1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dave Darland
My first attempt to get down and dirty, but can I do so convincingly?
Right off the bat, I admit that I’m not particularly knowledgeable about dirt racing and sprint car racing (either winged or non-winged). While I do feel very comfortable writing about most major league open wheel, stock car, and/or touring car drivers because I have built models for all those forms of racing, that is not something I could very reasonably do for dirt racing. It can be difficult to find complete results for USAC races sometimes. The Third Turn is trying and I salute them for that, but they still have a lot of gaps and the odds of even finding out who every driver’s car owner was are so remote that I didn’t bother trying. I will admit that I did count some USAC results in my open wheel model for some of the drivers who also made IndyCar starts and were teammates with other drivers who made IndyCar starts, but way too much data is missing for me to even think of a dirt model. I also have hardly watched any dirt racing in my life, so I fear I might not know what I’m talking about.
Having said that, I have still done a substantial amount of research in this realm. On my master file that contains year-by-year summaries for the accomplishments of over 22,000 drivers, I have already recorded all wins in the top three USAC divisions. Although I’m sure all the dirt fans will scream at me, from my research, Darland feels like an overrated driver and a career compiler because most of the truly elite talents in that form of racing left to go to NASCAR long before they would have stuck around to accumulate Darland’s total number of wins, although I suspect if for example Tony Stewart or Kyle Larson had remained primarily dirt drivers rather than switching to NASCAR, they would have both ended up with more wins and many more titles. I can’t help thinking of Darland’s era of sprint car racing as a relatively minor-league era, so I feel I have to dock many of his seasons accordingly as I feel (from a global racing perspective) that he was more very good than great. Having said that, he was very good for such a long time that the accumulation of his performance becomes great (much like drivers like Hélio Castroneves or Ricky Rudd, the latter of whom I will be writing about soon). Having said that, while I fear I might be ignorant about the extent of his greatness and be dismissing him too quickly because many of the eventual NASCAR drivers seemed to hit higher peaks before bolting out of the series, I do think he’s the sort of driver that a lot of people (particularly outside the United States) would ignore because most Europeans seem to barely rate any drivers who don’t come out of formula cars, rally racing, or sports car racing so I suspect if a European was making this, they might entirely ignore him, and that would definitely be wrong too. I think I’ve found a solid compromise.
