1,000 Greatest Drivers: Ted Horn
I'm glad I copied the list of all-time sprint car wins from crucean.com via the Internet Archive before the DDOS attack...
As with Billy Winn in August, it’s difficult for me to rate a lot of Horn’s earlier seasons as a lot of that will likely depend on how many Big Car wins he had each year. However, I don’t have access to that information yet, although I suspect it exists in some form in some library somewhere. I might shift some of my single-season ratings for Horn around if I ever find that information. I’m pretty unambiguous that Horn was the best driver in all three post-war years before he died. You could make a case for some other people, like Luigi Villoresi, who won 6 Grands Prix in both 1947 and 1948, Jean-Pierre Wimille, who won the French and Italian Grands Prix in 1948, John Cobb, who set a world land speed record in 1947, or Mauri Rose who won the 1947 and 1948 Indy 500s in one-offs. However, I chose Horn for #1 for all those years for two main reasons. One is simply the sheer volume of his winning since it seems he won on average 20 races a year (and probably more) while competing in IndyCar and sprint car races simultaneously as opposed to Rose who was better at Indy but largely didn’t compete anywhere else. The other is the fact that Europe was devastated after World War II while the US wasn’t and it took a while for European industry to recover, so I would say that in the immediate years after World War II, the US had greater infrastructure to support competitive fields with top-of-the-line equipment than Europe did, which is why I took him over the European drivers. I will say this: I definitely rate Horn way above the other two drivers to win three straight titles as Sébastien Bourdais did so against lackluster competition and Dario Franchitti’s power run was pretty hollow and overrated (much like Álex Palou’s run today). Not to mention that I think IndyCar racing was more central to global motorsports when Horn was racing there than when Bourdais or Franchitti were.
I got some of this from David Malsher’s retrospective on Horn, which I highly recommend.
