1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jenson Button

Belatedly, I included another Hall of Fame snub list.

After finishing my list of NASCAR Hall of Fame snubs a couple days ago, I wanted to make similar lists for other racing halls of fame. I decided to do the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame next because this one particularly intrigues me since it’s the only Hall of Fame that right now seems to be inducting people from Formula One, IndyCar, and NASCAR. The so-called “International” Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, which was already extremely NASCAR-biased to begin with given its location, has not inducted anyone since 2013 as the NASCAR Hall of Fame effectively replaced it. I guess that doesn’t bother me. Even though it did induct Formula One drivers, IndyCar drivers, founders of foreign car manufacturers, and so on, it only inducted one driver outside the United States (Brian Redman) since 2003. There’s also the Motorsports Hall of Fame in America, which still exists, but obviously it only considers drivers’ impact on North American series (I still might make a snub list for that). Better for the NASCAR Hall of Fame to just admit it only cares about NASCAR than to have a series billing itself as international and then effectively only induct NASCAR personages.

So, the IMSHoF is the best we’ve got in terms of inducting people from all disciplines of motorsports because Indianapolis is one of the few tracks where F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR have all competed, and at least unlike the IMHoF, it has actually inducted Michael Schumacher. The IMSHoF has decided that non-IndyCar drivers count, so in addition to Schumacher, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt, and Tony Stewart have also been inducted, primarily for their Brickyard 400 success (Stewart wouldn’t deserve it if just counting his IRL career at Indianapolis IMO). In my opinion, this makes NASCAR drivers the biggest snubs because there are four eligible drivers with multiple Brickyard wins who have not yet been inducted, while there is only one eligible Indy 500 winner, and quite frankly, Takuma Sato does not measure up to any of those four Cup Series drivers.

Furthermore, even though the Brickyard 400 became a joke amongst NASCAR fans and I get it, there was a period of time during the early IRL years when it was actually bigger than the Indy 500. I was trying to look up which years the Brickyard 400 had higher attendance, but I was really struggling with that, particularly because NASCAR hasn’t been reporting attendance for over a decade now (I didn’t even know that) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway never officially reported attendance either (only when there were sellouts), and obviously not all sellouts have the same attendance either. So after maybe an hour or two of trying to figure that out, I gave up.

The IMSHoF inducts two people a year, a driver and a non-driving contributor. Obviously, coming up with a driver list wasn’t hard, but the other list very much was. The problem is that in terms of IndyCar racing, very few people talk about anybody besides the drivers and the car owners these days. Unlike NASCAR where the crew chiefs are celebrities in the context of the sport, IndyCar’s equivalents really aren’t and I think I understand why. IndyCar does not have a single crew chief role and the three things NASCAR crew chiefs do are split into three different roles: chief mechanic, strategist, and engineer. As a result, while the NASCAR crew chiefs are talked about constantly, you can watch every IndyCar broadcast and be completely unable to name any of their equivalents. I know there were certain IndyCar chief mechanics who were famous back in the day like George Bignotti and A.J. Watson, but none of their equivalents get any screen time at all and I know that’s where a lot of the snubs here will be, so I’m flying blind on this one.

I couldn’t even tell you whether the chief mechanic, the strategist, or the engineer role is more important and I’ve watched almost all the IndyCar races since the start of the split. It seems like in IndyCar racing, the strategist role is where the household names are, and it’s not like I haven’t heard of any of them. I know Mike Hull has been Scott Dixon’s strategist for freaking ever, and Barry Wanser is with Álex Palou (and he was also with Dario Franchitti, which I think explains why the #10 car always seemed to have better strategy than the #9, not that the #9 car didn’t also seem to have better strategy than the rest of the field, mind you). Penske and Ganassi themselves were strategists for some of their cars for a while. Tim Cindric has oscillated between Hélio Castroneves, Will Power, and Josef Newgarden, and after he was fired and re-hired he’s now with Scott McLaughlin, and for being Penske’s ex-President and reviving the team’s fortunes in 2000s and all, I honestly never thought he was all that good a strategist to begin with (and maybe that’s part of why McLaughlin now suddenly looks like Ryan Briscoe 2.0). Kyle Moyer won the Indy 500 and CART title as chief mechanic for Jacques Villeneuve in 1995 and also as strategist for Simon Pagenaud in 2019 (he’s now Christian Lundgaard’s strategist). David Faustino was Will Power’s engineer and is now David Malukas’s strategist; I probably won’t forget that for a while just because I think it’s funny he shares a name with Bud Bundy’s actor. The Bretzman brothers, Ben and Eric, were Scott Dixon and Simon Pagenaud’s engineers respectively at their peaks, and they got written about a fair bit a long time ago just because having two great engineering brothers was unusual.

So, it’s not like there aren’t some big names and important figures in these fields. But the issue is you have to be a serious, hardcore IndyCar fan to have even heard of any of these people. You can watch every race and have all this blow by you since these people aren’t talked about constantly like NASCAR crew chiefs (probably because NASCAR crew chiefs handle all three of these roles simultaneously), even though as you can tell, a lot of them are actually very important (yes, Wanser is understandably getting a fair bit of press now, and rightfully so, since I’m tempted to say he’s even better at strategizing than Palou is at driving). It seems to me that the strategist is the most important role since those are the guys you hear about, but I could be totally wrong about that. Nonetheless, those are the people I went with for the second category, by and large, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are a lot of important figures I just haven’t heard of who will be inducted. Anyway, I looked up every winning chief mechanic as well as every winning engineer and strategist back to 2001 (I couldn’t find any of those people before that and I think maybe the chief mechanic did encompass all those roles in earlier years) to try to help me, but I’m sure there’s a lot I missed here.

There is a rule for the IMSHoF that inductees can be nominated twenty years after they started in professional auto racing, regardless of whether they retired or not. The question is what counts as professional auto racing; that can be truly vague. Since it was already announced that Scott Dixon and chassis designer Giampiero Dallara were inducted for 2026, I’m considering anyone who started their major league career by 2006 as a snub, but that is pretty vague. That means Will Power, who started his first Champ Car race in 2005, and 2006 IRL Rookie of the Year Marco Andretti should be just becoming eligible with Simon Pagenaud becoming eligible next year, but obviously, I don’t think any of these guys are top ten yet (Power may be a top ten IndyCar driver of all time, but his Indy 500 record is pretty blah compared to everything he did everywhere else and his win itself seemed to require less driving skill than any other win I can think of in the past 20 years tbh; it was all strategy). I tried to only judge by importance to the Speedway in general, not treating it as a general IndyCar Hall of Fame. Obviously, there are great drivers who should make an IndyCar Hall of Fame who shouldn’t make this one, like Alex Zanardi, Greg Moore, and Cristiano da Matta (because they never started an Indy 500 due to the CART series boycott) or probably Sébastien Bourdais and Paul Tracy (as great as they were, the Indianapolis records aren’t there; even if you do consider Tracy the rightful Indy 500 winner in 2002, his other finishes were abysmal and he had zero laps led there aside from the controversial finish).

If you look at the past inductees at the IMSHoF, they have typically been very open to inducting people who didn’t win the Indy 500 if they had contended to win several times, won poles, set track records, or even simply made a lot of starts/been around a long time/had a lot of friends on the committee. However, now that the Hall of Fame has to consider performance in multiple different series and there are so many different races to win, I don’t think I’m going to be putting non-winners very highly on my snub list even if some of them were better than some winners (I definitely think Marco Andretti had a better Indy 500 record than Ryan Hunter-Reay even if RHR won and Andretti didn’t, but neither are high on my snub list yet). Non-winners like Marco, Roberto Guerrero, Scott Goodyear, Carlos Muñoz, etc… probably all would have gotten in easily under the old standards, but the standards seem to be higher now that IndyCar drivers have to compete against drivers from other series. Would it surprise me if they got in someday? No.

Drivers

1. Jimmie Johnson: Okay, I know he had an extremely hit-or-miss career at the Brickyard 400 to say the least and a lot of people consider his win in 2008 to be the worst race in NASCAR history (it isn’t, for the record, there are plenty of Brickyards that have been worse actually; this was just the most embarrassing one except for maybe 2017). But his four Brickyard 400s still rank second to his “boss” Jeff Gordon’s five and since Johnson also won an IROC race at Indy in 2003, that means he is tied with Gordon for the most stock car wins there behind Kyle Busch’s six. I’m not going to say they were wrong to induct Scott Dixon first even though he only won the Indy 500 once since he is the all-time lap leader in the Indy 500 which Johnson isn’t at the Brickyard, but none of the other Indy 500 drivers come even close to matching honestly even any of the top four Brickyard 400 drivers here. Hell, his attempted three-wide pass with a blown engine of 2017 may be worthy of induction by itself.

2. Dale Jarrett: I admit that Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick both have stronger records than him, but I think Jarrett made a bigger impact at Indianapolis. Not only did he introduce the “kissing the bricks” tradition that crossed over to the Indy 500, his two Brickyard 400 wins in 1996 and 1999 came at the height of the CART/IRL split when the Brickyard was generally considered the more prestigious race and got higher attendance, while Busch and Harvick’s period of dominance occurred years after the race arguably no longer mattered. This makes him a bigger deal in my opinion even if the record is worse. But arguably his Brickyard that impressed me the most was 1998, when Todd Parrott ran him out of fuel and cost him the race while he was leading to receive the $10,000 halfway bonus for leading and Jarrett lost four laps under green before making up each of them on successive restarts and eventually finishing 16th in a race when it was almost impossible to pass.

3. Kyle Busch: With two Cup Series wins and four Nationwide/Xfinity Series wins, Busch is the winningest NASCAR driver at Indianapolis, and he became the second driver after Johnson to win the Brickyard in back-to-back years in 2015 and 2016. His 149 laps led in 2016 were the most ever recorded (and sorry, 2008 haters, that was the worst race in Brickyard history, even over the last two.) Furthermore, in the wake of his death, he will clearly be a sentimental favorite for any Hall of Fame induction he is up for. If they want to skip ahead of the line and induct him over Johnson or Jarrett, I don’t have a problem with that.

4. Kevin Harvick: Harvick became the third and final driver to win back-to-back Brickyard 400s after Johnson and Busch, but he also won in 2003 before it became clear how great he would eventually become. This also made him not only the third three-time winner after Gordon and Johnson, but only the second to win the Brickyard with multiple teams (Richard Childress Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing). His 389 laps led are only second to Gordon’s 528, but while he was always consistent at Indianapolis, with an extremely good average finish of 8.6 (the best of all time not counting Corey Heim and Christopher Bell), he wasn’t really a major factor for race wins until the Stewart-Haas period at a time when the race had mostly stopped mattering. As with Busch, I understand delaying him for dominating an era in a race that was fading to irrelevance.

5. Gil de Ferran: De Ferran’s Indy 500 record is drastically underrated as you can argue he could have easily won three consecutive Indy 500s if he hadn’t had bad luck. He did win the 2003 Indy 500 after passing his two-time defending-race-winning teammate Hélio Castroneves for the win, which was one more pass for the lead than Castroneves himself made in 2001 or 2002. In 2001, Castroneves illegally changed lanes to take the lead in the pits under caution while de Ferran correctly did not change lanes. Afterward, Castroneves was penalized and forced to drop behind Tony Stewart, but he was allowed to remain in front of de Ferran. This ultimately decided the race after Stewart pitted, so one can argue that de Ferran should have led Penske’s comeback 1-2 at Indianapolis and if he had, I think both of them would be viewed very differently now. Then in 2002, de Ferran left the pits second on his final pit stop after Tomas Scheckter crashed. He was about to inherit the position directly behind Castroneves and Felipe Giaffone when he lost a tire that wasn’t properly attached, which ruined his race. Tracy then inherited the third spot and we all know what happened next. If his tire had been properly secured, could he have passed Castroneves sooner? He was a better Indy driver than Tracy… Also, as with Busch there is a sentimental factor after his death. He deserves to be the next IndyCar driver inducted, although I’d still take the NASCAR guys first. I get that the Hall hasn’t wanted to touch the IndyCar split really. All the drivers from that era who were inducted either won 500s before (Arie Luyendyk) or after (Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti, Hélio Castroneves, Dan Wheldon, Tony Kanaan) the split. It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off the split era.

6. Takuma Sato: The overall record may be mediocre, but the Indianapolis record is not. Sato’s Indy 500 wins in 2017 and 2020 make him the only two-time 500 winner not in the Hall, and those weren’t his only good runs at the track by any means. Famously, he was every bit the equal of Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti as they jostled for the lead in the second half of the 2012 race and constantly exchanged the lead with each other before Franchitti made a nasty move to cut Sato off, triggering his last-lap spin. I don’t really blame him for doing that since it was the last lap, and he was doing this for a Rahal team that wasn’t amazing. Probably a lot of people could have won for Andretti in 2017, admittedly (much like how Muñoz had the best drive in the same car the year before), since all their cars were fast that day and he got lucky that several of his teammates blew engines, but he still had to pass Castroneves to do it. Then in 2020, he even more impressively won the Indy 500 everyone forgot since it was delayed to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In that race, he outdueled Dixon for the win in his last title season for a Rahal team that was even often quite slow on ovals. Dixon did kind of get screwed by the race-ending caution as it seemed he had the correct instinct about when to make the final pass if the race finished under green, so one could argue that finish was kind of a buzzkill, but cautions are part of the game and he got lucky with the timing there. The most successful driver of his generation at Indy and the most successful in general: he outdueled them both. And even as late as 2025, he led the most laps in a part-time entry. Sato might not have been a great driver in general, but he was at Indy, and I’m assuming he’s eligible since his F1 career started over 20 years ago even if his IndyCar career didn’t. And if he didn’t have those Indy 500 wins, I probably wouldn’t even be including him in the 1,000 but those wins move him to the right side of the bubble.

7. Sam Hornish, Jr.: Hornish, de Ferran’s replacement at Team Penske after his retirement, is the only one of the six great late-period IRL split drivers (you could almost argue they were the only good drivers for some of that time) who has not been inducted yet, as the other five all were (Castroneves, Dixon, Franchitti, Kanaan, and Wheldon). What makes him different, of course, is that all those guys won Indy 500s after the split ended and proved their mettle against the full post-split fields while Hornish ran off to NASCAR. Additionally, his Indy 500 finishing record is… kind of bad. Until his win in 2006, he had never finished on the lead lap there since he couldn’t stop crashing, but that is not to say he ran badly. Although Hornish had his only finish worse than 6th in his 2001 title season at Indy, where he had an early crash, he actually set the fastest lap in the race after the crash. He also ran 6th in 2003 with five laps to go with a severely underpowered Chevy when all the other Chevies were lapped or out, then led 77 laps from the front row in 2005 before finally winning from the pole in 2006. Although you can sort of argue the win was handed to him on a silver platter because he was able to stay out of the ptis when both Wheldon and Kanaan, who had dominated the race, were forced to pit on a late caution, he still needed to pass both Andrettis to win and successfully passed Marco Andretti for the win in a storybook ending by becoming the first driver to make a last-lap pass for the win. He’s essential eventually, but there are other priorities first. Still, the fact that all five of his main contemporaries are in makes this is a bigger priority.

8. Jacques Villeneuve: He couldn’t have possibly had a better start to his Indy 500 career after finishing 2nd and 1st in his first two starts, even if he only inherited the lead in his win in 1995 because his countryman Scott Goodyear passed the pace car on the final restart. Villeneuve won the race at the moment when international interest in IndyCar racing was at its greatest height in the wake of Nigel Mansell’s crossover but before the series’s split-induced decline. He also had one of the more impressive crossovers between the Indy 500 and the Indianapolis Grand Prix in F1, as his near-podium in 2000 for an underpowered BAR team might have been one of his most impressive drives. He then followed that up with a terrible Brickyard 400 in 2010, making him one of the few drivers to start all three of the major races, although his 2014 return to the Indy 500 twelve years after his last good season makes one wonder why he bothered. His brazen outspokenness, trash-talking drivers well after he was washed up himself, and especially Jeffrey Epstein associations caused fans to turn on him en masse, but unfortunately, I still think he deserves it.

9. Valentino Rossi: Now, I do not consider MotoGP riders for my 1,000 greatest driver list because they are riders, not drivers. But I suspect actual Halls of Fame will disagree on this distinction because a lot of publications consider motorcycle racers to be spiritually similar to auto racers. If they’re going to acknowledge the F1 drivers (and I agree they should), they probably should acknowledge MotoGP also. Marc Márquez is the only three-time winner there, but he hasn’t met his 20 years of eligibility yet. Dani Pedrosa, who won twice to Rossi’s once has, but Rossi won the first MotoGP race in 2008, and I think that should carry more weight than Pedrosa’s two wins later, especially since Rossi is frequently cited the greatest motorcycle racer ever. You can think that doesn’t matter, but obviously it helps with Hall of Fame inductions. Dale Earnhardt obviously isn’t one of the three best drivers in Brickyard 400 history, yet he was one of the only three NASCAR drivers to get in so far. The same should apply here.

10. Wolf Henzler: I could have gone for earlier Indy 500 winners (it’s weird that René Thomas isn’t in) or some of the other F1 winners (obviously Rubens Barrichello should never get in since his win is a joke and Lewis Hamilton might not be eligible yet, but Mika Häkkinen is. However, Henzler is who I landed on even though he will never happen. During the years when F1 hosted in the United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis, the one-make sports car series Porsche Supercup, which typically held races on the Saturdays of European F1 weekends, decided to hold double-headers annually at the Indianapolis round. In this series, Henzler won four times, more than any other driver has won on the road course except his own countryman Michael Schumacher. I actually think this is a stronger case than anyone else does because I have typically found that Porsche Supercup drivers have been the most underrated drivers overall for years, but I imagine a lot of IMS partisans don’t even remember that series raced there or even existed (since it gets basically minimal press coverage), so this will never happen. But I kind of think it should.

Contributors

1. Dean Sicking: It’s weird that NASCAR has retconned things so much that people think they discovered all the safety innovations that they later embraced when it is now forgotten that the research leading to the construction of the SAFER barrier was originally funded by Tony George and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with Arie Luyendyk offering the first test case for the technology when he crashed in the 1998 IROC race into a makeshift proto-SAFER barrier. IMS was the first track to introduce the SAFER barrier and it was very much an IMS project that got adapted to other tracks once it proved so successful (it’s arguably one of the few positive things George did), and the IMSHoF should be embarrassed that they let NASCAR induct this guy first. Taking credit for other people’s innovations as per usual, but it was an innovation that proved useful to any form of oval racing anywhere, so he should obviously be inducted here also.

2. Rick Hendrick: If they’re going to decide NASCAR drivers are eligible, they should obviously also consider NASCAR contributors. Even though the Brickyard 400 has existed for only a relatively small percentage of the time as the Indy 500, Rick Hendrick’s 11 Brickyard wins (5 with Jeff Gordon, 4 with Jimmie Johnson, 1 with Kasey Kahne, and 1 with Kyle Larson) are way more than any car owner other than Roger Penske (the owner who Hendrick literally modeled his NASCAR team after) has had in the Indy 500 itself (even Chip Ganassi only has either 6 or 7, depending on whether you count 1989 after he had bought a share of Pat Patrick’s team before he assumed majority control the next year) and this should be recognized.

3. Tim Cindric: I feel weird about this one for several reasons. It would certainly be a very glad-handed pick, what with Penske owning both IMS and the IndyCar Series and Cindric being team president for so long before he was fired in the team cheatin’ scandal than quietly re-hired as Scott McLaughlin’s strategy amid much controversy. All the bad blood from the attenuator scandal makes it hard for me to consider his career as a whole, but when I do that, his career is obviously deserving. Cindric famously brought Team Penske back from the dead after the worst period in their IndyCar team’s history (1996-1999) and immediately won back-to-back CART titles with Gil de Ferran, then spearheaded Penske’s first 1-2 finish in 2001 with Castroneves and de Ferran (even if I feel the wrong guy won that day), which led to him becoming Team President. I think he gets too much credit because I think Penske switching from its inferior Penske-Mercedes-Goodyear package to the dominant Reynard-Honda-Firestone package and replacing Al Unser, Jr. at the height of his alcoholism and a rotating cast of randos with the two future stars were bigger factors in his success, so sometimes I wonder if it was more that Cindric was there when it happened than actually instrumental in Penske’s revival. Regardless of how you feel about that, he was obviously an important figure in keeping Penske relevant, even if I don’t actually think he was an amazing strategist. He consistently gave his drivers good setups, sure, but in IndyCar, the strategists aren’t the engineers unlike in NASCAR where the crew chiefs kind of handle both. He first came to fame, remember, with Max Papis and Team Rahal in 1999 and although Papis did finish an uncharacteristic fifth in points, people’s sole memory of him that season was Papis running out of fuel on the last lap at Michigan while leading. Cindric’s strategy was always a little shaky with Castroneves, Power, or with Newgarden. I used to get down on Castroneves for not winning a title, but nowadays, I feel he always called the wrong strategies while the Ganassi strategists Mike Hull and Barry Wanser much more often called the right ones, leading to so many races where some Penske driver would dominate and then some Ganassi driver would win in the pits at his expense. I am convinced that Castroneves, Power, and Newgarden would all have more wins and titles now if they’d had either of those guys as strategists (and what he’s doing with McLaughlin now isn’t impressive either), and Dixon, Franchitti, and Palou would all have fewer with Cindric. Yet, he still remained relevant for a quarter of a century, which is hard to do, and presided over five Indy 500 wins as strategist (the first three of Castroneves’s, two of which admittedly were highly controversial, and both of Newgarden’s, and even those wins were controversial). So, I’m in a weird place with him. Obviously he deserves induction with as much of a conflict of interest as it is, but it feels to me like he has a worse record than everybody else thinks.

4. Mike Hull: While I think Barry Wanser’s strategies have been better than Hull’s as I think typically Franchitti and Palou’s strategies with the #10 car have been typically better than Dixon’s with the #9 and Wanser now has three Indy 500 wins (two with Franchitti and one with Palou) to Hull’s one, I am not so sure whether the Hall would actually consider Wanser to be eligible at this point since I’m not sure when they would argue his professional career started, so I’m going to argue with Hull instead. Hull was obviously a better strategist than Cindric and that goes without saying, as Dixon kept winning races and even championships on strategies at Penske’s expense, but then Franchitti won titles multiple times on strategy (2007, 2009) at Dixon’s expense. Hull is probably the second-best strategist of the 21st century after Wanser, but Wanser still reads as too new and Hull doesn’t, which is why I don’t have Wanser on this list yet. I think he might have been Juan Pablo Montoya’s strategist in his 2000 win too, but I can’t yet confirm that. Hull played effectively the same role as Cindric at Ganassi as GM and Team Manager, and I only ended up placing Cindric higher because Cindric was better at Indy, but Hull was certainly better on the rest of the schedule and no slouch at Indy since he guided Dixon to the most laps led there of all time.

5. John Menard: Okay, he was very successful as an IRL car owner but his Indy 500 finishing record was really shaky when considering Tony Stewart’s frequent mechanical breakdowns and Greg Ray’s crashes. His teams ended up rarely getting finishes despite dominant equipment year after year and maybe it feels weird I’m listing him and not the vastly more successful Newman-Haas team, whose cars even led more laps at Indy in a more competitive era. I kind of think there was more value added here though. He had a third-place finish at Indy with Al Unser in 1992 the week before his 53rd birthday, which is kind of unheard of. He won back-to-back poles at the Indy 500 with Scott Brayton, who was not good. After Brayton’s death in post-qualifying practice in 1996, Stewart inherited the pole as a rookie. Then, he was a qualifying juggernaut with Greg Ray, even turning that fundamentally mediocre driver into an IRL champion immediately after Stewart’s switch to NASCAR. Meanwhile, Newman-Haas kept dominating and not winning with drivers like Michael Andretti, Mario Andretti, and Nigel Mansell. Those guys presumably would have had just as much success with a variety of other teams, while I suspect most of those Menard drivers would have done worse with anyone else. Plus, of course from an Indy perspective, he was instrumental as one of the few people alongside A.J. Foyt who gave the IRL initial cred. I may not like the early IRL personally, but it’s hard to deny his influence in that role. And even though he never won the Indy 500 as a car owner, he did eventually win both Indy and the Brickyard as a chief sponsor, making him I believe the only sponsor to do that, what with Simon Pagenaud at Indy in 2019 and his hapless nepo baby at the Brickyard in 2011.

6. Jim McKay: The IMSHoF has decided announcers count, as they have already inducted Paul Page and Bob Jenkins. Now, what both of those guys have in common is that they were lead announcers for both the Indy 500’s radio and television coverage while McKay was only the play-by-play guy for television coverage, but he was the Indy 500’s first play-by-play TV guy on television and his 14 years in that role (1971-1974, 1976-1985) match Page’s for the longest in history; if you count his two years as host in 1986 and 1987 after that, he had a longer tenure than anyone on television. He might not be an obvious choice for most people, but he is a deserving one.

7. Henry Bock: Bock was the director of medical services at IMS from 1982-2006 and the IRL from 1996-2006. He often gets co-credit for the SAFER barrier in a lot of corners and he did help modernize the Speedway’s safety teams. My slight qualm here is that I honestly think CART’s safety team was better, more professional, and more modern than his was, but I am trying to go just based on impact on the Indy 500 itself.

8. Rick Galles: What sets him apart from a lot of his contemporary CART owners who either won the race like Jim Trueman or were vastly more successful and didn’t like Newman-Haas is that his win with Al Unser, Jr. in 1992 marked the only time that a team other than Penske won an Indy 500 in a chassis of their own construction. The Galmer chassis named for its two creators, Galles and ex-March engineer Alan Mertens, delivered a monumental upset that year due to its remarkable reliability. Although Michael Andretti obviously dominated the shit out of that race, Unser won in what was then the closest finish in history after the faster Fords dropped out because the car managed to survive probably due to its slower horsepower and this is definitely more of a credit to the team than the driver (indeed, Unser actually failed to have any DNFs this year, which was extremely rare at that time). This double feat of winning as car owner and constructor gives him the edge over a lot of owners in my opinion, and of course Unser nearly won again with him in 1989, etc…

9. Chad Knaus: I could have gone with a lot of Indy 500 chief engineers like Rick Rinaman, Kyle Moyer, Matt Jonsson, Richard Buck, Clive Howell, Denis Daviss, etc… but I’m going with this. NASCAR crew chiefs are more important than IndyCar chief mechanics, strategists, and engineers at this point, particularly because NASCAR crew chiefs handle all three of those roles and the IndyCar guys don’t. Yes, I think Cindric and Hull have greater impact at Indianapolis because they also managed the Penske and Ganassi teams for darn near a quarter century in addition to being strategists and Knaus didn’t quite do that. But his four wins are certainly still the most of any NASCAR crew chief, putting him at least in something pretty close to the same league as the great Indy 500 chief strategists in days of yore like George Bignotti and A.J. Watson in my opinion. I ended up going with him over a lot of successful IndyCar guys just because the NASCAR crew chief role is more versatile.

10. Bryan Herta: I didn’t expect to list him, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind with regard to Herta is either his mediocre driving career (particularly Alex Zanardi passing him in the hairpin turn on the last lap at Laguna Seca in 1996) or his son’s ostensibly mediocre driving career (c’mon guys, just because Colton sucks in Formula 2 doesn’t mean his IndyCar career, where he frequently trounced F1 alumni like Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean, and Alexander Rossi and contended for the title a mere two years ago, sucked). Bryan’s Indy 500 record is actually overall better than Colton’s with a third in 2005 and a fourth in 2004, but the reason he deserves induction is what he did after that. In 2011, his eponymous team Bryan Herta Autosport delivered the upset of the decade by winning the Indy 500 with a part-time Dan Wheldon, only one of three part-time Indy 500 winners in my lifetime. Five years later, he served as the strategist for Rossi’s Indy 500 win in 2016 as a rookie, and obviously if you will recall, that was a fuel mileage win so you could argue that Rossi won that entirely on strategy. He was the first true rookie to win at Indy since George Souders in 1927 (I don’t think Graham Hill exactly counts since he was already an F1 champion, and I don’t think Juan Pablo Montoya and Hélio Castroneves count because Montoya was already a CART champion and Castroneves was a veteran who already had four wins before his Indy 500 win). For lightning in a bottle to strike twice for Herta in delivering what one could argue were the two most unexpected Indy 500s of the 21st century, he belongs in. And since he’s Kyle Kirkwood’s strategist right now, there’s a solid chance he isn’t done. I could have done Michael Shank here instead for a very similar reason, but he reads as too new.

The deep cleaners arrived to clean the house last Wednesday, but due to years of collected dust and debris from my mom’s hoarding, the motor on their vacuum actually burnt up while servicing the living room, so they said they’d come back on Saturday after they got a replacement part, but that’s been put off until this coming Friday. I felt bad about that and offered to pay to replace their vacuum even though I had already paid them. They asked me to pay for half the cost of the replacement part and I agreed to do so. Construction on the ramp started today and it’ll probably be finished either tomorrow or next week. I’ve started trying to arrange things between the fourth floor social worker and the woman at PACE CNY to arrange in-home care to allow for Mom’s discharge, but the problem here is that each social worker seems to only stay there for a few months before leaving (okay, one of them was promoted). The social worker I was talking with a couple weeks ago has already left and is in the process of being replaced, but the woman who is about to become the fourth floor social worker is still on the seventh floor, so there’s still a lot of bureaucracy to navigate.

I have not much to say about either this weekend’s NASCAR or IndyCar races frankly. I watched the Cup Series at Iowa and IndyCar at Portland simultaneously in different windows, just switching which race I had on mute. Neither of them was very good and it was annoying they were both won entirely on strategy, but I saw an awful lot of people trashing the Iowa race and the Portland race gave me real perspective. Portland was so godawful that it made Iowa seem somewhat good in comparison.

Finally, LearnedLeague Match 110 just started on Monday, and I’m going to start going through each day’s past results after this. It gives me some easy content for these intros, allowing me more time to focus on the driver entries and other stuff. Trying to do a major driver like Button at the same time as an ambitious IMSHoF snub ranking was too much, but I should be able to keep up better if I’m just doing LearnedLeague content again instead of snub lists that took me far longer than I expected. Even better, you don’t have to hear my annoying, repetitive culture takes. Admittedly, since I intend to do both Tim Richmond and Rusty Wallace tomorrow, that might take a while, too.