In most sports there is invariably one person who stands alone above the rest. In basketball it is Michael Jordan. In tennis it is Serena Williams. In cricket it is Sir Donald Bradman; on that note, Bradman is so many statistical deviations above the mean that across all sport, Bradman is the greatest athlete of all sports.
In motor racing, that is easier to quantify because all you need to do is count the superlatives. In Formula One the greatest of all time is Sir Lewis Hamilton. In NASCAR, that mantle is shared by Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Jimmie Johnson. However when it comes to our own backyard and the greatest Touring Car Driver to have graced Australia, that answer is a little more difficult to quantify.
Aaron Noonan on the V8Sleuth podcast recently made the bold assertion that Craig Lowndes' 7 Bathurst victories are greater than Peter Brock's 9. To be fair Brock's 9 also comes with not just 1 but 2 wins where he jumped into the second car to win the race; where that's not simply been allowed according to the rules of late and so I can understand the reason for this. However as the rules at the time allowed it, then those two extra wins quite rightly stand. In order to win a thing, you have to compete according to the rules and if the rules state that you can do a thing then if you want to win, you can do that thing.
There is always the problem that as unreasonably subjective spectators, our own opinions of who the greatest is will be hampered by our own experience. The most intense emotions that someone generally has is between the ages of 13-25 and that 12 year period will often shape loads of our opinions. In my case, I really didn't like Peter Brock because I though he was annoying. That doesn't mean that I didn't have incredible respect for what he did and achieved. There has to be a way of eliminating emotion from the calculation; so that means establishing empirical rules for handling the data.
There is the obvious question of what the relative values of an Australian Touring Car Championship are, as opposed to a Bathurst 1000 win or a Sandown 500. At various times, the Bathurst 1000 was separate to the ATCC and at other times it was part of it. There are also those years early on in the piece where the ATCC was awarded after just a single race. Are those championships worth less because the champion only needed one win or are they worth more because the champion only got one crack at it and had to get it right the first time?
As someone who lives in the land of numbers, when you are faced with a lot of raw data, you have to decide what to do with it and that sometimes means making value judgements. As the value of things are measured relative to each other, then the value that you decide upon has to have some basis in sentiment.
When it comes to Australian Touring Car Racing, then there are some things which help you establish that relative value.
Four time Bathurst winner Alan Moffat once said that the ATCC was "just a warm-up for Bathurst". The actions of Nissan Motor Company in 1984 when they deliberately didn't win the championship by not fielding George Fury at Oran Park, just so they could get concessions in the technical regulations for Bathurst, indicates what they valued. Six times Bathurst winner Larry Perkins once said that "winning the championship only allows you to put number 1 on the door but winning Bathurst writes your name into immortality".
Bathurst is indeed valuable but I do not think that it is worth more than the championship; especially when some championships contain it as a component.
If the ATCC is worth 1, then I think that Bathurst is worth 4/7ths; which is slightly more than half. It follows that Sandown is worth half of that at 2/7ths, the Six Hours at various places also at 2/7ths and a 12 Hour Race being worth the same as a 1000 also feels about right to me. I think that the 24 Hours was such a rare thing that it can be rightly afforded the value of 8/7ths and the Round Australia Trials although being rallies, attracted so many touring car drivers that they are also worth 8/7ths. They especially cram thousands of kilometres into a very small space of time; so this also feels about right.
One of the other things that you learn about statistics is that they are always subject to interpretation when the result leads to many different conclusions that could be drawn. I could have not included the 24 Hours or the Round Australia Trials, or valued things differently and Jamie Whincup would be the greatest of all time. Would that have been a reasonable conclusion given that Peter Brock only won three ATCCs? Definitely. It would certainly reflect the fact that Brock was a relatively bad sprint racer. The argument could be made that Brock at the top of his powers basically had no real competition whereas Whincup won Bathursts and Championships in a highly professional and fiercely competitive era; which is what Aaron Noonan's argument boils down to and it is a good argument.
All that being said, this is the spreadsheet and the raw data:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkrTkMciUZzlwZmK8vySrgTrreVC9xOP/view?usp=sharing
That gives you the following index:
12.57 Peter Brock
11.29 Jamie Whincup
9.86 Craig Lowndes
9.14 Jim Richards
9.00 Mark Skaife
8.00 Allan Moffat
7.86 Dick Johnson
6.29 Bob Jane
5.57 Ian Geoghegan
4.71 John Bowe
4.29 Larry Perkins
4.00 Garth Tander
3.57 Steven Richards
3.57 Greg Murphy
3.57 Scott McLaughlin
3.43 Harry Firth
2.57 Marcos Ambrose
2.57 Glenn Seton
2.43 Shane Van Giz
2.14 Russell Ingall
2.00 Norm Beechey
1.86 Colin Bond
1.86 Mark Winterbotton
1.71 Bill Pitt
1.57 Bob Morris
1.43 John Goss
1.00 James Courtney
1.00 Robbie Francevic
This mostly feels about right; which is good enough. Brock won 9 Bathurst 1000s and Sandown 500s but did relatively badly in the ATCC. Whincup is the only 7x ATCC Champion but has underperformed at Bathurst. Lowdnes like Brock has underperformed in the ATCC. The GOAT is one of those three; with two stories still yet to be concluded.
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