1,000 Greatest Drivers: Leo Kinnunen

Also including my top 20 NASCAR Hall of Fame snubs.

People are sick of my culture takes and I’m starting to be sick of them as well, so I’m going to pivot hard away from that and perhaps more towards to what my Substack is supposed to be ostensibly about. I’m going to use this post and perhaps a couple future ones listing who I think are the biggest snubs for various auto racing halls of fame. I’m going to start with the NASCAR Hall of Fame. It seems like a fitting time to take stock of this, especially since I’ve nearly finished writing my driver posts for all the major retired Cup Series drivers. I’m going to have to rewrite a lot of them (especially the recent drivers whose posts I’ve already written) because I spent too much column space in earlier columns just regurgitating advanced statistics and not enough in writing compelling narratives, so many of these earlier posts will have to be altered. However, after finishing Jeff Gordon yesterday, there are now only three major retired Cup Series stars who I haven’t written a page for yet: Tim Richmond, Rusty Wallace, and Lee Roy Yarbrough (who you might not count as major since he isn’t in the Hall of Fame yet). There are a few other drivers I consider locks besides current drivers including Ken Schrader and Morgan Shepherd, not to mention driers in other NASCAR divisions. But for the most part, the big guns are nearly done and I thought doing this as I was about to finish this portion of the list. Doing it on an off week, even better.

I’ve come up with who I think are the top ten snubs for both the modern era and pioneer ballots. You’ll notice that I arguably have more names that have never been nominated than names that have, but I think that makes sense because not only are there many figures who have more significance than their statistical record implies, but there are also people who havve objectively strong statistical records who are just being ignored for… reasons. A few of them (particularly on the pioneer side) seem to be snubbed just because NASCAR has petty vendettas against them, but there are a lot of people whose legacies don’t seem to match their historical record also. Let us begin.

For the record, I do not consider Kyle Busch and Martin Truex, Jr. to be snubs. I know that Truex is probably going to be eligible for induction in 2027 and he probably will be inducted first ballot and a strong case will be made he should be #1 on this list, but he wouldn’t top it until it’s actually a snub. It’s certainly possible the NASCAR Hall of Fame could suspend their usual requirement of not inducting drivers until they have been retired from full-time competition for three full years to induct Busch early. If they choose to do this, he should get in immediately, of course, but if they don’t, I’m good with that too.

Modern Era Ballot:

1. Harry Hyde - Hyde has now made the ballot 11 times and not yet been inducted. I think the fact that they placed him on the Modern Era Ballot may be one major reason why. Most of the associations people have of Hyde in their head are about his ‘80s affiliation with Hendrick Motorsports and Tim Richmond, a storybook relationship that was the basis for the movie Days of Thunder. It feels like a lot of folks want to reduce his career to that when he was arguably vastly more successful in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. He was Bobby Isaac’s crew chief at Nord Krauskopf’s K&K Insurance team, and he was crew chief for all but one of Isaac’s 37 wins. People seem to forget that. He then won races with Buddy Baker, Dave Marcis, and Neil Bonnett, before the team got bought out by J.D. Stacy and was effectively ruined. Hyde struggled to find a full-time crew chiefing job again until Hendrick revived him. Now, I think anyone who is a foundational figure for a wildly successful team should probably be inducted, and Hyde was definitely that for Hendrick Motorsports. One could argue that without him just as without Geoff Bodine, the team would not still exist today. Indeed, I believe Hyde was the reason Bodine signed with Hendrick in the first place. The problem is that people seem to think that’s his entire legacy and ignore his success with Krauskopf. The man has 56 wins. This should be obvious and he is one of the guys I would vote for every time he is nominated if I had a vote. I think it might be time to try him on the Pioneer ballot. He’ll get the votes there and the majority of his wins and his title were before the modern era.

2. Ernie Elliott - It’s weird how underhyped he is. He served as his brother Bill’s crew chief for nearly his entire stint at Melling Racing except for 1990. Not only that, he doubled as the engine builder. Now, when you think about Bill Elliott, what you think about is raw, blinding superspeedway speed, which one could argue comes down to the equipment more than the driver. Well, who was building that equipment? The whole operation was pretty much a family team even after George Elliott sold it to Harry Melling and obviously Melling entirely collapsed after the Elliotts left, and the team was also fairly small, so almost everyone involved had to take on a wide range of roles, but as someone who believes the crew chief and engine builder have more input in making the cars faster than the driver, especially a guy like Elliott who filled both roles - this snub feels actually pretty egregious, but I’ve never seen people talk about him much. Elliott’s contemporary Waddell Wilson, who also served as a dual crew chief/engine builder has already been inducted and weirdly he has a bigger reputation, which is why he was inducted first. But Elliott has actually been more successful with 33 wins and a title to Wilson’s 19 and no title.

3. Jimmy Fennig - Even though Fennig has 40 wins and a title with Kurt Busch in 2004, I still kind of think he is one of the most underrated crew chiefs of all time. I think I’d probably rank him on my top ten crew chiefs list, but it might not be obvious to you until you look at what he did with what drivers and teams. First off, he gave Bobby Allison his final three wins all at Daytona and Talladega for the Stavola Brothers including the 1988 Daytona 500, which at the time made Allison the oldest Cup winner in history. After Allison’s near-fatal crash, Fennig stayed with the Stavola Brothers and Dick Trickle until he hooked up with Allison’s team when he reentered as a car owner in 1990. He remained fiercely loyal to Allison even despite his string of terrible driver hires. Before Fennig got to Roush, he gave all four of his regular drivers from 1989-1996 (Trickle, Hut Stricklin, Jimmy Spencer, and Derrike Cope) their best career points finishes. Then at Roush, he gave Mark Martin his winningest season and best of his second-place points seasons in 1998, before making Busch a superstar and winning him a title over the superior Jimmie Johnson. Finally, he capped things off by giving David Ragan his best career points finish in 2008. Over twenty years, you could argue he gave every full-time driver he ever had their best career season (sure, I think I’d take 1993 as Martin’s best and maybe 2009 as Busch’s, but you can still make that case). If anyone ever attempted to calculate Value Over Replacement Crew Chief, Fennig would score very, very highly. Yet I seldom see people list him as an all-time great crew chief or argue for instance that he’s better than Ray Evernham, which I think he is.

4. Geoff Bodine: Next we have four very similarly-placed drivers who are almost interchangeable to me and I do consider all of them to be the biggest driver snubs including the pioneer drivers, but at this point, I’m starting to think that crew chiefs are being snubbed worse than drivers and I would like to see more work done in that regard soon. Bodine was probably the worst of these four drivers in the Cup Series alone. However, a lot of people would argue that Bodine’s main legacy is his dominance on the Modified tour. Bodine has 97 verified NASCAR Modified wins according to The Third Turn the last time I checked (or maybe it was Auto Racing Research Associates where I got that number, I don’t remember). That number is probably an undercount because not all Modified results in that era were archived, and the same goes for the Late Model Sportsman tour, where he had at least 26 wins in 1980 and 1981 before it became the Busch Series. Even though I do not think his Cup career was as strng as Biffle’s, Irvan’s, or Richmond’s, I think his overall career as a NASCAR driver was greater when considering his entire volume of work. And obviously, saving Hendrick Motorsports by winning at Martinsville was a massive impact.

5. Greg Biffle: Biffle was the sentimental favorite for induction last year because he just died, so a lot of people were pissed that Jeff Burton got in over him as a result. I agree that Biffle is better than Burton even though Burton had slightly more wins than Biffle and was slightly higher in my teammate model when considering he was much older at the start of his career, the Cup Series generally had better competition in his peak years, and he also won Roush’s first two titles in the Craftsman Truck Series and Busch Series, which should add a little extra. It seems the Hall voters chose Burton instead because of some combination of his safety advocacy and his announcing, but that feels murky to me since I remember at the time Brett Bodine was the #1 safety advocate back then and I don’t consider Burton one of the all-time great analyses. I definitely would’ve taken Biffle over Burton, but stepping back, I do not think he was the second-best name on the ballot after Kevin Harvick, even if I think the choice they actually made was worse. He didn’t have so much more longevity than Irvan and Richmond really even though he had a full career. I definitely think Irvan and Richmond were more talented than him, but I do have to give it to him because he had the full career.

6. Ernie Irvan: It seems his legacy has really taken a hit in the social media age, and I can see why. Because social media by its very nature accentuates the negative since whatever creates the most outrage captures the most likes, it seems like more and more people (including drivers) are judged by their worst moments. So people online act like Chris Buescher is a great driver and not the merely pretty good driver that he is because he makes fewer mistakes than anyone else, while Juan Pablo Montoya’s entire career got defined by idiotic NASCAR fans for a mechanical failure that caused him to crash into a jet dryer, or people gleefully celebrate any time Kyle Larson crashes because he once claimed to be better than Max Verstappen, which people misinterpreted as him saying he was the best in the world (knowing how dumb Larson often is, he probably thinks Brad Sweet is the best driver in the world or something; no offense to Sweet who will certainly make the list but lol). It feels like Irvan’s checkers-or-wreckers style is something that fans used to celebrate but now detest. In a world where people seem to be judged by their worst moments than their best, he had a lot of awful moments and triggered a lot of stupid crashes. But at his best, he was an electrifying talent who really elevated the usually-hapless Morgan-McClure team into a borderline powerhouse, then gave Robert Yates the best year of its history after he took over the car at the 1993 Southern 500 until his crash the following year at Michigan. While a number of drivers have survived near-fatal crashes and even won titles after them (Brian Redman, Niki Lauda) I can’t think of another driver in NASCAR history who was given 10% chance to win after a crash who came back to win, even though by that point he was no longer as fast as Dale Jarrett. His story was pretty special, but you won’t notice that if you think whoever crashes the least is the best driver, which now seems to be a popular fan fallacy.

7. Tim Richmond: Richmond’s short but sweet career was very similar to Irvan’s. Another thing both of them share is that they were two of the best passers in Cup Series history, with Richmond’s 58.23% lead change percentage ranking second to Tony Stewart since 1985 and Irvan’s 55.39% not so far behind (compare Dale Earnhardt’s 54.14% and Jeff Gordon’s 51.20% for instance). They each had a steady buildup to an explosive career year, then won in unthinkable circumstances, with Richmond’s back-to-back wins while dying of AIDS arguably being a more impressive accomplishment than Irvan’s wins after recovering from his injury. But I ultimately placed Irvan higher than Richmond because I simply think Irvan’s 1993-1994 run was better than Richmond’s 1986 even if Richmond won 7 times while Irvan only won 3 (or 5 if you count the 1993 wins). Dale Jarrett replaced Irvan at Robert Yates Racing in 1995 and did significantly worse, while Richmond was only barely better than Bodine if you look at literally anything except wins or the actual points standings in 1986. To Richmond’s credit, it’s remarkable that he managed to win twice in what was a pretty weak 1987 season for Hendrick when the three full-time cars only combined for one points win, that being Darrell Waltrip’s rock ‘em sock ‘em win at Martinsville where he turned Terry Labonte into Dale Earnhardt. A lot of people think NASCAR is intentionally snubbing Richmond because of the notoriety of a driver with AIDS or because of the controversy over his failed drug test or whatever. If that were the case, why did he make the 50 Greatest Drivers list? For all the talk about how much he is ignored, he still got a 30 for 30 show. I think he’ll make it, probably before Irvan will, who in my opinion has been much more ignored lately.

8. Randy Dorton: Perhaps this is too low since he was Rick Hendrick’s chief engine builder for most of their first 20 years when they ascended into becoming the biggest powerhouse, but my tendency is to rate the engine builders who also served as crew chiefs or car owners (like Robert Yates, Waddell Wilson, or the aforementioned Elliott) much higher than people who serve in the engine builder role only. I think most of the voters agree, which is why they haven’t voted him in yet, but I may be slightly ignorant here.

9. Sam Ard: While I’m not in favor of just any old Busch Series champion, during the time when Ard was competing there, the ex-Late Model Sportsman series wasn’t really that much of a feeder series for the Cup Series, and indeed, very few of the Sportsman/Busch stars actually went on to compete in the Cup Series, choosing to remain stars in a smaller pool. At this time in the ‘80s, it was understandable because there was more money to be made dominating a minor division than being a mediocre performer in a major one. And Ard certainly was not a mediocre performer as he won two of the three Busch Series titles he contested, and his ten wins were the most for any non-Cup driver until Connor Zilisch last year. Now, I don’t think he was as good as Jack Ingram, who bookended Ard’s two titles in 1983 and 1984. Ingram, after all, won three Late Model Sportsman titles before that and Ard did not while Ingram had at least 183 wins including the Sportsman era to Ard’s 97. They are not close, although two Ard’s credit he simultaneously won back-to-back titles in the NASCAR Weekly Series Mid-Atlantic division where Ingram also competed in 1982 and 1983, a significant accomplishment that is underplayed somewhat at a time when there was a lot of crossover between the Busch races and the ex-Sportsman races that fell off the Busch schedule and were added to the NASCAR Weekly Series schedule. Even if Ard wasn’t as close to Ingram as people think he was, it’s time to think about inducting him. (But I feel far, far differently about Randy LaJoie and Jack Sprague.)

10. Buddy Parrott: Okay, this last spot was a tough decision between five or so very similarly placed crew chiefs: Buddy, his son Todd, Tim Brewer, Cole Pearn, and Rodney Childers. I could have gone for any of them, and I definitely think I’d take any of them over my next two driver choices (Neil Bonnett and Sterling Marlin) so I’m going to go for the one who didn’t win a title, but I have my reasons. Brewer has 53 wins and I suspect he’d be high on most people’s lists. While I support his induction, I kind of view him as the anti-Jimmy Fennig in a way since it seems like every driver he had did better with another crew chief. He had a 10-win title season with Cale Yarborough and a 12-win title season with Darrell Waltrip, but I would say Yarborough’s strongest relationship with a crew chief was Herb Nab while Waltrip’s was with Jeff Hammond. Brewer won with many other drivers, but Tim Richmond and Geoff Bodine were better with Harry Hyde, Neil Bonnett was better with Leonard Wood, Terry Labonte was better with Dale Inman and arguably even Gary DeHart, and Bill Elliott was better than his brother Ernie (who is routinely less-regarded as a racing figure when he was actually more important). Junior Johnson deserves to have some crew chiefs inducted including Brewer, but I think overall he was less important to the Johnson organization than Nab and barely more important than Hammond. Childers and Pearn still read as too new to me and they are each too linked to one and only one driver respectively (Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex, Jr.) while Buddy worked with a lot of different drivers. For a while, I thought Todd, who started as Buddy’s car chief when Buddy was Rusty Wallace’s crew chief at Penske in 1993 and 1994, had eclipsed Buddy, especially when considering he turned a previously-middling Dale Jarrett into arguably Jeff Gordon’s chief rival, but I think you have to start with Buddy first. What a lot of these crew chiefs weirdly have in common is two wins with mediocre-to-awful drivers: Reutimann with Childers, Elliott Sadler with Todd, but I think Buddy being responsible for Derrike Cope’s two-win 1990 really takes the cake here. And that is only a small part of his legacy as his 47 wins include 21 with Waltrip at DiGard, 19 with Wallace at Penske, 2 with Richard Petty at the Mike Curb team during the one year he didn’t race at Petty Enterprises, and finally, he gave Jeff Burton his first three wins for Roush in 1997. With 20 years between his first and last wins, he actually had more longevity than Brewer, even if Brewer’s 53 wins eclipsed Parrott’s 47. Parrott’s biggest accomplishment in my opinion is rather unheralded. By being the first crew chief to hire a pit crew trainer, he was instrumental in the professionalization of the pit crews and turning them into real athletes in their own right, rather than just some guys who knew a guy who knew a guy like the pit crews usually were before. That was one of the main factors that resulted in Wallace’s dominance in ‘93 and ‘94 and helping eventually make Penske a powerhouse. I feel both DiGard Racing and Team Penske need more representation than just their drivers, and this would kill two birds with one stone.

Pioneer Ballot:

1. Smokey Yunick: He has been my #1 snub every single year for the last decade and still has not made a ballot, presumably because he talked a lot of trash about NASCAR in his memoir. Not only was he the first crew chief to win two Cup Series titles with Herb Thomas, he was arguably a more legendary figure than Thomas was as he defined the crew chief role and became the model that future crew chiefs aspired to be in a way that Thomas really wasn’t. He also is credited with 9 wins as a car owner, including the 1961 Daytona 500 with Marvin Panch. Although it seems to be unclear whether he was the car owner for Fireball Roberts’s 1962 Daytona 500 winning entry or not, he was definitely the crew chief, he became the first two-time Daytona 500 winner as a crew chief that year, and his wide-ranging automotive interests extended far beyond just that and his vaunted Best Damn Garage in Town. It’s difficult to determine his exact win count since there was very little reporting on who the crew chiefs were in very early NASCAR seasons, but his impact was undeniable.

2. Dick Hutcherson: Like Ernie Elliott, I placed him so highly because he was a man who wore many hats. His Cup Series career was certainly impressive, as his 14 wins in 103 starts give him one of the best-ever winning percentage and his nine wins in a rookie are the best ever (even though NASCAR decided not to make him eligible for Rookie of the Year because he was a past champion of the rival IMCA tour and series have often made weird distinctions about rookie eligibility for incoming drivers from rival tours), but I’m not entirely sure I would induct him just based on that as he faced some of the worst competition of all time in his nine-win 1965 season, and then he retired not long after that. However, what makes him an obvious lock in my mind is that he followed that up to be either the crew chief or team manager for David Pearson’s back-to-back titles for Holman-Moody in 1968 and 1969. It’s murky whether Jake Elder or Hutcherson was his crew chief in those years (I’ve seen both listed and they might have been co-crew chiefs), but he was definitely heavily involved. Few top drivers other than Lee Petty ever also served in the crew chief role, and other than Petty, he’s the only Cup driver to actually win a championship in that role. That alone makes him a lock, but that is not all! Oh, no. That is not all. After all that was done, he and Eddie Pagan teamed up to go into the chassis construction business and their Hutcherson-Pagan chassis dominated for a while and were the basis for many other successful chassis. Do the voters even know all this? Slam dunk.

3. Herb Nab: Because Brewer remained a public figure in the NASCAR garage and Nab didn’t, Brewer seems to be the crew chief most associated with Junior Johnson’s success, but I would give Nab a significant edge. Although I don’t think he was as important as Yunick, Nab probably has more Cup Series wins than any other crew chief sitting outside (racing-reference.info says 74, but who knows? I don’t trust that site to have proper documentation for information on crew chiefs when I’ve struggled to find it myself.) After winning 14 races with Fred Lorenzen in 1963 and 1964, which included Lorenzen becoming the first driver to win $100,000 in a season the former year and the first to win five straight races the latter, he then moved to Junior Johnson’s team, where Johnson tied Ned Jarrett for the most wins with 13 in 1965, the last season he competed regularly. He remained with Johnson as a car owner for Lee Roy Yarbrough’s 7-win season in 1969 when he became the first driver to win the Daytona 500, World 600, and Southern 500 in the same year, and stayed there through Bobby Allison’s 1972 when he won 10 times and set his consecutive races led streak, and Johnson’s first two titles with Cale Yarborough in 1976 and 1977. He then left to join Harry Ranier’s team, where he discovered engine builder Waddell Wilson, who has already been inducted. It’s kind of weird he was inducted first, but the problem is nobody seems to talk about Nab anymore. They definitely should.

4. John Holman: I don’t talk about it a great deal, but I’m a big fan of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and my favorite podcast is Who Cares about the Rock Hall?, hosted by two comedians Joe Kwaczala and Kristen Studard. I’ve even been on it! It’s probably one of the reasons I sweep up the pop music questions at both bar trivia and LearnedLeague so frequently. But one of the things the Rock Hall does that I like is inducting two bands as one collective when their histories are inextricably linked and you really can’t judge one without the other. The three bands they inducted this way are Parliament/Funkadelic, The Small Faces/The Faces, and Joy Division/New Order this year. Those bands’ legacies are so intertwined you can’t really judge them independently of each other. More people should do this. It’s beyond stupid that NASCAR does not allow collectives to be inducted, and ushered in Glen Wood before Leonard just because he had a driving career, and inducted Ralph Moody without inducting Holman just because he had a driving career. Neither Wood or Moody would have gotten in without their role as co-partners in their highly successful teams. The Wood Brothers’ legacy and Holman-Moody’s legacy are so intertwined that it was really dumb they decided to induct the drivers first when neither of them would have had any business being inducted if not for their role as team owners. Let’s fix this, please.

5. Fonty Flock: Probably the best Cup driver of this era not inducted who only served as a Cup driver, Flock was the dominant driver of the 1951 season but only lost the title due to a relatively poor finish at the Southern 500, which carried a disproportionate amount of points. He also won the most races on the NASCAR Modified tour in 1948 with 15 (when that series was effectively analogous to the Cup Series since that is where all the top NASCAR drivers raced before the Cup Series was introduced in 1949). In 1949, he won the Modified title, and although Cup had overtaken it in importance, the Modified title was still pretty important that year since most of the NASCAR races that season were affiliated with that tour when there were only eight Cup Series races. He was also an extremely unlucky driver, as when I attempted to determine TNLs for old drivers, I think he had about 27 or something even though he only has 19 wins, which makes the fact that he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame and on the 50/75 Greatest Drivers lists much more obvious. My model is also extremely kind to him as he ranks 5th overall with a rating of .328 and two of the drivers he’s behind (Roger McCluskey and Paul Goldsmith) had their primary stock car accomplishments in the USAC Stock Car Series, so he only trails Lee Petty and his brother Tim amongst primarily NASCAR drivers, and they’ve been in the Hall for a long time. I think he’s been snubbed from everything and his career has been erased just because of France family bitterness over him accusing them of stealing Talladega from him when he discovered the plot of land and they promised to offer him a cut of the deal before ultimately refusing to do so. So, he’s obviously deserving, but it will probably never happen.

6. Ralph Earnhardt: I used to be an opponent of this, believe it or not. When he was announced to the original 50 Greatest Drivers list in 1998, I really didn’t get it. I had a 50th anniversary edition of Inside NASCAR magazine and it did not do a good job of explaining why on earth he deserved to be on that list (or, for that matter, Ray Hendrick). I was convinced for quite some time that Ralph only made the list because insiders only wanted to make Dale happy or something. Now, of course, I understand why. I don’t think I was aware until the relatively recent past that all the data for the pre-1985 Modified tour and pre-1982 Late Model Sportsman tour were largely lost to history, so we may never have complete counts for Modified or Sportsman wins for the drivers who competed in that era. The fact that Hendrick never won a title and Earnhardt only won a single Sportsman title makes them seem less important if you don’t have knowledge of the full volume of their wins, and that used to be difficult to obtain if you weren’t there for it. Now, I have archived all the Sportsman and Modified wins from the Third Turn that we know about, and I can confirm that he has an absolute crapload of wins (easily more than drivers like Jerry Cook or Hershel McGriff, even Jack Ingram). My current counts for him according to my last count on The Third Turn (and the counts on that site do fluctuate from time to time) are: 127 Late Model Sportsman wins, 72 Limited Sportsman wins and a title in 1959 (I admit I’d never heard of that series), and 12 Modified wins. Okay, now I’m sold. I wuz wrong. I still wouldn’t take him over his son or his grandson though.

7. Jake Elder: Okay, he either has zero, one, or two titles. I can’t really tell. It depends entirely on whether Elder or Hutcherson was Pearson’s crew chief when he won those titles for Holman-Moody in 1968 and 1969, and I don’t think I’ve seen a convincing consensus on that, but what he does have are a lot of wins over a long period of time. After his success with Pearson, he bookended Darrell Waltrip’s career with his first and last pairs of wins, three of which came when Waltrip was an owner-driver. He then served as Benny Parsons’s crew chief for his best three-year run before becoming Dale Earnhardt’s crew chief in his rookie season, and staying as his crew chief for nearly half of his eventual 1980 championship campaign. After that season, he mostly fell off as his shopping his venerable suitcase to one team after another eventually hindered his career, but still he somehow won a race at Atlanta with Morgan Shepherd in 1986 in a car owned by Jack Beebe. Do you know who Jack Beebe is? Most of you do not.

8. Ray Elder: Elder was nominated on the Modern Era ballot last year. This is stupid. He belongs in, but NASCAR certainly made the effort to push Larry Phillips in through the Pioneer Ballot even though Phillips’s entire relevant NASCAR career started after Elder’s ended. Phillips’s entire career as far as NASCAR is concerned was in the modern era, while exactly half of Elder’s success came before and half after the switch from the pioneer era to the modern era, so he has a very strong case he should be placed on the Pioneer Ballot instead. (So, honestly, does Harry Hyde who had his primary performance legacy in the Pioneer Era even if his cultural legacy was largely in the Modern Era, and I hope that happens, too.) As with Ard, Elder dominated the NASCAR West tour at a time when it was more lucrative to dominate a small pond than compete nationally. The Cup Series hardly raced out west so it was also far more expensive. When it did compete on the West Coast, Elder was remarkably successful, winning two Cup races in Winston West equipment at Riverside. Elder is linked with his supposed rival Hershel McGriff, which also explains why he should be on the Pioneer Ballot instead since McGriff started in the ‘50s. But they weren’t even close to rivals. Elder won 47 races and 6 Winston West titles. McGriff, who is already in, won 34 races. Elder won the title the one time they both competed full-time in 1972, although to be fair, McGriff won 12 races to Elder’s 7. I’m sure McGriff could have come close to matching what Elder did in that period if he hadn’t raced part-time most of it, but he didn’t, and Elder has the superior record because McGriff simply chose not to show up much of the time. And Elder’s two Cup wins had much deeper fields than McGriff’s four. Yet McGriff makes all NASCAR’s lists and Elder has been perpetually snubbed. Do the right thing and put him on the Pioneer Ballot, where he’ll actually get the votes someday! Although I guess his elder unrelated Elder should get in first.

9. Jim Paschal: The odd erasure of his legacy is puzzling. With 25 wins, he is the winningest driver who never made the 50 or 75 Greatest Drivers list and he only made a single Hall of Fame ballot. I guess he’s docked somewhat because he was teammates with Richard Petty at Petty Enterprises and Petty blew him out, but then, Petty blew everybody out. Paschal’s .172 rating in my stock car model certainly suggests he’s a Hall of Famer when you look at who is rated just above (Matt Kenseth, Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, Kurt Busch) or below him (Denny Hamlin). Usually, there’s some reason NASCAR ignores a driver, whether its France family anger that Fonty Flock accused them of stealing Talladega from him or Speedy Thompson’s intentionally causing a wreck that ended Herb Thomas’s career or Jack Smith’s racism or Lee Roy Yarbrough’s attempting to strangle his mother or Tim Richmond’s AIDS. I can’t think of what the issue here is. Any ideas?

10. Tiny Lund: There are a bunch of morally ambiguous folks I could’ve put in this last spot instead. Honestly, in terms of historical importance, Carl Kiekhaefer probably should be ranked really high but I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it because he undeniably one of the biggest schmucks in the racing business, and I’m okay with them ignoring Thompson, Smith, and I guess Yarbrough too for the above-listed reasons (although Yarbrough was certainly way better than the other two, but not as good as their crew chief Nab who they’ve also historically ignored, so whatever). I was going to argue for Bob Welborn but Michael Finley, a Frontstretch writer I admire, kind of talked me out of it by uncovering his vehement racism towards Wendell Scott, which was comparable to Jack Smith’s and saying that he couldn’t endorse Welborn or Banjo Matthews for the same reason. (I’ve decided not to consider morality for the 1,000 greatest drivers list, but I suppose for the Hall of Fame it should matter somewhat, even if it doesn’t have an explicit morality clause like the Baseball Hall of Fame does.) There are enough worthy people they’re ignoring who don’t have bad blood on their name, so I guess I’ll pivot. Lund is very similar to Welborn in that he had a handful of Cup wins (5 vs. Welborn’s 9) and he even won a widely-celebrated underdog Daytona 500, but his real legacy is elsewhere. By my count, he has 79 verified NASCAR wins (a lot more than Welborn), including 3 Cup wins, 41 Grand National/Grand American wins (2 of which also counted as Cup wins), 5 Grand National East wins and a title there, at least 27 Late Model Sportsman wins and 2 NASCAR Modified wins, and finally 1 NASCAR West Series win. He won in pretty much every NASCAR division even though he only dabbled in Cup, and had at least some NASCAR win every year from 1963-1975, and his legacy was way bigger than his five Cup wins suggests. I feel better about this . He made the 50 Greatest Drivers list for a while. Hopefully, he’ll make the Hall someday too.

LEO KINNUNEN……………….FINLAND

Born: August 5, 1943
Died: July 26, 2017

Best year: 1972
Best drive: 1970 Targa Florio at the Circuito delle Madonie

One of Finland’s most versatile racers, Kinnunen was initially successful in rallying, ice racing, and autocross, but his best performances came in sports car racing. In the 1967 Finnish Rally Championship, he lost a tiebreaker to Simo Lampinen and actually beat future World Rally Champion Hannu Mikkola while driving for car importer Antti Aarnio-Wihuri’s eponymous AAW team. He then finished second to eventual World Champion Jochen Rindt in the debut race of the European Can-Am clone Nordic Challenge Cup, winning the last two races to take the 1969 championship.

These successes landed Kinnunen a factory Porsche ride in 1970 for John Wyer Automotive alongside F1 star Pedro Rodríguez. Although the team heavily favored Rodríguez, Kinnunen shockingly won his World Sportscar Championship debut at the 24 Hours of Daytona and they combined for three other wins. Although there was no WSC driver’s championship back then, they were primarily responsible for Porsche’s manufacturer’s championship. Kinnunen stepped out of Rodríguez’s shadow with a career-defining drive at the Targa Florio. Although they didn’t win, Kinnunen handled most of the driving after Rodríguez fell ill and drove from fourth to second thanks to a 33.5 minute final lap around the dangerous 44.7 mile circuit, breaking Vic Elford’s lap record by 1.5 minutes; the record still stands.

Kinnunen lost his JWA ride as he was negotiating for an F1 ride with Team Lotus. Rindt, who dominated that year’s championship, pushed for his then-manager Bernie Ecclestone to hire him but talks collapsed after Rindt’s fatal crash and Ecclestone offered him a ride for no pay. Instead seeking a salary, Kinnunen returned to the Nordic Challenge Cup for AAW, now renamed Interserie, where he won three consecutive titles and 11 races from 1971-1973, despite having to witness Rodríguez’s fatal Interserie crash directly in front of him. He also finished third at the 1000 Lakes Rally in the inaugural WRC season in 1973. Kinnunen finally got his first F1 opportunity in a Surtees for a privateer team branded AAW in 1974, but Aarnio-Wihuri had no involvement. The car had a damaged monocoque and suspension and was 80 kilograms overweight, which resulted in Kinnunen DNQing five of his six attempts. Nonetheless, he became the first Finnish F1 driver and the last F1 driver who used an open-face helmet. His international career never really recovered after this failure.

Kinnunen was highly rated in his heyday by many insiders, some of whom considered him Finland’s greatest circuit driver, even over their World Champions. I can’t go that far and believe his refusal to commit to a single discipline and failure to learn English during his peak era prevented him from fulfilling his potential. It was probably a mistake for him to turn down Lotus immediately after Rindt’s title, but Interserie certainly proved more lucrative. Nonetheless, the respect he had from legends like Rindt and Rodríguez says a lot, and it’s hard to argue he didn’t have the talent level of an F1 winner even if his actual F1 stint was a fiasco.

Year-by-year: 1967: C, 1969: C, 1970: E, 1971: C+, 1972: E, 1973: E-, 1976: C