1,000 Greatest Drivers: Carl Edwards
Why do fans now argue he was "mid"?
When I don’t have a particular driver I’m planning to write about in a given day, I’m going to go through my list of locks and write about drivers on their birthdays frequently. Obviously, this means my three day cycle where I write about an open wheel driver one day, a stock car driver the next, and a touring car driver the day after that will quickly unravel at this point. There are several drivers on my lock list who I could have written about in the last week as Gordon Johncock, Nigel Mansell, Lucas di Grassi, Richard Göransson, and Alain Menu all had birthdays in that timespan, but there were other drivers I wanted to write about more, and I’m sure I’ll occasionally interrupt this new trend for something more timely or if there’s just somebody I feel like writing about based on various discussions in “the discourse”.
As it turns out, my discussion of Edwards actually is rather timely. In addition to being his 45th birthday and his impending induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame next year, there has been much scuttlebutt in the past day about Edwards after Kyle Larson proclaimed himself a better driver than Max Verstappen (by the way, Sports Illustrated, do you realize that the Knoxville Nationals and the Chili Bowl aren’t NASCAR races?) The never-ending debate between F1 and NASCAR fans naturally led many fans to bring up the 2008 Race of Champions where Edwards beat Michael Schumacher, which is definitely one of his career highlights. Do I think Edwards was better than Schumacher? Lol no. It should come as no surprise that a NASCAR driver at his absolute peak can beat an F1 driver in the middle of a three-year sabbatical, but I do recognize that it was one of the things that caused Europeans to take NASCAR seriously for the first time. I also wanted to correct the record of those who feel like he was somehow an unworthy selection to the NASCAR Hall of Fame and not an incredibly obvious one.
