaccarella seems to have a stronger reputation in general as he had seven major wins overall including three Targa Florios, and a 12 Hours of Sebring win (which really entirely came down to his co-driver Mario Andretti running down and passing Peter Revson). Vaccarella seems to have also been the more versatile driver as he made F1 starts while Ferrari never entered Guichet there at a time when they were typically also entering their elite sports car drivers in F1 races.
Verdict: Drop. Once I saw that I had awarded him 19 points, I realized I didn’t know what I was thinking. I only have Vaccarella at 16 points, even though he had more overall World Sportscar Championship wins, and Vaccarella is someone who has the reputation of a legend, while I don’t see people hyping Guichet much. I think Vaccarella was faster in their Le Mans win, but I’ll probably need to buy the ‘60s book in that history of Le Mans series before I know what to make of these two. Vaccarella certainly has a more legendary reputation, but he started out as an amateur too, literally serving as a math teacher before he pivoted to racing. I kind of think neither of these guys are up to the standards of the typical Ferrari factory sports car drivers of the day, but I see more people hyping Vaccarella as a legend than Guichet, so I’ll probably be keeping him and dropping Guichet for the time being unless I found later that they were equally fast.
Alex Gurney (18)
Summary: The American Klaus Graf, you can mostly copy and paste everything I said about Graf right here. Gurney, the son of American legend Dan, was one of the most dominant drivers in the latter years of the IMSA split, with Gurney and his co-driver Jon Fogarty winning two titles on the Grand-Am side just like Graf and Lucas Luhr did on the American Le Mans Series side. Fogarty and Gurney’s Grand-Am titles came in 2007 and 2009 and they won 16 races from 2007 to 2013.
Case for: Apart from the Scott Pruett/Memo Rojas duo, Fogarty and Gurney are two of the four drivers alongside Max Angelelli and James Weaver to win multiple titles in the overall prototype class in the Grand-Am era. The main advantages the Fogarty/Gurney duo have over the Luhr/Graf duo are that their GAINSCO team lasted a lot longer as they won six out of seven seasons from 2007-2013, unlike Graf, who was only relevant about half that time. Furthermore, even though Fogarty and Gurney won only 16 races to Luhr’s 20, the Grand-Am prototype competition in that era was stronger than the ALMS prototype competition as Fogarty and Gurney had to face the Pruett/Rojas and Wayne Taylor cars every year, and they kind of alternated titles between each other for a number of years. Pruett and Angelelli were strong competitors to have to face year after year, and there were typically 10-15 regular entries in the Daytona Prototype each year, so these were not scrimmages. While I think Fogarty was the better driver, some of their stats weren’t far apart (863 laps led for Fogarty to 758 for Gurney and 11 fastest laps for Fogarty to 8 for Gurney), although one big exception was Fogarty’s 24-5 advantage in poles.
Case against: I initially had Gurney out because I thought Fogarty was carrying him to a similar extent to how Pruett was carrying Rojas. My main reason for this is that they competed against each other in open wheel cars in CART’s Toyota Atlantic Series, where Fogarty won the title in 2002 (and again later in 2004) while Gurney finished third in points in 2002 and failed to win a race. That convinced me Fogarty was significantly faster, and all his numbers are definitely better. Considering the 24 Hours of Daytona was Grand-Am’s only marquee race and was almost certainly more important than the Grand-Am championship, it’s a major strike against both Fogarty and Gurney that they never won it. Their reign of dominance also ended basically immediately after Grand-Am and ALMS merged into the current IMSA series in 2014 when their 24 Hours of Daytona co-driver Memo Gidley suffered his gruesome crash and destroyed the Bob Stallings Racing team’s only tub, which resulted in the team shutting down permanently. Neither Fogarty nor Gurney’s careers really recovered from that, meaning they were unable to transition from the shallower Grand-Am era into the deeper IMSA era.
Verdict: Keep. If Graf is a near-miss for me, I think Gurney has to be a yes. While neither of them remained relevant into the merged IMSA era and neither won the marquee race in their series overall, Gurney had a longer period of relevance and faced a lot more competition in his title seasons than Graf ever did in his. Furthermore, the fact that Fogarty also had very little major league success without Gurney strengthens his case relative to Graf, because Luhr was obviously better than Graf and one of the best sports car drivers of his generation, while Fogarty (although I have him as a lock) definitely turned out not to be one of the best sports car drivers of his generation, meaning Gurney was probably pulling more weight.
Ray Guss, Jr. (16)
Summary: An obscure NASCAR Weekly Series legend, Guss won 158 races in the Central division of what was then called the Winston Racing Series, along with the 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1995 regional championships. He later won championships in NASCAR’s All-Star Series in 1999 and IMCA’s Summer Series in 2010 and 2011. He has a total of 223 wins listed on The Third Turn.
Case for: Guss’s win total is massive and by itself, it’s not easy to dismiss. I developed a crude system for evaluating Weekly Series-type competition where I would award a C- grade for 15-19 wins in a season, C for 20-24, C+ for 25-34, E- for 35-49, and E for 50 or more. That awarded Guss enough points to make the bubble thanks to his 38, 34, and 24-win seasons from 1989 to 1991.
Case against: Yet, I somehow feel like he shouldn’t make it. Guss never won the NASCAR Weekly Series overall for all his wins because he was competing in the heyday of five-time champion and future NASCAR Hall of Famer Larry Phillips. Phillips won four of his five national championships in the same period as Guss’s dominance, and he had 189 Weekly Series wins from 1989-1996 in addition to his five national championships while Guss had “only” 149 (even though Phillips did not compete in the Weekly Series in 1990 and Guss did). He did have those other minor league titles, but the dominant drivers in the All-Star Series/All-Star Tour were the brothers Joe and Steve Kosiski, and they had a crapload of Weekly Series wins too. Joe Kosiski actually had 238 Weekly Series wins (although they weren’t quite as heavily concentrated) 306 overall and Steve had 113 Weekly Series wins and 192 overall, yet they both regularly tended to beat him when they competed head-to-head there, with Steve winning seven All-Star Tour titles to Joe’s four and Guss’s one. And I think it’s hard to justify listing the Kosiskis either, even if Joe won the NASCAR Weekly Series national championship in 1986, something Guss never did even if he arguably hit a higher peak.
Verdict: Drop. What becomes more and more apparent the more research you do into the grassroots is that winning 100+ races at the grassroots level (although very impressive sounding) is actually not all that rare. Tons of drivers you’ve never heard of have done this and I have to be selective. I think the best way to evaluate Guss is to compare him to Phillips, who has a much more legendary reputation. One thing worth noting is that when drivers like Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin claim that Phillips was one of the best drivers they ever raced against, they are referring to when they were all racing against each other in grassroots Midwestern late model tours in the ‘70s and ‘80s before Wallace and Martin advanced to the NASCAR Cup Series. From my understanding, that is when Phillips was at his peak, but the problem is most of those races are very poorly documented so most of the records from Phillips’s career are from his NASCAR Weekly Series heyday when he won five national titles in eight years from 1989-1996 when he was 47-54 years old. Given the natural aging curve, it is hard for me to imagine Phillips was at his peak then. Because of the influence of drivers like Wallace and Martin, they got Phillips inducted into the Hall of Fame and I’m not going to say I’m against it, but it seems like Phillips’s best performances were probably 15-20 years earlier in non-NASCAR late model series, even if all that stuff is very poorly documented now. Guss was 30-37 those same years (much closer to the typical peak age for a driver), and yet Phillips still won more races than Guss even though I believe Phillips’s late-career NASCAR performances are actually a relatively minor part of his legacy. That I think makes Guss a clear no. Although maybe I should more strongly consider Joe Kosiski…
Christopher Haase (16)
Summary: A prolific German sports car winner who’s still relevant today, Haase won three minor league sports car titles in consecutive years (the German ADAC GT in 2007, the GT4 European Cup Sports Light championship in 2008 and the FIA GT3 title in 2009) before winning two major league titles as a pro, the GT Endurance Pro Cup in 2012 and the International GT Open in 2024. He has also won five major 24 hour races, the Nürburgring 24 Hours in 2012 and 2014, the 24 Hours of Spa in 2017, and the Dubai 24 Hour in 2019 and 2024.
Case for: Haase contributed to Audi’s first win at the Nürburgring 24 Hours in 2012 and he had only one shared teammate (Markus Winkelhock) across all five of his major sports car wins, indicating he was clearly one of the linchpins of his teams. Haase has had considerable longevity, as he has won in 17 out of 20 seasons from 2007-2026 and since he doesn’t turn 40 until next year, it’s hard to imagine he’s done winning yet. His 45 wins is a pretty solid number for a sports car driver (it’s way more than Guichet has, for instance).
Case against: Although all his other teammates were different, Winkelhock was on Haase’s winning teams in four of his five 24-hour wins and I definitely think he was better (I have all three of the major Winkelhocks as locks, but I don’t think Haase is one). Despite all his marquee race wins, Haase tended to eschew a lot of the more prestigious championships in favor of more minor sports car titles. While his Blancpain Endurance Series title in 2012 became the now very prestigious GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, it was a lot less prestigious then, when it was still kind of second-fiddle to the European Le Mans Series and the World Endurance Championship hadn’t started yet. His International GT Open title again had decent competition and was sort of a major title, but it would be hard to argue any of his titles came against IMSA or WEC-caliber competition. His winning is obviously inflated by the fact that he stayed out of WEC and IMSA in favor of more obscure tours, and it’s pretty telling that when he competed in IMSA full-time in 2014 and 2015, he only won once (although it was a Petit Le Mans class win), and when he returned to the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup, he had another one of his winless seasons in 2022. He certainly wouldn’t have had as many wins in more prestigious series.
Verdict: Keep. In sports car racing, the endurance races are more important than the titles anyway since they tend to have far deeper fields. He obviously was one of the linchpins of his teams along with Winkelhock, and he was pretty fast in his two IMSA GTD seasons with speed percentiles of 79.93 in 2014 and 64.64 in 2015 and one fastest race in both seasons. The fact that he won three different prestigious 24 hour races and two of them twice really helps, and obviously, he’s still kicking today and he might still have big seasons in the future. It would be way too premature to drop him. I kind of think maybe Guichet and Haase’s points should be inverted.
Hubert Hahne (19)
Summary: European touring car pioneer from the ‘60s who won the European Touring Car Division 3 championship in 1966, which included an overall win in the 24 Hours of Spa. He was surprisingly the brother of ‘80s/’90s touring car star Armin Hahne who I have as a lock, even though he was 20 years older. (That’s even wider than the gap between Troy and Joe Ruttman!)
Case for: Hahne won six overall European Touring Car Championship races and fourteen more in class, finishing in the top five in ETCC points either in class or overall five times (1963-1966 and 1968). He also won a smattering of races in a bunch of other touring car series, including an overall win in the 12 Hours of Nürburgring (before the 24 hour race was introduced), another class win in the 24 Hours of Spa, two wins in the Deutsche Rundstrecken Meisterschaft für Tourenwagen (then the most prestigious German touring car title), along with a British Saloon Car Championship (proto-British Touring Car Championship) class win, non-points German and Austrian touring car class wins, and hilariously, a win in the Nürburgring series VLN in 1995 when he was 60 - 26 years after his previous win! Is that a record? (I’m not checking. My master driver list has almost 35,000 drivers on it.) The fact that he paved the way for Armin’s future (and greater) success probably makes some impact also. Although he has very few teammate comparisons, his 5-2 record and .179 rating are solid. He was the first driver to complete a lap at the Nürburgring in a touring car in less than ten minutes.
Case against: Although I think he hit a high peak from 1963 to 1966, he didn’t sustain it for very long and I suppose my big question is the level of competition he faced. He finished third in a five-way tiebreaker for the 1963 inaugural ETCC title and the drivers who beat him weren’t legendary, although I do have fifth-place finisher Tom Trana (the last driver in the tie) as a lock. He was outmatched by John Whitmore in both the 1964 overall championship and the 1965 Division 2 championship, but I have him as a lock so that’s not necessarily a disqualification. In his 1966 title season, he beat Dieter Glemser and co-drove his winning Spa entry with Jacky Ickx. Since he got top finishes in other races and Ickx didn’t, he won the title, but Ickx went on to be one of the top sports car drivers ever and (briefly) one of the top F1 drivers of his time, so it’s not hard to imagine that Ickx was the team leader there.
Verdict: Keep. I’m all over the place on this one, but I think he was dominant enough for long enough against strong enough competition to justify a place for him, albeit a fairly tenuous one and I actually find him a bit more questionable than Gurney or Haase, even though I initially awarded him more points. The 24 Hours of Spa win is his big accomplishment but if Ickx primarily won that for him, that takes something away from him. I do think the fact that he paved the way for Armin’s success has to mean a little here, but I found myself less convinced the more I wrote. Not unconvinced enough to feel that he deserves to be cut now though.