1,000 Greatest Drivers: Justin Wilson

A championship-caliber talent who sadly never got a championship-caliber car.

I was a big fan of Wilson when he was active so this was obviously pretty hard to write, but I knew I had to write about him on the anniversary of his death. As early as 2008, I was constantly rooting for Penske and Ganassi to hire him and it just didn’t happen. I remember actually being upset when Penske chose Will Power instead. Given Power’s vast success since then, I’m not going to say Penske was wrong. But it seems like a lot of the Champ Car drivers got screwed at the time of the reconciliation. Power, Simon Pagenaud, Ryan Hunter-Reay, and to a much lesser extent Graham Rahal still survived, but it seemed like literally all the others, no matter how talented (and Wilson was better than all of them except probably Power), simply got ignored by the top teams like Penske and Ganassi because they already had their established drivers and Andretti seemed to be going for marketable novelties over talented drivers at the time. Wilson presumably would have won the Champ Car title in 2008 if the Champ Car season hadn’t shut down, and he was definitely the biggest victim of the reunion, not Paul Tracy (who was pretty much done winning anyway). He still amazed me, especially for Coyne, and I honestly think he was pretty much exactly as good as Sébastien Bourdais (he literally beat Bourdais substantially for the F3000 title in 2001 before Bourdais admittedly won it the next year, and his Coyne years were in my opinion better than Bourdais’s Coyne years). Bourdais too really should have gotten some top-tier rides in his late period as well as he somehow still managed to win in mid-pack at best cars five years in a row for 2014-18, but I do think Wilson was definitely a match for him (he’s slightly ahead of him in my model even). He was never able to prove it, and that’s a damn shame.