Top 200 Drivers of 2025: The Top 50

So, the 24 Days of Listmaking ends during the 24 Hours of Daytona.

I tried. I really tried to get this done before the 24 Hours of Daytona because I knew that releasing it during the race would probably mean no one would ever read it. I had about 11 drivers left to write when I went to bed last night around 5 AM. When I got up, there wasn’t enough time to finish before the race, so I decided to write it during the race. It also became more urgent to push forward and get this done because of the major nationwide ice storm that is projected for this reason. Even though I normally visit my mom on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I decided to stay home on Friday and work on this and my other work because I did not think it was reasonably safe for me to walk outside with wind chills of -25°F. With the potential that much of the country might see power outages this weekend, I wanted to at least finish this before that happened, particularly if we have a power outage here ourselves. I don’t think that’s likely in Syracuse because we are certainly better able to handle the snow and the ice, and I fear the effects of the storm will likely ravage the Southern states more, because they aren’t as used to handling snow or ice.

I am drained, and I might not write the Greg Biffle, Allan Moffat, and Rex White posts today, but those will be my next three, and I will likely make those paid posts. I need to focus on my paid work now, so I can pay some badly overdue bills. I just landed a job that will pay me nearly twice as much as I ever made in a year for part-time work, so hopefully, this should get me my first stability this year. Since this is part-time, I can still balance my work here with that, visiting my mom, and maybe one or two of my other jobs as well, although I think I’m going to have to let at least one of them go. And since one of the top employees at my new company has Crohn’s disease, they’ll likely be very accommodating for my IBS symptoms. I couldn’t have asked for much more.

I wanted to get a few words in about NASCAR’s new points system. A lot of people are so excited about it, and I just can’t get myself there. On one of the Discords where I post, I wrote:

“Am I the only person who doesn’t like this? I feel like I’m on an island with this one. Feels like the decline in excitement will be more than the only marginal gain in integrity... What it really reminds me of is a lot of the obnoxious IndyCar fans who talk about IndyCar’s ‘purity’ because at least ‘we’re not NASCAR’ despite them having more boring racing and a lot of competition gimmicks in their own right, including even the fake red flags and shit. What I think this really also proves to me is how me and my generation have aged out of social media. It feels like the discussion is way more positive than it shold be because the people now dominating social media started watching NASCAR races in the Chase era and now have nostalgia for it, when I considered it to be bullshit to begin with. I think one of the things that bums me out actually is the excessive bonus points for winning, when the difference between 2nd-3rd is still the same as the difference between 35th-36th. So I get a worst of both worlds vibe for this where most of the field is going to be doing boring points racing if they think they can’t win, while it’s gonna be boys have at it and lots of carnage for any of the drivers who think they can. Worst of both extremes to me.”

I think one of the issues is that I just don’t have nostalgia for 2000s NASCAR. I can admit in retrospect that it had the best competition ever and that the racing was also quite solid, but as someone who grew up watching ‘90s NASCAR, 2000s NASCAR felt more dumbed-down, corporate, and much more pandering to rednecks than ‘90s NASCAR did. (Boogity, boogity, boogity!) As I was preparing for college, I stopped watching almost all racing for a couple of years because IndyCar was collapsing, I couldn’t afford any of the cable packages F1 was on, and NASCAR was trying to bully one who wasn’t an ardent Iraq War supporter out of the fandom at the time. Much like how country music in the ‘90s Garth Brooks/Shania Twain era attempted to pander to everyone, by the 2000s, as we entered the Toby Keith era, country became “for neocons only”, and the same thing happened to NASCAR. I was maybe the most anti-Iraq War student in my high school class (although I admit I fell for Afghanistan). I guess that wasn’t cool at the time, and I couldn’t even believe all the Democrats fell for Colin Powell’s speech, which I half-listened to and never bought. It was exceedingly obvious after the Axis of Evil speech that Bush was going to invade Iraq under any pretext, and he had made that abundantly clear even before said pretext was revealed. So, I could not get down with all the post-9/11 jingoism that became associated with NASCAR and country music (when that wasn’t really a thing in the ‘90s), and I think that killed it for a lot of millennials and was the factor in NASCAR’s decline, or maybe second after the Great Recession. More than the chase, more than the top 35 rule, the lucky dog rule, the charters, the wave-around, or whatever else you want to complain about. It was a cultural thing. The CBS and ESPN broadcasts in the ‘90s were for everyone (even if the CBS broadcasts were admittedly a little boring), while the FOX broadcasts were for one demographic only, and now it seems like most people think the Mike Joy/Larry McReynolds/Darrell Waltrip booth was the best booth of all time. Not I!

The pivot to wanting an all-neocon fan base worked when Bush had 90% approval ratings, but it was a short-term gain coupled with a long-term loss once that demographic lost its popularity and clout. It seems NASCAR came back with Gen Z, much to my surprise (because they had none of that context), but maybe this is why I can’t get down with the 2000s nostalgia. While I certainly preferred a full-season format (although not Latford) over either, I sometimes preferred the playoffs to the ten-race consistency chase, because if you’re gonna gimmick it up, fully gimmick it up, rather than creating some half-hearted compromise that pleases no one. The Chase 2.0 still maintains the issues of awarding consistency too much (albeit over a smaller sample size, which means a single DNF is even costlier). At least you could win your way out of bad luck before, but now, it’s going to go back to being more about avoiding bad luck than any positive achievements, and doing so over a 10-race sample size, which is still arguably too short to recover from it. I suppose stage points and bonus points for winning will make this a little better, so I’ll certainly give it a chance. I guess people are excited because they thought NASCAR would never listen to the fans again, and they considered it a step in the right direction. But to me, it just reminds me of all these IndyCar fans on the Racer comments sections who sneered at NASCAR, calling it NA$CAR or NAPCAR or whatever, and praised IndyCar’s “integrity” even though they introduced lots of NASCAR-esque gimmicks like fake red flags and somehow it was okay with them… Which is honestly one of the things that I’ll admit eventually led me to prefer NASCAR again over IndyCar in this decade. But as somebody who lost interest in NASCAR in the 2000s (I guess mainly for political reasons, until I realized I was still too autistic and too trailer-trash for any of the fellow Cornellians I guess I was trying to impress to want anything to do with me), that is not an era I want back.