Bubble Drivers: M
The Mueller Report (along with 38 other drivers not named Müller).
Here is an amusing graphic for you to look upon:
Okay, that was exhausting. 42 drivers here, which was maybe too much for one column. At least no other letter except for the 44 S drivers comes even close. I am planning on restarting charges this week on October 1. I’ve also been trying to push hard to finish my ultimate driver list by the end of the year, and I can see some light at the end of the tunnel and I might be able to do it. When I do so, I will probably share it with all my paid subscribers at that time before looking to self-publish it on Amazon. This file is currently nearly 5 MB with over 173,000 rows of data and around 29,000 drivers. I would never even think of trying to publish this in a physical book, but I have put so much work into this I probably should try to publish it as an ebook to see if anyone will bite.
I’m also still trying to get my mom out of the nursing home. I’m filling out a form to apply for the construction of the ramp, but the organization I’m dealing with right now told me they probably wouldn’t be able to build one until the spring and I certainly don’t want to wait that long, so I’ve been asking some other local people for ideas about who might be able to construct one sooner. I don’t have any great leads on that yet. Perhaps for the time being, if this does take six months, she could maybe be transferred to an assisted living center, which she would probably like more than the nursing home since it would probably be less noisy and it would also likely cost less money. I hadn’t thought much about that intermediate alternative yet.
I’ve been trying to work on my sleeping habits after I was unable to fall asleep last Tuesday night. I guess that was entirely understandable because I was beating on myself for not being able to get my mom out and how it was all my fault, etc… So I ended up deciding to stay home to not risk falling asleep on the bus ride back and I slept from about 3:00 to 8:00 PM on Wednesday and 5:00 to 11:00 PM on Thursday, while being up in the extremely early morning hours. I finally went to bed at 9:00 and got up at 7:00 and I thought I had it, but in my wave of insomnia, I decided to buy some magnesium pills to make sure I got enough sleep. After I took a magnesium pill last night, I didn’t fall asleep until after 5 am and all was ruined again. I was so doggedly consistent to the point that when I was in kindergarten, I would scream at my parents if they started the bedtime process any later than exactly 7:00 PM. (How on earth was my autism not detected then?) But I think I was honestly more mature then and I’d like to get some of that back. Anyway, I’m going to have either one post for the N and O drivers or separate posts for both this week. Here are the Ms.
Walt Maas
1974: C-
1975: C
1976: C
1977: C+
Cumulative points: 8
Although Maas won two titles in the IMSA GTU class, I decided that class did not have nearly strong enough competition.
Rob MacCachren
2007: C-
2018: C-
2022: C-
Cumulative points: 3
I’m willing to be sold on this because he won a record seven Baja 1000s, but the whole desert truck racing scene seems too disconnected from the overall racing scene with the exception that a few stars passed through there either before (Robby Gordon and Jimmie Johnson) or after (Parnelli Jones) they became stars. I think two of the other things holding me back are firstly that this particular discipline is so hard to research (for a lot of seasons you can’t even tell who the SCORE Trophy Truck champion was nor how many races any driver won) and also that so much of his success including five of his Baja 1000 wins came after the age of 50, which suggests to me that desert truck racing also requires less athleticism than a lot of other disciplines. Granted, many will argue that I shouldn’t have drag racers or especially world land speed record holders on the list for similar reasons, so I can see how I might be wrong about this.
Dave MacDonald
1963: E-
1964: C+
Cumulative points: 8
MacDonald was one of the biggest rising sports car stars at the time of his death in the 1964 Indy 500 with two overall wins in the United States Road Racing Championship and two more in class, class wins at the 12 Hours of Sebring and 3 Hours of Daytona, an overall win at the 1963 Pacific Grand Prix sports car race against a field that included A.J. Foyt, Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Lloyd Ruby, Roger Penske, Frank Gardner, Jim Hall, Richie Ginther, Bob Holbert, and Dick Thompson amongst others, and back-to-back second-place finishes in Cup Series races at Riverside including leading the most laps in 1963. Although he obviously looked poised to become a long-term great driver, much like his contemporary Bobby Marshman, I don’t think he was around long enough.
Umberto Maglioli
1953: E
1954: E
1956: E-
1957: C
1959: C-
1963: C
1964: C+
1968: C
1969: C-
Cumulative points: 35
Although Maglioli didn’t make many F1 starts, he was one of the biggest sports car drivers of his era and he frequently outperformed F1 championship contenders in sports car races in his heyday. His two biggest wins probably came at the 1953 Targa Florio (a 7 hour, 8 minute race where he drove solo) and the 1954 Carrera Panamericana (which he also drove solo for 17 hours, 40 minutes). In that race, he beat the shared entry of future F1 champion and winner Phil Hill and Richie Ginther by 24 minutes. He did tend to usually lose to the big F1 stars when they finished, but he came closer to matching them than arguably any of the sports car specialists of his time. His nine WSC wins either overall or in class also include another shared Targa Florio in 1956 and the 1964 12 Hours of Sebring, which he won several years after 1957, when he suffered a crash that hurt his legs so badly that doctors believed he would never walk again. That last bit made him an absolute lock in my mind.
Willy Mairesse
1956: C-
1960: C-
1961: C-
1962: E-
1963: C+
1965: C
1966: C
1967: C-
Cumulative points: 16
Mairesse is probably best known for his F1 career where he won two non-championship races in 1962, but I’d say he was better elsewhere as he won the Belgian Rally Championship in 1956 along with 5 World Sportscar Championship wins including 2 overall Targa Florios in 1962 and 1966 and a Le Mans class win in 1965. He does have an above average rating in my open wheel model as well. Although it might be hard to argue he was great in anything, the fact that he was good in a lot of things (much like drivers like A.J. Allmendinger, John Andretti, Johnny Mantz, or Chuck Stevenson) is why I would rather be on the side of accepting him than rejecting him, but I might change my mind. I would take most of those over him I think.
Timo Mäkinen
1963: C-
1964: C
1965: E-
1966: E-
1967: C
1970: C
1972: C-
1973: E-
1974: E-
1975: C+
1976: C-
Cumulative points: 33
The father of four-time World Rally Champion Tommi, Timo was a great rally driver in his own right. He is very similar to the fellow Finnish Rally Championship legend Simo Lampinen who was one of his chief rivals with Lampinen winning four titles in 1963, 1964, 1967, and 1975, to Mäkinen’s three in 1966, 1970, and 1973. Sure, you could argue the Finnish Rally Championship is a minor league, but in my opinion, it effectively wasn’t since Finnish drivers disproportionately dominated rallying more often than not as eight different Finns combined to win 16 WRC titles, and both Mäkinen and Lampinen fared very well against the future Finnish WRC champions when they competed domestically, so I want them both on the list. Even though Lampinen won one more title and they tied with 18 Finnish Rally Championship wins and 7 European Rally Championship wins (some of which were also Finnish Rally Championship races double-counted for both), I think Mäkinen was better because he did more internationally. In the ERC, Mäkinen had three consecutive finishes in the top three in points from 1965-1967 when Lampinen only finished third once, Mäkinen won a Monte Carlo Rally when Lampinen didn’t, and Mäkinen won four WRC rallies when Lampinen never did, so that’s why I have him as a lock and Lampinen not, but I admit they were very close.
Frédéric Makowiecki
2007: C-
2008: C-
2009: C-
2010: C+
2011: C+
2012: E-
2013: C+
2014: C+
2015: C-
2016: C+
2017: C+
2018: C+
2019: C
2020: C-
Cumulative points: 33
Although I was kind of surprised to discover he only had one significant title in the debatably minor league Porsche Carrera Cup France in 2010 (although he did beat Kévin Estre) he was a reliably consistent workhorse nearly always as a Porsche factory driver for well over a decade with 16 Porsche Carrera Cup France wins, 13 FIA GT wins, 2 GT Endurance Pro Cup wins, 3 Super GT wins, 6 WEC class wins including a Le Mans class win, 6 IMSA class wins including 2 12 Hours of Sebrings and 2 Petit Le Mans, 4 VLN/NLS wins, and an overall win in the 2018 24 Hours of Nürburgring. As kind of a sports car career compiler, he might not have had the most exciting career, but it’s definitely a career worthy of recognition.
Guillermo Maldonado
1988: C+
1989: C
1990: C
1991: C
1993: C-
1994: C
Cumulative points: 12
I suspect I’ve been too generous with many of these Argentine touring car drivers because I know a lot of knowledgeable people like Marshall Pruett find this scene totally dismissible. While I respect this scene much more than he does, I will acknowledge the Argentine series did not have the depth of WTCC/WTCR/TCR World Tour, BTCC, DTM, or Supercars most of the time so I’m not going to list every champion. That buck may start here with Maldonado (who is unrelated to F1 driver Pastor). He had a very successful career in the TC2000 series with 17 wins and a championship in 1994, but what holds him back in my opinion is that he was not even close to that generation’s best Argentine touring car driver Juan María Traverso who won six titles in eight year from 1986-1993 and won 4 or 5 races every single year, and Maldonado didn’t win his title until 1994, the only year in that stretch where Traverso did not compete. I find this sort of analogous to Dave Blaney in the World of Outlaws, who won his only title in 1995 when Steve Kinser and Sammy Swindell both competed part-time because of their NASCAR gigs. I’m probably going to reject both of them for the same reason.
Roger Mandeville
1980: C-
1981: C
1982: C
1983: C+
1984: C
1986: C+
Cumulative points: 13
The early teammate for Amos Johnson (who I’ve already covered here), Mandeville was actually better than Johnson when they were teammates as he edged Johnson out for IMSA titles in 1983 and 1984 (and he was also the team’s car owner), but he didn’t last as long as Johnson as he only had one particularly noteworthy year after that in 1986 when he had 2 overall wins and 6 class wins, while Johnson had a much longer run with four consecutive 24 Hours of Daytona class wins, and that was a race Mandeville never won even in class.
Olaf Manthey
1982: C-
1983: C-
1984: C+
1985: C
1987: C+
1990: C
1991: C-
1992: C
1993: C-
1994: C
1995: C
Cumulative points: 20
The VLN series at Nürburgring (renamed NLS in 2020) got a lot of press this weekend when Max Verstappen randomly crossed over to enter and win a race on his debut in that series, but I’ve never rated that series highly and have decided to leave off most of the prolific series winners unless they won the 24 Hours of Nürburgring itself, which I consider to be more important than all the other races combined, especially because most of these other drivers did not have noteworthy other accomplishments (especially solo ones, which I tend to value more highly). Manthey is an exception as he does have some legit solo credentials in addition to his 30 VLN wins: he also had a Porsche Carrera Cup Germany championship in 1990 (which is close to a major league in my mind), a DTM win in 1987, a win in its predecesssor DPM series in 1984, and three DPM/DTM top five points finishes in 1984, 1985, and 1987, along with a solid touring car rating of .089. The fact that he did have some solo success in his own right is why I think I’m going to say yes on him and no on some of his VLN contemporaries like Jürgen Alzen and Arno Klasen.
Raffaele Marciello
2013: C
2018: E-
2019: C+
2020: C
2021: C
2022: C+
2023: E-
Cumulative points: 22
One of the most highly-regarded sports car drivers today, I saw people in 2023 even hyping him as the best driver in the world, but I thought that was definitely overkill. I admit I find drivers like him who primarily competed in the SRO-based sports car series like the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint and Endurance Cups difficult to evaluate because I normally like to differentiate between teammates by looking at lap leader/lap time/lead change data, and that is almost impossible to find for the SRO series, as opposed to the WEC, IMSA, European Le Mans, and even Asian Le Mans Series, which provide substantially more information. I think I end up underrating a lot of the SRO drivers precisely because I have access to less data on them. As a result, that’s why I didn’t have him originally rated for 2021 when I decided in retrospect that I should have. Nonetheless, while I suspect I might be underrating him here, he’ll become a lock if he gets a C+ this year. I suppose that’s possible since he just won his first 24 Hours of Nürburgring this year.
Henry Martin
1997: E
1998: C-
1999: C-
2000: C
2004: C-
2007: C-
Cumulative points: 16
Martin was somewhat similar to the aforementioned Maldonado as he too won a TC2000 championship in 1997 and 19 overall wins in the series, which looks close to Maldonado’s record. The big difference is that in 1997, he set the all-time single-season record for wins in the series with 13. Unlike Maldonado, who won his title when the ‘90s legend Juan María Traverso wasn’t competing, Traverso did compete in 1997 and won only one race, which is why I decided to give Martin a full E. That one year was definitely better than the rest of his career combined as he won six TC2000 titles the next three years, then spent most of the next decade racing in the fairly minor league Top Race where he won 12 races and never finished better than fourth in points. He did also win a Turismo Carretera race in 2002. Although his overall record isn’t that much better than Maldonado’s, I think the fact that he hit a higher peak and won in all three of the biggest touring car series is why I’m probably going to say yes on Martin and no on Maldonado.
Jean-Michel Martin
1977: C
1979: C+
1980: E
1984: C
1985: C-
1986: C+
1987: E-
1988: C
1989: E-
1990: C+
1991: C
1992: C+
Cumulative points: 41
The only reason I didn’t have this Martin (the father of Maxime) as a lock was because I hadn’t entered a great portion of his legacy on my master driver list. One of the biggest series I haven’t gotten around to yet is the Belgian Touring Car Championship, where he won six titles in 1977, 1979, 1980, 1986, 1989, and 1990, and I only had the last one listed because I hadn’t entered the ‘70s/’80s Belgian touring car results yet. Mea culpa. But I was still planning on listing him even before that since he won the 24 Hours of Spa overall four times in 1979, 1980, 1987, and 1992. In the last of those years, he also won the 24 Hours of Nürburgring, but he fell off soon after that.
Maxime Martin
2011: C
2012: C+
2013: C
2014: C-
2015: C+
2016: C
2017: C+
2018: C-
2019: C+
2020: C+
2022: C+
Cumulative points: 26
Like Makowiecki, Maxime is a career compiler and he is nowhere near as good as his dad, but he compiled enough of a career to make him barely a lock in my book anyway. The strongest thing about Martin’s career is his very high touring car rating of .321, way higher than Jean-Michel’s .058, but what doesn’t impress me is that he’s hardly ever won or even contended for a championship in anything unlike his six-time Belgian touring car champion father. Nonetheless, I still decided his 5 FIA GT wins, 6 GT World Challenge Endurance Pro Cup (including the 2016 24 Hours of Spa), 4 GT World Challenge Endurance Sprint Cup, 3 ALMS/IMSA wins, 3 DTM wins,2 WEC wins (including a Le Mans class win in 2020), and one electric touring car win in 2022 were barely enough.
Pierluigi Martini
1983: C-
1986: C
1988: C-
1989: C+
1990: C
1991: C
1994: C
1999: C
Cumulative points: 15
It’s hard to know how to evaluate a driver who spent almost his entire career at a Minardi team that was almost completely uncompetitive for even points-scoring results but it’s clear that while at Minardi, he performed very well against an extremely strong caliber of his teammates. Although Martini didn’t show up on F1metrics’s top 100 list, his .141 rating in my model puts him roughly on par with an average IndyCar xhampion, and if you look at some of his head-to-head performances, you can see where that comes from. After winning the 1983 European F3 title and four wins in F3000 (the chief F1 feeder at the time) from 1986-1988, I have to look primarily at his qualifying performances since the Minardis were too slow to score points most of the time (although he did score nearly half of Minardi’s total points and give them their only lap led), and so unreliable they frequently failed to finish. His qualifying performances were electrifying as he beat Luis Pérez-Sala 22-4 (including a 15-0 sweep in 1989), Paolo Barilla 13-1, Gianni Morbidelli 12-5, Christian Fittipaldi 4-2, Michele Alboreto 13-3, and Luca Badoer 5-4. That is an impressive record. The only teammate he didn’t beat in qualifying was JJ Lehto who tied him 8-8, but I have him as a lock anyway. And then after Martini’s F1 career ended, he went on to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall in 1999. He’s not a lock, but I definitely think I should.
Giulio Masetti
1921: E
1922: E
1924: C+
1925: E-
Cumulative points: 9
Here’s another early Grand Prix driver who was pretty great with four wins from 1921-1925 including back-to-back Targa Florios, but I’m rejecting a lot of these sorts of drivers because of the lack of 1920s competition in Europe (as I’ve said before, I think the US competition was better in that decade) and my decision to award fewer points to the pre-World War II drivers. I do think that was the correct decision.
Hiroshi Masuoka
2001: C
2002: E-
2003: E-
2004: C+
Cumulative points: 15
I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do for the Dakar Rally. I know it was one of the most prestigious races in the world (at least before it stopped going to Dakar, it was) but it does sort of seem to be its own little ecosystem where most of the top Dakar stars just race at Dakar and don’t even enter the other major World Rally Championship events. Like for all his Dakar Rally wins, would anyone say Stéphane Peterhansel is a driver on par with the top WRC legends? Even if it is the most prestigious rally race, for this list I prefer to go for the rally drivers who showed more versatility and the ability to win numerous different venues or win multiple rallies in a season rather than just winning the same rally over and over (I realize the Dakar Rally even in its golden years did not run exactly the same route, but still…) So I don’t think I’m going to list any of the one-time Dakar Rally winners unless they at least won something else (as most obviously Jacky Ickx did). Masuoka however won Dakar twice in 2002 and 2003 and ranks fifth all time with 25 stage wins. Even if I admit I kind of have a bias against this discipline because its drivers are more one-trick ponies in my mind than truly versatile (even at the level of the contemporary WRC stars), I think he had a bit too much success for me to ignore.
Fabio Sotto Mayor
1984: C-
1986: C+
1987: E-
1988: E
1989: C+
1990: C+
Cumulative points: 25
Mayor had a short but sweet run in Stock Car Brasil with a six-win championship season in 1988 and 15 wins overall from 1984-1990. He seems to be obscure even domestically because not only does he not have an English-language Wikipedia page, even his Portuguese page is a stub. Having said that, we all know at this point that I rate touring car drivers seemingly higher than anyone else does and Stock Car Brasil is certainly a bigger deal than the Argentine touring car series, so I think he deserves some props. Weirdly, he has a negative rating of -.047, which is why I left him out of lock status for quite some time, but when I actually looked closer at his career, I noticed that he beat twelve-time champion Ingo Hoffmann in points when they were teammates in 1987 (although Hoffmann won the head-to-head), swept his teammates in both 1988 and 1990 when he won the title and finished fifth in points while his teammates finished 26th and 29th respectively in those years. Okay, that’s enough for me, but doing a write-up on him is gonna take a hell of a lot of research.
Cameron McConville
1996: C+
1997: C+
1998: C+
1999: C-
2002: C-
2003: C-
2004: C+
2005: E-
2006: C+
Cumulative points: 23
The most underrated Supercars driver of all time, McConville really does seem to have been a championship-caliber talent who was wasted throughout his prime years because he was forced to drive one shitbox after another after another. McConville had a fast start where he won the Australian GT Production Car Championship in 1996 at the age of 22, where he beat among others four-time Australian Touring Car Champion Jim Richards and defending ATCC champion John Bowe for the title. He then moved on to the Australian Super Touring Championship, which was not quite as prestigious as the ATCC but it was at times kind of close. In that series, he won nine races in 1997 and 1998, but by the time he finally made the jump to Supercars, he never got even a decent car to drive for some reason. He continued to be a strong performer, particularly in 2004 when he only narrowly lost to Garth Tander in points and tied him in the head-to-head, three years before Tander’s dominant 15-win championship season; he also won that year when Tander did not. The next season, he had an astonishing 28-0 record against a cast of five rotating teammates and earned his only top ten Supercars points finish. In 2006, he kept it up by kind of blowing out 28-time winner and lock Greg Murphy, who had won four races a mere year prior. Because I admit there’s a major “what could have been” factor about this rather than what actually was, I don’t think I can make him a lock but I definitely want him. He was also on the first of two winning Bathurst 24 Hour teams before that race was eventually reduced to 12 hours.
Bill McGovern
1970: E
1971: E
1972: E
1973: C+
Cumulative points: 33
McGovern had a dominant run in the British Saloon Car Championship (now British Touring Car Championship) where he won three straight titles and 28 class wins from 1970-1972. At a time when his namesake was failing at presidential politics, McGovern peaked in 1972 with an undefeated season winning all ten races in class. As I’ve remarked earlier, the BSCC in this period was very weird because the title went to whoever dominated their class the most, so if a driver like McGovern picked an extremely uncompetitive class and dominated, they could repeatedly beat superior drivers that competed in other classes with weaker competition. That is my reservation on him and why I left him off my lock list at first, because I do think Frank Gardner and Brian Muir, the two drivers who were splitting most of the overall wins in that era, were better but they kept losing the titles because they were splitting the overall class wins while he was uncontested. But those were the rules of the game at the time and I do think the titles were regarded highly in those circles even though I don’t think anyone would posit McGovern as the greatest series driver ever. I think I have to make him a lock. He did finally earn one overall win in 1973.
Graham McRae
1971: E-
1972: E
1973: C+
1978: C-
Cumulative points: 19
One of the top drivers of the Formula 5000 era, the Kiwi won three consecutive Tasman Series titles from 1971-1973, but admittedly that series was no longer anywhere near as prestigious in those years after the F1 championship contenders stopped competing there (although admittedly he did beat Chris Amon for the 1971 title, who actually only finished fifth). McRae also crossed over to win in the American and European F5000 series as well, winning the American F5000 title also in 1972 and winning 9 European F5000 races from 1971-73. In 1973, he also crossed over to the Indy 500, where he won Rookie of the Year over Bobby Allison in a race where neither of them finished. He later added a 1978 Australian Drivers’ Championship and across the Tasman Series and Australian Drivers’ Championship, he collected three Australian Grand Prix wins in 1972, 1973, and 1978, but obviously those races didn’t have F1 competition. Still, that’s a lot of precious metal he collected. Although he had a short run, I think he did enough against strong enough competition where I think I should list him, even if his rating in my open wheel model is actually pretty abysmal.
Jimmy McRae
1980: C
1981: C+
1982: C
1983: C-
1984: C
1985: C-
1987: C
1988: C+
Cumulative points: 16
The second regionally legendary rallying father of a WRC champion in this section alone, I don’t think Colin’s dad was as good as Tommi Mäkinen’s simply because I don’t think the British Rally scene of the ‘80s was as strong as the Finnish Rally scene of the ‘60s and the ‘70s since Finland has overall spawned a lot more great rally drivers than the UK has. I still have tentatively decided to list McRae for his five British Rally titles, two Irish Rally title, and three consecutive European Rally Championship top five points finishes. While he didn’t beat WRC stars as often as either Mäkinen or his son did, I would say he did beat the top-tier WRC stars often enough to put him just on the right side of this list.
Christopher Mies
2009: C-
2011: C-
2012: C+
2015: C
2016: C+
2017: C
2018: C+
2021: C
Cumulative points: 17
A driver I always confuse with Christopher Haase, a fellow German sports car driver of similar ability who was even Haase’s teammate a couple times (where they won the FIA GT3 title together in 2009), now that I’ve dug deeper into both, I would say Mies was a little better than Haase. They both have five titles, but I would say Mies’s are on average a little stronger as his Blancpain Endurance Series (now GT World Challenge European Endurance Cup) title in 2012 is probably more prestigious than anything Haase has done, and he also stepped out of his comfort zone by winning the Australian GT title in 2015 at a bunch of tracks where he hadn’t won before. He also has three 24 Hours of Nürburgring wins to Haase’s two, but they seem basically interchangeable to me. They probably both deserve to make the list, but neither deserve to be locks.
Andreas Mikkelsen
2011: C
2012: C-
2014: C-
2015: C
2016: C+
2017: C-
2019: C
2021: C+
Cumulative points: 15
Mikkelsen won three World Rally Championship races in 2015 and 2016 and also won five minor league rallying titles in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge in 2011 and 2012, the European Rally Championship in 2021, and the WRC-2 class championship in 2021 and 2023. I’m really on the fence since the competition for most of those titles wasn’t very good and his wins only came for the dominant Volkswagen team which won a string of successive titles with Sébastien Ogier. Mikkelsen never came close to beating Ogier, but he did beat his other teammate Jari-Matti Latvala in 2016 (even though Latvala usually beat him in earlier years). I think this one might come down to whether I ever end up completing my rally drivers’ model or not. That might be all I’d need to determine if he belongs on the list or not. Right now, I’m very unsure.
Rod Millen
1979: C-
1980: C-
1981: C+
1982: C-
1984: C-
1985: C-
1988: C-
1989: C
1994: C-
1996: C-
1997: C-
1998: C-
1999: C-
Cumulative points: 16
Millen was the closest thing the all-time greatest American rally racer John Buffum had to a rival in his heyday. The New Zealander won three New Zealand Rally Championships from 1975-77 before winning three SCCA Rally titels in 1981, 1988, and 1989 and the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship also in 1989. Afterward, he began to compete in desert truck racing, where he won three consecutive MTEG Grand National Sport Trucks championships from 1992-1994. In the last of those years, he won his first of five Pikes Peak Hill Climbs before he won that race four years in a row consecutively from 1996-1999. Since I decided to award a point for every Pikes Peak winner, that put Rod on the right side of the bubble even though most of what he did was very minor league. Nonetheless, I’m planning on listing Buffum too and even though Buffum had stopped competing regularly by the time of Millen’s last two titles, Millen wasn’tsuper far off with 29 SCCA Rally wins to Buffum’s 47 from 1979-1987.
Steve Millen
1989: C-
1990: C
1991: C+
1992: C
1993: C-
1994: E
1995: C-
Cumulative points: 20
Rod’s brother Steve was definitely better in my view. Although he too originally came up through that same American rally scene, he didn’t do much of anything there and became most noted as a sports car driver. Like his brother, he too won two MTEG Grand National Sports Trucks titles in 1986 and 1988 and I do think that versatility helps both of them. But he didn’t really take off until he became a regular IMSA winner. After a random straggling win in 1985, Millen won eight overall wins and ten IMSA class wins from 1989-1995 along with the GTS class titles in 1992 and 1994. Even more impressively, 11 of his IMSA wins were solo wins so he was obviously doing more of the work himself than some of his teammates. With co-drivers John Morton and Johnny O’Connell, he won three consecutive 12 Hours of Sebring class wins from 1993-1995, but his 1994 was easily the most impressive as he became the first driver ever to earn class wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, and 24 Hours of Le Mans in the same year in 1994 (I think only the Olivier Beretta/Dominique Dupuy/Karl Wendlinger team from 2000 has done this since). That one year and his versatility is enough for me even if portions of the rest of his career aren’t so hot.
Tommy Milner
2010: C
2011: C-
2012: C+
2013: C
2016: E-
2018: C-
2024: C-
Cumulative points: 15
I think Milner has arguably been the worst of the long-running Corvette Racing factory Chevy sports car drivers over the past 25 years. Although he did win the 2012 ALMS GT championship, the 2016 IMSA GTLM title, two Le Mans class wins, two 24 Hours of Daytona wins, and a 12 Hours of Sebring, his career has always felt rather wanting to me relative to nearly all the factory Corvette drivers, but that is admittedly a quite illustrious list (Oliver Gavin, Ron Fellows, Johnny O’Connell, Jan Magnussen, Antonio García, Nick Tandy, Jordan Taylor, etc…) Not being as good as those guys doesn’t make him necessarily undeserving, but this one might come down to judging his lap times against his teammates. I’ll be able to get those for a lot of more recent years, but maybe not for his better years early on. Like how I won’t make up my mind about Mikkelsen until after I complete a rally drivers’ model, I probably won’t make up my mind about Milner until I find more lap data.
Ferdinando Minoia
1907: 3
1926: C+
1927: E-
1928: C+
1931: E-
Cumulative points: 25
Minoia had a weird career as he won the 1907 Coppa Florio, one of the biggest Grand Prix races of its time in that era when there weren’t many of Grand Prix races, then he mostly disappeared for the next couple decades before reemerging in the 1920s where he won a Le Mans class win in 1926, an overall Mille Miglia win in 1997, and the first proto-F1 European Championship in 1931, but he didn’t win any races in that series and was surprisingly lacking in wins. Still, for his widely varied accomplishments over an extended period of time, I think he’s deserving.
Gerhard Mitter
1962: C-
1963: C-
1965: C
1966: E
1967: E
1968: C+
1969: C
Cumulative points: 29
Much like Umberto Maglioli, Mitter was a driver who only made a handful of starts in F1 races but proved his mettle by showing signs of dominance even against F1 stars in his sports car appearances. Mitter became the only driver to win three consecutive Euroepan Hill Climb Sports Car Championships in 1966-1968, but he is better known for his World Sportscar Championship performances, where he won six overall wins (including the 1969 Targa Florio) and ten class wins including the 1966 24 Hours of Daytona and three consecutive Sebring class wins from 1965-1967.
Ritomo Miyata
2020: C-
2022: C-
2023: 5
Cumulative points: 22
I overrated Miyata in a euphoric mood perhaps as some show of autistic solidarity when I ranked him third after he won the 2023 Super Formula and Super GT titles simultaneously, making him the first known autist to achieve some measure of motorsports greatness. However, now that he has proven himself to be an extremely mediocre Formula 2 driver and when considering he still had a below-average rating in my open wheel model even after 2023, I think I overrated him and I moved Johan Kristoffersson and Álex Palou up one spot each. Winning the Super GT and Super Formula titles simultaneously is not that rare. Even Pedro de la Rosa did that, and I wasn’t even thinking of considering him for this list. So maybe I’m just continuing to overrate Miyata for the autism thing. It’s possible I might push down his 2023 season to a regular E instead of a 5th-place season if I think he doesn’t belong on the list, which eventually I might.
Stefano Modena
1987: C+
1988: C-
1989: C
1990: E-
1991: E-
1994: E-
1996: C
1997: C-
1999: C-
Cumulative points: 25
100% of statistical modelists agree: Modena was a secretly great F1 driver. In my open wheel model, his rating of .270 sits right between Nigel Mansell and Nico Rosberg. F1metrics has him 56th, and a YouTuber who’s a lot more popular than I am ranked him fourth! While obviously, that last one’s ridiculous, the fact that so many different models converge on his secret greatness probably says something. Although he never had cars capable of winning and he often didn’t even have cars capable of points scoring, his qualifying numbers especially were pretty amazing as he beat Oscar Larrauri 10-2 in 1988, Martin Brundle 9-7 in 1989, swept David Brabham 14-0 in 1990, and beat Satoru Nakajima 15-1 in 1991. I have all four of those drivers as locks. If I based his rating just on qualifying instead of race results, he’d shoot up even higher to .314! Weirdly, he lost in qualifying to Mauricio Gugelmin in 1992, which I suppose is a major feather in his cap and makes a case for him. After Modena’s F1 career ended, he moved to touring cars and he did pretty well in my touring car model also with a rating of .169 that is almost exactly tied with three-time Supercars champion Mark Skaife. Even in touring cars, Modena kind of had dubious equipment with only five major touring car wins, but those all came in 1994 when he won 3 Italian Supertouring Championship wins and two DTM wins running both series part-time. Although he’s rather lacking in career wins, I genuinely don’t think it’s unreaonable to make him a lock.
Guy Moll
1932: C
1933: E-
1934: 3
Cumulative points: 23
Before Moll died in a crash at the age of 24, Enzo Ferrari took great interest in Moll and hired him earlier that year where he showed blinding speed and won two Grands Prix including the Monaco GP before his untimely death. Despite his short career, Ferrari rated him as one of the best drivers he’d ever seen and my ruling on him essentially came down to whether I think that season was good enough for a high top five placement. I ultimately decided that it was.
Franck Montagny
1998: C-
2001: C
2002: C-
2003: C
2008: C+
2009: C-
2010: C
2011: C
Cumulative points: 14
Everything about Montagny’s career was super weird. He had arguably one of the greatest European minor league careers in history, winning the Formula Renault Campus France championship in 1994, finishing second in French Formula 3 in 1998 (where he won 12 out of 22 races and blew out future star Sébastien Bourdais 16-1 and swept his other teammate Jonathan Cochet 16-0), then winning two titles in the Open by Nissan series (later World Series by Renault) in 2001 and 2003 and finishing second the year in between. In 2002, he beat Justin Wilson 9-6 and the next year he beat Heikki Kovalainen (who managed to beat both peak Sébastien Loeb and peak Michael Schumacher in the Race of Champons in 2004) 11-1. As a result of all that, he has an astonishingly high rating of .406 in my open wheel model that is only barely worse than that of Alberto Ascari and Fernando Alonso. He also finished second on his IndyCar debut in the 2008 CCWS finale at Long Beach as well as the debut Formula E race in 2014 before he failed a drug test and never raced again. But he busted out of F1 and never got a full-time IndyCar ride despite all the potential he showed, so I don’t know what to do with this. His main highlight I guess was his five overall American Le Mans wins (including three consecutive Petit Le Mans wins from 2009-2011) and two more in class, but it feels like he should’ve done a lot more than he did. I want to say no but I rationally think I should say yes. Really torn.
Tiago Monteiro
2004: C-
2010: C+
2011: C+
2014: C+
2015: C+
2016: C+
2017: C+
2019: C-
Cumulative points: 20
Monteiro is most famous for backing into a podium at the ill-fated 2005 U.S. Grand Prix, but I don’t really think either of his F1 seasons are worth rating. However, he reemerged as a touring car star, where he proved much better, winning 13 races in the World Touring Car Championship and its replacement World Touring Car Cup, although he never finished better than third in points and was usually outperformed by championship-caliber teammates. The big exception came in 2017 when he was leading the points when he had a near-fatal crash at Barcelona. He did return and heroically won two more races in 2019 and 2021, but was never quite the same afterward.
Adam Morgan
2013: C+
2014: C+
2015: C+
2016: C+
2017: C
2018: C+
2019: C
2020: C+
Cumulative points: 20
A British Touring Car Championship driver I feel I might be overrating, Morgan won 11 races from 2014-2022 but never finished better than seventh in the championship. However, that was because he was driving as an independent, underfunded owner-driver for much of that time, which would put him in the same category as drivers like James Hylton. Back when I was posting on the Racing Reference comment sections and working on my 2015 top 100 list (where I did list him), one of the posters back then (either Biscuits in a Red Bull or We Need More Onion) was really hyping him up and pushing for him and they did sell me on him from that point, but in retrospect I’m not so sure now that in recent years he did get a factory ride and got blown out by series champions Jake Hill and Colin Turkington. Still, I’m going to go to bat for him for now because he was the highest-finishing owner-driver in points every year from 2013-2017 and the highest-finishing driver on a single car team every year from 2013-2016.
Bob Morris
1974: C
1975: C
1976: C-
1978: C
1979: E-
1980: C-
1984: C-
Cumulative points: 14
Contrary to some of these other touring car drivers, I kind of find Morris wanting despite his Australian Touring Car Championship/proto-Supercars title in 1979, his minor league AMSCAR title also that year, and his Bathurst 1000 win in 1976. His nine career ATCC wins isn’t a lot and the competition was pretty terrible (Peter Brock was basically the only good driver he was seriously competing against in 1979 because even some of the other top competitors like Allan Moffat were no longer competing part-time). His Bathurst 1000 win is also disputed and his touring car rating of -.095 is quite bad. Right now, I think I want to say no but I might change my mind.
Michèle Mouton
1977: C
1978: C-
1979: C-
1981: C+
1982: E
1983: C-
1985: C-
1986: C-
Cumulative points: 20
The greatest female non-drag racer, Mouton won four World Rally Championship events in 1981 and 1982 and finished second in the championship in her three-win 1982 where she beat her teammate Hannu Mikkola in the championship the year before he turned the tables and won the title the following year (although admittedly, it looks like Mikkola was always faster and Mouton tended to only win rallies where he retired). However, she had a pretty eclectic career overall with a Le Mans class win in 1975, a Pikes Peak Hill Climb win in 1985, and a German Rally Championship title in 1986. Between her versatility and breaking new ground, I think I should.
Brian Muir
1965: C-
1966: C
1968: E
1970: C+
1971: E
1972: C+
1978: E-
Cumulative points: 34
A 2005 Motorsports Magazine article ranked him the 19th greatest touring car driver (or as they called him “tintop” driver of all time) and I can see why. While I don’t agree with a lot of that list (no, John Cleland and especially Gerry Marshall who I’m not even going to list are not better than Klaus Ludwig and Laurent Aïello - are you freaking kidding?) I’m willing to back them up on this one although I probably wouldn’t put him in my top 20. After finishing 3rd in his native Australian Touring Car Championship when it was a single-race championship in 1965, he switched to the British Saloon Car Championship in 1966 and became a star. In his second start, he won an overall BSCC race against that year’s F1 champion Jack Brabham and defending F1 champion/past BSCC champion Jim Clark. In both 1968 and 1971, he won the Class D championship and finished second in points with a season-high six overall wins, each time losing to drivers who competed in less competitive classes (Frank Gardner and the aforementioned McGovern respectively). Afterward, Gardner switched to Muir’s Class D to also compete for overall wins and he beat Muir significantly in 1972 and 1973, although both drivers lost to McGovern in 1972 before Gardner won his third and final title in 1973. While I would rank them Gardner > Muir > McGovern, I think they’re all pretty close and they should all be locks.
Fritz Müller
1976: C-
1977: C
1978: C
1981: C
Cumulative points: 7
I wasn’t expecting to say no on him because he was the first driver to win four 24 Hours of Nürburgrings in 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1981, and he was also the first driver to win three consecutively, but then I actually looked at those fields and saw that they were absolutely terrible with almost no name or international drivers at all (it was ominous that none of the winners from 1976-1981 have a Wikipedia page, and I’m not sure that’s even undeserved although Winfried Vogt obviously should since he’s the only one of them I’d call legitimately great). Just winning a prestigious race doesn’t mean a lot if the competition is lacking.
Herbert Müller
1963: C
1965: C
1966: C
1967: C-
1968: C
1973: C
1974: C
1975: C
1976: C-
1979: C-
1980: C-
Cumulative points: 18
However, this guy was a little more deserving as I was mulling through Müllers. His career peak probably came from 1974-1976 when he won three straight titles in the European Can-Am ripoff Interserie. While I rejected six-time Interserie champion Walter Lechner last time, Müller competed there when it had deeper fields and I would say he did a lot more outside of Interserie than Lechner did, with two European Hill Climb GT titles, two overall Targa Florio wins and 12 additional WSC class wins including a Le Mans clas win in 1979, and a second-place points finish in the proto-Interserie Nordic Challenge Cup in 1969, where he beat among others F1 winner Jo Bonnier, Chris Craft (who had 7 BSCC class wins that year), and Brian Redman (who had 5 WSC wins that year). It’s marginal, but I think he should.
Hermann Paul Müller
1938: C+
1939: 4
Cumulative points: 11
This Müller was the points leader in the 1939 proto-F1 European Championship before the season was canceled due to the onset of World War II. On that basis, I initially thought I should, but his open wheel career was honestly very brief because he was a motorcycle racer through 1936, only drove open wheel cars from 1937-1939, then returned to motorcycle racing after the war and I don’t consider motorcycle racing for my list. As an open wheel driver, he only won a single race as far as I can tell at the 1939 French GP, and he inherited the lead after the similarly-named and grossly superior Hermann Lang had an engine failure while leading. Is one race really enough, especially when he merely backed into the lead? I decided no. Even though I was originally going to list him, I dropped his 1939 to fourth and elevated Wilbur Shaw to third to keep him off the list.
Nico Müller
2016: C
2018: C
2019: E
2020: E
2024: E-
Cumulative points: 29
Nico is a driver who I believe was a near miss for my top 200 list every year on 2021-2023. I dunno, maybe I should’ve listed him some of those years. It was a close call every time. Thanks to his Formula E performances, he has a pretty high open wheel rating of .156 even though he hasn’t actually won there yet and probably never will now that he’s left the series. His touring car rating of .027 is surprisingly significantly worse, but that is where his true greatness is as he won 11 DTM races from 2016-2022 and earned back-to-back second-place points finishes while his teammate, lock Robin Frijns, won only 3 races to his 9. I know his sports car performances have also been held in high regard, but I kind of find him a little overrated. Not overrated enough to leave him off the list, mind you.