Every Touring Car Driver Since 1958 Ranked

by Sean Wrona

Over the past six months, I have been working on probably the most intensive project of my life with the exception of my typing book. As you know, I have been calculating models ranking drivers across a wide range of motorsports disciplines and eras as preliminary research for my second book wherein I will rank the top 1,000 drivers in motorsports history. In each of these models, I count head-to-head records for each pair of teammates including only the races where both drivers. The models are designed so that an average driver has a rating of 0 while each driver's rating reflects the expected probability that the given driver will beat an average teammate minus 0.5. The vast majority of drivers in all my models will be situated between -0.5 and 0.5 representing an expected probability range of 0% to 100%. However, if a driver gets swept by a driver rated >= .5 or sweeps a driver rated <= -.5, I set the rating for those teammate comparisons to 0 because I do not want to penalize a driver for sweeping an awful driver or reward a driver for getting swept by a great one.

After completing my stock car model in 2021 and my complete open wheel model last year, I wanted to start work on a third model to rank touring car drivers throughout history. Most people when assembling a greatest drivers list (especially in the United States) would just formulate a list almost entirely consisting of some combination of Formula 1, NASCAR, and IndyCar drivers with maybe a few token rally and sports car drivers sprinkled in but I knew that neglects a sizable percentage of the motorsports landscape.

Touring car racing tends to be one of the most overlooked disciplines in motorsports as most touring car series tend to take place over a particular country or geographic region and don't often get broad exposure outside their home country. I've noticed that the drivers in these series are perennially underrated in most international driver rankings as they are generally considered second-rate relative to open wheel drivers. Never mind that a lot of star open wheel drivers spent considerable time in touring cars (usually after their open wheel careers ended) and were not necessarily great. For example, 1980 Formula One champion Alan Jones spent the second half of his career racing touring car in Australia and only managed a career record of 67-100 against his teammates, notably losing to Supercars champion Glenn Seton 39-13 and the more obscure Supercars driver Tony Longhurst 40-10. Keke Rosberg, an F1 champion two years later, spent three years in the German DTM series where he was decent but he was definitely significantly outperformed by three of his teammates: 1996 champion Manuel Reuter and five-time champions Klaus Ludwig and Bernd Schneider. The same goes for F1 stars like Jean Alesi (66-90), David Coulthard (8-14), Mika Häkkinen (22-49), and Ralf Schumacher (21-91) who all had losing records in their touring car careers, often against drivers who never had the opportunity to compete in open wheel races at the major league level. Some of the hottest open wheel prospects ended up spending their prime years in touring cars after they couldn't find F1 rides and they often did better than the ex-F1 stars. These included 2002 German F3 champion Gary Paffett, 2004 Formula 3 Euroseries champion Jamie Green (who scored more points that year than full-timers Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton combined), and future IndyCar driver Robert Wickens, who beat a stout field including Jean-Éric Vergne, Alexander Rossi, and Daniel Ricciardo en route to winning the Formula Renault 3.5 championship.

My other models were ambitious enough, but this was the most ambitious of the lot. People have obviously made models to rate Formula One and NASCAR drivers before although I'm not sure whether anyone else built a model to rate F1 drivers alongside drivers in other open wheel series before me. Constructing this was a challenge because I wanted to make sure to include all the drivers from the major league touring car series while also avoiding being too expansive in my driver selection. I thus first needed to determine which touring car series count as major leagues and what do not and what series and races count as touring car series and what do not. These were not easy calls to make.

Ultimately I decided to include all drivers who made at least one start in one of ten touring car disciplines. These were: the TCR World Tour (and any of its predecessors, the Touring Car World Cup, World Touring Car Championship, World Touring Car Cup, and TCR International Series), DTM (and both its predecessors DRM and DPM), the Supercars Championship (and its predecessor the Australian Touring Car Championship), the British Touring Car Championship, the Super Tourenwagen Cup, the Japanese Touring Car Championship, the European Touring Car Championship, ETCR (the eTouring Car World Cup), Stock Car Brasil (recently named Stock Car Pro), and Porsche Supercup.

I included drivers from these series only in seasons where either the entirety or nearly the entirety of the schedule consisted of races with one driver per car. There was a European Touring Car Championship that ran under various names from 1963-88, but most of that series's history consisted of multi-driver teams more like a sports car series. The same holds true for the inaugural World Touring Car Championship in 1987 (which was loosely related to the original ETCC) and the Japanese Touring Car Championship prior to 1994. However, one exception I made is that I did include all drivers who made at least one start in Australia's two big endurance races, the Bathurst 1000 and Sandown 500, even when they did not count towards the Australian Touring Car Championship (which they usually didn't until the series became V8 Supercars in 1999.) It is impossible to consider an Australian touring car driver's career without considering their performance in those races as they do make up a significant portion of drivers' legacies in a way not really comparable to any other race in another touring car series. I do count the races in the multi-driver series for each driver's record, but I did not automatically include drivers in my model if they competed in any of these series but did not compete in any of the single-driver series, because that would have added too many more drivers to the model and this was already big enough. So for example, in this year's Sandown 500, which was the last Supercars race, Broc Feeney and Jamie Whincup won in one of the three Triple Eight Engineering entries while Shane van Gisbergen and Richie Stanaway finished 3rd and Zane Goddard and Craig Lowndes finished 10th. In my model I counted it as a 4-0 record for Feeney/Whincup, a 2-2 record for van Gisbergen/Stanaway, and an 0-4 record for Goddard/Lowndes, and likewise for all other multi-driver races.

I wanted to avoid adding too many multi-driver races to the model so I had to draw a line between sports car and touring car races and that is a line that is very nebulous historically. Are classic races like the Spa 24 Hours, Nürburgring 24 Hours, and the RAC Tourist Trophy sports car or touring car races? All three of these races have been classified as both throughout their history and have been officially part of touring car season schedules. I think most people would classify endurance races such as these as sports car races because when people think of touring car racing, they think of single-driver races (with the exception of the Supercars endurance races.) The fairly arbitrary line I drew is that I decided to include these races in the model if they counted towards an official touring car championship and exclude them if they did not. Generally, if a race or series could be better classified as a sports car series than a touring car series (such as the World Sports Car Championship, World Endurance Championship, IMSA, and various national or international GT races) I did not include it.

The exceptions I made to that rule besides Bathurst and Sandown included the earlier years of the European Touring Car Championship, Japanese Touring Car Championship, and World Touring Car Championship when they had multiple-driver teams (I couldn't really avoid them since they were explicitly billed as touring car championships), the European Championship for GT cars (which was the only GT series that got full coverage on TouringCarRacing.net, where I got most of my data from) as well as the current seasons of DTM and Porsche Supercup and its subsidiary Porsche Carrera Cup series.

Most touring car fans will tell you that Porsche Supercup is not a touring car series because the type of car it uses is the Porsche 911 GT3, which is generally regarded as a sports car. Most sports car and touring car fans classify series based on the type of car raced while I am more interested in grouping the trends amongst drivers and the interconnections between series. Porsche Supercup is the parent series of a vast array of regional Porsche Carrera Cup series, the most famous being the German, British, and Australian series. But one thing I noticed was that numerous drivers went back and forth between these series. The Porsche Carrera Cup Great Britain is officially a support series for the BTCC, as the Porsche Carrera Cup Australia is for Supercars and the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany is for DTM. An absolute ton of drivers have crossed back and forth between their domestic series. For example, 1992 BTCC champion Tim Harvey eventually left the series and almost immediately afterward switched to the Porsche Carrera Cup Great Britain where he went on to win two championships. Dan Cammish was one of the most dominant minor league drivers in history in British Formula Ford and the Porsche Carrera Cup Great Britain before he went on to Porsche Supercup and then immediately after that he raced in the BTCC. When Cammish bizarrely was released from his ride three races into the 2021 season, he returned to Porsche Carrera Cup and won another championship. Lots of drivers went immediately back and forth between Porsche Supercup and DTM over the years, and five of the drivers currently racing in DTM: René Rast (who won both championships three times), current points leader Thomas Preining and Preining's teammate Dennis Olsen, and the fellow teammate pair Laurin Heinrich and Ayhancan Güven were all the highest-rated Porsche Supercup drivers in my model in various years. Three of the Sandown 500 co-drivers who finished in the top seven (David Russell, Dale Wood, and Alex Davison) are all regulars in the Porsche Carrera Cup Australia this year.

The bottom line to me is that if drivers go back and forth between all these series constantly like clockwork and all the Porsche Carrera Cup series are feeder series for their respective domestic touring car championships, then I think Porsche Supercup and all the Porsche Carrera Cup series should count towards this model, even if they are not "technically" touring car series. The same goes for DTM, which is now considered to be a GT series and no longer a touring car series even though "Tourenwagen" is still in the name. Four of the drivers who competed in DTM when it was officially a touring car series (René Rast, Sheldon van der Linde, Marco Wittmann, and Lucas Auer) are still there and it would seem weird for me to include some but not all their seasons just because the type of car changed. As I said, many of the newer DTM drivers came directly from Porsche Supercup anyway and if I think that should count then modern DTM should count too. Since they are single-driver series that do consist of many, many drivers who did compete in some other major league touring car series or likely will in the future, I think they should count. While most people think the major distinction between sports car series and touring car series is the type of car, I think the main distinction is between single-driver and multi-driver series. I probably would have ruled differently about DTM and Porsche Supercup if they became multi-driver series but if the goal here is to evaluate road racing drivers in full-body cars while focusing primarily on single-driver series because it's difficult to determine which driver is doing more of the work on a multi-driver team then I think I made the right decision to include these series, even though Porsche Supercup was admittedly exhausting to include since the multi-car teams there tend to be massive and there are more mid-season driver changes and one-offs there than any other series I can think of.

To determine which races to include for each driver, I used four main websites. TouringCarRacing.net had the best coverage for the earlier touring car series, but that archive stops in the year 1993 when most of the world's touring car series were suddenly rebranding as "supertouring" series. No problem. The Super Touring Register has better coverage for the '90s and 2000s races, while for most other races in that era and more recently I used Wikipedia. I did Google searches for each driver's name on TouringCarRacing.net to make sure I could identify all their races and I mainly used Super Touring Register to fill in the gaps for the races that neither TouringCarRacing.net nor Wikipedia had. I also used racing-reference.info for some of the Supercars data to confirm which drivers were actual teammates. For the record, I only included drivers as teammates if the team name was the same or at least the two cars shared a co-owner. Satellite operations which are common in BTCC and Supercars were not counted as teammates unless the Wikipedia links to each team name linked to the same page. TouringCarRacing.net was missing some team names particularly for the European Touring Car Championship and World Touring Car Championship from the '60s-'80s, so to fill in those gaps, I used RacingSportsCars.com, which did have better coverage for listing the car owners of ETCC and WTCC teams than TouringCarRacing did, but I did not collect data from any of the sports car series on that site that weren't officially billed as touring car championships.

As usual, I only included races where both drivers finished but that was not always clear. There were certain races on the TouringCarRacing.net pages that had notes listed in the "Reason out, remarks" column where it was unclear to me whether the driver finished or not so I had to make my own best guess in those scenarios. There were many races where drivers were listed without finishing positions because apparently the entry lists were known but the complete finishing results were not; I did not count any of those races towards the model. Many touring car series have had rounds that are split into heat races. If both races counted for championship points as part of a season schedule, then I counted both races. However, if only one race counted for points then I only counted that one. If the two heat races were combined into a single round and did not count for points as separate races, then I only counted the teammate comparison once and only if both drivers finished both heat races (so if driver A beat driver B in race 1 but then driver A DNFed in race 2 of a two-race round that only counted for composite points, I didn't count it.) I did count any independent races that did not count toward championship points towards any touring car championship on TouringCarRacing.net along with some non-points events on the BTCC, DTM, and Supercars schedule but I excluded races that were originally intended to count for championship points but ultimately did not because they were rain-shortened or otherwise canceled short of the distance they would have required to count for points. A lot of these decisions were fairly arbitrary but I think they were correct. Bizarrely, there was one DTM non-points race in Munich that had an elimination format so a bunch of drivers who didn't make the final eight ended up tying for 9th while those who didn't make the final sixteen tied for 17th. There were some teammates in there, so as a result there are a few 2010s DTM drivers with "half wins". Jack Sears and John Whitmore also had a more legitimate one in the 1965 Silverstone GP.

If two drivers technically drove for the same team but were listed in separate classes based on the type of car raced, I did not count them as teammates because they had substantially different cars. I usually checked this on TouringCarRacing by determining if the two cars had the same engine displacement because engine displacements are one of the categories of data that site does keep track of. If the engine displacements were at least close (within 20-25 cubic centimeters of each other or less), I counted the two cars as teammates but if there were large differences in engine displacement I did not. If one driver was listed as having traction control but the other didn't, I generally ignored it since it seems like drivers without traction control actually beat the drivers with traction control as often as not. However, if the drivers were placed into separate classes based on the caliber of drivers rather than the type of cars (as in series like some of the Porsche Carrera Cup series which have pro-am and amateur classes), I did count them as teammates since the drivers differed more than the cars in those cases.

While I tended to be exclusive when it came to races that could be better classified as sports car races (with the exception of modern DTM and Porsche Supercup), I tended to be extremely inclusive with regard to what type of series I included among single-driver series. Essentially any single-driver series where drivers raced on road courses in any kind of performance, production, saloon, and/or touring car was fair game for my model if I could find the data on Wikipedia. I did not only use the English language version, as I obtained almost all my data about the Argentinean touring car series from Spanish Wikipedia (although there were a lot of seasons where the Turismo Carretera and Top Race series did not have complete results data), a lot of my Stock Car Brasil data from Portuguese Wikipedia (I was unable to find the results from the 2000-2002 races anywhere but I was able to find the results from all other seasons going back to 1979), and some of my DTM and Porsche Carrera Cup data from German Wikipedia. I was unable to find the results from the 1993-1999 Porsche Supercup seasons anywhere and I was also unable to find the results from a lot of the individual Porsche Carrera Cup series, but I did a very thorough job otherwise. I included over a hundred different series here, including some quirky ones like European and Brazilian truck racing championships (did you know that after Felipe Giaffone's too-brief IndyCar career ended that he became a legend of Brazilian truck racing? I did not until now...) I also included a couple electric car championships like the Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy, a few other GT Series like the ADAC GT Cup (which only existed for one year in 1993), ADAC Supercup in the '80s (which was loosely affiliated with the World Sportscar Championship; it ran some shared races and used the same cars, but was largely independent), along with pretty much every minor league or feeder series for the major league championships. I also included the BMW M1 Procar championship which only ran for two years in 1979 and 1980 but featured many of the top F1 drivers of the day racing against sports car and touring car stars from other series.

Pretty much any series was fair game for me as long as it was road courses only (or almost entirely road courses - I think Stock Car Brasil had a few ovals in some seasons) and single-driver cars. However, drivers had to be split into separate teams. I did find some series with eligible drivers that did not appear to be driving for separate teams; I didn't include those. However, any series that was listed with drivers driving for separate teams was included. I admit in some of these series like Porsche Supercup and the Porsche Carrera Cup series that all drivers drove the same identically-prepared cars so I'm not sure how much effect the teams had in terms of differentiating the equipment. I assumed that if drivers were driving for separate teams that the team personnel did contribute to the speed of the cars. After all, I remember how all IndyCar teams from 2006-11 used the same Dallara chassis and Honda engines and all the equipment was the same but the quality of the team did play a role so I figured the same would play a role here even though I still don't know enough about Porsche Supercup.

I wanted to do this model for a variety of reasons. Besides feeling I needed to do so in order to create a more accurate analysis of racing drivers, there were several specific motivating factors here. One of them is that many (perhaps even most) of the greatest drivers in sports car history (particularly in the last 50 years) drove major league touring cars at some point in their careers, especially Porsche Supercup, which has really had a roll call of eventually-great sports car drivers passing through it including (are you ready?) René Rast, Kévin Estre, Richard Westbrook, Wolf Henzler, Earl Bamber, Jörg Bergmeister, Nicki Thiim, Richard Lietz, Michael Ammermüller, Mathieu Jaminet, and Matt Campbell. That largely sums up an entire era of (especially European GT) sports car racing, doesn't it? Most of the big Le Mans stars of the '80s, '90s, and 2000s like Klaus Ludwig, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Tom Kristensen, Frank Biela, Emanuele Pirro, Rinaldo Capello, Allan McNish, and so on were full-time touring car drivers, so the number of great sports car drivers who are not covered by either my open wheel or my touring car model is actually relatively small, and it's mostly just the American drivers. I am effectively also using this as a model to help me rank sports car drivers against each other so I can determine how much of a role each driver played on some of those legendary sports car teams, and I think this will be very effective in doing that.

Another reason I decided to build this model and made it so expansive was the recent success of Supercars drivers internationally, which seems to be leading to a gold rush in touring car drivers being sought out for other series. This arguably started with Scott McLaughlin's successful switch to IndyCar. While he didn't win the title this year like I thought he would, he still does seem to be very close to overtaking Josef Newgarden as the top driver at Team Penske. While I was working on the model, it was announced that two-time defending Supercars champion Shane van Gisbergen, who won both of the chapionships after McLaughlin left, would be starting the inaugural Cup race on the Chicago street course. My highly ambitious goal was to finish this model in advance of that race because it would have been a very timely article, but I didn't come close to doing that. When he became the first driver to win on his Cup Series debut in 60 years, that seems to be leading to even more interest in touring car drivers. Former DTM champion Mike Rockenfeller is making more and more NASCAR starts. Supercars points leader Brodie Kostecki is being sought out for a potential NASCAR move. But I think if there is one driver that really set me on the path to doing this, it was Agustín Canapino.

When Agustín Canapino's IndyCar hiring was announced, he was lambasted throughout American media as an unqualified ride-buying hack who had no business getting an IndyCar ride considering he had almost no open wheel experience even though he was a legend in his home country while nobody seemed to be criticizing the other rookies Marcus Armstrong, Sting Ray Robb, and Benjamin Pedersen, who were all mediocre and uninspiring open wheel ladder drivers. In the wake of Scott McLaughlin's success, I thought Canapino was an interesting idea and as I did more research into him, I was gobsmacked by his record. One of only four drivers to win all three of the major Argentinean touring car championships (TC2000, Turismo Carretera, and Top Race.) Five Top Race titles in a row and six overall. Four Turismo Carretera titles including three in a row. 87 wins overall in those three series in a rather short period from 2008-2022. Yet I saw people who should know better like Marshall Pruett immediately dismissing this by arguing those series were irrelevant even though I knew upon doing research that José María López came directly from those series to winning three consecutive World Touring Car Championships, where he actually faced less competition than he did in Argentina, and Canapino usually even beat López there. Another TC2000 champion Néstor Girolami has been winning lots of international touring car races too. I think Americans felt that entire scene was dismissible because nobody writes about it in English and I wanted to do my own research to see how good he really was. The funny thing is that most of the American insiders had so few expectations for him that the fact that he achieved even as much as he did led Pruett (who had criticized him before) to later call him "the greatest story of the year." I on the other hand had a lot higher expectations and as a result I was disappointed as he seemed a lot more mediocre than I was expecting (and yes, I know how slow the cars are.) I was so annoyed by all the backlash he was getting initially that I started this year wanting to root for him, but all that good will was squandered in my opinion when some of his more vociferous fans sent death threats to Callum Ilott after two incidents he arguably didn't even cause and then Canapino added fuel to the fire after the season finale by criticizing Ilott himself in the wake of all that. I came to the eventual conclusion that while he was vastly underrated by American fans in the beginning while also being overrated by some Argentineans who seem to act like he's the reincarnation of Fangio when he isn't close to that, he is overrated as an open wheel driver now as a lot of people seem to be impressed that he wasn't Sting Ray Robb because they expected him to be a hack and a roadblock. I did not expect that but I don't really see future IndyCar stardom from him in a way I might have before the start of the season. As for this model, if only there was some way I could compare what McLaughlin did in Australia to what Canapino did in Argentina... Well, eventually I did it.

But Canapino is not the Argentinean driver who leads this model. That honor goes to Mauro Giallombardo, the 2012 Turismo Carretera champion who won three races there, two in Top Race, and co-drove the winning entry at TC2000's premier endurance race in Buenos Aires. Giallombardo did not have a great number of teammate comparisons, primarily because he spent most of his time in Turismo Carretera and I was unable to find complete results for most of that era's races. However, among what I was able to find he had a clean sweep with an 11-0 record including wins over Canapino, two-time TC2000 champion and current points leader Leonel Pernía, and Stock Car Brasil champion David Muffato (who is admittedly one of the weakest Stock Car Brasil champions.) Giallombardo suffered a head injury in a road accident in 2017 and was placed in an induced coma for a month. While he did improve, he has not raced since. Although he doesn't seem to be one of the all-time legends of Argentinean racing, it seems like there was potential there for a legendary career that was never realized.

When I was starting work on the model, I initially assumed that Jim Clark would be leading it. I already knew that on top of his F1, IndyCar, and Tasman Series success that he also won the British Touring Car Championship in 1964, which was then called the British Saloon Car Championship. Having done further research, I realized that he had a 15-0 teammate record including a 5-0 sweep of Jack Sears who was both the first BSCC champion as well as the first driver to win two titles. If he was that dominant against a driver who was arguably dominating over everyone else, that should be enough to lead the model, right? Not quite because it seems like the drivers Giallombardo had as teammates in the 2010s were actually stronger than Jim Clark's teammates in the '60s but regardless, Clark's touring car legacy is a major feather in his cap which the vast majority of his fellow F1 champions cannot match.

Four other drivers posted undefeated records with ten or more teammate comparisons. The most famous one is Yoshimi Katayama, who qualifies as a BSCC driver on a technicality as the RAC Tourist Trophy counted as both a BSCC event and an ETCC event simultaneously but Katayama usually entered ETCC events in Europe also, but even though he drove in multi-car races, he beat the other team car in every single one. He also co-drove with Allan Moffat in the Bathurst 1000 in 1983 and finished 2nd. Prior to the start of his auto racing career, he also won four motorcycle Grand Prix races and later in the '80s and '90s, he went on to score three Le Mans class wins. Clearly Katayama had a successful career that is possibly worthy of placement on my top 1,000 list. The other three drivers Brian Callaghan, Jason Hughes, and David Griessner are more flukish though. All three of those drivers had undefeated records against single teammates who had no other teammate comparisons: Brian Callaghan, Jr., Fiona Leggate, and Andreas Rinke respectively. As a result, all those drivers more or less have undefined ratings because they are not connected to the rest of the model. With each pair of iterations, the undefeated drivers' ratings toggle between 0 and 0.5 while the winless drivers' ratings toggle between 0 and -0.5. Because I conducted an even number of iterations (30) they randomly ended up on the positive side, but it's clear that the ratings for these drivers don't really mean anything because they are effectively undefined.

As for the drivers who were not undefeated, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that René Rast ended up being the highest-rated driver. He won three titles in both Porsche Supercup and DTM and he did so against some exceptional teammates, going 46-14 against Jamie Green, a driver who won 17 DTM races and 29-3 against Norbert Siedler, who won two Porsche Supercup races and had four consecutive top five points finishes in that series. Both of those drivers themselves are very highly rated, so obviously Rast will even be more highly rated. In general I noticed that the DTM drivers tended to be higher than most other drivers, probably in part due to the fact that WTCC and BTCC races frequently had inverted starting grids for one race a weekend, meaning that sort of gimmickiness prevents drivers from obtaining the level of domination that they tend to obtain in more pure formats. The next-highest is Laurent Aïello, one of the drivers who I thought would pose the biggest challenge to the undefeated drivers. Not only did he post an incredible 222-41 teammate record (58-1 greater than Rast even), but he also won championships in four different touring car series in a nine year span: the French Supertouring Championship in 1994, followed by the Super Tourenwagen Cup in 1997, the British Touring Car Championship in 1999, and DTM in 2002. His BTCC championship is by far the most impressive since he did it as a rookie, beat his teammate David Leslie 15-5 (and Leslie is very high rated himself with at least a .500 record against every other teammate), and then immediately left to switch to DTM after a college basketball-esque one-and-done. I'd probably pick him as the greatest touring car driver of all time. He then added a DTM title in 2002 to complete his career before retiring. Marco Wittmann's dominance in DTM in his heyday (which was shortly before Rast's) was pretty analogous so that's not a surprise either. It should come as no surprise that sports car legends like Kévin Estre and Nick Tandy perform very admirably, but I wanted to briefly discuss some of the more obscure names.

Nick Yelloly has recently broken out as an IMSA star with his overall win at the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen alongside teammate Connor de Phillippi. Perhaps his breakthrough could have been predicted if you look at his record here, which is astounding. The 37-4 record is impressive enough, but even more impressive is his 11-1 record against Larry ten Voorde, a driver who might just be the most underrated driver in the world. Even though Porsche Supercup is an important feeder series for sports car talents and serves as a support race for the European rounds of the F1 championship, I never see people raving about those drivers or even talking about them at all unless they succeed in sports car racing later. Part of the reason I really wanted to include Porsche Supercup in the model is that I don't know much about that series either and want to better understand how to evaluate its drivers, who seem to significantly fly under the radar and remain arguably the most underrated in motorsports. However, the series also has a lot of amateur drivers in it and it seems the quality of the field has recently diminished. Despite ten Voorde winning both the Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany championships in 2020-2021 simultaneously and posting a 407-31 record, easily the best of any driver with that many teammate comparisons, he did so in general against teammates so lousy that there was a limited amount he could gain in the ratings and he ended up a lot lower than I thought he would and probably underrated. After I finished calculating everybody's teammate comparisons, I actually thought Yelloly would be leading the model because he beat a 407-31 driver by an 11-1 margin, but it turns out the competition level was too bad there to enable him to do that.

A few other drivers were significantly more surprising than even Yelloly. Marcio Campos is a driver I had never heard of and a driver who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page in English or Portuguese, but he did beat Gabriel Robe 7-2 in the Campeonato Brasileiro de Turismo before beating Cesar Ramos 4-2 in Stock Car Brasil. Considering Robe went undefeated against all his other teammates and Ramos is only barely losing a years-long teammate comparison to Thiago Camilo, a 37-time Stock Car Brasil winner, Campos's rating actually makes sense even though it looks like a fluke. Albert Costa is only that high on the list based on comparisons in the minor-league European Mégane Trophy. Similarly, Frank Wrathall ended up rating so highly because he beat future BTCC perennial once-a-year-winner Adam Morgan 22-3; Wrathall did go on to win a BTCC race himself but his career was derailed when he was imprisoned for running over a cyclist in his street car. The obscure Stock Car Brasil driver Laércio Justino, who never won a race there or finished better than 9th in points, ranks 21st in the model with a rating of 0.407 because he went undefeated against two of his three teammates. The exception was his brother Ananias, who he beat only 5-4. Because Ananias lost to Alessandro Weiss in Stock Car Brasil by a greater margin (1-3), that probably explains why Weiss is rated so highly here even though he never won a race either. This particular triumvirate reminds me of that Mark Taylor/Richard Antinucci/Ronnie Bremer where they all bizarrely ended up overrating each other because they didn't have many other connections. I don't really think any of those drivers are list-worthy.

A couple of the other drivers above .4 are worth further discussion though. Kieth O'Dor appears to be one of the model's greatest finds. He only won two major league touring car races, one in the four years he drove in the BTCC and one in a partial 1995 season in the Super Tourenwagen Cup. The same day that he won his first STC race at the AVUS circuit in Germany, he was killed in a crash in the second race at that track's doubleheader. But in retrospect, his teammate comparisons are truly electrifying. He beat three-time BTCC champion Win Percy 8-1 in 1993. The next year, he beat former DTM champion Eric van de Poele 7-1. In his 1995 season, he posted an undefeated 10-0 record against future three-time ALMS champion Sascha Maassen (8-0) and past F1 driver Ivan Capelli (2-0.) He was the highest-rated touring car driver globally in both 1992 and 1995 and considering the very high quality of his competition, this genuinely seems legit and not a fluke. Clearly he was becoming one of the best touring car drivers in the world considering how badly he was blowing out former champions and he just never had a competitive car to prove it.

Sean Edwards is a very similar case. From 2008-2013 he collected eight wins in Porsche Supercup and eight more wins in Porsche Carrera Cup Germany and he was having a spectacular season in 2013. In addition to winning the 24 Hours of Dubai and the 24 Hours of Nürburgring in the same year and generally being regarded as the linchpin of those teams, he was also leading the Porsche Supercup points by a fairly significant margin with two races left and he scored his first ALMS class win at Long Beach too. Edwards had a very eclectic racing career that also included serving as the stunt driver for Ron Howard's Rush and serving as a driving instructor for other racers. Unfortunately, one of his driving students crashed while Edwards was the passenger and Edwards was killed in the crash. I might argue he was racing's biggest loss in the 2010s since it looked like he was well on the way to a superstar sports car career for possibly the next two decades while Dan Wheldon and Justin Wilson seemed to have declined from their peaks in their last couple years. But because so few people pay attention to Porsche Supercup to begin with, Edwards is not someone you tend to hear much about even with his Hollywood connections. He even beat René Rast 8-6 in Porsche Carrera Cup Germany in 2012 making him the only driver who had more than one shared teammate race against Rast to post a winning record against him. His greatness is even more obvious than O'Dor's and he will make the list. Besides I've got to have at least one Sean, don't I?

I'm not going to go into significant detail about most of the other drivers in this section but I will list the highest-rated drivers for each of the other series I have not covered yet. Olimpio Alencar, Jr. is the highest rated Stock Car Brasil driver at .422 and he did have an electrifying career with 21 wins and one title from 1979-1987 including winning a race every year in that time span. Although he wasn't as big a star as drivers like Ingo Hoffmann, Paulo Gomes, and Chico Serra, he had much better teammate records than any of those guys and I was really surprised how low Hoffmann was even though he won twelve championships, but admittedly he didn't have teammates in some of his best years. The highest-rated Australian driver besides the Brian Callaghan anomaly is surprisingly Peter Doulman, a driver who was successful in an uncompetitive car going on to win the 1993 Australian 2.0 Litre Touring Car Championship, a relatively uncompetitive subclass of the ATCC featuring cars with smaller engines and mostly obscure drivers. This series eventually became more competitive with drivers like Tony Longhurst, Paul Morris, Greg Murphy, Geoff Brabham, and Brad Jones and became known as the Australian Super Touring Championship. By the point those drivers were entering, Doulman's moment had passed and although he still outperformed his teammates whenever he entered, he quickly faded from view. I'm not sure what to make of him or his contemporary John Smith, who was also surprisingly one of the highest-rated Australian drivers and had the best teammate rating in Australia two different years. Both of those drivers did beat '70s Aussie legend Colin Bond for the 2 liter championship in 1993 but I think Bond was mostly washed up by then. Ignoring the obscure Australian Supertouring drivers, Scott McLaughlin is the highest-rated Supercars driver and that should come as no surprise to anyone.

The highest-rated World Touring Car driver is a driver you've likely heard of but haven't thought about in years. Jean-Karl Vernay, who used to be known as J.K. Vernay, won the Indy Lights title as a rookie in 2010 and beat a field that included future winners James Hinchcliffe and Charlie Kimball (who were both more experienced) but he was never able to find an IndyCar ride. No matter. He transitioned to sports and touring cars and went on to win the Porsche Carrera Cup France, a Le Mans class win, and a title in the TCR International Series, which was a short-lived spinoff of the World Touring Car Championship that eventually merged back into it to form the World Touring Car Cup (WTCR.) In the first two WTCR seasons in 2018 and 2019, Vernay was matched up against three-time BTCC champion Gordon Shedden, who had won that title as recently as 2016, and he demolished him 32-5. Vernay's rookie championship in Indy Lights the year before Josef Newgarden's rookie championship may have indicated some major potential that was never realized, but he did end up realizing it in a different way and I'm not sure how many people even noticed. Similarly, even though he failed to make it to IndyCar after Ed Jones and his teammate Félix Serralles stole the 2016 Indy Lights title from him by team orders and claimed the ensuing cash prize, Santiago Urrutia has bounced back and become something of a touring car star in his own right with seven WTCR/TCR World Tour wins since the start of 2020 and a quite high rating in this model as well.

Overall it seems like the ratings here are quite a bit inflated compared to the open wheel and stock car models and that makes sense because there are a lot more amateur drivers that make it to the top levels of touring car racing than there are in the other two forms. At some point, I'm going to have to do a comparison between the driver ratings in my open wheel model and those in my touring car model to determine how much I would need to reduce the ratings here to make it comparable to the open wheel model so that I can more accurately understand how to equalize the ratings across each model to reflect for the competitiveness of each series for more accurate overall ranking lists, but that will likely be a project for the future. I do intend to do a rally car model at some point using this same structure, but that probably won't be until next year because I have a lot of more important stuff to focus on now.

This model includes races as early as 1958 and as recent as September 17, but I don't think I entered the DTM races from the following weekend. There were over 5,000 drivers I had to go through to complete this model. A large percentage of them did not have teammates, but 3,001 of those did. Of those 3,001 drivers, there were a massive 1,553 drivers that had at least ten teammate comparisons across all touring car series, and I have listed them from best to worst in the below table. I have also listed their career teammate rating, their highest-rated year, and any major league touring car championships they have won. After that, I have listed the top five highest-rated drivers for each season and below that I have listed the highest-rated drivers for each of the six major leagues that are currently running. The first column lists the highest-rated drivers from either the European and/or World Touring Car Championship (which had various differing names over the years), followed by Supercars, DTM and its predecessors, BTCC, Stock Car Brasil, and Porsche Supercup. I was thinking about adding more detail there, but I'm too worn out and just want to release this now. I realize this is long enough as it is.

The Model