1,000 Greatest Drivers: Alan Kulwicki

This should be a quickie.

Actually it wasn’t because I still needed to trim a lot down to compress this to 500 words and in Kulwicki’s case, there are a lot of things you need to talk about that can’t really be omitted. I did want to use this pun since if my first favorite NASCAR writer Matt McLaughlin is to be believed, Dale Earnhardt apparently actually called him “Quickie”. I know I missed three columns I intended to write last week (Johnny Cecotto, Henry Segrave, and Garth Tander). I will make those up some time but obviously the five drivers I did do last week (Scott Pruett, Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton, Cale Yarborough, and Mark Martin) all had more important careers than those three in my opinion (unless you throw in Cecotto’s motorcycle racing dominance, which I am choosing to ignore on my list). I do want to try to release columns closer to every day again for the month of April and I knew I needed to do Kulwicki today first, which leaves me only four Cup champions left from my lifetime (Waltrip, Wallace, Gordon, and Stewart) for later. I scribbled most of this on the bus ride to visit my mom at the nursing home again. She still wants to leave desperately but the social worker and head nurse on the fourth floor are refusing. The notary public was supposed to come to sign her power of attorney form today but she had another commitment and I was supposed to have an appointment with the gastroenterologist tomorrow, but I postponed it a couple months because I apparently didn’t call for my cab ride soon enough.

Obviously Kulwicki has no teammate comparisons so he is not listed in my model. Normally I pick a race a driver won for best race, but I couldn’t do that this time. If you’re wondering why I rated him for 1981, it’s because he beat Mark Martin and Dick Trickle to win the Slinger Nationals championship. He definitely was nowhere near as good as them at the grassroots level, but I still thought he was marginally worthy enough that year, especially since I assume he had an equipment deficit in the ASA and other series like that just like he did in NASCAR.