Welcome to Sean Wrona's Substack
I am an auto racing archivist, historian, and statistical analyst, having launched race-database.com in 2007, which was at the time the third largest online auto racing statistical archive until I abandoned the project in 2015, and racermetrics.com, a spinoff site where I have invented a variety of advanced auto racing statistics and written eighty columns since 2015. I also write shorter NASCAR race previews and reviews for individual drivers every race weekend for the website RotoBaller. Currently I am doing preparatory research for my second book where I will rank the top 1,000 drivers in motorsports history.
My paid posts will primarily consist of historical capsules of 500 words or fewer summarizing the statistical history of individual drivers’ careers for drivers who I am certain will make my list. For each driver, I will list their birth and death dates, each driver’s best individual season and drive in my opinion, their ratings and head-to-head teammate comparisons for all drivers who are listed in either my open wheel model, stock car model, or touring car model, and a year-by-year evaluation of each driver’s career. For each driver, I will rate a season as 1-5 for drivers who I considered to be one of the top five drivers globally in that year, E for Elite drivers who I rate 6th-25th, E- for Elite Minus drivers who I rate 26th-50th, C+ for Competitive Plus drivers who I rate 51st-100th, C for Competitive drivers who I rate 101st-150th, and C- for Competitive Minus drivers who I rate 151st-200th in a given year. The #1 driver of the year will score 100 points with 70 for #2, 50 for #3, 30 for #4, 20 for #5, 10 for E, 5 for E-, 3 for C+, 2 for C, and 1 for C-. The 1,000 drivers who score the most cumulative points will be the drivers I select for the list, and then I will be re-ranking them via a different method.
For all years starting around 1947-1949 when NASCAR was formed and racing returned in Europe, I will use this rubric. However, for the pre-World War II seasons, there was simply much less racing out there so I will likely list fewer drivers in those years. In general, an E driver is a driver I consider to be great for that year, E- great but flawed, C+ very good, C good but not earth-shattering, and C- barely good. I will naturally skip years where I do not believe that driver was in the top 200 in that year and these ratings are far from set in stone and I will likely be tweaking them after I make the original posts. However, I expect the writing in my driver capsules will mostly stand.
I will not be going in any particular order but simply writing about whichever driver I feel like writing about on a given day; I will primarily be focusing on retired drivers but I’m going to wait a bit to write about drivers from rally racing because I still need to do more research there, although rally drivers will obviously be well-represnted on my list. I will be primarily focused on my paid posts for the time being, but I will try and make a free post every week or so as well.
For my founding members, I will be providing two major additional perks. When my book is released, I will provide all founding members a free signed copy as I did with my previous book on the history of competitive typing when I ran a Patreon for that book. Additionally, I have a massive master file including any driver who accomplished pretty much anything at a major league or top-tier minor league level in motorsports history and it is about 90% complete in my estimation. It is over 3.5 MB and includes over 21,000 drivers with a year-by-year list of their accomplishments. The file isn’t quite complete yet but I intend to finish it over the next few months and when I do so, I will send a copy to all founding members.
Simultaneously with my racing research, I was the most successful competitive typist of the 2010s, when I became the only typist in history to hold the all-time records on 10FastFingers, TypeRacer, and Nitro Type (then the three most famous competitive typing sites) simultaneously. I won a total of twenty typing championships from 2010 to 2022, most famously the Ultimate Typing Championship at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference. I also won the international Intersteno Internet Contest for fastest typing speed in one’s mother tongue language a record eight times, and I won the multilingual championship for fastest typing across an array of many languages three times; in 2011, I became the only typist in history to win both these contests in the same year. In 2021, I published my first book, Nerds per Minute: A History of Competitive Typing, which served as simultaneously a history of typing from the invention of the mechanical typewriter to the modern Internet age, a memoir of my experiences in the typing scene, and an instructional guide discussing my own typing strategies. I have been featured in or referenced by The New York Times, The New Yorker, FiveThirtyEight, the BBC, and Slate.
I maintain a YouTube channel with 6,000 subscribers and run periodic videos on a variety of topics, usually relating to typing although I have recently branched out by launching a personal series called The Maladroit Millennial. Despite my niche presence, I haven’t posted much of anything in the past couple of years, but I may do so again to help promote this Substack, which I intend to be my bigger focus. It’s possible that if I primarily attract interest from competitive typists (which is not unlikely), I may begin throwing in either posts on the history of typing and/or more personal posts at a certain point, but for the time being, auto racing analysis will be the focus.