1,000 Greatest Drivers: Sam Hanks

There's no crying in raceball.

I’m planning on writing two columns tonight on two early IndyCar drivers (Hanks and Johnny Aitken), although these drivers are so early that my season grades are going to be all over the place. Hanks supposedly won hundreds of midget races, but in that era, it’s somewhat hard to even figure out who won many of the midget championships because the AAA Contest Board threw out all their data when they got out of the racing business and were replaced with USAC. I tried to judge my season grades for Hanks forhis midget years based on what is written about him in the biographical narratives on Historic Racing and Motorsport Memorial, which I typically use for such ancient drivers, but I might likely adjust many of his midget seasons up or down if I get any idea of how many races he won in each of these seasons, which is likely almost impossible to find at this point since many of them were probably never even recorded in newspapers. Nonetheless, this is my best attempt. I do think his ‘50s career, when he won his IndyCar title, his Indy 500, several major league stock car wins (although the AAA/USAC Stock Car Series didn’t have quite the competition that NASCAR did), and set the closed-course world record that stood for fourteen years, is better than his midget career, but I suspect a lot of people “in the know” might disagree. He is even technically credited with two F1 top ten points finishes thanks to his second-place Indy 500 finish in ‘56 and win in ‘57 counting for championship points. Hanks tends to be one of those Indy 500 winners people blow past, but they really shouldn’t, since he was one of the truly great drivers in that period. Although IndyCar in the ‘50s was admittedly a period when a lot of mediocrity floated to the top, I would not include Hanks as an example of that.