I’m finishing this a bit earlier than I expected to today because Mom ended up asking me to cancel her vision appointment. I don’t think the cataract surgery was scheduled for today, and I think today’s appointment was just going to be a preliminary screening to be assessed for cataract surgery, but Mom was worried that today might be her surgery day and that she might lose her vision entirely if it didn’t work. She was also worried that she might get attacked by the bus driver, and I was unable to allay he fears before she made me cancel the appointment. That all made me angry, but I got this done sooner than I otherwise would have, I guess. I probably would’ve had enough time to complete a driver entry as well, but I think I need to focus on my other paid work. Besides, right now, I’m enjoying these bubble posts more than the driver posts anyway. I realize this might delay when I actually finish the book. I don’t have a great deal to say about current races since right now I’m in historian mode more. I did just enter the entire history of the WISSOTA weekly series championship yesterday.
Bob Bondurant (20)
Summary: A legendary motorsports personality whose legacy went well beyond driving, Bondurant is best known as a driving instructor, where he trained Hollywood actors to race after training James Garner for his work in the film Grand Prix. That’s an important intangible, but his driving career is also quite solid, as he earned 11 World Sportscar Championship class wins (including the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans as a rookie when he co-drove with Dan Gurney, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the 12 Hours of Reims). He also earned 1 SCCA National Championship win and another in class, two United States Road Racing Championship class wins, and at least 24 wins in minor regional SCCA events.
Case for: Bondurant feels like the kind of driver who I should list on reputation alone, but how much of that reputation is based on his racing performances and how much of it is based on his Hollywood connections? He definitely had a lot of wins, including 18 out of 20 in 1956, 30 out of 32 in Shelly Washburn’s Chevy Corvettes from 1961-1963, so the win count I have for him is likely an undercount. I ended up awarding him another point by rating his 1960 season C- (which I previously had unrated), which technically takes him out of my Bubble group and into my Near Lock group, and I suspect I’m missing a lot of wins for him.
Case against: However, the competition in most of his wins was extremely shallow, and he is rather lacking in overall wins against top-notch competitions, even if he won most of the major races in class. His run as a serious international competitor only lasted for a couple of years in the mid-’60s. His chief rival was Dave MacDonald, whom I currently have outside the list, but maybe that was a mistake. His F1 and NASCAR crossovers were not amazing.
Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, I think the volume of his wins overcomes his lack of competition. I might’ve said no if he didn’t win internationally, but even if they were only class wins and not overall wins, 11 World Sportscar Championship class wins in only two years is quite substantial. Unlike Stan and Stanton Barrett, he was much more than just a Hollywood stunt driver.
Darin Brassfield (15)
Summary: Solid sports car career compiler with 11 Trans-Am wins from 1984-1992, and 10 IMSA wins in addition to 6 class wins from 1985-2002, including a class win at the 1992 12 Hours of Sebring.
Case for: It’s hard to immediately dismiss a driver with that many wins over such a long time, but it’s worth noting that he had only one win after 1996, so his longevity isn’t quite what it seems from the above. His period in Trans-Am didn’t quite line up with the series’s late-period heyday with Scott Sharp, Jack Baldwin, Ron Fellows, Scott Pruett, Tommy Kendall, and Dorsey Schroeder, but he did race and win against all those guys at some point, even if he left the series before its deeper seasons in the mid-’90s. Nine of his IMSA wins came in solo drives.
Case against: While he was always fairly relevant from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, he was very much a career compiler who never had a particularly strong peak. Not only did he win neither an IMSA nor a Trans-Am title, he only even seriously contended once in 1993, and even that year (when he won four times), he still only finished third of the four full-time drivers in the championship. When there were often only 5 or 6 either good and/or full-time drivers competing in Trans-Am or his IMSA classes, that’s not amazing even if he did win a lot. He only won the 12 Hours of Sebring once in class and never won the 24 Hours of Daytona, and the marquee races are probably more important than the titles in sports car racing since they have deeper fields.
Verdict: Drop. If I’m even having second thoughts about Baldwin, who had three major titles, more marquee race wins, and a lot more longevity, even though he didn’t start winning until 35 (by which point Brassfield had basically already stopped winning), Brassfield didn’t really have a prayer.
Colin Braun (19)
Summary: Braun can certainly do a lot more for you than Brassfield. A very prolific sports car champion and winner, Braun has five titles, three in IMSA (two in the PC class and one in the LMP3 class), one in the Asian Le Mans Series LMP2 class, and one in the GT World Challenge America Pro-Am class. Across all those series, including IMSA predecessors Grand-Am and the American Le Mans Series, and one win in the SprintX Series, he has 17 overall wins and 28 additional class wins. These include three 24 Hours of Daytona wins (one overall), three 12 Hours of Sebring class wins, and one Petit Le Mans overall win.
Case for: That’s a lot of titles and class wins I just rattled off. He has been relevant for a very long time, having won his first Grand-Am race in 2006 before he was even old enough to vote, and still winning as late as 2025. When you compare him to his contemporaries Jordan and Ricky Taylor, they seemed to fall off sooner than Braun did, even though he’s older than them. A lot of Braun’s co-drivers, especially the amateur and manufacturing magnate Jon Bennett, who owned the CORE Autosport team Braun won both his PC titles with, were very bad. He was relevant in a bunch of different series, although almost of them were American.
Case against: My big issue with Braun at the moment is that the competition in all five of his title seasons was truly putrid, as the PC and LMP3 classes were arguably the most amateur in their eras and the number of drivers who were even good in those classes was… limited, although he did beat Renger van der Zande in both 2014 and 2015 and Bruno Junqueira in 2015, João Barbosa and Felipe Fraga in 2022, Bryan Sellers and Ryan Dalziel in 2023, and Julien Andlauer, Louis Delétraz, Tom Dillmann, and Alessio Rovera in 2025. His speed percentiles have been very weak relative to Tom Blomqvist, who I also found to be borderline, and his 24 Hours of Daytona win is obviously tainted due to the cheating scandal.
Verdict: Keep. Even though he spent most of his best years racing in very weak pro-am classes, there were still at least a couple of good drivers he had to beat almost every year. Enough so he should make the list. I haven’t finished calculating speed percentiles for all the post-IMSA merger years, but I plan to do that in the next year. I’ll probably sort out discrepancies between a lot of the modern sports car drivers when I do that, but I don’t think Braun will be one of the drivers I ultimately drop.
Dick Brooks (14)
Summary: Highly-regarded underdog ‘70s and ‘80s NASCAR driver. If you exclude crossover drivers who competed in a bunch of different series, many people would argue he’s the best one-time Cup Series winner.
Case for: Although his one win at Talladega was rather fluky, which is not a good sign, Brooks really put Junie Donlavey’s team on the map with its first four consecutive top ten points finishes from 1975-1978, improving the team to such an extent that Ricky Rudd and Jody Ridley arguably piggybacked off his previous success when they replaced them in their second and rookie seasons, respectively. Rudd and Ridley’s three straight top ten points finishes after Brooks extended Donlavey’s streak through 1981, but then in the team’s final two decades after that, only Ken Schrader in 1987 (the year before he went to Hendrick Motorsports) got a top ten points finish. The Donlavey team, for all its hype, was always pretty bad, with only a single win due to a scoring error in half a century as a car owner, and Brooks might’ve been the team’s most important driver.
Case against: The ‘70s were the worst decade for NASCAR competition. Although some might argue that the ‘50s or ‘60s were worse (and the short track competition, especially the west coast short track competition, definitely was), the superspeedway fields in the ‘50s and ‘60s were vastly deeper than the ‘70s. By the ‘70s, most races were on superspeedways. So many of the best stock car drivers of the era weren’t racing in the NASCAR Cup Series; they were either competing in other NASCAR divisions or, more often, in different sanctioning bodies like the USAC Stock Car Series, ASA, and ARTGO. When you only had 5 or 6 great drivers competing regularly most of the time in the ‘70s (the only decade where there weren’t even ten different drivers to earn 10+ wins), being the best of the rest feels a little hollow.
Verdict: Drop. While I definitely think Brooks was an underrated driver, I find my case against more convincing than my case for. I guess the big question here is whether Brooks reminds me more of James Hylton (who I have in my near lock tier) or Lake Speed (who I have in my near miss tier). Like Brooks, I find both those guys to be underrated drivers who consistently elevated their uncompetitive cars. However, Hylton was an owner-driver in his prime years, while Brooks wasn’t, and Speed’s era was more competitive. I think Brooks was better than Speed, but I also think Speed is probably his best overall comp, so if I’m going to say no to Speed, I should say no to Brooks also. Nonetheless, he deserves more respect than he gets.
Perk Brown (14)
Summary: There are a surprising number of NASCAR drivers you’ve never heard of with a crapload of wins, even if you’ve been a NASCAR fan for decades. Usually, these drivers won dozens of races in either the Modified tour (before it became the modern Modified tour in 1985) or the Late Model Sportsman tour (before it became the eventual Busch Series in 1982). Since those series were never properly archived, these drivers’ legacies have been whitewashed. I decided to award specific letter grades for each number of wins in these two tours, and Brown’s 92 verified Modified wins and 8 verified Late Model Sportsman wins from 1950-1973, certainly make a solid case for him by itself.
Case for: It’s all about the number of verified wins Brown has, but I admit that even after I did all this research on him, I still know close to nothing, and I’m probably not going to research him unless I actually write an entry for him.
Case against: But I do not believe I will be writing an entry for Brown. While 100 wins seems like a lot, it’s not exactly unique, as there are a bunch of other quite obscure drivers who also met that threshold. A lot of the modified drivers racked up substantially more wins than their legacies warranted, in my opinion, because there were hundreds of individual races on some of the early Modified schedules, far more than in the Cup Series. He also never finished higher than third in the Modified championship, and doesn’t really show up on any of those lists of the greatest Modified drivers either.
Verdict: Drop. There are some of these obscure minor league NASCAR drivers who I will genuine[y fight for, like Bugsy Stevens (who has 141 wins and three consecutive Modified titles, including a 29-win championship season in 1968), Al Pombo (who has 194 Modified wins and 55 Late Model Sportsman wins, including eight consecutive Modified seasons with 14+ wins), and Sonny Hutchins (who has 56 Modified wins and 119 Late Model Sportsman wins). Compared to those guys (all of whom I have as locks despite their extreme obscurity), Brown seems fairly mundane. Even Jerry Cook seems mundane compared to them, and he’s a Hall of Famer. Brown basically has a similar career to Cook, but without the titles. This is a pretty easy no.