1,000 Greatest Drivers: Chaz Mostert

Will today's best Supercars driver ever have a fast enough car to win the title he deserves?

I pre-empted my originally scheduled Roberto Mouras column for the same reason I didn’t write the Omar Martínez column last month. I don’t know enough about that era of Argentinean touring car racing. While I know those drivers need to be on this list, I’m not ready to write about them because I’m pretty sure the vast majority of everything written about them is in Spanish and I don’t think I am yet knowledgeable enough to write those entries up to my usual standard, so I’ve decided to pivot to Chaz Mostert. I think he’s easily the best Supercars driver today after Shane van Gisbergen left, while I’ve tended to find Brodie Kostecki and Will Brown overrated since they both popped out of nowhere and started dominating seemingly only because they had the dominant car; they remind me a lot of Alex Zanardi and Jimmy Vasser in the ‘90s, but I suppose their longevity remains to be seen. I still think Mostert’s better. I haven’t updated my touring car model since May so this is somewhat out of date, but since Mostert beat Ryan Wood 19-3 this year and Wood had few teammate comparisons outside of Mostert, I doubt he will have shifted much. After completing my touring car model, I’ve decided to raise all his 2021-2023 seasons from E- to E because I think I didn’t give him enough credit for the TCR Australia title in 2021 at the time, and the fact that Nick Percat immediately bounced back to have a multi-win top ten in points season after Mostert annihilated him in 2022 and 2023 makes those years look even better in retrospect. However, I think this year was his best.

I reluctantly signed up for a Bluesky account today. To be honest, from what I’ve seen, I don’t like it much. It’s probably marginally better than Twitter, but the point of Bluesky seems to be to bully conservatives while minimizing interactions with them and that doesn’t give me my jollies. Sure, bullying the members of privileged groups is marginally less bad than bullying the members of unprivileged groups, but it’s still bad, and a lot of the loudest Bluesky users remind me of many of the people who rejected me in college because I was too unsophisticated and/or meatheaded and/or autistic for them. As an old millennial, I grew up in the zero-tolerance-for-bullying era and I still prefer those corny family sitcom values to the culture of everyone-dunking-on-everyone that replaced them, which places me out of step with almost all “extremely online” people across the entire political spectrum. I have no nostalgia for pre-Elon Twitter like a lot of the Bluesky users do (all these antisocial media platforms were always horrible in terms of mainstreaming sociopathic behavior), but I don’t plan on writing about politics there. I am curious whether I gain more traction there than on Twitter. Probably not after I wrote that… Can we please have Geocities and AOL Instant Messenger back? (Okay, sure. Kyle Drake is trying.) That was the best era of the Internet by far.

PS I tried to use that “scour the Outback for latent talent” line in a RotoBaller column on SVG and my boss Jordan McAbee edited that out so I decided to use it here instead.