1,000 Greatest Drivers: David Brabham

Brabham: The Final Chapter

Even though I said that I think David Brabham was more talented than his brother Geoff here and I do believe that even though Geoff got a lot more hype at the time, he ended up scoring only 55 cumulative points compared to Geoff’s 69 based on my single-season ratings, so maybe a lot of these need more adjustment, especially for sports car drivers where it’s really hard to tell which driver is putting in more work (especially prior to the 21st century). David Brabham did race into the pretty recent past so it might be possible for me to find lap times and stuff like that from his era, and I do have lap leaders from the premier class for most of his ALMS seasons so I can tell you that he was clearly the team leader over Scott Sharp in 2009 but not over Simon Pagenaud in 2010. With any of these sports car drivers, I may adjust a lot of their seasons up and down if I ever come across more detail on lap times, lap leaders, on-track lead changes or anything like that, but I guess it remains to be seen whether David or Geoff will openly wind up ranking higher on my list even though my instinct and my models say David was better since David was well above average in both my open wheel and touring car models while Geoff was well below average. As for his best race, I acknowlege that the Australian Drivers’ Championship (even if it is the most prestigious open wheel championship in Australia) had become a pretty minor league thing by the time Brabham won it, but driving from 38th to the lead in 13 laps is mind-blowing (even against weak competition).

I finally got the power of attorney and notary public forms signed today, so that was one big relief.