1,000 Greatest Drivers: Gordon Spice

Chief victim of the stupidest points system in motorsports history.

Since there isn’t a NASCAR Cup Series race this weekend due to Easter, I don’t have any RotoBaller columns due. Furthermore, the North Syracuse bus doesn’t run on the weekends so I can’t visit my mom in the nursing home (I did call her). So I’m planning to write two columns today and two tomorrow. The two columns today on Gordon Spice and Alain Cudini will allow me to catch up to my originally scheduled pace, then I intend to write two columns on Phil Hill and Achille Varzi tomorrow with the hope that I will write each column in advance of the day I have it scheduled from here on out, so I can hopefully drop each column for the next day on midnight or thereabouts.

Although Spice was one of the world’s best drivers in both sports cars and touring cars in the ‘70s and ‘80s, his touring car record is decidedly underrated because he competed in the British Saloon Car Championship (now British Touring Car Championship) during the bizarre period of multi-class racing when the overall champion was whoever most dominated their individual class. Spice tended to compete for overall wins so there were more top drivers in the classes where he competed, which meant even though he won seven class championships in the BSCC and scored the most overall wins four times, he never won the overall title since every year there was somebody who dominated a class with less competition. To me, this is honestly even stupider than NASCAR’s playoff formats and it’s a good thing they finally moved away from that system in the ‘90s shortly after the BSCC renamed itself the BTCC.