1,000 Greatest Drivers: Arie Luyendyk

Despite unusual team instability, he might've been the best Indy 500 driver of the '90s.

I finished writing this right about the time that the Bristol Night Race started, and then I edited it down during the race. I’m glad this race was one of the most boring of the season so I don’t really feel I missed anything while I was writing this. Luyendyk is one driver that I find somewhat difficult to evaluate because he drove almost entirely for second-rate teams and almost never got the top-tier rides he seemed to exist. He did have one season with Chip Ganassi in 1993, but that was before they became a powerhouse in 1996. Furthermore, he almost never had teammates although his 19-4 record in the races where he did is pretty amazing. Admittedly, this includes an 8-1 defeat of Scott Goodyear in 1990 when Luyendyk and Goodyear were both driving for Doug Shierson Racing but Luyendyk had the dominant Chevrolet engine while Goodyear had the greatly inferior Judd engine. Many people would say I shouldn’t have counted them as teammates since they had unequal engines, but I decided to do so because that was consistent with his later performance when he swept Goodyear 2-0 when they were reunited at Treadway Racing in 1997. Furthermore, my pithy argument is that when two teammates have unequal equipment, they usually give the faster cars and engines to the superior driver for a reason and this has happened in many even more even teammate relationships so I think it should count. If I count Luyendyk’s 1990 races against Goodyear and ignore his minor league races, his driver rating of .143 is comparable to other oval experts like Kenny Brack, Tony Kanaan, and Dan Wheldon, but if I don’t count it, he drops to .066. While that isn’t great and suggests he was probably more like drivers like Ryan Briscoe, Ryan Hunter-Reay, and Graham Rahal, who were only actual title contenders once or maybe twice, he is still higher rated than a lot of drivers who are better-respected. I might not have quite considered him a lock if he didn’t also have those Daytona and Sebring wins (proving he could win on a road course), but he did clearly contribute to those wins as he set the fastest lap in his Sebring win. Overall, he’s a legend but probably on the lowest tier of engines: think of him as the Sterling Marlin of IndyCar basically.