Well, after being locked out of my Twitter account for over a year and a half, I could finally log in again this morning. The question is whether I want to stay. The only reason I’ve been periodically trying to log in for a while was honestly because I wanted to deactivate and then purge my account, but I’m leaving myself open to the possibility of changing my mind. I haven’t stopped making silent accounts and occasionally lurking, but I’ve mostly lost the desire to post any short-form content. Truthfully, I don’t feel like I’m either conservative enough for X, liberal enough for Bluesky, or edgy enough for either platform. I don’t particularly want to hang out on either the platform where racists congregate or the platform where people who think it’s okay to celebrate conservatives’ deaths congregate, so chances are good that I’ll likely (finally) purge my account now that I have access to it again. I might change my mind if people interact with me there again, but I don’t expect that to really happen, and I’m certainly not paying Elon for a checkmark to get more interaction. Before I do leave for good, I think I will want to copy down all my private message conversations, but probably not my posts.
It took me a while, but I figured out that, apparently, the reason water is profusely spilling onto my basement floor is because a condensate pump attached to my furnace has been malfunctioning. The furnace itself seems to be fine, but the water spewing out of it could be a fire hazard since it’s at least somewhat near a bunch of cords. My big concern here is that Mom is getting cold all the time. She was constantly complaining about being cold while she was at Van Duyn because she left the heat on at home at around 83° constantly during the last two years she was home, and Van Duyn had it at only around 72°. After Mom returned home, I’ve had it on about 78° or 79° as a compromise, but she’ll likely get really cold until I have it repaired. I finally decided to have the furnace shut off, and I got an HVAC contractor to come look at it today, and I can probably afford it. (They haven’t arrived yet.) Since the furnace likely doesn’t have to be replaced, and at most I need to replace the condensate pump, that should only cost a few hundred dollars and I can afford that now and can then move on to seeing about fixing the oven, possibly replacing the dryer, and/or finally taking pictures of the roof to prove it was completed so hopefully Mom can get a new homeowner’s insurance provider and lower her monthly mortgage costs as a result. Fingers crossed.
Bob Burman (19)
Summary: A pioneering IndyCar great, Burman earned six non-points IndyCar wins and arguably more depending on how you count. He was not really old enough to race in the inaugural IndyCar season in 1905, and he died in a crash in a non-championship race at the Corona road course early in 1916, the next season that had a points championship. In the years in between, when incompetent IndyCar historians retroactively added a bunch of races to championships that didn’t exist at the time, he was credited with six wins, more than any driver who never won a points race.
Case for: Those six races weren’t his only wins, either. In addition to winning the first 250-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (the 1909 Prest-O-Lite trophy), he also won a scrimmage there in a five-mile event before the Indy 500 started. He set an unofficial world land speed record, but the record was not formally recognized. He also set quarter-mile, half-mile, kilometer, and mile speed records in the run up to the Indy 500. I ranked him as the #4 driver of 1909 and 80th on my 100 greatest IndyCar drivers list. He made the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame (albeit nearly a century after he died), which suggests he may have a bunch of wins in races I’ve never heard of, like the supposed 2,557 his contemporary Ralph DePalma won. In addition to his minor Indy wins, he also won multiple races on dirt tracks and road courses.
Case against: He never won an Indy 500, only finished on the lead lap once, and only led 41 laps there. He arguably never had as strong a peak as some of his contemporaries; when Russ Catlin created imaginary championships for the seasons that had no points championship, Burman didn’t win any of them. Obviously, the races he won at Indianapolis did not have Indy 500-quality fields. None of his wins had more than 13 drivers entered.
Verdict: Keep. Burman nonetheless feels like a driver who should make the list on reputation because I know he was regarded as one of the greatest pioneering drivers in this scene, and his speed records (even though most of them were unofficial) were certainly important for the era. I suspect he was a truly prolific winner, and we just don’t have records of most of his wins. None of his six major points wins were shorter than 1 hour, 20 minutes, so they were full-length (unlike Barney Oldfield’s, for instance).
Steve Butler (16)
Summary: The first driver to win four USAC Sprint titles (1986, 1987, 1988, 1990), Butler also won two USAC Silver Crown titles in 1988 and 1992, becoming one of the most prolific USAC champions of all time. I suspect I am vastly underrating him here.
Case for: He was the only driver to win USAC races on both pavement and dirt, and both winged and non-winged sprint cars in the same season, showing great versatility. An important intangible is that he engineered many of his successful chassis himself at a time when fewer drivers were doing that. Although his number of wins is rather small, winning at least one championship in five out of seven seasons from 1986-1992 is a pretty high extended peak, and in 1989 (the only time he didn’t win a sprint car title from 1986-1990) he was injured when he crashed and broke his shoulder in Indy 500 practice (he never ended up starting the race, but was very fast as a rookie before the crash). He also retired at 37 in 1993, so that prevented him from obtaining as many wins as other drivers who were probably worse.
Case against: It really is just longevity and his relative lack of wins. 25 sprint car wins are okay, but that’s only tied for 27th on the all-time USAC Sprint Car win list, and he’d be even lower if you counted the pre-USAC AAA-era sprint car drivers. Despite winning two Silver Crown titles and finishing second in points twice, he actually only won three Silver Crown races and five All Star Circuit of Champions wins, which is why I’ve awarded him far fewer points than you might expect.
Verdict: Keep. Even though I currently have him below my 17-point threshold, where the current 1,000th-ranked driver is, I feel like this is a snub I would have to explain if I made it. He is probably the best driver I have gone through in this entire group of bubble drivers thus far, and snubbing him might be my biggest mistake despite the lack of wins. The fact that he was successful in both winged and non-winged sprint cars when not a lot of others were also makes a strong case for him. You could say that applies to Dave Blaney also, and maybe I was too hasty to drop him, but I would say that even though Blaney has a lot more wins. Butler probably hit a higher career peak and he was also competing in the same era when drivers like Jeff Gordon were coming up. Omitting him would be a bad mistake.
Wally Campbell (15)
Summary: While Campbell has fallen into obscurity, he has a surprisingly eclectic career with multiple stock car titles, and many wins across stock cars, modifieds, open wheel cars, and sprint cars, despite dying only one day after his 28th birthday.
Case for: Campbell’s 1951 NASCAR Modified title came at a time when the Modified Tour was still highly relevant (it was considered NASCAR’s top division in 1948 and on par with Cup in 1949, and it took quite a while for the Modifieds to fall into a completely ancillary role, so the series was still very relevant at this time). Buck Baker, Buddy Shuman, Fireball Roberts, Speedy Thompson, Cotton Owens, and Ralph Earnhardt were all semi-regulars that year, so this title was not necessarily a gimme. He also has 27 confirmed Late Model Sportsman (proto-O’Reilly) wins in two seasons, two stock car titles in the rival ASCRA stock car series, three wins in NASCAR’s short-lived open wheel Speedway division (where he finished second in points in 1952), and eight Big Car (proto-sprint car) wins before he was killed in practice for a Big Car race at Salem. He was leading the Eastern Big Car championship at the time. The 50 career wins I have for him are a lot considering they only came in five years (1950-1954), and definitely an underestimate.
Case against: I have no idea how many Modified wins he actually has. The Third Turn claims he only had a single Modified win in his 1951 championship season, which is strange considering how many races most of those early Modified seasons had, the fact that he also won 19 Late Model Sportsman races that year, and the fact that he has 12 listed Modified wins in other seasons. It’s almost impossible to find any information about the ASCRA series, so it’s hard to know how many wins he has there either.
Verdict: Keep. Although he was just starting an IndyCar career at the time of his death, and the AAA refused his entry for the 1954 Indy 500 (mandating that he gain more experience first), Campbell’s ability to deftly cross over between stock cars, modifieds, open wheel cars, and sprint cars wasn’t that common, and he won multiple times in each of those disciplines. I have to assume that if he won 19 Late Model Sportsman races in 1951 and he beat all those Hall of Famers/50 Greatest Drivers/prolific Cup winners for the Modified championship also, that he had to have won more than one Modified race that year but we just don’t have a record of it. I think this is a profile worth rewarding, but I’d like to know how many Modified races he actually won in 1951 before I decide.
Jamie Campbell-Walter (16)
Summary: Sports car veteran who won the 1999 British GT and 2000 FIA GT titles back-to-back with his co-driver, Julian Bailey, who I earlier rejected. I argued at the time that even though Bailey is the bigger name (probably) that Campbell-Walter has the longer case since he had greater longevity and more sports car wins. He added a third title in the inaugural WEC season in 2013, although it came in the relatively shallow WEC LMGTE Am class.
Case for: 13 FIA GT wins, 10 British GT wins, 2 WEC class wins, 2 wins in the marquee RAC Tourist Trophy sports car race (one of which counted for FIA GT credit and one of which did not), and a win in the 2007 Dubai 24 Hour. His 27 wins (only 2 of which came in class) are better than the 22 I have for Bailey.
Case against: On the other hand, I acknowledge Bailey has a stronger reputation since he was also faster at Le Mans and had solo touring car wins and at least made starts at F1, while Campbell-Walter’s only wins came with other co-drivers. While he had a lot more success without Bailey than Bailey had without him, the lack of single-driver wins for him and knowledge of which driver was carrying the weight in his peak period makes this a little dodgy. Winning an amateur class in the WEC isn’t amazing, although he did beat Jean-Karl Vernay, who I have as a lock, and Campbell-Walter and Stuart Hall did beat their Aston Martin teammates Kristian Poulsen and Christoffer Nygaard, but those two seemed to be faster as they won five poles to Campbell-Walter/Hall’s 1 and those two seemed to win the title mainly because they had 0 retirements while Poulsen/Nygaard had 3. And Poulsen/Nygaard I have nowhere near the list. He never finished better than 14th at Le Mans overall or 6th in class.
Verdict: Drop. I’m starting to think if I drop Bailey, I should drop him also. I thought I was going to keep him and drop Bailey, but it seems like Bailey’s greater versatility, number of solo wins, and Le Mans performance kind of cancels out Campbell-Walter’s greater longevitty of wins, and it’s telling that in both cases, their two years of dominance with one specific car were probably better than the rest of their careers. I think if I drop one, I have to drop both.
Shorty Cantlon (15)
Summary: 1930s IndyCar driver with four wins and five poles. He was nowhere near the bubble when I originally envisioned the list, but when I awarded more points to the 1923-1939 seasons, he entered bubble consideration, but I’m still far from convinced.
Case for: He finished second as a rookie in the 1930 Indy 500 to Billy Arnold, also finished second in the championship, and he ranks third in verified laps led behind Arnold and Wilbur Shaw that year. In 1931, he led all drivers with two wins (tied with Lou Moore for most) and three poles. He added another win in 1934.
Case against: The first half of the ‘30s had arguably the worst competition in IndyCar history, even including the early IRL and late CCWS years. After a majority of the great drivers of the 1920s were killed in crashes, the so-called “junk formula” era was very dumbed-down and disrespected by IndyCar historians, and apart from Arnold, Shaw, Bill Cummings, and Louis Meyer, it’s hard to argue any of the other drivers were genuinely very good. Despite finishing second in his first Indy 500 start and competing at Indy almost every year until he died in a crash in the 1947 500, he never led a lap at the track. His two wins and three poles in 1931 came when he was driving Louis Schneider’s car with which he had won the Indy 500 earlier that year. I consider Schneider (who inherited the win in 1931 after Arnold crashed with a five-lap lead) to be a bottom-five Indy 500 winner in history. While Cantlon was probably better than Schneider overall, I don’t think he was significantly better by enough of a margin to justify listing him.
Verdict: Drop. While I’m not going to say I was wrong to award more points to the 1920s and 1930s drivers, because it seemed like, in general, their cumulative points were coming out worse than I would rate their overall legacies, he never really had much of a case, and I was never really seriously considering him. The points increase was useful to promote drivers out of the bubble who didn’t belong there, but I’m going to remain skeptical about the drivers who remained on the bubble even after I made this adjustment, particularly those who didn’t even reach the 17-point threshold where my 1,000th-place driver is right now, even after the adjustment.