November Schedule for Driver Capsules

Who I intend to write about next month.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m going to go extremely heavy on 21st-century NASCAR stars this month as I have decided to cover the seven knockout playoff-era champions in the run up to the NASCAR championship race at Phoenix, although since I always tend to finish my columns late at night I likely won’t finish the Truex column until after the race is over. I will also be covering Brad Keselowski and Kurt Busch on the days they won their championships and Dale Jarrett and Dick Hutcherson on their birthdays, so this is going to be a very NASCAR-themed month. If either Christopher Bell, William Byron, or Tyler Reddick wins the title, I will likely add them to my lock list as well and I might preempt someone to write about the Cup champion instead. However, if none of them wins the title, I may wait before I declare any of those three to be locks. Admittedly, my final grades for each driver for 2024 may depend on who wins the title/makes the Final Four or not. For example, if Joey Logano wins the title, I will reluctantly place him near the very bottom of the C+ tier, but otherwise I basically consider Logano’s current season to be roughly analogous to Alex Bowman’s 2021 and Logano’s year this year would also be a C. As with Omar Martinez last month, I suspect there are a few drivers here I may not be ready to write about yet, particularly the rally racers and Roberto Mouras so it’s possible I might miss one or two of these.

As far as the other drivers are concerned, I’m planning on writing about all of them on their birthdays except Louis Chevrolet (because that is the day the Chevrolet car company was founded), Craig Breedlove (because that was the day he set his last world land speed record, and yes, I have decided to include drivers who set world land speed records on my list and I’ll explain that when I get to him), Petter Solberg (who I moved to one day before his birthday because the slot was open and I wanted to do Brad on that specific date), Roberto Mouras, Richard Burns, and Graham Hill (all of whom I plan on writing about on the days they died), Filipe Albuquerque (who won the Race of Champions on that day), and Ralph Mulford (who won the Vanderbilt Cup on that day).

Since I’m making this post public and free, one of my subscribers told me a week or two ago that I’ve been releasing too many capsules and he suggested maybe I should slow down my release schedule and only publish on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays or something like that, so I wanted to hear from anybody else who might be subscribing (either paid or free) in the comments. Do you think I’m writing too much and should I slow down so you can keep up with it? At the moment, I do not have a full-time job and I am just piecing together income from a combination of my RotoBaller columns, my Substack, and some data entry work entering historical college football rosters for one of my former colleagues at Sports Reference from when I used to work there.

I admit one of the reasons I’ve been releasing columns so fast is that I would like to finish this project as quickly as I can because I think I eventually might want to go offline in a few years, I’ve been getting steadily sicker, and this is almost the only thing that is giving me any sort of joy at the moment, but obviously my quasi-unemployment allows me to write columns faster than I imagine many people can read them, so if you think my release schedule has been unreasonable, let me know and I may slow down but this will probably be my release schedule for this month.

November 1: Ken Miles
November 2: Alan Jones
November 3: Louis Chevrolet
November 4: Kevin Harvick
November 5: Ryan Blaney
November 6: Joey Logano
November 7: Kyle Larson
November 8: Chase Elliott
November 9: Kyle Busch
November 10: Martin Truex, Jr.
November 11: Al Holbert
November 12: Björn Waldegård
November 13: Masahiro Hasemi
November 14: Tommy Milton
November 15: Craig Breedlove
November 16: Tazio Nuvolari
November 17: Petter Solberg
November 18: Brad Keselowski
November 19: André Lotterer
November 20: Tim Harvey
November 21: Kurt Busch
November 22: Roberto Mouras
November 23: Olivier Beretta
November 24: Marco Wittmann
November 25: Richard Burns
November 26: Dale Jarrett
November 27: Ralph Mulford
November 28: Filipe Albuquerque
November 29: Graham Hill
November 30: Dick Hutcherson