1,000 Greatest Drivers: Robert Kubica

On the Pole.

I decided to catch up on my backlog by skipping the Raffaele Pinto post that was originally scheduled for today. He is a driver who I definitely feel is worthy as he won the European Rally Championship before the World Rally Championship was formed when it was the most prestigious rallying championship and he also earned a variety of important sports car wins including class wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona, 24 Hours of Spa, and 12 Hours of Sebring thereby proving his versatility, but he is very obscure. If I struggle to write even the columns on all-time rallying greats like Colin McRae yesterday, obscure drivers like Pinto will be significantly more difficult, so I’m going to wait.

I realize I missed Kubica’s birthday yesterday but I decided I wanted to finish updating my open wheel model before I wrote the Kubica and Verstappen columns (my last 1,000 greatest driver posts of the year) to account for all the open wheel races this season including this weekend’s Formula E season opener and Formula 1 finale. There are some big surprises in my current model update, most notably the extremely high placements of a number of this year’s Formula 2 drivers, but I’ll write about that later. I may release model update columns for my open wheel, stock car, and/or touring car models later this month (which will likely be free posts here), or I may expend all my energies into working on the top 200 columns first. We’ll see. I will state for the record that there were 85 major league open wheel drivers who had five or more teammate comparisons this year. Max Verstappen was the highest-rated driver in the open wheel model and Kazuto Kotaka was the lowest. I will likely share the 83 drivers in between on a later date.

For the record, if you exclude Kubica’s post-comeback F1 starts, his rating in my model would be .247 (53rd), placing him one spot above Jenson Button…