Top 200 Drivers of 2025: The C- Tier

Featuring 76 drivers not on last year's list, and 33 drivers not on any previous list.

Okay, I finished my top 200 list on Sunday but it took me nearly a whole week to write this. It wasn’t a good week as I lost my cell phone, although I eventually found it a couple days later. My food stamps expired without me realizing it. Because my income wildly oscillates from month to month because I have four gig jobs including this with inconsistent hours, inconsistent income, etc…, the Onondaga County Department of Social Services keeps needing me to update my income and hours worked constantly to verify my current income for food stamps. Apparently, one of the times I submitted my income verification, I thought that was my renewal and it wasn’t so my food stamp account closed and I had to go through a massive rigmarole to work through the system to submit my paperwork (including figuring out how to get my malfunctioning printer to work so I could scan the income verifiation documents) for that as well as heating assistance, which my mom used to automatically get (it’s connected through the food stamp system, but now that Mom is no longer living here, the power bill had to be switched to my name). And of course, they’ve added an unhelpful AI system to process calls, which never seems to understand my voice when I tell it what department I would like to be transferred to, with no option to press buttons to advance. Thanks, Eva. (I actually think I like ChatGPT, but you suck!) And then I found out I had -$76 in one of my bank accounts so I had to take an additional $100 loan out of my life insurance to cover that. And I really had to rush to complete enough work for one of my other jobs to get enough money for today’s housing payment, which I did. Barely.

So, not a good week, and obviously all that stuff had to take priority over completing this. But I promised and I really did want to get it done faster than this, especially since I had the list essentially done last week except for the writing. I’m probably wasting my time doing this, but I have been reading all my previously written content (so far just Racermetrics articles, no paywalled Substack articles yet, although I’ll probably read some of my old paywalled Substack articles at some point) on YouTube to see if I can make a successful pivot as an auto racing stats YouTuber. However, so far, almost nobody watches those videos since they only want typing content from me. On the other hand, I’m hardly losing any of my established subscribers and my watch time is going up. I know watch time matters more than either subscribers or views in the long run.

I finally got an inspector to see if they might be able to build a ramp for my mom to come. She was really unpleasant this week, and that’s been stressing me out. Her roommate told me to leave again and is trying to pressure me to never visit because she hates me, seemingly more than she even hates my mom even though unlike my mom, I haven’t said anything violent to her. One of the times she told me to leave on Monday, my mom got up and attempted to punch her roommate and failed. I have no idea why her roommate is being seemingly even nastier to me than she is to Mom when the stuff Mom has said to her is so much more outrageous. A couple hours later, Mom’s roommate was watching another episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel and as usual, I couldn’t stop laughing at the repeated recitations of “ancient astronaut theorists”, and especially the theory that Moses’s burning bush was actually aliens. Mom’s roommate of course thought I was laughing at her, and I quickly told her, “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the show.” or whatever, but I guess she thinks because I was laughing at the show she was walking it must be that I was laughing at her. I do want to get Mom out of there, even if it likely means she won’t want me to leave the house again and one of the few things I have liked about Mom being in the nursing home is that I have finally had freedom to roam for seemingly the first time in decades.

I have an appointment scheduled on Monday to join the Unique Peerspectives group to be a peer, as I mentioned at the start of the F1 article. I obviously need help and people to talk to in the real world about my actual physical needs (rather than venting here to people who don’t want to hear it), I also want to help others, I’ve been dreaming of finding an autism support group, and they’ve got one (well, neurodivergent but same dif), and I hope that I can potentially parlay my volunteer work there to obtain experience to hopefully land another public service job and complete my remaining 2 years, 4 months for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. I really hope that goes well.

I have been still going to bar trivia regularly. One could call it a waste of time, but I’m getting needed social interaction, and it doesn’t cost anything, and the bartender doesn’t even expect me to buy anything. I’m even on the bartenders’ team. There’s a $2,500 winter contest for all the Syracuse Trivia Night locations, so I thought I’d come back for that. I had my most invigorating moment at trivia yet last week. Every week, they have a question called “The Impossible Question”, which asks for a specific number that the host assumes that none of the participants will know; whichever team comes closest to getting the answer right earns bonus points. I’d never gotten one of them before. Last week, the question was “How many total songs are on the Beatles’ three best-selling albums?” I knew people were going to get that wrong because I knew that The White Album was one of them, and I know that double albums count as 2 sales instead of 1 (and I expected that most of the other teams didn’t know that last part, so they would not have guessed that was one of the three best-selling albums). So I correctly guessed it was The White Album, Sgt. Pepper, and Abbey Road, guessed that there were like 32 tracks on The White Album, 18 on Abbey Road because of all those goof tracks, and 10 on Sgt. Pepper. I guessed 60. That ended up being exactly correct. That was awesome. I asked for bonus points for getting it exactly right, but sadly, Nick declined.

Okay, as for the list, I didn’t force myself to necessarily place drivers in the same tiers I previously announced on the individual series columns. Most notably, there were two drivers I previously wrote entries for (James Courtney and Mitch Evans), who I decided to drop. Yeah, Courtney led all Supercars drivers n my touring car model, but he was in his last season and he didn’t really do very well, and I think it had more to do with him having a rookie teammate in Aaron Cameron than anything Courtney himself did. And Evans… he was just too far behind Nick Cassidy in Formula E. If he had actually won both of his 2024-2025 Formula E wins in the year 2025, I probably still would have, but the first of his wins came in 2024 and I already counted it toward that list. For a driver who had consistently led all Formula E drivers in my open wheel model for several years running to post a -.213 rating this year is probably not worthy to list. I also dropped several drivers I originally placed in the C tier into this tier (mainly the more marginal Supercars drivers) once I saw how the rest of the list (including series I was ignoring) was turning out.

There were 76 drivers on last year’s list who I will not be listing this year. (I made some minor tweaks to my 2024 list before this, so this reflects these revisions, even though I did not publicly announce them.) To begin with, we say goodbye to Nasser Al-Attiyah, Justin Allgaier, Klaus Bachler, Brady Bacon, Felipe Baptista, Eduardo Barrichello, Sébastien Bourdais, Antron Brown, Kyle Busch, Júlio Campos, Pedro Cardoso, Ricky Collard, Josh Cook, Tyler Courtney, Corey Day, Louis Delétraz, Pipo Derani, Luis José di Palma, Romain Dumas, Christian Eckes, Luca Engstler, Mitch Evans, Santino Ferrucci, Robby Foley, Louis Foster, Robin Frijns, Ty Gibbs, Franco Girolami, Mikaël Grenier, Ross Gunn, Christopher Haase, Kevin Hansen, Brendon Hartley, Loek Hartog, Ryo Hirakawa, Rob Huff, Callum Ilott, Kasper Jensen, Harri Jones, Brad Keselowski, Harry King, André Lotterer, Tadasuke Makino, Zane Maloney, Felipe Massa, Keagan Masters, Tommy Milner, Edoardo Mortara, Nico Müller, Tomoki Nojiri, Esteban Ocon, Tiago Pernía, Ma Qing Hua, Thomas Randle, Alexander Rossi, Carlos Sainz(, Sr.), Morris Schuring, Daniel Serra, Alexander Sims, Madison Snow, Marco Sørensen, Joel Sturm, Rafael Suzuki, Kody Swanson, Brad Sweet, Ricky Taylor, Larry ten Voorde, Parker Thompson, Martin Truex, Jr., Yuki Tsunoda, Colin Turkington, Renger van der Zande, Matthieu Vaxivière, Mariano Werner, Kenta Yamashita, and Ricardo Zonta.

I was initially going to drop Austin Cindric and Finn Gehrsitz, but I granted them both last second reprieves once I realized I had entered both Kelvin van der Linde and Greg Anderson twice. I made a last-second cut while writing, swapping out Charlie Eastwood for Charles Milesi. And then as I was writing this preliminary section afte everything was done, I was like, “Oh shit, I forgot Thierry Neuville”, so now I need to recalibrate. I had an entry here for Connor de Phillippi because he won the GT World Challenge America championship alongside Kenton Koch, but even as I was writing it, I was struggling to convince myself he belonged because there were only four full-timers in the Pro class in that series, and Koch obviously did a lot more in IMSA than de Phillippi did, so I bumped him to make room for Neuville. I think listing them both is redundant, and trust me, Koch will be a lot higher on the list.

Prior to de Phillippi and Eastwood, my last cuts were: Marcus Amand, Rubens Barrichello, Ricardo Feller, Rylan Gray, Kiern Jewiss, Daniel Juncadella, Keagan Masters, Bryce Menzies, and Clemens Schmid. For each driver on the list, I list their rating last year. If a driver on my list was not listed in 2024 but I have listed them before, I list NR for not rated. If a driver was not listed in 2024 but I have never listed them before, then I write “first-timer”. There are 33 first-timers, and most of them are indeed newly relevant. Only two of them are really surprises, and one of them is here: a driver who is a top 1,000 lock, but his peak relevance came in the 2010s before I was making these lists.