1,000 Greatest Drivers: Mauri Rose/Al Unser/Rick Mears
Finishing up the month of May... three days late.
Both the IndyCar race at Detroit and the NASCAR race at Nashville were better than I expected for two circuits I have never much liked, although I admit I get annoyed whenever a caution comes out in the middle of a green-flag pit cycle and ruins the race by inevitably having several drivers inherit positions they don’t deserve solely due to a pit strategy roulette. The odd thing is that unusually, neither of those cautions really had impact on the outcomes of the races. In the NASCAR race, all the fastest cars and drivers eventually made their way back to the front and generally displaced the drivers who benefited from lucky pit calls, and in the IndyCar race bizarrely, almost all the drivers who benefited from pit strategy had bad luck what with Alexander Rossi being penalized for pitting before the pits were closed, Mick Schumacher stuffing David Malukas into the wall and taking both of them out, and Josef Newgarden still struggling while driving hurt. Graham Rahal’s fairly annoying podium was actually the only box score evidence that anything abnormal had taken place other than the many cautions in both races. I’m glad I’m off all microblogging platforms right now ‘cause I’m sure everyone on them was mocking Santino Ferrucci as per usual after he spun out Rinus VeeKay to trigger the race-altering caution and then stalled later, erroneously calling him a dirty driver just because he is a bigot. No, guys. Those are two separate things! I’m a lot madder at Scott McLaughlin to be honest because he wrecked Will Power in a much more intentional looking way, took him out of the race while VeeKay still got a decent finish, and wasn’t penalized (which Ferrucci was). It was bad enough the way that Roger Penske jerked Power around last year and to see McLaughlin do that to Power when he was having his best run of the year felt like rubbing more salt in the wound.
The NASCAR race was better of course, but I have a feeling people are going to erroneously remember that as an all-time classic when it was annoying that the aero push was so bad that in Stage 2 it seemed like none of the faster cars could catch up to the guys who backed into top positions on strategy and there were so many stupid crashes. Again, I blame most of these crashes on the stupid double-file restarts, which I’ve despised since they were introduced in 2009, but now I’m getting to be the millennial version of boomer writers like Matt McLaughlin who felt NASCAR was all fine and dandy until Loudon was added to the schedule or whatever and I recognize that. It was mildly surprising for me to see Shane van Gisbergen legitimately battling Kyle Larson for the lead if only because the Trackhouse Racing cars seem to be truly terrible if Ross Chastain wasn’t even running well at one of his worst tracks and Connor Zilisch looks awful, not to mention his lack of oval experience. I realize every driver with the Next Gen chassis looks awful for about 50 starts so it’s not like I’m writing off Zilisch yet, but I have been skeptical of him for a while if only because Noah Gragson won eight races with the same Xfinity Series team Connor Zilisch won ten with last year and Gragson still looks awful. Sure, Gragson was in his fourth year while Zilisch was a rookie and Zilisch was injured twice and still won more races at a much younger age, so I’m not saying he’s not better or that he’s not going to win races. What I think bothers me is his stan army and that it feels like he’s one of the only NASCAR drivers you’re not allowed to criticize these days. Criticize him at all and you’ll get pushback in much the same way that you’ll get pushback if you even try to write the slightest defense of Corey LaJoie. (Okay, he’s bad now, but you’ll never convince me he was always bad.) People act like he’s better than Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney already when he isn’t. So I’m vindicated to see that he has had a learning curve and I acknowledge he’s been unlucky, but even I didn’t think SVG would be regularly outrunning him on ovals. Marcos Ambrose sure never showed anything like that on ovals; granted, this Cup car is based on the Supercars chassis SVG is dominated with while Ambrose’s Cup car was entirely different, so that could have been it.
Having said that, I think I was more pleasantly surprised by Zane than Shane. Zane Smith is somebody I’ve always thought was pretty good but I also always thought he had a low ceiling, which is why I have not (yet) listed him on an annual top 200 list (although I’m gettin’ ready to this time). I liked his Hail Mary attempt to win the race on fuel mileage, but apparently the faster teams have gotten better on fuel mileage. Instead of everybody waiting to pit until they run out of fuel, nowadays teams have better optimized their strategies to pit early enough to be able to catch the leader on track, which is not something the teams used to do. That allowed Christopher Bell to snatch the lead from Smith before Denny Hamlin passed Bell on the last lap, but I was still really impressed by Smith regardless and he’s now had in my opinion the two best drives of his career back-to-back (that 2024 Nashville race the booth kept hyping where he finished 2nd he had a terrible run and just got extremely lucky). I thought it was really funny and a sign of Tyler Reddick’s absurd luck this year that he crashed seconds after crossing the finish line, thereby extending his streak of completing every lap this year despite crashing.
Because I crossed off my own signature and signed my mom’s name on our previous title, I had to buy another one so I still have some paperwork to complete the transfer of the car to Habitat for Humanity, but at least it’s out of the garage. Although I did not quite finish these last three columns by the end of May, at least I’ve finally done them because I had had Unser and Mears planned for last year and didn’t get around to them then as I also had a tight schedule of Indy 500 winners I didn’t complete at that time.
