1,000 Greatest Drivers: Rodger Ward
Being second-best to A.J. Foyt has caused him to be overshadowed.
Despite winning two IndyCar titles and two Indy 500s, Ward doesn’t seem to get enough respect. It seems like for a lot of people, the emergence of A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti is when IndyCar racing starts while the first half-century has sort of been erased to the point nobody talks about it anymore. Ward seems to be one of the chief victims of this. In the races Foyt and Ward both started, Foyt’s advantage was 47-42 in finishes and 24-21 in wins. They were extremely close, but because the roadster era of IndyCar racing seems to be rather disrespected relative to the formula car era (probably because the Europeans crossed over in that era and didn’t participate as much in the roadster era), he has weirdly become a historical footnote. It doesn’t seem like many people talk about the fact that he was actually the winningest IndyCar driver of all time very briefly. He overtook Ted Horn’s 24 wins with his 25th win at Phoenix in 1963 before Foyt overtook him the next year in his ten-win season (which is also when he finally overtook Ward in finishes and in wins shortly before Ward’s retirement in 1966). Part of it no doubt is the fact that Ralph DePalma’s supposed win total of 25 includes 19 wins in seasons that did not actually exist and the bizarre 77-race schedule of 1946 when AAA added 71 Big Car (sprint car) races to the IndyCar schedule to make sure there were enough races after the war inflated Ted Horn’s win total. Since historians at the time erroneously believed DePalma actually had 25 wins instead of 6, I’m not sure anyone noticed at the time that Ward actually had the most wins, so if anybody talks about him today, it’s almost always about the all-time great duel in the 1960 Indy 500 which he lost more than his numerous great accomplishments.
But more than that, he has so many other distinctions. He is the highest-rated IndyCar champion in my open wheel model (although he’s second to Greg Moore overall), one of only three drivers to win major league titles in both open wheel and stock cars (sure, you can debate whether Ward’s AAA Stock Car title “counts” as major league, but you can do the same for Tony Stewart’s 1996-1997 IRL title, right?), the winningest driver at Milwaukee ever (a track that has held races nearly continuously since 1937 except for the recent hiatus), and he even won a USAC Road Racing Championship race driving a midget. He entered that same midget in the 1959 United States Grand Prix shortly thereafter, but that didn’t go very well. Ward is one of only two drivers along with Bobby Unser in 1971-1974 to lead the most laps in four consecutive seasons (much to my surprise, neither Sébastien Bourdais nor Josef Newgarden did this). Because most people’s IndyCar knowledge now seems to start with Foyt and Andretti, this whole other era has strangely been forgotten and that’s a shame.
