1,000 Greatest Drivers: Billy Arnold/Bill Cummings/Bill Holland
Bills, bills, bills.
I guess that was a classier reference than the alternative in my head, “Three dollar bill, y’all.” I’ve been working on all of these over the past several days and didn’t post any of them one at a time because I still had to edit them down to the desired 500 words, so I decided to do all these guys together because I intended them as free posts anyway, so after this, I’m only behind one day on this Indy 500 winners’ series.
I also have a lot going on home. One of my high school classmates found a contractor she knew who was willing to help me drag my mom’s car out of our garage so I could eventually clean it out and hopefully move some clutter from other rooms into it so I can order a deep clean as I intend to do over the next month or something. Now I can donate it to Habitat for Humanity and create more space for Mom to come home. Speaking of that, I finally received the contract for the ramp installation and roof replacement that is necessary for my mom’s discharge from the nursing home. I still need to find a notary for when Mom signs the form and that might take a week, and Mom even signing the form is going to be a struggle since she has lost her vision, probably has cataracts, and doesn’t want surgery. She’s still struggling. A couple days ago when I called her she told me she thought she was on a spaceship, but I want her to come home.
I don’t have much to say about the NASCAR all-star race or Indy 500 qualifying. I did think the format for the NASCAR all-star race was stupid with all the drivers competing together rather than having a qualifying race as before, and I thought that it was way too long for a race that was intended to be a made-for-TV event, but despite all the crashing, it was nowhere ner as bad as I thought it would be. As for Indy, I’m really starting to feel bad for Felix Rosenqvist. Álex Palou is becoming his worst nightmare. He replaces him, he inherits the lead on a pit stop after Rosenqvist had dominated all day at Long Beach, and now he snatches the pole from him after Rosenqvist had dominated qualifying all day. He really deserves more than he’s gotten in his career to date. Hell, I’ve always thought he is better than Marcus Ericsson and yet one of them got to occupy a Ganassi seat much longer and got an Indy 500 and a string of deus ex machina wins out of it while the superior driver gets shat upon again and again and again. The Palou v. David Malukas battle I pretty much figured this month was going to be looks like it’s going to come to fruition, but I must say I was surprised by Conor Daly and Alexander Rossi’s speed. I have thoughts on the NASCAR Hall of Fame too, but that’ll be for tomorrow.
One of my subscribers who unsubscribed to me suggested I should separate my personal content from my racing content and potentially start a second Substack for the former. How do y’all feel about that? Do you have any strong opinions as far as that goes? Let me know in the comments. I realize a lot of you were likely fans of me or my typing or my other writing first and weren’t entirely here for racing content in the first place. The reason I decided I wanted to discuss a wider range of topics is because I want to give myself the opportunity to pivot to something else when I finish this book project, but if people aren’t interested in the personal topics, I can try to pivot away from that.
BILLY ARNOLD……………………….USA
Born: December 16, 1905
Died: November 10, 1976
Best year: 1930
Best drive: 1930 Indianapolis 500
Arguably the most dominant IndyCar driver of the ‘30s, Arnold’s brief but electrifying career was a relatively short blip in a fascinating life’s journey. Despite a rough upbringing in a Chicago ghetto where he served as his family’s sole breadwinner from age ten, he earned a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Illinois, then subsequently embarked on a racing career. After his first win in 1927, he made his Indy 500 debut in 1928, finishing seventh that year and eighth in 1929.
1930 marked a fundamental transition. After former driver and World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he instituted a new formula that outlawed European-style performance racing cars in favor of cars that more closely resembled American passenger cars. He also removed the 33-car limit and mandated a return to riding mechanics. Detractors called this the “Junk Formula”. This new package nonetheless created a major opportunity for younger drivers like Arnold. Although initially unable to find an Indy 500 ride, Arnold unexpectedly served as a last-minute replacement in 1926 AAA champion Harry Hartz’s entry when Hartz decided he was still too hurt to race.
Arnold won the pole, but Louis Meyer passed him on Lap 1 before Arnold repassed Meyer on Lap 3. He led the rest of the race, winning by seven minutes over Shorty Cantlon. Not only did Arnold become the then-youngest 500 winner, his 198 laps led and consecutive laps led will likely never be broken. Arnold then won twice at Altoona en route to the championship. In 1931, he set the fastest qualifying time at Indy but a pole day disqualification relegated him to an 18th place starting position. Nonetheless, he took the lead on Lap 7 and led 155 consecutive laps until a broken axle caused his car to go airborne, ride the wall for 200 feet, and catch fire. Arnold and his riding mechanic Spider Matlock were ejected from the car with Arnold suffering a broken pelvis and Matlock a broken collarbone. His injuries caused him to miss the rest of the season. In 1932, he took the lead on the second lap and had nearly lapped the field when he crashed while avoiding another car. Coincidentally, this time Arnold had a cracked collarbone and Matlock a broken pelvis. Arnold’s wife made him retire after that. Later, he received a Ph.D. from MIAT College of Technology, served as Chief of Maintenance for the U.S. 8th Air Force in World War II, and was an early water-skiing pioneer.
Like many pre-World War II racing stars, Arnold was a venerable polymath with innumerable unrelated successes. While his driving career marked a relatively short portion of a rich life, his numbers remain astonishing. Despite starting only five Indy 500s, he ranks 13th in laps led. He certainly benefited from extremely weak ‘30s fields but he still had to race the best of who was left, and I think his dominance was extreme enough to compensate for the lack of competition.
Year-by-year: 1928: C+, 1929: C+, 1930: 2, 1931: E-, 1932: C+
BILL CUMMINGS…………………….USA
Born: November 11, 1906
Died: February 8, 1939
Best year: 1933
Best drive: 1930 AAA Championship Car Race #1 at Langhorne Speedway
Indianapolis’s first native son to become a major IndyCar star, Cummings was exposed to auto racing from his early childhood as he was born two miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway where his father worked for the Marmon company for whom Ray Harroun won the first Indy 500. After serving as a messenger boy and taxi driver, he began racing motorcycles at age 16 before switching to cars a few years later, where he became a regional dirt track star by 1929.
Cummings next shocked the racing world with a start-to-finish win on his IndyCar debut in the 1930 season opener at Langhorne, where he eventually became the first driver to win at the notoriously dangerous track four times. After bookending the season with a win at the Syracuse Mile, he garnered the nickname “Wild Bill” the following winter while racing on several dangerous high-speed California ovals. Immediately after the 1932 Indy 500, Cummings forged a relationship with car owner/sponsor Mike Boyle, for whom he drove for the rest of his career. In his first eleven starts for Boyle, he won eight poles. This stretch also contained a streak where he won four of five races. In the 1933 season alone, he won all three poles and earned flag-to-flag wins at Detroit and Syracuse despite a mechanical failure at Indy.
In 1934, the AAA mandated a limit of 45 gallons of fuel for the Indy 500, which resulted in teams developing radically low-displacement engines to save fuel. Cummings’s win marked not only the first for a four-cylinder engine since 1920 after eight-cylinder engines had dominated the intervening years, but also the then-closest margin of victory of 27 seconds over Mauri Rose. Rose attempted to protest by arguing that Cummings had gained three quarters of a lap when the cars were supposed to be slowed down but was rebuffed. However, that would be Cummings’s last win and he fell off significantly afterward. Sadly, during the 1939 offseason while driving his street car, Cummings penetrated a guardrail and fell 50 feet into Lick Creek. Although a couple bystanders found him and took him to the hospital unconscious, he never regained consciousness and died two days later.
In addition to his driving successes, Cummings became a pillar of the Indianapolis community when he established a bar called the “Lucky Seven” after his winning car number and was also noteworthy in smuggling the era’s greatest black driver Charlie Wiggins as an engineer for his winning Indy 500 entry when African-Americans were not allowed to enter the Speedway, pretending he was his janitor. Cummings’s win paved the way for a series of winning low-cost, high-efficiency engines that helped IndyCar racing survive the Great Depression, and Boyle’s success continued with Cummings’s replacement Wilbur Shaw, a three-time Indy 500 winner and fellow Indianapolis native who became vastly more iconic but was generally rated lower when both were alive. Cummings’s heyday might have been brief in an uncompetitive era, but his peak dominance was more explosive than most.
Year-by-year: 1929: C+, 1930: E, 1931: C+, 1932: C+, 1933: 3, 1934: E, 1935: E-, 1937: C+
BILL HOLLAND………………………USA
Born: December 18, 1907
Died: May 20, 1984
Best year: 1946
Best drive: 1947 Indianapolis 500 (yes, I picked the one he didn’t win)
One of the most successful sprint car drivers in the World War II era and IndyCar drivers immediately afterward, Holland came from a sports background as his father Willard Holland had been a Major League Baseball player for the original Baltimore Orioles in 1889. Bill Holland had a different athletic background, initially starting out as an ice skater, where he tried out for the 1932 Winter Olympics before switching to sprint cars (then called big cars) and midgets in 1937. Holland emerged as a major star when he narrowly lost the 1940 AAA Eastern Big Car championship to Joie Chitwood. After winning the 1941 title, World War II interrupted his career.
When racing resumed, the AAA inexplicably added all 71 big car races to the 1946 IndyCar schedule alongside the six full-length championship races. Despite entering no championship races, Holland finished fourth in the championship and won 17 times. He finally made his championship car debut at the 1947 Indy 500 as a last-minute replacement for Tony Bettenhausen, who gave up the coveted Lou Moore ride to strike for more pay. Holland immediately impressed with 143 laps led. While leading his teammate Mauri Rose in a presumptive 1-2 finish, Moore displayed a pit board reading “EZY” to convince both drivers to slow down. Holland agreed but Rose passed him and won. Holland waved Rose past, erroneously thinking Rose was a lap down. He won the next two races at Milwaukee and Langhorne for car owner Fred Peters before reuniting with Moore despite the ignominy in 1948, where he lost another 1-2 finish to Rose, this time legitimately.
In 1949, Moore again issued the “EZY” board while Holland led Rose. Holland again obeyed it while Rose again violated it, but this time, Rose’s magneto failed with eight laps left and Moore fired Rose for disobeying orders. After another second-place finish in 1950, the AAA suspended Holland for a year for competing in a five-lap match race in Opa-locka, Florida against future NASCAR winner Bobby Johns; they added another year when he complained in the media. His career never recovered. After retiring, he and his wife managed skating rinks in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Although Holland is primarily known for his Indy 500 starts these days, I am most impressed by his sprint car career. He still ranks fifth with 64 AAA/USAC sprint car wins, only one behind Rex Mays. Even more impressively, he achieved this despite not seriously racing until his thirties and the World War II hiatus. While his IndyCar appearances outside Indianapolis were often hit-or-miss, no one will likely ever earn top twos in their first four Indy 500 starts again. Although his career was probably already winding down, his suspension marked one of the pettiest political decisions in motorsports history in an era when all American sanctioning bodies were trying to keep their drivers under control. Holland’s decision to rebuff that may have ruined his career, but proved inspirational to later generations of drivers who wanted to race anything anytime.
Open wheel model: #272 of 931 (.056)
Teammate head-to-heads: 3-2 (2-0 vs. George Connor, 0-2 vs. Mauri Rose, 1-0 vs. Lee Wallard)
Year-by-year: 1938: C+, 1939: C+, 1940: E-, 1941: E-, 1946: 3, 1947: 4, 1948: C+, 1949: E, 1950: C+