1,000 Greatest Drivers: Simon Pagenaud

The bizarro mirror image of Tony Kanaan.

Today, I’m going to try and play catch up by doing both Simon Pagenaud and Tony Kanaan. I’m going to do Pagenaud first since it’s his birthday and I don’t want to miss it. I wanted to do these drivers together because their careers are sort of bizarre mirror images of each other. Both drivers won a single IndyCar title and Indy 500. They are very close in wins (Kanaan leads Pagenaud 17-15) and my open wheel model (Kanaan is narrowly ahead .151-.145). They only had one mutual teammate Hélio Castroneves who Kanaan beat 7-6 and Pagenaud beat 36-29 (almost exactly the same percentage), but while Kanaan was a great oval racer who seemed a little awkward on road/street courses (with only two road/street course wins), Pagenaud was a great road racer yet pretty awkward on ovals (with only three oval wins). They even both had wildly inconsistent and rather disappointing stints at Penske and Ganassi at the tail end of their careers after performing better for ostensibly weaker teams. Their careers weirdly echo each other in a lot of superficial ways. However, I do think Kanaan is definitely better and I’ll discuss why in his entry.