I finished calculating all the lap leader and lead change data for the World Endurance Championship season yesterday as well as the speed data today because I wanted to get all that done before today’s Hirakawa post so I could properly evaluate him at this moment in time since this was probably Hirakawa’s best season ever. I’m still not ready to compile my complete WEC statistical table yet, and I do think I want to go over the NASCAR season first, but I now have that basically done except for completely collating it into table form.
I ended up changing my mind on George Fonder, who I am now dropping after my analysis into Pappy Hough, who I erroneously had listed as winning the same title as Fonder.
LearnedLeague started back up this week. Now that I am only competing against the bottom-feeders in the lowest E class, I’m doing a lot better, sitting at 3-0 and I think I’m going to win today also. Of course, I also started 6-0-1 in the last season before losing 12 straight matches to be relegated. Now that I’m in the lowest class, at least I can’t be relegated again! I probably won’t be sharing those match results like I was doing before since I’m losing interest, but I think I’m going to continue to half-heartedly do them since I paid for them. Hilariously, I didn’t log in to answer my questions on the second day until five minutes before they were due, but I still won.
Ryo Hirakawa (16)
Summary: Factory Toyota driver who won the 2017 Super GT500 championship with future Super Formula champion/current Formula E star Nick Cassidy before switching his primary sports car series from the Japanese domestic Super GT to the international World Endurance Championship, where he has eight overall wins including the 2022 24 Hours of Le Mans and three titles with co-drivers Sébastien Buemi and Brendon Hartley in 2022, 2023, and 2026. Although he wasn’t as noted as an open wheel driver, he still won four races in Japan’s Super Formula series along with five top five points finishes before scoring a point on his F1 debut this year.
Case for: Toyota has dominated the WEC’s premier class pretty consistently dating back to 2017 during the LMP1 era. However, Hirakawa arrived there at the start of the Hypercar era when they have faced considerably more competition as opposed to some of the later LMP1 seasons when they were effectively only competing against themselves. They continue to still win most of the WEC titles and overall Le Mans races, and Hirakawa has been an important contributor. I just finished calculating 2026 WEC data today to prepare for this entry although I’m not ready to write the post yet. In addition to winning this year’s title, he was also the fastest Toyota driver this year and the only Toyota driver to make a pass for the lead twice. He was thereby rewarded with a stopgap F1 debut for Haas, where he finished 10th while his teammate Oliver Bearman failed to finish. It will probably be his only F1 race, but it’s still a nice accomplishment. Although he only ranked fifth in Toyota speed in his WEC rookie season of 2022, he has been above the median of the six drivers every year since, ranking second in speed in 2023 and 2024 and third in 2025 before finally leading the Toyota drivers this year. His 4-1 lead change record is really solid also in a series where it’s almost impossible to pass.
Case against: It’s mostly just that his open wheel career is a little lackluster. His -.142 rating is pretty lackluster, and he’s surrounded by the likes of Kevin Cogan, Luca Badoer, and Logan Sargeant. For a lot of drivers from multi-driver sports car series from eras that do not have sufficient lap data, I frequently have to estimate their speed based on their performance in single-driver series, but for Hirakawa, I don’t have to do that!
Verdict: Keep. I think all the drivers from Toyota’s dynasty run should be recognized, especially as they all won elsewhere since Buemi and Nyck de Vries are Formula E winners, Mike Conway is an IndyCar winner, Hirakawa is a Super Formula winner, and even Kamui Kobayashi and Hartley, who never won any major league open wheel races, proved competitive in several different sports car dynasty runs. Hirakawa might be lower-rated than all five of those guys in my open wheel model, but that doesn’t matter since he delivered the goods in sports cars. His great lead change percentage and being above the median amongst these drivers in speed every year except his rookie season clearly means he was pulling his end of the bargain. And what, am I seriously going to drop him over his best year ever, a year when he was the champion, fastest Toyota driver, had the best lead change record amongst Toyota drivers, and had a respectable F1 debut? No. He stands a good chance of making this year’s top 25 and becoming a lock.
Matt Hirschman (18)
Summary: One of the oddities in the American grassroots racing scene lately is that NASCAR’s dominance in the American motorsports landscape causes people to judge any driver primarily on the basis of their NASCAR success. If you do that with Hirschman, the son of five-time NASCAR Modified champion Tony Hirschman, Jr. and brother of Ty Gibbs’s spotter Tony Hirschman III, you might view him as a somewhat middling Modified driver who won 12 races and never won a title. However, there are a ton of modified drivers with hundreds of wins overall and Hirschman’s one of them. He has 175 overall wins, way more than drivers NASCAR fans are more likely to be familiar with like Justin Bonsignore’s 55 or Doug Coby’s 49.
Case for: In addition to his sheer number of race wins, Hirschman’s absurd number of titles are even more impressive. He won the Race of Champions Asphalt Modified Championship ten times including the last two years (proving he’s still very much relevant), the Monaco Modified Tri-Track Series title eight times, and the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Tour-Type Modified Championship five times, giving him more titles (23) than seasons raced (22) since his first title in 2005. That is freaking mind-blowing. He has also won the most prestigious Modified race, the Race of Champions, a record 11 times all in the last 15 seasons. He also has more verified wins than Jerry Cook (136), Mike Stefanik (137), and his five-time champion father (64).
Case against: I think the case against is mostly just ignorance. Because NASCAR has the best-marketed Modified Championship, the fact that other drivers like Coby and Bonsignore were better than him there makes him look second-rate to some, even though he has vastly more wins than both of them combined.
Verdict: Keep. Yeah, as I’ve been trending towards rating grassroots legends higher and mediocre major-leaguers lower in recent years, I’ve warmed significantly to a lot of drivers like this and I may start bumping them up. His career isn’t over and he’s still as strong as ever. The fact that he underperformed in NASCAR gives his career a weird skew, like it does to an even greater extent for Stewart Friesen (who has 468 wins), but it’s just way too many titles to dismiss, I think.
Dutch Hoag (17)
Summary: One of the relatively few modified drivers who actually has more verified wins than Hirschman, Hoag has 198 verified wins, and as I have done research on the classic era of modified racing I definitely know that people in the know consider him to be one of the best drivers ever in that discipline and were sneering at him not being in the NASCAR Hall of Fame or whatever. Honestly, it’s kind of the same thing for Hoag as for Hirschman in that they were definitely good NASCAR Modified drivers, but their career highlights were usually elsewhere. He is estimated to have 400 wins overall.
Case for: Hoag has 57 verified NASCAR Late Model Sportsman/proto-O’Reilly wins, including 11, 14, and 17 in the years 1952-1954 alone and four verified NASCAR Modified wins, which is not too shabby, but most of his legacy came in standalone grassroots racing at local tracks, and that stuff is even more poorly archived than the Late Model Sportsman stuff. His five Race of Champions are the second-most to Hirschman’s 11, and he has more wins in that event than Richie Evans (3), Geoff Bodine (2), Ray Hendrick (2), Mike Stefanik (1), Jerry Cook (0), and Red Farmer (0).
Case against: Does he really have 400 wins? These estimated win counts usually seem to be wild overestimates most of the time. Cook supposedly has 342 wins (even if that’s correct, he still has fewer claimed wins and verified wins than Hoag), but I don’t buy that for a second once I saw that Cook even had a winless 1971 Modified championship season. Dick Trickle supposedly has 1,200 wins, but Auto Racing Research Associates only came up with 741 (still a ton, mind you). I find some of these ostensible win totals to be tall tales. As Rick Houston would put it, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, so I have to think his reputation is a little inflated by people who saw him race, even if he’s fallen into obscurity for most everybody else.
Verdict: Keep. I think the fact that both he and Hirschman have more wins in what is generally considered the most prestigious modified race than any of the drivers who are usually cited as the greatest modified drivers of all time (from people whose only exposure to modified racing comes from NASCAR media narratives) makes a strong case for both of them. If I can prove he has 400 wins and figure out how many wins he had each season, he’ll probably become a lock. But does he belong in the NASCAR Hall of Fame? No. Most of his legacy is outside of NASCAR. It would be like inducting Juan Pablo Montoya or something.
Pappy Hough (14)
Summary: A crossover driver who competed in midgets before World War II and NASCAR after, Hough put up some numbers, winning the AAA Northeastern Midget title and 17 races in the 1941 season, finishing second to Mike Klapak in the inaugural 1950 NASCAR Late Model Sportsman season with 23 verified wins, more than Klapak’s 12, and then winning the inaugural 1951 NASCAR Short Track title, a somewhat prestigious title where all the other champions after him (Neil Cole, Jim Reed, Lee Petty, and Marvin Porter) won Cup races.
Case for: 58 wins in his only five relevant seasons (1939-1941 and 1950-1951) is impressive, as is his ability to put up big results both before and after World War II (which a lot of drivers couldn’t do) and the fact that he dominated entirely different disciplines both before and after the war. I awarded fewer points to the 1940 and 1941 seasons because there was no racing in Europe but there was in the US, meaning that the international global landscape was shallower, but you could argue that the early ‘40s seasons weren’t any weaker than the very weak ‘30s competition-wise in the US. Hough beat Petty 4-2 in the 1951 Short Track season in the races where both Hough and Petty have known results.
Case against: Hough had an admittedly short run and you could argue all his success came in minor league races. While a lot of midget drivers went on to win in IndyCar and a lot of drivers in other NASCAR divisions did so in the Cup Series, he did neither, so you could argue he might be a little second-rate on that basis. Reed was entered in Hough’s NASCAR Short Track win, but Petty entered a Cup race at Macon instead that day.
Verdict: Drop. It’s an impressively eclectic career with explosive dominance, but there were lots of drivers who won lots of midget races and did little else. Hough did other things, but he still lost the Late Model Sportsman title to Klapak (whose stock car career impresses me much more) and he was too short-lived. There is a level of grassroots dominance that I think is sufficient. Hirschman and Hoag hit it, but I think Hough didn’t quite. I also just realized that I had both George Fonder and Hough listed as the 1941 AAA Eastern Midget champion. Fonder won the Eastern title, while Hough only won the Northeastern title, which was presumably less prestigious. Looking at this further, I noticed that the other frontrunners in the Eastern Midget championship in 1941 were similarly obscure: runner-up Charlie Miller won 15 times, third-place Johnny Peterson 9, fourth-place Joe Garson 6, and fifth-place Johnny Ritter 15. These may have all been great midget racers, but none of them did much of anything nationally outside of midgets, and I think that’s why I’m going to say no not only to Hough, but I’m going to twist my thumb on Fonder and now say no to him as well.
Will Hoy (15)
Summary: A British Touring Car Champion from 1991 amidst the least competitive period in series history, Hoy had an okay BTCC career with 9 wins and another in class, and he also won 8 class wins in the Japanese Touring Car Championship and 2 World Sportscar Championship class wins.
Case for: He had a smattering of success for about a decade, winning at least one touring car race somewhere every year from 1987 to 1992, and then continuing to win BTCC races as late as 1998.
Case against: The word “okay” is doing a lot of work there. While normally I will list nearly every BTCC champion by default, Hoy is one of the least distinguished champions. When counting the number of class races each driver won (which you kind of have to do here, since plenty of the top drivers points-raced by intentionally competing in less competitive classes because whoever dominated their class the most won the title, regardless of who won the races overall), only three other champions had fewer wins (Jeff Uren’s 8, John Love’s 7, and Alec Poole’s 7). Uren and Poole are not even remotely list-worthy in my opinion and Love only is because he also won six consecutive South African F1 titles afterward. Hoy is also the second-lowest-rated BTCC champion in my model, with only a barely above average rating, and the only driver with a (much) lower rating, 1990 champion Robb Gravett, actually has more wins (13). In my Chris Hodgetts entry, I complained about how he faced the worst competition in BTCC history. But at least Hodgetts had 39 wins, nearly twice as many as Gravett and Hoy combined. I think Sytner is a little stronger than the other two. Hoy’s two WSC wins came in the infamously uncompetitive 1992 season when FIA regulations smothered the once-exciting Group C class to death and even the 24 Hours of Le Mans had only 28 cars start that year. Worse yet, Hoy was not even competing in the main class, but the terrible FIA Cup class that had only two full-time cars.
Verdict: Drop. Title or not, there’s really nothing much to seriously recommend him. He simply won a title that wasn’t even a dominant one (three wins) before the series immediately went on to have far stronger competition in the Super Touring era when tons of great non-British touring car drivers began crossing over. But none of them were there in Hoy’s championship season, so it’s a pretty clear rejection.