1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dan Wheldon
This is why we shouldn't embrace competition gimmicks.
It took quite a while for me to pare this down from 1,400 words, like I knew that it would. I knew I had to be sensitive on this one and I also knew there were many things I needed to mention. Obviously, I had to condense the narrative down a few times. Yes, I know Wheldon actually started for Andretti a couple races before Indy because Dario Franchitti was injured in a motorcycle crash, but I didn’t have to room include it. I also know that Toyota and Chevrolet both withdrew from the IRL after 2005 making the series an all-Honda show from 2006-2011, which is the main reason for Ganassi’s return to form (since Honda had utterly dominated the series in 2004 and 2005 and Ganassi’s Toyotas were terrible in that period), although I would say Wheldon definitely helped there. I’m surprised I didn’t have room to mention either Tony Kanaan and Scott Dixon because I was expecting to mention both of them. I was initially planning on rating Wheldon’s 2005 as a top five season because if you just rattle off the accomplishments like I just did there, it definitely sounds like one. A lot of people would say that’s the best IRL season to that point (although I think I like Dixon’s 2003 better), but I ended up not giving him any top five seasons just because I sneakily think Wheldon’s 2006 is better than his 2005 as he beat Dixon substantially worse in 2006 than he did Kanaan in 2005, and Dixon was obviously better than Kanaan. He was extremely unlucky to lose that title in a tiebreaker to Hornish when he really kicked his ass all season (and in the Indy 500 also, where Hornish was also extremely lucky).
I know most fans loved Randy Bernard because he was responsive to the fans and he accepted a lot of fan input. I really never did as it seemed like half the time Bernard was just taking instructions for what to do from Robin Miller (I liked his writing but he should not have that much influence over the running of the series) and Miller often had bad ideas. Bernard seemed to never take driver safety into consideration at all and that was a trend all throughout 2011 as that season brought us the random draw for the second race at the Texas doubleheader, where Wade Cunningham (who crashed in the first race) drew the second starting spot (which to be honest scared the shit out of me at the time), then racing in the rain at Loudon, then the whole Las Vegas boondoggle. Bernard’s indifference to driver safety actually made me nostalgic for Tony George at the time, and I honestly felt Mark Miles was an improvement at first (at this point, Miles has outlived his usefulness). Yes, Bernard does get credit for introducing the DW12 chassis and that helped revitalize the series, but I have no other happy memories of his tenure. I suspect the Las Vegas race is the reason why IndyCar has now entirely left 1.5+ mile superspeedways outside of Indy, and that was a big loss. Texas was becoming a historic venue and it seems pretty obvious to me that the drivers never wanted to race there again after Wheldon’s death (indeed, four drivers immediately retired after the Las Vegas crash: Davey Hamilton, Alex Lloyd, Tomas Scheckter, and even Paul Tracy). Even though I was more indifferent to Texas than most fans, this still seems like a big loss and I bet it would still be on the schedule if Bernard hadn’t engineered the Las Vegas fiasco. I know most fans disagree with me, but I’m pretty sure the teams and the drivers don’t, and obviously the series is going to listen to the teams and the drivers more and they clearly don’t want to race on this track. I still remember when Jimmie Johnson said that IndyCars shouldn’t race on any ovals at all, before he actually did so. What bothered me most was that Wheldon was forced to start last, which put him right in the middle of the mess. Although he qualified poorly (29th), I must note that the drivers who started 29th and 30th (Ana Beatriz and Simona de Silvestro) did drive through the wreck. Makes me wonder.
