1,000 Greatest Drivers: Greg Moore

One of the few mega-hyped drivers who I think was still underrated.

I know I have to handle this one sensitively since today is the 25th anniversary of Moore’s death. His was the first driver whose death I watched live and it did shake me. I do think when fans project what a driver would have done after their death, a lot of the time people’s projections are more than what the drivers actually would have delivered. I’ve read several people suggest that Dale Earnhardt would have won the 2001 championship even though he’d been consistently a 6th-10th place driver the last four years of his career. I don’t think Alan Kulwicki would’ve come even close to ever winning a title again, particularly as owner-driver operations and single car teams collapsed by the late ‘90s. I’m not convinced Davey Allison would have, but there’s probably a stronger case there. I think Dan Wheldon and Justin Wilson’s best years were behind them and they had at most a couple wins left.

But Moore is different. While my model is likely significantly inflating him at fourth overall both because I removed DNFs from my model (and he had a lot of DNFs) and because we never saw his decline, I think he was probably the best oval driver in CART in the years that he raced and there is no one who thought Hélio Castroneves was a better driver than Moore at the time of his death (although Castroneves’s 1999 is actually pretty solid since he was driving for an unsponsored team that went out of business). I think there’s no question he would have gotten the IRL title that eluded Castroneves if he’d followed Penske to the IRL, which presumably he would have. Although maybe you could argue Castroneves was better than Moore on road courses, I bet Moore would have blown the hell out of the IRL fields in the 2002-2004 all-oval seasons especially. I know Castroneves had a lot of great moments, but I don’t really feel he had the transcendent talent of the other three four-time Indy 500 winners and even in the time he raced I think Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Dan Wheldon, and Sam Hornish, Jr. were all better oval drivers. Penske really, really dominated at Indy in the 2000s and there’s no doubt in my mind Moore was better on ovals than the three Penske winners that decade (Castroneves, Gil de Ferran, and Hornish) so I think he really lost most of his prime in a way that most other drivers who died didn’t, and when considering how often he won for a team with subpar Mercedes engines, he’s probably one of the few drivers who is massively overhyped relative to the level of his success who is still underrated. I hope I did him justice here.