1,000 Greatest Drivers: Billy Winn

Winn for the win!

I didn’t quite finish this entry before the IndyCar race started and then I wanted to listen to the remainder of the Craftsman Truck race afterward, so I’m submitting this a little later than I originally wanted to. This one is rather difficult because so much of Winn’s legacy is tied up in his legendary sprint car career. From what I have read, when AAA (yes, the roadside maintenance people) withdrew from running IndyCar, sprint, and midget racing after 1955 in the wake of Bill Vukovich’s fatal crash while leading the Indy 500 followed by the Le Mans crash the next month, they threw out their entire record book, which means it’s extremely difficult to find lists of winners for the pre-1956 era of sprint car racing. One guy has done it, but this site is no longer currently running and only accessible through the Internet Archive and even his win counts might be slightly off, so we might not know exactly how many wins Winn has. Furthermore, since I like to split my driver evaluations year-by-year, that is even more difficult. If Gene Crucean is correct that Winn has 46 sprint car wins in addition to his four IndyCar wins, that’s obviously a legendary career for a guy who died at 28. However, I won’t easily be able to do single-season evaluations without knowing how many wins he had per season, and I might have to spend a lot of money I don’t have to possibly have access to year-by-year sprint car results from the pre-World War II seasons. I believe these data exist in the Henry Ford library, but nobody has put them online yet and I would likely have to pay someone at the library to digitize them, so I might need to have a librarian curate these data for me since they are not available online. I did find one online source that says he had ten Big Car wins in 1932 and five in 1933, but I’m not sure how accurate that is. One thing I do know: he belongs on the list.