1,000 Greatest Drivers: João Barbosa

Unfairly ignored because sports car fans hated the Daytona Prototype.

I needed to do a little research for this one. As with all sports car drivers, the season ratings are highly open to change until I go back and calculate lap times and/or lead change records for some of those seasons. From what I remember at the time, Barbosa was always the leader at Action Express Racing and Christian Fittipaldi was kind of along for the ride until Filipe Albuquerque joined the team in 2018 and overtook him as team leader, but that could be wrong. IMSA’s current archive of post-race PDF documents goes back to 2016, so I should be able to calculate everything for the later years of his career eventually, but admittedly most of his best years came before that. I do firmly believe that a lot of the dominant drivers of the Daytona Prototype era are kind of fading into obscurity just because snobbish sports car fans hated the DP chassis. Scott Pruett still gets love because he had continuous on-again, off-again sports car success for almost 30 years. The Taylor brothers continued into the post-DP era with cars that the sports car fans actually liked. Max Angelelli still gets a lot of hype also, but a lot of the other dominant DP-era drivers like Barbosa and even more so Jon Fogarty are seemingly fading in hindsight just because sports car fans didn’t like their cars. C’mon guys, that’s not fair. Just because you don’t like a particular chassis doesn’t mean you should refuse to acknowledge a driver who dominated with it!

My mom desperately wants to return home from the nursing home, so I called up the code enforcement officer last Friday to ask him what needed to be done before he’d sign off on it. I removed about 80% of the clutter on the kitchen floor, especially during an all-nighter on Sunday night going into Monday morning. The code enforcement officer was pleased with my progress but still told me it wasn’t enough. He offered to help me begin clearing the house and is going to let me have access to a dumpster for free for a month while he and a couple of his guys offered to help clearing the house over the next week with the hopes that Mom will be able to return. Last night, I took a bunch of chairs, yarn, plastic bags, wicker baskets, board games, and puzzles to give away and/or throw out and I’m going to probably give away at least half of our 1,200 books over the next few days. Much to my surprise, my mom was so desperate to come home that she did authorize this while I visited her yesterday. Over the last week while going through stuff, I found her cell phone, her rosary, and her viola, which are all very important to her so I guess this has been a pretty good week.