1,000 Greatest Drivers: Hurley Haywood

Curiously shares the same birthday as his more venerated teammate.

After those two rather heavy and presumably alienating posts I wrote the last two nights, I’m going to try to be lighter for a while and stick to what you came for and mostly focus on racing content for a while now. Starting on May 11, I’m going to go through most of the remaining Indy 500 winners who I will be including on my list who I haven’t covered yet. There are still other Indy 500 winners I am intending to include like Ray Keech and Takuma Sato besides this run of 21 drivers, but I don’t consider either of them locks for opposite reasons (Keech’s career was just too short as he only started two Indy 500s before he died at 29, while Sato is definitely worthy as a career compiler but had too low a ceiling for me to call him a lock).

However, over the next eight days, I will be covering both halves of two of the most famous American sports car racing duos: Hurley Haywood and Peter Gregg and Ricky and Jordan Taylor. Curiously, Haywood and Gregg were both born on May 4 (Gregg eight years earlier) so it makes sense to do them both consecutively. I chose to do Haywood first but I could have done them in either order. Technically, this was the one for May 3 but since Haywood’s birthday is May 4, no big deal that I didn’t have it posted until then. Jordan’s birthday is May 10 so I whooshed Ricky into the previous slot because I had an empty slot on May 9. There was only one great driver born on May 9 and that’s Shane van Gisbergen and I already did him when I probably should have waited. Now normally, I don’t like to do current drivers and the Taylor brothers are very much active and I’m sure neither of them are done winning, but it seems equally clear that their best races are probably behind them so I won’t be missing much by writing those articles now.

This week’s schedule:

May 3: Hurley Haywood (paywalled)
May 4: Peter Gregg (paywalled)
May 5: Glenn Seton (free)
May 6: Sam Bird (free)
May 7: Denny Hulme (paywalled)
May 8: Jo Bonnier (free)
May 9: Ricky Taylor (paywalled)
May 10: Jordan Taylor (paywalled)

I watched both the F1 race at Miami and the NASCAR race at Texas today and I liked both, but I also don’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about either of them except that I’m kind of surprised that Alan Gustafson has finally figured out strategy after being maybe the worst strategist among elite NASCAR crew chiefs of the last 20 years.

If anybody wants another Alex Zanardi piece in the wake of his death, let me know. There’s probably a lot I’d change about the one I released over a year and a half ago…