1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dan Gurney

Still vastly underrated despite his spectacular record.

I had most of this written but hadn’t truncated the post from nearly 1,200 words to my usual 500 nor had I done his season-by-season evaluations because I decided to file my taxes instead last night, which was certainly more important. I’m going to try to do this post followed by the Mel Kenyon post tonight to catch up. I’ve now filled in every day through early October, mostly filling in gaps with drivers I intended to cover from December through March but skipped at the time. I doubt I’ll keep up with that kind of schedule with everything else I have to do, but I still have enough gaps in October and November to fill in the missing gaps. I plan to finish new driver posts by November 30 to give me a full month to complete my top 200 driver posts for 2025. While writing, I decided I needed to pick 1964 as Gurney’s best year, so I bumped it up from 4th to 3rd for that year since I already had him 3rd in 1962 and moved Graham Hill one position down. Hill did beat Gurney that year in points and in F1metrics’s model, but Gurney was ahead of Hill in my model and also had a more versatile year winning in F1, Cup, and the World Sportscar Championship. Furthermore, Gurney was pretty much dunking on a three-time World Champion in Jack Brabham while Hill’s teammate Richie Ginther was actually pretty awful (-.168 in my open wheel model; I’m probably not listing him despite the fame of being one of the few American F1 winners). I think this was the right choice.