🇺🇸 Eric Palmer

Eric Palmer holds a Racer Rating of 2,891, placing him in the competitive amateur band. This rating describes a driver at the front of club racing and regional competition; one with a real competition licence racing against professionals rather than among them, though typically not sustaining that level consistently. Palmer's record across ten starts in 2019 and 2020–2021 shows him finishing an average of P13.5 when classified, competing in the Whelen Mazda MX-5 Cup and IMSA Prototype Challenge for Copeland Motorsports and Jr III Racing respectively.[1]

Palmer raced primarily among semi-professional and professional-level fields. In IMSA Prototype Challenge, he shared the grid with multiple drivers ranked significantly above him, including 2020 series champion Naveen Rao and Matthew Bell, a Gold-graded professional and back-to-back LMP3 champion. Against these stronger competitors, Palmer consistently finished behind them; he never beat Rao, Dickerson, or Bell across eight shared races with each. His strongest head-to-head results came against Dan Goldburg, a Bronze-graded amateur whom he beat three times in eight races, and occasional single results against established drivers such as Parker Thompson and Alan Brynjolfsson. Palmer finished ahead of Goldburg and Rasmus Lindh often enough to show competitive moments, but the pattern across his record is of a driver well below the standard of those around him.[2]

Palmer's career ended after the 2019 Whelen Mazda MX-5 Cup season, following two starts that yielded no points. He competed as part of a family entry at Jr III Racing during his IMSA Prototype Challenge campaign in 2020 and 2021, a team that has produced stronger drivers but has never had Palmer among its leading results.