1,000 Greatest Drivers: Rex Mays

He had a 1.33 average finish in back-to-back IndyCar seasons yet never won a 500.

I signed the document to allow bidding to begin on the ramp construction today and I’ll obviously have to sign a similar document in a couple weeks once a contractor has bid on the repairs. While the man from Onondaga County Community Development came over, I asked if he knew how I could extricate Mom’s afghan from the washer. I did not ask him to do it, but out of the goodness of the heart, he did, and I really appreciate it. The afghan wasn’t damaged at all. I already washed all the items that were in that load all over again because the blanket that was in with the afghan was very mildewed and there was a bit of standing water, but I’ve cleaned most of that up, so that’s good.

I know this post is from a month ago, and I’m always a little behind the times, but I think the best thing I read this year was this passage from Freddie DeBoer’s Substack:

“I don’t think this is a particularly materially hard time in which to live. (I invite you to ponder what life was like for someone who was born in 1900 and lived to 1975, all the horrors they might have experienced, if you disagree.) But I do think this is a very emotionally difficult time. Human beings need other human beings, and we’ve created immense digital barriers between each other in a way that has left millions feeling lonely and unheard; human beings need depth and meaning and purpose, and we’ve created a digital world that can provide only momentary distraction and novelty but which is nonetheless killing the parts of art and culture and community that provide slow, durable, meaningful rewards. No more potluck dinners but endless hours on TikTok, no more romance but endless amounts of extreme online pornography, no more deep, hard-won knowledge but plenty of podcasts that will enable you to pretend that you’ve gained that knowledge, no more challenging and electrifying novels but as many shitty webcomics as you can consume, no more human beings, only the black mirror staring back at you. That’s where we are: we have sacrificed everything deep and penetrating and good about human life, for the right to absolute convenience and total distraction. It’s a horrible bargain and everybody is sad all the time.”

That really haunted me down to the nether regions of my soul, and yes, this is indeed what I’m looking for at this point of my life, especially in the wake of Mom being forced into the nursing home for hoarding. I have never wanted material possessions less (indeed, I will want to get rid of about 90% of them after Mom dies, even beyond what I already threw out a year ago), but never craved close connections with other people more. Not even dating, just like ‘90s sitcom friendships (which I am well aware probably never existed), what Anne of Green Gables would call “bosom friendships” or something. Most of the things he cites here on both sides of the analog/digital divide are admittedly not things I’d be really into. My ARFID made dinners nightmarish, I’ve never been into romance, TikTok, porn, or webcomics (having grown up on Calvin and Hobbes, webcomic art is typically too bad for me to take it seriously, although I’m sure there are exceptions… I think Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is one). I’m really struggling these days to find fiction I like and reading almost entirely nonfiction mainly because things that gets critical praise are usually too nihilistic for me, while things that gets commercial success are too insipid. I guess I’m just a middlebrow and middlebrow art is dead… Guilty on the podcasts though. I’m so desperate for some simulacrum of human connection that I’ll happily listen to my imaginary friends ramble about nothing in particular in the absence of human friendships. But I’m trying and hopefully tomorrow’s Neurodivergent Support Group will go well.

I have all the Indy 500 winners that I have not done yet who are locks on my list scheduled for the last 21 days of May. I decided to do Eddie Cheever last week because honestly, in his specific case his IndyCar career is less impressive than the rest of his career, which is not something I can say for most of the drivers I will be covering in May. Speaking of May, Rex Mays is another exception because he surprisingly never won the Indy 500, which puts him on the Mt. Rushmore of “best IndyCar drivers who never won the 500” with Michael Andretti, Sébastien Bourdais, and Ted Horn. I don’t really know how I’d rank those four drivers since they’re all about the same to me, but my gut instinct is I would probably take Bourdais last because he had the worst competition (yes, I really think Horn and Mays’s competition in the ‘40s was probably stronger than Bourdais’s in late-period Champ Car, although Bourdais’s late-period success in mediocre cars in the merged IndyCar definitely makes this closer) and also because I gave the other three multiple top five seasons and I didn’t give Bourdais any. Indeed, I have Mays and Horn #1 for five years in a row (1940-41 for Mays and 1946-48 for Horn), which I guess shouldn’t be very surprising because Europe was in World War II and the US was not during the first period, while Europe was still devastated after the war and it took a while to fully recover during the latter period. You could mention a bunch of other names here like Tony Bettenhausen and Paul Tracy (yeah, yeah, shut up) I guess, but I honestly don’t think they come close to the other four (even though I gave both of them one top three season each).

There was one fun anecdote I found about Mays that didn’t really fit in my article, but I had to share it here:

“It was [as] a pilot that Rex had a rather naughty party trick - whenever a newcomer flew in Rex's plane, he would shut the engine off and say 'oh no', before turning the engine back on once he'd seen his passenger's face!”

Which raises the question: Why did the biggest safety advocate in auto racing of his era think it was okay to play such a practical joke on his passengers? I guess we’ll never know.

Finally, I want to thank Michael Ferner, who sent me the complete list of pre-USAC AAA-era sprint and midget winners from his personal archive. I would not have been able to write this article without it, because while I had a pretty solid estimate for how many sprint car wins Mays had overall (that estimate ended up being wrong; he actually has 61, not 65, because four of his wins came in non-points events), I didn’t know how many wins he had per year. Until I knew that, I didn’t know where to rate a lot of his ‘30s seasons. Now that Ferner has sent me a list of how many wins he had each year, I can more accurately evaluate those years and I bumped almost all of them up, most notably bumping up his 13-win 1934 title season to 5th and his 17-win 1935 title season to 4th. I did lower his 1947 season from C+ to C because even though he finished 5th in points, he went winless and for the most prolific polesitter of his time to only win a single pole is pretty disappointing too.