Auto racing as we know it began in 1895 with a trio of point-to-point races in Italy (Torino-Asti), France (Paris-Bordeaux), and the United States (Chicago), so 2020 marks the 125th anniversary of the beginning of motorsports. While I have been planning to do a ranking of the top 1000 racing drivers in history for quite some time and mentioned it several times in past articles here, I thought 2020 would be a good time to seriously start. Although I don't expect to complete this project for a few years, particularly since I just launched a Patreon for my book on the history of competitive typing in April. That will be my main focus for the remainder of the year, but I'd like to devote some time to this project as well. Regardless of when I actually finish this (if I finish it), I think it makes sense to include only races from 1895-2020 for the symmetry of 1000 drivers over 125 years or 8 drivers a year. Technically, some might argue the Paris-Rouen contest of 1894 was a race as well even though it was officially billed as a "contest", although Paris-Bordeaux is probably most frequently cited as the first race.
I will begin the process of ranking by creating a master list of drivers that have achieved a certain level of prominence in an individual motorsports series or even multiple series. Drivers will be split into groups of Locks (who are going to be included on the list 100% without question), Near Locks (drivers I intend to list but could potentially change my mind on), Bubble (drivers that I think I could make solid cases both for and against), and Fringe (drivers who had some merit but not in my opinion enough to rise to a level of serious consideration for the list.) Think of Locks as the "great" tier, Near Locks as the "very good" tier, Bubble as the "good" tier, and Fringe as the "passable/decent" tier, although I will probably include some drivers who don't even rise to that level since I will probably be including all or mostly all the winners in major league racing series on the master list. Drivers will be selected from all disciplines of racing including open wheel racing, rallying, sports car racing, touring car racing, stock car racing, sprint car racing, rallycross racing, drag racing, and so on. The exception will be motorcycle racing. I won't be including any motorcycle racers unless they became accomplished in an auto racing series (as John Surtees and Jimmie Johnson eventually did) because motorcyclists are designated as riders instead of drivers. Some people may find this pedantic and argue that MotoGP has more in common with major league auto racing than some other disciplines I will be including, but I think it is a sensible place to draw the line. Seasons for each driver will be evaluated according to their consistency, dominance, passing ability (where relevant - obviously this wouldn't apply to rallying for example), versatility, comparisons with teammates and other drivers in similar equipment, level of competition, and clutch performance among other things.
For each year in which a driver competed, I provide a grade considering all these aforementioned facets of performance. I award an Elite grade (E) to drivers who were among the greatest drivers in the world in that year, an Elite Minus (E-) to drivers who had great seasons where something was notably lacking, a Competitive Plus (C+) to drivers who had very good but not great seasons, a Competitive (C) to drivers who had run-of-the-mill good seasons that weren't particularly great, and a Competitive Minus (C-) to drivers who had barely good seasons with some level of minor distinction but also, as Robert Christgau would put it, "flirt[ed] with the humdrum or the half-assed." For drivers who had no such distinctions whatsoever, which to be fair is the vast majority of drivers in the world, I award a Marginal (M) grade. For the top-tier elite drivers in a given year, I will also rank the global top five drivers in a given calendar year separately from the other E drivers, because I think there are usually sizable gaps between the very top drivers that don't exist to that degree amongst the regular elite or lower drivers. For each season, I award points based on each driver's grade. The #1 driver in a year will score 100 points, followed by 70, 50, 30, and 20 points for the 2nd-5th place drivers. All remaining E drivers will score 10 points, with E- drivers scoring 5, C+ drivers scoring 3, C drivers scoring 2, and C- drivers scoring 1. Marginal drivers score 0 points.
For recent seasons, I am thinking there should be about 25 E drivers globally including the top five who will be distinguished, 25 E- drivers, and 50 drivers at the C+, C, and C- levels. Having said that, I am not going to force myself to these specific limits for a variety of reasons. The number of racing series has wildly fluctuated over the years and there are many more racing series from the '70s onward than there were in the past. When there are more drivers out there, it stands to reason that there will also be more drivers at each level of competition, so one should figure recent decades will be better represented than say, the 1920s. Additionally, competition itself varies substantially over time. In times of economic prosperity, depth of competition is usually stronger than during recession or war years as in the latter there are usually fewer series active and there is less money in the sport generally resulting in more pay buyers/ride-buyers and less room for great drivers to shine. It seems like no coincidence to me that the deepest year in NASCAR Cup history (2002) and the deepest year in IndyCar history (the 2001 CART season) came in the same time period, because the sponsorship deals were clearly inked during the turn-of-the-century boom economy. It stands to reason that back then both Cup and IndyCar were producing more competitive drivers than they are today. So some exceptionally deep seasons may have more than 50 elite drivers while others, especially those prior to World War II, will have fewer.
By summing all the points across a driver's career, I can come up with an approximate measure for career value, which I will use to select the 1000 drivers. However, just ranking drivers by competitive or elite seasons alone does not really take every important aspect of a career into account. Once I have decided upon the 1000 drivers, I will then assess them across ten different categories and award 10 points for the 100 best drivers in that category, followed by 9 for the 101st-200th best drivers, and so on down to 1 point for the worst 100 drivers in that category. This mean that drivers will score between 10 and 100 points across the ten categories. Since there are only 91 possible scores here, there will of course be hundreds of ties. I will break these ties by career points using the above formula. If there are still ties after that, I will make personal judgment calls. The ten categories I will be evaluating drivers on are as follows.
While I think many racing series (especially Supercars, NASCAR and other stock car and/or touring car series) rate this too highly, the drivers who come closest to finishing well on a repeated basis should be rewarded. I do think top positions should be rewarded more when determining this so taking an average that weights top positions more like a harmonic mean might be preferable to the standard arithmetic mean you normally see. Consistency matters both for an entire career and on a season-to-season level so drivers who seemingly alternate between good and bad seasons or who have long stretches of mediocrity between two eras of relevance (like Johnny Rutherford, Dario Franchitti, and Terry Labonte) will be marked down here relative to drivers who maintain the same level of performance consistency from season-to-season (like to name three of their contemporaries respectively: Gordon Johncock, Scott Dixon, and Dale Earnhardt.) If there are situations like injuries or car downgrades that lead to a decline in results, I will adjust for that rather than criticizing drivers for something beyond their control (my season grades will be based on what I feel the quality of the season was taking the equipment into account, not just the raw data. However, if there are random jagged jumps between seasons with no such mitigating factors, I believe that is worthy of criticism. Two of the key factors I will be looking at here are having as few marginal seasons as possible in one's prime (the most consistent drivers should at least have a C- or above rating in every year of their prime) and a low crash DNF percentage. Obviously mechanical breakdowns have not remained consistent over time so I don't believe drivers should necessarily be judged for them. F1metrics argued that in the past several decades, Alain Prost was the only driver who maybe was responsible for his own reliability. As a result of this analysis, I will largely be putting down mechanical breakdowns as bad luck rather than poor skill, though I know many disagree. However, crash avoidance is something that generally speaking the driver does have control over and is more comparable over time. I know many crashes themselves result from mechanical breakdowns or unavoidable pileups (such as start crashes, street course track blocking incidents, or restrictor plate big ones) but I probably won't be going into that level of detail. Regardless, the drivers that avoid crashes will tend to be consistent so I see that (and crash DNF percentage particularly) as an important determinant here as well.
This refers to dominance at the career level more than on the level of an individual season. Championships for instance will primarily be considered in a later category where I assess clutch performance and I won't be considering them much here. This category instead measures career stats at the race-by-race level. How much did drivers win? How much did they lead? Here I will consider many of the statistics I have invented such as cumulative races led (CRL) and lead shares. However, some of these numbers do vary by era especially based on the number of races in a given era and the strength of competition, both of which often wildly fluctuated. What matters perhaps more to me than the raw numbers is how much a driver dominated an era. Drivers who won more races than any of their contemporaries within the races they started will rate more highly here than drivers who were career compilers but were rarely if ever considered the top driver. Adrián Fernández, who won 11 IndyCar races in an era when the average season length was 18 races should not be ranked over Louis Meyer, the first three-time Indy 500 winner, who won 8 IndyCar races in an era when the average season length was around 6 races. Meyer was obviously a much more dominant figure in his era than Fernández even though the latter won more races. Calculating each driver's rank vs. contemporaries (RVC) as I did in my top 100 IndyCar drivers ranking is a good way to directly compare driver impacts in eras that had substantially different numbers of races, although I may slightly modify this by only ranking wins during each driver's competitive periods so as not to penalize drivers for sticking around too long. I will also somewhat consider intangible factors when measuring this such as who the drivers themselves particularly rated highest or who they feared the most, although this would certainly play a relatively minor role compared to more measurable data. For recent years, I will also consider average speed data since that has become available via the Internet. For instance, to attempt to distinguish between sports car drivers on the same team, I will look at which drivers had a higher average speed. In eras before such data were available, I will look at which drivers were more likely to have fastest laps, since that is often the best measure we have for speed in multi-driver team racing in the 20th century.
Here I consider many of the passing statistics I invented earlier on this site. Who made an on-track pass for the lead in the most races? Who had the largest difference between passes for and passes against? Who had the best lead change percentage? Who led these statistics over a given season or era? Who tended to be most effective at making passes for the win? Everybody else tends to give this category short shrift but I think it is vital. Repeatedly making on-track passes for the lead is one of the best predictors for eventually winning in the same sense that repeatedly making first downs is one of the best predictors for scoring and therefore eventually winning in football. As with consistency (but not dominance), I will consider this on the season level as well as the career level because these can tell you different things. The best example of this is Mark Martin, who has a negative lead change percentage because he was too passive at the beginning and end of his prime but had the best lead change percentage three different years in his heyday (1992, 1995, and 1998.) Drivers like Martin will be rated highly in this category if they scored highly in lead change percentage often even if their career-level lead change percentage wasn't that impressive. While I believe this category is essential, it will also no doubt be the hardest to find information on because lap data can be sparse for many series and video footage or race recaps to determine whether passes are natural or not can be even harder to find. I've done a good job of this for the last 40 years of NASCAR and substantially longer for F1 and IndyCar (even though I haven't released the complete fruits of those analyses yet.) Additionally, there are some forms of racing such as drag racing and rally racing that do not have on-track "passing" so I would have to come up with some way to measure something similar for these series. I think for rally racing, I may base this on lead changes between stages. Despite the fact that this will likely be the most difficult category to assess, I definitely think it is an important one.
This reflects how well drivers can adapt to all different kinds of cars. Adapting does not just mean competing in a bunch of different forms of racing but succeeding in them. The best drivers in this category cross racingt series and win. However, I recognize that most great drivers primarily specialize in only one series, particularly lately, so what I'm looking for from those drivers is the ability to adapt to a variety of packages or rules configurations within the same series. For instance, open wheel drivers who win with multiple different chassis or engines will be rated higher than those that only win with one combination (especially only with one dominant combination). Some weight will be given to the first driver to win using a certain chassis or engine manufacturer. For a sports car driver, winning points races and/or championships in multiple different classes or series would help you here. For a NASCAR driver, winning races and/or championships in multiple generations of cars will be key. Drivers who by contrast won only for a short period of time for the same team, chassis, and/or engine manufacturer in an era when there weren't too many significant changes to the cars will be significantly penalized here.
Is the driver perceived as a specialist at any kind of race track or a threat to win regardless of the type of circuit? Drivers who win on all kinds of tracks at a relatively even rate, such as F1 drivers who win on almost every circuit on the schedule or IndyCar drivers equally likely to win on ovals and road courses will do well here, while drivers who are considered specialists on one particular type of circuit won't. Drivers who make unusual crossovers such as dirt track drivers who became strong road racers (like Tony Stewart) or drag racers (like Doug Kalitta) will do well here. Basically this category reflects how willing a driver was to step outside their comfort zone. Drivers in series where most race circuits are largely the same with mostly subtle variations probably won't do as well here.
Not all series have the same level of competition, nor do eras within the same series. Formula One obviously has a stronger field than the World of Outlaws at any given time, so while Michael Schumacher and Steve Kinser may both get perfect tens for dominance, the difference will be felt here. However, in all series, certain eras are more competitive than others. Formula One's competition peak was generally from about 1972-1983, so F1 drivers who peaked in this period will probably be a sizable proportion of the drivers who score a perfect 10 here. At F1's absolute competition peak in 1978 there were about 20 career race winners entered in every race, which is astounding if you're only familiar with F1 from the '90s onward when there were usually only around 6 competitive cars and often fewer. Similarly NASCAR's competition peak was around 2000-2011 and IndyCar's was either the late '60s/early '70s or the late '90s/early 2000s CART seasons (I would say the late '60s had the deepest Indy 500s, but the early 2000s had the best full-time competition.) Drivers who peaked in these time periods will be rewarded in this category relative to drivers in the same series who obtained the same statistics in weaker periods. However, drivers do not automatically receive points for competing in strong periods unless they are actually competitive in them. For instance, Graham Hill remained in F1 deep into the '70s competition boom but was considered washed up at the time. Drivers like that will be judged by the period in which they were actually relevant.
This reflects the input drivers made relative to the equipment they were given to drive. Drivers who scored the first wins for a given team, the first wins for a team after a long winless drought, the best seasons for a long-running or extremely successful team, and/or consistently dominated their teammates over a long period will do well in this category. If a team never won after a key driver left or suddenly improved when a driver arrived, that will help you in this category as well. The prototypical driver for this is Lewis Hamilton. He arrived at McLaren in 2007 after they had gone winless and led the championship for most of his rookie season, managing to tie the two-time defending champion Fernando Alonso in points. After Hamilton left, McLaren never won again despite having World Champions like Alonso and Jenson Button in the cars in subsequent years. Hamilton joined a Mercedes team that had only won one race before his arrival and then started routinely winning championships with them. This may be the greatest impact on teams of all time, but it's far from the only example. Many other drivers are known for elevating their teams to such a degree that teams instantly improve when they arrive and falter when they leave (Kevin Harvick is another good contemporary example.) These drivers would do well. However, the flip side of this is a driver like Ricky Rudd. While he was consistently successful for strong teams, most of his teams did better with other drivers, and despite never winning a championship or even coming close, he was replaced by three different drivers at three different teams who won championships within three years after he left (Bobby Allison at DiGard, Dale Earnhardt at Childress, and Terry Labonte at Hendrick.) This is not to mention that he barely outperformed 4-time winner Ken Schrader at Hendrick and got outperformed fairly badly by Dale Jarrett at Yates. Basically, this category reflects whether other contemporary drivers could have done the same thing in that driver's place - whether a driver was easily "replaceable" or not. In Hamilton's case, no. In Rudd's case, probably.
This is where championships come into play. This category reflects both a driver's ability to come on strong at the end of a race and come on strong at the end of a season. Clutch race performance is generally measured by how many wins a driver has relative to the amount they "should" have based on how much they lead. Drivers with more wins and especially more TNL than cumulative races led are examples of drivers who win more than they would be expected to. However, I definitely want to use wins and TNL here to differentiate between drivers who luck into the lead a lot and those who genuinely are much stronger at the end of a race, which is what I want to capture here. Other metrics that will be considered here are the difference between CRL and CRL counting only the last 10% of a race, and the difference between TNL lead change percentage and overall lead change percentage. Drivers who lead much more often in the final portion of a race and/or make passes for the lead much more often at the end of a race than they do earlier in a race are the best examples of clutch performers. On the season level, one can take the number of races each driver led the points standings and divide it by the number of races in the season to do an equivalent of CRL on the season level. Alan Kulwicki would therefore be extremely clutch in 1992 because he led the points standings for only one week, while Juan Pablo Montoya would be extremely unclutch in 2015 because he led the points after every race except the final one. Drivers will be somewhat rewarded more if they regularly won close battles for the championship rather than cruising to it or clinching early, although drivers who do the latter will certainly be rated highly here as well.
This is simply straightforward: the number of E or E- seasons per driver. If there are ties, which there probably will be, I will rank by accumulated points.
Ditto, except this also includes C+, C, and C- seasons in addition to E and E- seasons. These two measures can result in radically different perspectives, as extremely dominant drivers with short careers like Bill Vukovich will probably place highly in the former category but not in this one, while there are other drivers like Terry Labonte or Eddie Cheever who might never have obtained elite status but were competitive for their equipment almost every season for well over a decade who might clean up here. I imagine these two statistics will be more different than you might expect.
When considered together, these ten categories summarize most of what I feel is essential in the evaluation of a driver's career. Most of these statistics wil obviously be correlated with each other. The longer a driver's competitive career, the more chances that driver will generally get to win on a wide variety of tracks and to win in a wide variety of types of cars. Great passers will usually be clutch perforers. Even consistency and dominance, which are considered polar opposites by some, are generally correlated. Hence the top drivers will generally do well in everything, and the drivers who barely make the list will not, but that is likely as it should be.
For each driver who makes the list, I will provide a short synopsis of their career analysis along with selecting the best season and best race for that driver in their career. For example, if I was doing Dale Earnhardt, it might look something like this:
| 1979 | C+ | 3 |
| 1980 | E | 10 |
| 1981 | C | 2 |
| 1982 | C+ | 3 |
| 1983 | C+ | 3 |
| 1984 | C+ | 3 |
| 1985 | C+ | 3 |
| 1986 | E | 10 |
| 1987 | E | 10 |
| 1988 | E | 10 |
| 1989 | E | 10 |
| 1990 | E | 10 |
| 1991 | E | 10 |
| 1992 | C | 3 |
| 1993 | E | 10 |
| 1994 | E | 10 |
| 1995 | E | 10 |
| 1996 | C+ | 3 |
| 1997 | C | 2 |
| 1998 | C | 2 |
| 1999 | C+ | 3 |
| 2000 | C+ | 3 |
| 2001 | C | 2 |
| Career value | 135 |
For the most part, Earnhardt's season grades should be pretty cut and dry and I don't think many of them (especially from 1984 to his death) are even really debatable. I don't think Earnhardt did anything of particular significance to warrant any kind of competitive grade in his pre-Winston Cup years, so I will start in 1979. For each driver, I will only be listing what I will call their competitive period, starting with their first competitive season and ending with their last, so for Earnhardt's contemporary Darrell Waltrip, I would stop at 1995 and just ignore everything after that (I would put his 1993-1995 seasons at C- but definitely he was never competitive after that.) For some of Earnhardt's other contemporaries like Harry Gant and Terry Labonte who have periods of marginal seasons in between, the marginal seasons will be listed if they fall between a driver's first and last competitive seasons, like Gant's late '80s or Labonte's early '90s. However, as with Waltrip, I won't include the long tails where they were no longer competitive (Gant's 1994 would not count and I have not decided whether I think Labonte's final competitive season should be 1999 or 2003, but if I do count the latter, it will definitely only be C-.) Many would argue I should leave 2001 out but I'm not going to do that. There are eras when top drivers sometimes only competed in a single race per year, such as the Indy 500 or the 24 Hours of Le Mans so I want to include every driver I judge to be competitive only if they competed in a single race, and Earnhardt was still competitive at the time of his death (he also made his 24 Hours of Daytona appearance, which probably gives this some weight as well.) I also want to do this (i.e. speculate what the season might have been if the driver lived) in case there are drivers who died in mid-season who I think deserve inclusion (this won't matter in Earnhardt's case, but it might matter in Alan Kulwicki's.) It's quite possible that a couple of Earnhardt's seasons (basically only 1987 and 1990) I might judge to be top five globally and they could end up being worth more than 10 points for him, but 135 points is not a bad place to start and would easily make him a lock for the list.
However, I will reward grades above marginal for minor league drivers when it feels applicable to me. It would not feel appropriate in Earnhardt's case but an excellent example would be Martin Truex, Jr.'s 2005 where he beat three different drivers: Clint Bowyer, Carl Edwards, and Denny Hamlin, who all went on to second place points finishes, not to mention that Edwards finished 3rd in points in CUP the same year and Hamlin did so the following year. Truex also won an IROC race and won the inaugural Mexico City Busch road course race, which at the time was a big deal but is now forgotten. Most observers expected a Cup veteran like Rusty Wallace or a road course winner like Adrián Fernández to win that and Truex's win was an upset and a big deal (although not as much of an upset now as he is rapidly rising up the list as one of NASCAR's all-time greatest road racers.) Truex's 2005 would probably be a C+ to me and it's better than a lot of his earlier Cup seasons. However, since minor leagues are generally viewed as developmental divisions I will tend to evaluate these seasons differently based on context. A driver who achieves a major accomplishment in a minor league series at a much younger age or especially as a rookie would be rated higher than an established veteran who does the same thing, so I'll be giving Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Martin Truex, Jr. a lot more credit for their 1998-99 and 2004-05 than I will Jeff Green's 2000 since Junior and Truex were clearly "upwardly mobile" in a way Green was not (F1 scouts for years have always said the best drivers are the drivers who win minor leagues as soon and as young as possible, and I think the same applies to all other developmental leagues as well.) There are some instances where I'd even consider throwing an E grade out for minor league seasons or at least an E-. These would be and few far between, and would probably only occur every few years. However, if somebody wins multiple minor league championships the same year, like when Lando Norris won the Eurocup Formula Renault 2.0, the Formula Renault 2.0 NEC, and the Toyota Racing Series championships all in 2016, or when Mike Stefanik won both the modified and Busch North titles simultaneously, or when Dick Trickle won both the ASA and ARTGO titles in 1984-85, I might call those elite, but it would have to be on a big scale. Competing in multiple racing series and dominating them simultaneously is one example of this, but that will obviously happen extremely rarely. Generally, I'd give C+ to your average Formula 2 champion if they win the championship in their first season like George Russell did, or a C otherwise if it's a slower ascent like Pastor Maldonado, a C to your average Busch/Xfinity champion, and a C- to your average truck/Indy Lights champion, but I probably wouldn't even give an Indy Lights champion a C- unless they won the title in their rookie season to be honest. The other way I'll consider a really high grade for a minor league series is if you have an absurd level of dominance. Not many people do, but Daniel Cammish did (look at how ridiculous his winning percentages were until they finally leveled off when he made it into the big time of British domestic racing that is the BTCC.)
But I digress. Back to the Earnhardt example. Many people would agree with me on my selection for Earnhardt's best race, which I chose because he won and took the lead on track at Bristol despite losing his power steering. Fewer people will agree with my choice for best season but I definitely like his 1990 over his more heralded 1987 for quite a few reasons. The other Chevies were significantly slower in '90 than '87, Earnhardt had to battle for the championship rather than hving it handed to him on a silver platter, he caused fewer intentional wrecks, and he won the Cup title and IROC title in the same year becoming the only driver to ever do that. I do consider everything each driver did in all series in a given year, but major league drivers will be judged primarily by what they do in major league racing series. I think IROC can give a boost to a Cup driver but minor league stuff such as Xfinity or trucks, where Cup drivers so often compete (unlike almost all minor league racing series in the world?) Not really. I'd probably give Brad Keselowski a boost from M to C- for 2010 for his Nationwide title and his teammate Joey Logano a slight boost from the C- his Cup season deserves to C for 2012 for his 9 Nationwide wins, but I definitely wouldn't give drivers a large boost for feasting on people in minor league series, especially drivers who have already entered their prime which at that point Keselowski and Logano hadn't. I intend to select a best season and best race for each driver, and some of them will be unconventional (I like Will Power's 2011 over his 2014 title season, I like Dale Jarrett's 1997 over his 1999 title season, and I like Jeff Burton's 1998 Richmond race where he outdueled Jeff Gordon at the height of his powers much more than the Loudon race he led start-to-finish.) I mostly provided NASCAR and IndyCar examples in this article because I am better-informed about them and have done more research in those directions, but I intend to be just as serious for drivers in all other racing leagues, even those that I know less about at the moment.
It has taken me several years of fantasizing about this project before I could finally explain what I wanted to do and build a framework that I felt would produce a satisfactory metric. I can definitely see it taking several more years for me to finish all this but that is my ultimate goal as the culmination of my Racermetrics research. At the moment, my typing book remains the bigger focus now (the scheduled completion date for that project is December 15) but when I need a break from that I'll periodically work on this sometimes. I also realize there are columns I promised that I have not yet finished. I'll try to get to the Formula One teammate head to heads that I promised last year for my next column before the start of the current F1 season (whenever it ends up starting due to the coronavirus.) I also still have year-by-year leader statistics that I have largely completed but have not yet uploaded for the AAA, USAC, and CART eras of IndyCar racing back to 1930 as well as Formula One back to 1967, and obviously I'll need to finish writing that stuff up if for no other reason than to complete the research for this project in particular. As I earlier stated, this project will first require me to come up with a master list of any driver who I think could possibly make the list to assess and that alone may take months but I don't want to forget anybody: including obscurities like regional rally drivers, international domestic minor leaguers from the Porsche Carrera Cup (I already mentioned Cammish but I'm sure there's more where that came from), Le Mans class winners from the '30s, pre-NASCAR stock car drivers... I want to cover everyone! Like most of my projects, this is so ridiculous in its ambition that there's a chance I will never finish, but I think it's still worth a try. If you can come up with some drivers that I should consider who might fly under my radar, let me know in the comments section.
