1,000 Greatest Drivers: Tony Longhurst
The relatively obscure proto-Supercars driver beat an F1 champion 4-1.
Longhurst was one of my biggest discoveries when I completed my touring car model about a year ago. Even though he won multiple Bathurst 1000s, he doesn’t seem to have a particularly legendary reputation because so much of his legacy came in now-defunct Australian touring car series other than the Australian Touring Car Championship, but he was clearly great. He actually ranks directly above Supercars champions Rick Kelly and Craig Lowndes in my model. No, I don’t think he’s better than Lowndes, who is weighed down by all those years in the 2010s when Jamie Whincup and Shane van Gisbergen crushed him, but Longhurst was clearly more legit than I realized. He beat 1980 F1 champion Alan Jones 4-1, 4-time Australian Super Touring Champion Paul Morris 3-1, and five-time New Zealand Touring Car Champion Craig Baird 6-1, and those were not small sample sizes and I think all those drivers were great and will probably make my list too, although I’m a bit iffy on whether I consider either Morris or Baird to be locks or not. Longhurst actually beat Jones by a larger margin than two-time ATCC champion Glenn Seton did (39-13), and Seton and Jones were actually teammates during one of Seton’s title years! Clearly, Longhurst was a championship-caliber talent even if he no longer has a championship-caliber reputation. He’s essentially the Supercars equivalent of what Sterling Marlin is in NASCAR or Arie Luyendyk is in IndyCar: a guy who won the biggest race twice but was unfairly pegged as not being versatile over the entire schedule more because he tended to usually have second-rate cars at best for most of his prime years than because he was actually bad. I think any of those guys could have been title contenders for an extended period in more dominant cars, but I’m glad my touring car model allowed me to find hidden gems like this. To a lesser degree, I feel the same way about Brad Jones and Cameron McConville, but I think listing both of those guys is more of a stretch. McConville especially feels more like the Supercars Darren Manning or Cole Whitt: a guy who had the talent to win enough races with an extremely high teammate rating, but not enough actual results to really justify listing.
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