1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jack Hewitt
Just do it.
Okay, I didn’t find room for his nickname “Do It Hewitt”, but I found a way to use it anyway. I had to get quite a bit of this from newspaper archives because sprint car drivers from this era often have surprisingly little written about them online. The amount I had to look up probably made this better, though, as I was able to find and insert a couple of funny quotes, as befitting a driver who is perhaps even better known as a personality, as dominant as he was.
I didn’t have much to say about any of this weekend’s races. It was nice that Charles Leclerc got a long-overdue win in the F1 race, as poorly officiated as that restart during the middle of the last lap was. Normally, I’d say the same thing about Pato O’Ward ending his winless drought in IndyCar, but that kind of annoyed me, if only because I hated to see the driver McLaren is keeping winning out over the driver they are dropping who is beating him in points. I was also mildly annoyed that Chase Briscoe won over Christopher Bell when Briscoe has had a pretty lucky Joe Gibbs Racing career, while Bell has been horribly unlucky this season, even discounting his injury, but the racing was okay across the board.
There was a lot of scuttlebutt about O’Ward asking Zak Brown to be “relieved of his F1 duties” today. Of course, there was all the cringe garbage you inevitably expect where F1-only fans went on about how he wasn’t good enough or that he’s mid or whatever. I know he’s too old to be considered, but he’s been ahead of both McLaren F1 drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, pretty consistently in my open wheel model. O’Ward actually had a better teammate head-to-head record (9-6) against Colton Herta than Norris did (13-14) when they both competed against him in minor leagues. It just seems like everything is so specialized now that if you don’t commit to one singular series/developmental path and instead try to cross over between a bunch of different series these days, you typically fail. Part of the issue seems to be that there is far less testing available in pretty much every series (especially post-COVID) to learn unfamiliar cars quickly, which makes talented drivers like Herta in Formula 2 this year fall flat on their face when competing against inferior drivers who have more experience with those particular cars and tracks (see also Connor Zilisch this year, etc…) Yes, I am certain that O’Ward would be a worse F1 driver than Norris and Piastri because is career wasn’t geared towards that, but I am also certain that they would be worse IndyCar drivers.
It just gets really frustrating when you read these F1 fans who act like the 15th best F1 driver is better than the best driver in any other series. We’ve seen F1 drivers cross over to IndyCar, and few of them have set the world on fire there lately. Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean, and Takuma Sato were… fine. Above average for sure, but aside from Ericsson and Sato’s very strong Indianapolis records and Grosjean’s two or three epic road/street course drives (which he didn’t win), you could forget they were even racing in IndyCar half the time. (Do you even remember that Grosjean has returned to IndyCar now?) Were they not qualified to be F1 drivers because they didn’t become IndyCar championship contenders? Even better example: Fernando Alonso literally DNQed at Indy, and he was a World Champion.
One of the things I like about my open wheel model especially is that it can cut through a lot of this bullshit. I guess a lot of F1 fans care only about F1, and their measure of success is how successfully anyone is in F1, and any driver who wasn’t at least an above-average F1 driver is mid, even if their dominant performances in domestic series were actually more impressive than what Nico Hülkenberg is doing or whatever (mind you, Hülkenberg is still going to be a lock on my list so I’m not dissing him or anything, but I do think it’s quite fair to say he had a low ceiling and is mainly making the list as a career compiler). I don’t really care so much how drivers do as F1 drivers, I guess, and you’re not going to get me to say Michael Andretti, Sébastien Bourdais, and Alex Zanardi sucked because they flopped there (although I do rate Zanardi much lower than the other two). Even the Eurocentric media like Autosport are not that biased towards F1 drivers, but it seems like a lot of fans who came in through Drive to Survive or whatever, are. But I know what social media is like and I don’t have to listen to it.
As for O’Ward personally, I admit I expected him to challenge and eventually overtake Álex Palou at some point, and he seems to be getting farther and farther away from doing so. Ever since IndyCar went to their ticking timebomb hybrid engines in the middle of 2024, nobody’s seemed to have anything for Palou. Nonetheless, I’d still say it’s hard to argue O’Ward has fallen off either, while many of the big stars (Scott McLaughlin, Josef Newgarden, Will Power, Scott Dixon, Herta) all have. Yes, it now appears that some combination of Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Discaard, and David Malukas may be vying to overtake O’Ward as Palou’s principal challenger, but I have not yet given up on O’Ward winning a title or an Indy 500 (while I probably have for McLaughlin at this point).
Personal to Colton Herta: Give up on your disastrous Formula 2 campaign and try to fight for the #9 car. You’ll never get an opportunity like that again. Or even returning to Andretti in the #28. If Ericsson could dominate a race at Gateway out of nowhere, maybe you could still win a championship…
JACK HEWITT………………………..USA
Born: July 8, 1951
Best year: 1986
Best drive: 1998 4-Crown Nationals at Eldora Speedway
One of the greatest sprint car drivers of the late 20th century, Hewitt was the son of Don Hewitt, the first driver to turn laps around Eldora Speedway. After returning from the U.S. Army, he began racing seriously in 1975. Although he was simultaneously a carpenter, he quit once racing proved more profitable. When the World of Outlaws launched in 1978, Hewitt initially competed semi-regularly, but he never ran a full WoO schedule because it would have limited him to 60 races a year. A master of both winged and non-winged sprints, Hewitt preferred to compete regionally in the Midwest to maximize his number of starts, typically entering 120-150 races annually, so he primarily focused on the USAC Silver Crown, Midget, Sprint, and All-Star Circuit of Champions races.
Hewitt peaked in the mid ‘80s in Bob Hampshire’s #63 car using a chassis nicknamed Gussie. With this chassis, he won 30 races in 1985, including his only ASCoC championship, and 29 in 1986. The latter year, he earned six USAC Silver Crown wins in eight starts, setting a single-season record that still stands. He became the first back-to-back Silver Crown champion in 1987, and he won at least one top-tier USAC race every year from 1982-2001. His 23 Silver Crown wins were the record until Kody Swanson broke it in 2018, but Swanson never matched Hewitt’s versatility. Although Hewitt never won a Sprint or Midget title, he also won 46 USAC Sprint races (which ranked second when he retired), 56 ASCoC races, and 7 Midget races. He also frequently competed in Australia, finishing second in the 1990-1991 World Series Sprintcars championship.
However, Hewitt truly made his mark at Eldora, winning 43 races in six different divisions, including a record 19 at the track’s marquee 4-Crown Nationals. In 1998, he achieved an historic feat by becoming the only driver ever to win all four races (USAC Silver Crown, Midget and Sprint, and UMP Modified) at the 4-Crown Nationals in one night, for four different car owners no less! Also that year, Hewitt achieved a lifelong dream by becoming the then-oldest rookie starter and finishing 12th at the Indy 500 in the brief period when the IRL catered to overlooked sprint car drivers. His career ended in 2002 when he flipped ten times at the Twin Cities Raceway, suffering severe injuries to his neck and right arm, but he survived the crash.
Despite his sprint car dominance, Hewitt was modest about his accomplishments. When included on a list of the 25 greatest sprint car drivers, he questioned his inclusion, believing it resulted from his fan interactions more than his driving. Always both plain-spoken and outspoken, he remained approachable while chiding NASCAR and World of Outlaws stars for “hid[ing] in their trailers”. After sweeping the 4-Crown Nationals, he was handed a broom and misunderstood the gesture, believing the officials “wanted [him] to sweep something up.” He might be better remembered as a personality than as a driver, but his driving career was unquestionably great.
Open wheel model: N/A (.464)
Teammate head-to-heads: 2-0 (1-0 vs. Donnie Beechler, 1-0 vs. Jason Leffler)
Year-by-year: 1982: C-, 1983: C, 1984: C-, 1985: E-, 1986: E, 1987: C+, 1988: C+, 1989: E-, 1990: C+, 1991: C+, 1993: C, 1995: C-, 1998: C-