1,000 Greatest Drivers: Scott Tucker

Just kidding. It's actually Ray Hendrick.

I’m not normally into April’s Fools jokes since they can be a little mean-spirited, but I also know I’m kind of a humorless sourpuss most of the time and I wanted to spice things up. Yes, Scott Tucker has a lot of sports car wins and even titles, but everybody who knows about him also knows that he wasn’t a talented driver and he was a conman to boot. I wanted to psych people out with a driver who actually made some kind of auto racing starts but was also completely undeserving, but I wanted to pick someone funny. I considered Tim Allen, Michael Avenatti, Caitlyn Jenner, Cleetus McFarland, Frankie Muniz, Vince Neil, and Jason Priestley. Some of these feel like deserving targets, but some of them admittedly feel like punching down. Other people suggested Jocko Flocko, Jack Goff, Justin Kredible, and Dick Passwater, but I went with this one because it’s unquestionably punching up. This dickhead made billions of dollars in payday loans even where they were illegal and then used that to finance his racing career, buying the best co-drivers like Christophe Bouchut to make him look good.

Today’s actual driver is incoming NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee Ray Hendrick, who was born 97 years ago on this date. I admit I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about when he made NASCAR’s original 50 Greatest Drivers list. I was a subscriber to Inside NASCAR magazine at the time and they had a 50 Greatest Drivers issue right after I signed up for it (or maybe I bought it in a store and that’s what led me to get a subscription later). The magazine did a piss-poor job of explaining why he actually belonged on the list and I questioned it for many years. After all, he never won a title in any NASCAR series, so what gives, right? I half wondered if he had some relation to Rick Hendrick and that’s what got him on (much like I’m convince Ralph Earnhardt would not have made the list without Dale’s success), but he does not. Then, I did my research. While I think a lot of estimates of career wins are frequently inflated (and Hendrick’s claimed 700 wins might be), when I started doing my research, I found that he had 169 verified Modified wins, not counting his win at the 1969 Race of Champions, and 82 Late Model Sportsman wins to boot on The Third Turn, then actually discovered he had many more verified wins on a site I discovered more recently. Okay, fine. It appears he only didn’t win titles because he didn’t compete in as many races as other drivers did. Jerry Cook, for instance, is not presently on my list because I only have 95 verified wins for him and his 1972 Modified championship season was even winless. He just kept winning titles over more dominant drivers (like Hendrick) because Cook entered substantially more races in a season than the dominant drivers did. This convinced me that Hendrick should be on the list and is a worthy inductee into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, while Cook now looks much shakier to me the more research I do. (However, if Cook’s supposed 342 wins is closer to the truth than the 95 that I have for him, I will probably change my mind.)

Anyway, I used this LearnedLeague thing in part because the season ended last week but also in part as a distraction so hopefully no one would notice I didn’t mention which drivers were scheduled this week so I could pull off the April Fool’s prank. Here is my final psot reviewing my LearnedLeague matches, and then maybe I’ll do another one later assessing how I did in each of the different categories.

This is the first time I came close to sweeping a round. Granted, I probably wouldn’t have gotten either counterpoint or eschatology without the clues (and the clue for #6 was funny). House of Cards I was pretty sure even though I never watched it. Mumps was also a guess because it was the most plausible-sounding answer for anything that had a well-known vaccine. Obviously, I guess this was a prety easy round since my opponent also got four of those questions right even though she finished last in our rundle and got demoted. Lombardi was my first thought for question #3 just because of how famous he is, but I really had no clue. I correctly guessed it was people from New Jersey because of Edison, but I had no idea what football coaches were from what states. So, I thought I should pick a famous coach from New York and I landed on Bill Parcells. Looked it up after I submitted my answers and found out that Parcells is really from New Jersey while Lombardi is not, so I like my answer better. But yeah, it’s still wrong because of the Brooklyn clause.

After being matched up against the last-place finisher in the rundle, this time I was matched with the person who won it. On my birthday, no less. Given that, the fact that I was able to tie her was a good enough birthday present for me. I put Pygmalion for #2, which I didn’t think was a horrible guess, “National League Pennant Game 7” for #3 (when I guess I should’ve just put baseball, but it still would have been wrong), and Champagne for #6 because I guess since gastronomic refers to fine food, I figured wine might qualify. Champagne apparently isn’t a city though. This gave me an 0-10 record on geography, which I didn’t think was a bad category for me until now.

Wasn’t sure about #1 but the fact that Frank Sinatra was nicknamed Ol’ Blue Eyes made that a solid guess. I figured out Settlers of Catan even though I’d never played it, but I underestimated how famous it was I guess. That ended up being tied for having the highest percentage of correct responses, and I kind of get it. The kind of people who would be into trivia games would likely also be into board games. I struggle to really calibrate what things are nowadays considered mass culture that I don’t realize are part of mass culture because I grew up in the monoculture era when most people had different pastimes. I put cod for #2 and Burmese Empire for #5. Finally, I guessed that was an oblique reference to Vladimir Putin because I knew he had two nonconsecutive terms as President of Russia, but if I’d have thought harder, I’d have remembered that Prime Minister isn’t his title (well, it was between his two terms) and I also vaguely remembered (correctly) that he replaced Yeltsin in 1999, later than the stated date. It was the most frequent wrong answer though. And since I finally got one food question and two art questions this round, that left current events as the only category where I haven’t gotten one question right yet.

This one I could have maybe won or tied if my strategy had been better. Even though I don’t consider myself that big of a film buff, I have read a lot of criticism, which I often tend to enjoy more than actual movies because I am insufferably pretentious. So I knew Cahiers du Cinéma cold, but that was a harder question for most than it was for me. If I had rated that higher and some of the other questions lower, I could have won or tied. I put Archimedes for #4, but come to think of it, wasn’t there another Archimedes question already? They probably wouldn’t have had two. Finally, I just guessed Home for #5 and that was wrong, but it was a good guess. Still, a solid performance against somebody who had a much better record, so I clearly was improving at this.

And here’s the final match from last week, another one I could have won if I’d rated the questions better. I knew that food/drink was my opponent’s best category but I still thought this was objectively the hardest question, probably because I myself know nothing about food. Obviously, I got the Scrabble question and I probably thought that was easier than it was just because I was a tournament Scrabble player. The other three questions I got were just deductive guesses that I’m pretty sure were right. I had never heard of harissa and thought that was something obscure. I’m going to keep doing this, but I’m going to have to assume the food questions are easier than I think they are every time. Just because I haven’t heard of hardly any of the answers doesn’t mean my opponents haven’t. Still, considering I had to play three of the top five finishers in the rundle in the last four days, I really expected to get demoted to Rundle E, especially because I was below the cutline before those four matches. So I really didn’t expect to tie two of those people and lose to one of the other ones by only a point. Maybe I have a future in this…

RAY HENDRICK………………………USA

Born: April 1, 1929
Died: September 28, 1990

Best year: 1969
Best drive: 1969 National Open at Langhorne Speedway

When Hendrick made NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers list in 1998, I was admittedly puzzled. The future Hall of Famer never won a championship and the Inside NASCAR magazine I subscribed to as a boy didn’t make a strong argument for his inclusion. I assumed his reputed 700 wins were an unverifiable overestimate. Okay, my bad. When I got around to doing my research, I noticed that the Auto Racing Research Association verified a staggering 415 wins, not 700 but impressive enough. If these were all NASCAR-sanctioned, he’s likely the winningest NASCAR driver ever. Nonetheless, I don’t blame anyone for not getting it.

Hendrick raced in both the Modified Championship before it became the Whelen Modified Series in 1985 and the Late Model Sportsman Championship before it became the Busch Series in 1982, but those predecessor series had slipshod record-keeping. He only made occasional Cup Series starts because he preferred his day job as a construction foreman for his brother Ed and also because he made more money from local appearance fees than he would have racing full-time in Cup.

It seems the main reasons Hendrick never won any titles were because he made fewer starts in a season than other title contenders and because of his “checkers-or-wreckers” style. The closest he came was 1966, when he crashed while in a championship position at the Atlanta season finale before losing to Ernie Gahan. As Sportsman races started replacing Modified races in the South in the ‘70s, Hendrick remained dominant, racking up at least 271 Modified wins from and 142 Sportsman wins from 1951-1980. His biggest wins came in the marquee Race of Champions, which he won twice in 1969 and 1975 at Langhorne and Trenton respectively. In 1969, he drove from 10th to take the lead in five laps against a stout 45-car field that included Richie Evans, Jerry Cook, Geoff Bodine, Benny Parsons, and Jim Hurtubise, then led the rest of the race. His twenty wins at Martinsville remain a record. Although the modifieds mostly eschewed superspeedway racing later, Hendrick’s wins included races at Talladega, Pocono, and Charlotte. He was particularly skillful at manual steering and navigating traffic, and the advent of power steering infuriated him.

Hendrick’s legacy is frequently misunderstood because he was mediocre in the Cup Series, he never won a title despite possibly being the winningest NASCAR driver ever, and the early Modified and Late Model Sportsman seasons are poorly archived. However, Evans is the only modified driver who might’ve been better and the Modified Championship was much more important in Hendrick’s era than in decades since because it was a destination series that had far deeper fields and raced on a much more interesting variety of tracks. Hendrick was unquestionably better than Cook, but never got the same respect solely because Cook won six titles almost entirely because he entered more races, then became a NASCAR official. Hendrick is a driver you have to research to fully understand his significance. Thankfully, NASCAR finally did its research.

Year-by-year: 1952: C, 1953: C, 1954: C-, 1955: C-, 1956: C+, 1957: C, 1958: C, 1959: C+, 1961: C, 1962: C-, 1963: E-, 1964: C+, 1965: C+, 1966: E-, 1967: E-, 1968: E-, 1969: E-, 1970: E-, 1971: C, 1972: C+, 1973: C+, 1974: C+, 1975: C+, 1976: C, 1979: C-