Top 200 Drivers of 2025: The C+ Tier

Andy Miller's Genuine Draft

One of my longest-standing traditions of late has been my participation in an All-Racing Fantasy League in 2009. I stumbled into this sort of by accident after I launched race-database.com in 2007. I think I was constantly googling for anybody who referenced or linked to my site in the desperate hope that it might gain traction, make money, and become a viable competitor to racing-reference.info and the other sites like that. It never really did, and I abandoned it in 2015. However, throughout my frenetic googling, I noticed Will McCarty’s now long-defunct Is It May Yet? blog. He was probably the first person ever to link to me after I launched it, and I was so excited. (Will is actually one of my subscribers right now. Hiya, Will!) My decision to archive the IRL and CART first, then F1, then NASCAR reaped dividends here. I then followed all his other links and accidentally discovered this network of other IndyCar bloggers, and started posting on many of their posts over the years. I was definitely more of a NASCAR fan growing up, but accidentally discovering this blog scene is probably a big reason why I was enjoying IndyCar racing a lot more in the 2010s than NASCAR, although honestly, this decade, I think NASCAR has been better. One of those bloggers was Andy Miller, who goes by The SpeedGeek, and I discovered that he was planning an All-Racing Fantasy League where players selected a team of drivers from F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, Grand-Am, and the American Le Mans Series (eventually replaced with WEC and IMSA and then Formula E was later added). They had done a trial run that didn’t count for money in 2008, but 2009 was the first year that the ARFL was in something approaching its modern form. All drivers scored points according to a points system based on IndyCar points, so the drivers in series that tended to have more races were more valuable. That meant NASCAR drivers were overwhelmingly most valuable at the time. In recent years, that’s started to change as F1’s number of races is starting to approach NASCAR’s. Since the top teams have a much larger advantage in F1 and NASCAR, that usually means the F1 champion outscores the top NASCAR drivers now. Players pay $20, with the winner getting 60%, second place 20%, and third place 10%. Players start a certain number of oval and road course drivers each week, or free drivers who you could use for either type of track. You can make trades, a limited number of waivers per year, and lately, the league has introduced a rule where you can keep a driver one year and lock them into the previous round of the next year’s draft. I have done this every year since 2009 and won it twice, including my first attempt (I was really high on Juan Pablo Montoya’s Cup career when few others were at that time, and that reaped big dividends). I almost always place in the top half, but it’s been a while since I really contended for the championship.

This year, I drew the third spot. George Russell was the first driver taken by Andy’s brother, who assumed (like most) that Mercedes is going to dominate in F1 this year, but the second player picked Lando Norris, and I picked Oscar Piastri, because even though Russell is a better driver than the other two, McLaren’s chassis may still be better than the Mercedes team’s chassis at his been in previous years, although I’ll admit Piastri vs. Max Verstappen was a tough decision. It was also a surprisingly tough decision whether to keep Ty Gibbs as I have for the past several years or switch to David Malukas, who I signed last year before he went to Penske. As it turned out, I ended up getting to draft Malukas again anyway. I really wanted to switch off Gibbs as he’s become such a disappointment relative to expectations, but even somebody who scores a top 20 points total in Cup is still way too valuable to let go and I realized that. But I did draft Corey Heim later to give me an option if he finally gets a Cup ride, ‘cause I think whenever he finally gets the ride he deserves, he’s gonna be better than Gibbs and I’d rather go with him for the long haul (someone else already had Zilisch, and somebody did draft Colton Herta in the final round this year). Anyway, here was who I drafted (bizarrely, all drivers with pretty short names):

One of the things I really wanted to focus on this year was dual-use drivers, because those are the drivers who tend to be worth a lot of points. In addition to being a likely Formula E champion, Nick Cassidy is also full-time in WEC, Dries Vanthoor is full-time in both WEC and IMSA, and Ross Gunn is full-time in IMSA and at least making some WEC starts, even though I believe it’s still unclear whether he will be full-time there, so I think I kinda nailed this. Obviously, it’s all going to hinge probably on whether Piastri dominates or not, and also how Malukas does on the road courses for Penske, which I think is a big question mark. I really like this team, and I got to pick good choices as well as picking only drivers I like (except for Gibbs and Heim, one of whom I’m going to drop next year depending on Heim’s future).

But that was not the only draft I participated in this year. One of my hobbies that I don’t talk much about and apparently haven’t talked about here is that I have liked following the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for quite a while and I enjoy a lot of the conversations and the people in this space. I have been listening to Who Cares About the Rock Hall?, a podcast co-hosted by two comedians, Joe Kwaczala and Kristen Studard, since it dropped in 2018, and I appeared on a Patreon episode once. Every year, this podcast has a draft, and they just finished theirs a day ago, but the Discord server for the podcast, which I joined a year or two ago, also has its own draft to predict the next Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees/class, and I entered that as well a couple weeks ago. In the five open rounds, I selected Coldplay (because it’s really weird given the combination of their commercial success, critical acclaim, and industry love that they weren’t inducted in their first year), No Doubt (because they’re simultaneously exploding in popularity now and are one of the biggest ‘90s bands not in, even despite Gwen Stefani alienating a lot of her original fan base), The Guess Who (because I wanted to maximize points and go for the classic rock acts nobody else wanted to draft who were more likely selections than the less likely acts people WANTED to draft), Fiona Apple (because I guessed that in the wake of that Lilith Fair documentary that they’d pick somebody from that scene, and that seemed likeliest to me because her career lasted longest), and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (see also: The Guess Who, but I chose them specifically because Jack White shouted them out in his acceptance speech last year and they were one of the few acts on that list who I think were popular enough that the Hall might actually consider it). I chose Estelle Axton in the round for non-performers, because it was egregious that they inducted the other co-founder of Stax Records, Jim Stewart, and didn’t induct her, and it seems like they’ve been correcting a lot of their mistakes in female snubs in recent years (solo Carole King, solo Tina Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Carol Kaye, etc…) Then finally, in the wild card round where players could only draft people who didn’t appear on anyone else’s list, I selected Robert Cray. One of the Rock Hall’s biggest problems now is that it seems far less interested in inducting R&B acts than it used to be, and almost all the black artists it goes for are either rappers or people who are extremely pop and at most R&B adjacent, like Lionel Richie or Whitney Houston. Their weird nomination of Lenny Kravitz makes me think they’re looking for black artists who white people who only like rock and don’t like R&B (which is a lot of their voting body) might go for, so I selected Cray for that because they venerate those sort of blues rockers even if they didn’t have a lot of hits, although Tracy Chapman is probably more likely in that vein and I considered Hootie and the Blowfish (which seems very adjacent to all those Lenny Kravitz, Black Crowes, Dave Matthews Band, Phish nominations and/or inductions they’ve been trying lately). Both these drafts were a lot of fun.

I’ve been slowly studying stuff for my reentry into Learned League next month. I think this is one of the main things I’m going to want to do on the bus rides to the nursing home and back, although I have much better and more important things to do than studying trivia at home. Nonetheless, over the past couple weeks, I memorized all the countries in alphabetical order for the first time in my life, and I almost have all the world capitals nailed down. I’m starting to take this a little more seriously now that I’m going to bar trivia every week, especially because we’re currently in a $2,500 winter tournament. I highly doubt our team is going to win that, but we’re close enough in points that we have a chance to win in our bar to advance to the finals.

No new updates on my mom. I’m still trying to get a ramp installed for her to possibly be able to come home, but who knows if that will happen. My big concern here is that one of the requirements is that if you leave the house within five years after the ramp is constructed, you have to pay something back. I know that after my mom dies, since almost all the equity in the house is drained, Medicaid is going to force me to give up the house. I’m okay with that, as long as I can get my income up so someone will rent to me, and there are increasingly hopeful signs. But that’s gonna be really rough if they do facilitate a ramp construction, she dies within five years, and then I have to give the house up because she is trapped in the nursing home against her will, which is draining the money from her estate and making it more and more likely that Medicaid may force me to vacate and then pay it back. Awful vicious cycle there.

My goal is to have the top 50 posted late Thursday night (probably very early Friday morning). After that, I’m going to do the 1,000 greatest driver entries on the three drivers who died in 2025: first Greg Biffle, then Allan Moffat and Rex White. I think those three I’ll have as free posts, and I think I’m going to be making a lot more of the 1,000 greatest drivers posts free posts in the future to see if I can expand my audience. In general, I think I should focus on having only the big name drivers paywalled (and I think most of the household names I’ve done already), but I still intend to paywall the major drivers. Thank you and good night.