1,000 Greatest Drivers: Al Unser, Jr.

Insert trigger warning here.

Man, if I thought writing about Josef Newgarden and Tony Stewart recently was hard, this is the hardest. Because of my age and when I came in as a fan, I remember Unser’s career but do not remember any of the good parts. The very first IndyCar race I ever watched was the 1995 Indy 500… which he missed. The first CART season I got really into was 1997… which was the first time he sucked. He obviously improved somewhat in his later years in the IRL and I did watch some of those races, but he never looked like one of the IRL’s big stars even after he switched series. What I do remember very vividly is his arrest after he hit his girlfriend and left her by the side of the road. While much has been written about Unser’s alcoholism, it kind of bothers me that all his violent outbursts have been kind of swept under the rug although they attracted a lot of attention at the time. If you look at his Wikipedia page, there is a lot of discussion about his DUIs but not so much about the more serious stuff. He somehow seemed to get less backlash from his several cases of domestic violence than Kurt Busch did around the same time for far lesser offenses, and that really bothers me.

It is hard for me to go back and really give Unser a fair shake because this is when I came in. I didn’t see his greatness, but I was there for all the bad moments. Obviously, I did look at all the CART races from his prime period just to collect the lead change data and I can tell he was great. But I never really went back and watched most of those races (except the Indy 500s), because quite frankly from what I can tell that whole era was dull. Unser primarily dominated street course races (which always tended to be boring) and his greatest periods of dominance came from 1988-1991 where for the most part only the Chevrolet teams were remotely competitive and as a result there were only like six competitive cars all season, followed by the 1994 season where Unser was pretty much unopposed. Even if I went back and watched all those old races, I think from what I can tell they were so dull that it would not cause me to stop thinking of the domestic violence first. As someone who wasn’t there for the dominance but was there for his criminal history, it’s really hard for me to not be biased here, but this is my best attempt.