Okay, my abdominal pain has mostly gone away at this point. I still have some occasionally but there are a lot of times I don’t have any at all and my body seems to have worked through it. I did schedule an appointment with a gastroenterologist for next week, but it doesn’t really feel urgent at this point and I don’t have a work assignment right now so I’ll send this off, and maybe I’ll even do another one later. Or a full driver post, but I’m enjoying these more right now.
Warwick Brown (15)
Summary: A primarily domestic Australian open-wheel racer, he won the 1975 Tasman Series championship (which included the New Zealand Grand Prix) and back-to-back Rothmans International Series titles, including an Australian Grand Prix win in 1977 and an undefeated season in 1978. He also finished a relatively close second to his countryman and future World Champion Alan Jones in the 1978 Can-Am Championship. Despite only winning one race to Jones’s five, Brown did beat Al Holbert, Elliott Forbes-Robinson, and George Follmer, who are all locks on my list.
Case for: Even though he doesn’t seem to have the same reputation as contemporaries like Kevin Bartlett, I think he was better because he won three open wheel titles to Bartlett’s two, his .154 rating in my open wheel model is well above Bartlett’s -.272 (although both have extremely low sample sizes), and personally, I value his Can-Am win over Bartlett’s Australian Touring Car Championship wins because I think those fields were bigger.
Case against: The fact remains that he didn’t start competing in the Tasman Series until after the F1 drivers left so the domestic Australian competition was not that great. He did beat Jones and F1 winner Peter Gethin for the 1977 Rothmans title, but Vern Schuppan was the only particularly good driver he competed against in 1978 and I don’t know if I’m even going to list him. In his crossovers to the American Formula 5000 series in 1975 and 1976 against much stronger fields, he finished 7th in points both times and didn’t really factor for race wins.
Verdict: Keep. I am more persuaded by the case for, as it seemed he was at least comparable to Jones in the years right before Jones’s World Championship win (he even has a higher rating in my open wheel model than Jones, but again, small sample size), and I think I find his career stronger than a lot of the other Australian domestic drivers like Kevin Bartlett and Frank Matich who get more hype in Aussie circles.
Will Brown (15)
Summary: An active Supercars driver and 2024 champion with 13 career wins, Brown is also the only driver to win both that title and Australia’s arguably second-most prestigious touring car title in TCR Australia.
Case for: I was actually relatively early on the Brown bandwagon, placing him on my top 100 list as early as 2021. Considering that many people would say Supercars is the deepest touring car series (I think I would say DTM, but then those people would argue that DTM is no longer a touring car series), Brown would be an automatic selection for people.
Case against: For all his success, I think Brown is the most overrated driver in the world currently. He sort of reminds me of Damon Hill, Jimmy Vasser, and Bobby Labonte in that I feel he backed into his title by default because he had an overwhelmingly dominant car against an inexperienced teammate who went on to eclipse him easily. I once went on a podcast and called Brodie Kostecki the most overrated driver in the world for similar reasons because Erebus Motorsport seemed to dominate out of nowhere with two drivers who really hadn’t done much in their career to that point. Kostecki proved me wrong as he backed up his performance in subsequent seasons, but Brown really hasn’t. He got really lucky to be elevated to the team leader after Kostecki had throttled him and had a third-year teammate in Broc Feeney, but Feeney even then was just as fast and everybody knew he’d eventually overtake Brown. Once he did that clearly in 2025, Brown has scarcely been relevant again. His rating in my touring car model at last update was only -.010.
Verdict: Keep. Even though I suspect that Brown has already peaked and he will never win a title again, he is still a currently relevant driver, and it’s hard to imagine that he won’t garner enough cumulative points to make it onto the list by the time I’m done.
Ivor Bueb (15)
Summary: Bueb won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice in 1955 and 1957, the first time coming as a rookie, and he also won all three of his British Saloon Car Championship (now British Touring Car Championship) starts, a non-points British toruing car win, a class win at the RAC Tourist Trophy, five international non-points British sports car races and seven national ones before his death in a Formula 2 crash in 1959.
Case for: It’s hard to dismiss a multiple Le Mans winner, as I will definitely be listing the vast majority of them, and the undefeated BSCC record and winning Le Mans as a rookie also looks very good on the surface.
Case against: But I think in Bueb’s case, it was almost entirely car over driver as all his success came in overwhelmingly dominant Jaguars. Obviously, his first Le Mans win is tainted because it came in 1955 after his co-driver Mike Hawthorn triggered the infamous crash that killed Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh and 80 fans. Hawthorn and Bueb did not even inherit the lead until Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss in the other Mercedes withdrew from the race with a 1.5-lap lead in solidarity with their team car. Not to mention that Hawthorn was clearly the team leader as he was an eventual World Champion and he set the fastest lap at Le Mans four years in a row, while I kind of think Bueb was along for the ride. After Mercedes entirely withdrew from international motorsports after that season, the Jaguars ran essentially uncontested at Le Mans for a couple years and completed a hat trick in 1956 and 1957, but I think Bueb probably wasn’t the team leader his second year either as his co-driver Ron Flockhart was probably better. Flockhart had also won the race in 1956 with Ninian Sanderson, a driver who did almost nothing else, while at least Flockhart had three non-points F1 wins and an F1 points podium. This is much better than Bueb’s lackluster F1 record, but I even have Flockhart in my Near Miss category, and even Flockhart’s open-wheel rating is a fairly lackluster -.085. Why I think I had Bueb higher was the BSCC wins, but even that is a hollower accomplishment than it looks like. He took over the Equipe Endeavour Jaguar from owner/driver Tommy Sopwith, but Sopwith had won all eight races he finished in the inaugural BSCC season in 1958, so Bueb going three-for-three looks less impressive, especially since I don’t have Sopwith on the list either.
Verdict: Drop. Although I initially started this entry thinking I was going to go the other way, I’ve definitely talked myself out of it. He probably wasn’t going to win Le Mans in 1955 except for benefiting from his World Champion teammate also causing a devastating wreck which prompted the truly-deserving Mercedes drivers to withdraw from the race, then benefited from Mercedes’s departure in subsequent years. If I’m not going to list either Flockhart or Sopwith, I shouldn’t list Bueb either. Flockhart probably has a stronger case. Jaguar overrated everyone.
Maximilian Buhk (17)
Summary: Buhk won both the Blancpain Endurance Series and Blancpain Sprint Sereies championships in his first three years as a major league driver from 2013-2015, including the 24 Hours of Spa as a 20-year-old, and he did so with different teammates.
Case for: The Blancpain Series are now regarded much more highly than they were at the time after they were renamed the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint and Endurance Cups. Given their current prestige, Buhk’s 11 GT Sprint wins, 3 GT Endurance wins, 5 ADAC (German) GT wins, 3 GT Asia wins, and 1 VLN win plus another in class are a lot to reckon with. In his 2013 Blancpain Endurance title, he and his teammates actually ran part-time.
Case against: Even if the Blancpain Series did feature the 24 Hours of Spa as a round on its calendar and even if he did win it as essentially a rookie, I have to figure his teammates Maximilian Götz and especially Bernd Schneider (one of the best drivers of his generation) were carrying more of the weight, although Schneider was admittedly almost 50. The GT Sprint title impresses me more since I do think Buhk has a stronger career than his co-driver Vincent Abril. But my main issue is that he didn’t seem to keep it up. After a very productive twenties, he retired in 2022 after two weak DTM seasons. He didn’t have a DTM teammate, so he isn’t in my touring car model, but I don’t think his rating would be that great if he was.
Verdict: Keep. I don’t think I have enough evidence to drop him yet, but I very well may. What I woiuld need to make my decision on this is some means of determining how fat Buhk was relative to his teammates in the 2013-2015 period. Unfortunately, the GT World Challenge series still don’t provide lap leaders and lap times like the IMSA and WEC do, which is one of the reasons why I think I end up underrating drivers from that sphere. Since I don’t have any means of determining how fast he was relative to his teammates (especially in that era since it’s even more difficult to find lap times from ten years ago), I don’t really know what to do with him. I might end up dropping him just because I don’t have enough evidence of his own speed, and the fact that he struggled more in single-driver racing like DTM is definitely a strong case against.
Doc Bundy (14)
Summary: Like Darin Brassfield, Bundy’s a sports car career compiler with a lot of wins but a relatively shallow peak. He was a 24 Hours of Le Mans class winner in 1982, a year he also won two Trans-Am races. Additionally, he earned seven overall IMSA wins from 1983-1998 and four more (including the 1985 24 Hours of Daytona) in class, a championship and five wins in the short-lived IMSA Supercar series in 1992, four SCCA World Challenge wins, and an SCCA Endurance overall win and a class win.
Case for: His 25 wins is a fairly solid number and I’m impressed how old he was at his career peak, as all his wins came at the ages 36-52. Unlike Brassfield, he did at least win both Le Mans and Daytona. He did beat Hurley Haywood to win his one major title in the IMSA Supercar Series in 1992.
Case against: Honestly, I’ve talked myself out of this before I even started writing. First off, while a lot of IMSA drivers in Bundy’s era had solo wins, Bundy didn’t and every single one of his teammates in his wins was better (Al Holbert, Bobby Rahal, Bob Tullius, Brian Redman, Wally Dallenbach, Jr., Sarel van der Merwe, Andy Wallace, David Brabham, Johnny O’Connell) with the sole exception of the third driver in his Daytona win, John Jones, who he only co-drove with in that one win. Yes, he beat Haywood to win a relatively minor IMSA title, but freakin’ Kenny Wallace (not known for his road racing prowess) finished fourth in points the year before his Cup Series rookie season. Bundy might have finished second in the Trans-Am standings in 1982, but he was well behind Elliott Forbes-Robinson, only winning out on a tiebreaker against Phil Currin (who never won a Trans-Am race and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page) in a year when actor Paul Newman actually got a win at the age of 57.
Verdict: Drop. There really isn’t much of a case here. He’s a redundancy.