1,000 Greatest Drivers: Hélio Castroneves
Still overrated as a titleless four-time Indy winner, but he was admittedly unlucky elsewhere.
I had this mostly written yesterday but I hadn’t pared it down to 500 words until now. This is the second of three consecutive columns (Stewart, Castroneves, and Al Unser, Jr.) that won’t be fun to write. In Stewart and Unser’s case, it’s making sure to be sensitive about their off-track issues while in Castroneves’s case, it’s that he’s such an icon to so many people based on his four Indy 500 wins when he really isn’t to me. The fact that he became the only four-time Indy 500 winner of the IRL era while also not winning a title even though five of his teammates did (Gil de Ferran, Sam Hornish, Jr., Will Power, Simon Pagenaud, and Josef Newgarden) means when evaluating his career, you essentially need to argue whether the other races matter or not, which gets into a lot of awkward split politics that aren’t fun to talk about. Essentially the Hulman-George family always felt that all races should play second-fiddle to Indy. I suppose you can understand this since Tony Hulman bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway first and then accidentally started running USAC after the AAA abruptly withdrew from motorsports sanctioning. CART started in part because they wanted to increase marketing for the other races, so acting like the rest of the schedule doesn’t matter and treating Castroneves like some all-time great is wrong and especially playing into Tony George’s vision. It was pretty funny that he ended up being more famous for appearing on Dancing with the Stars than for his Indy 500 wins, which really showed how much IndyCar had already fallen by then.
The other thing is that both of Castroneves’s first two Indy wins were controversial. Everybody knows about 2002 and we don’t need to relitigate that, but I discovered as I was watching the 2001 Indy 500 that that race is actually even more controversial. Castroneves’s teammate Gil de Ferran was leading the race before they pitted under caution. While leaving the pits, Castroneves illegally switched lanes to beat de Ferran out and cut off Tony Stewart in the outside lane. They came out in this order: Castroneves, de Ferran, Stewart. If they just had done a no-call, I probably wouldn’t have been complaining about this. However, on the restart, they penalized Castroneves and forced him to restart behind Stewart yet ahead of de Ferran even though de Ferran committed no infraction. I do not understand why Castroneves was allowed to restart in front of de Ferran after being penalized for his pit exit when he beat de Ferran out of the pits. This ultimately decided the race after Stewart pitted later. Then of course there is the 2002 caution timing business. People excuse Castroneves’s lack of titles by basically going, “Yeah, but Indy WINZ!” If you actually look at the first two wins which were the backbone of his legacy, they were definitely pretty awkward and unimpressive. In fact, the only 21st century Indy wins I would say you could argue were less impressive were Dario Franchitti in 2007 and Will Power in 2018. I’ll even take Josef Newgarden’s own controversial wins and Marcus Ericsson’s win over those.
Having said, you don’t want to go too far and deny him legend status as an overreaction, which I think for a while I did. Even though five of Castroneves’s teammates won titles and he didn’t and even though he had a losing record to every teammate except Juan Pablo Montoya (even Ryan Briscoe), he still has an overall well above-average rating in my model because his teammates were so strong and he had a long litany of very good seasons even though he had few great ones. He definitely had a high floor with only one truly awful season (2011) in his heyday even if he didn’t have a high ceiling, and his consistency from season-to-season was better than most of his peers also. I actually was a fan before Dancing with the Stars and the tax evasion trial and I definitely rooted for him for the title in 2008, where you could argue he outperformed Scott Dixon. He beat him in lead shares and average finish. Dixon won the title because he had 6 wins (including the Indy 500) to Castroneves’s 2, but he was also substantially luckier, which might have been enough to swing the title for him since he only won by 17 points. Dixon was still much higher in my model because he beat Dan Wheldon 12-4 (greater than Castroneves beat the worse Briscoe), so I did rate him as still being better but I can see the other case. Based on that season, I can see why he probably deserved a title for his overall career even if none of his other seasons came even close. While it was funny when Jimmy Vasser called Castroneves his “favorite actor” because he didn’t buy the sincerity of his bubbly personality, I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that Vasser was better just because he won a title and Castroneves didn’t. I’ve also started to come around on Castroneves in part because I honestly think the recently-fired Tim Cindric was a pretty terrible strategist who cost Castroneves, Power, and Newgarden all a lot of wins (primarily on road/street courses), as I mentioned in the Newgarden post. If I’m going to argue Castroneves was overrated because of certain fans’ Indy centrism, I also have to acknowledge that part of the reason he never won a title was simply because Cindric was not as good a strategist as Ganassi’s Mike Hull. If he’d had Hull in 2008, would he have beaten Dixon for the title? Maybe. It is Castroneves’s fault that the tax evasion trial pretty much killed his momentum from that season and he never really quite got his mojo back as he played second-fiddle to other teammates for the rest of his career, but I don’t deny that he had a great career even though a lot of people overrate it.
