1,000 Greatest Drivers: The Kinsers
I definitely was not informed enough to sprint through this column.
Sprint car racing is not by any means one of my primary areas of expertise, but I gave it my best shot. I originally had Steve Kinser scheduled for June 2 and slotted Mark in the next day for June 3, but obviously I didn’t quite get either done by then because I didn’t finish my Indy 500 winners series in time. Nonetheless, I did my research and discovered that while the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame’s bio of Mark claims that he was a drummer for a rock band, from what I can tell, he was actually the keyboardist for a country band and I have newspaper citations to prove it (unless it’s not the same Mark Kinser, but I think it is). I have entered every World of Outlaws winner and every AAA/USAC Sprint, Midget, and Silver Crown winner, along with winners and champions in a lot of the more minor series, but I still have major gaps here, especially when it comes to the grassroots drivers from this particular scene who predated the formation of the World of Outlaws. It wasn’t until I was actually writing this that I went, “Oh shit, Dick Gaines should be on the list.” The only record I have for him on my master driver list is his win in the 1974 Knoxville Nationals, but apparently he won somewhere between 600 and 800 races and almost none of them were important enough to be properly archived because mostly he seems to have been a barnstormer who didn’t compete in actual series, so I still have a lot to learn here.
This has been a really bad irritable bowel syndrome week for me so I’ve been struggling with motivation overall, although I did complete an assignment for my counselor that I’ve been working on about a month. He asked me for a timeline of the traumatic events of my life and I know he was kind of flabbergasted that I ended up writing for 29 pages. Granted, I included a lot of incidents that were not traumatic for context as I wanted to cover all the major events of my life whether they were traumatic or not. I have no idea whether I’m going to publish any of that here, but I’m thinking probably not. I did really hit it off with a guy at the Unique PeerSpectives men’s group so that was good.
I don’t think I’m ever going to try to become a voracious trivia fiend at this level, but I read a good article for the Baffler written by Jeopardy!/Survivor contestant Drew Basile called “The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer” that I recommend. At least I know enough to know what he is referencing in that title.
Next column will be either Satoru and/or Kazuki Nakajima, but I don’t think I’m going to post a full schedule until I feel like I’m on schedule again. That should be easier now that I finished writing my life history and since I also finished reading the last book in Quentin Spurring and John Brooks’s series on the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. From what I can tell, they haven’t released one for the 2010-2019 decade yet, but I did just finish the 2000-2009 book and I just bought the 1990-1999 book a few days ago on eBay, but it probably won’t arrive until next week, so the next few times I visit Mom I’m probably going to try to largely write some of my upcoming columns on the bus. I’m not sure how much the Brooks book helped me. I was hoping maybe it would provide lap times or lap leaders or even how many laps each driver was in each car, but there’s none of that, and I would have taken that over the numerous glossy pictures of cars at speed, although many of the pictures are certainly cool. The book does contain running positions for every hour at Le Mans, so I could construct a crude average running position I guess, but it wouldn’t help me as much for my main task, which is deermining which of the drivers on multi-driver sports car teams are really doing the work and which are just along for the ride. The one thing I will say is that I did become convinced that Tomáš Enge should probably be on the list despite his mediocre F1 and IRL careers after I saw he was the only driver in that decade to win a class pole five years in a row, so that’s one thing I guess…
STEVE KINSER………………………..USA
Born: June 2, 1954
Best year: 1987
Best drive: 1994 IROC Race #3 at Talladega Superspeedway
Kinser was inextricably linked with the World of Outlaws, where his 20 championships and 690 feature wins both set records for any driver in any series. According to Auto Racing Research Associates, Kinser has 926 career wins, the second-most verified wins behind only Shane Sabraski’s 1,018, but Kinser had a lot better competition. He hailed from a multigeneral racing family as his father Bob worked as a bricklayer four days a week and raced on the weekends, his distant cousin Sheldon won three USAC Sprint Car titles, and his third cousin Karl dominated as a car owner with Dick Gaines until he was critically injured in an effectively career-ending crash in Champaign, Illinois in 1977. Although many were skeptical, Karl hired Steve to replace Gaines even though he had only two years of racing experience and was previously better known as an Indiana wrestling champion.
Steve initially followed Bob into the bricklayer trade, believing he’d be unlikely to make a living from racing. However, when Ted Johnson formed the World of Outlaws in 1978, outlaw sprint racing, a previously disrespected form consisting of unpolished drivers competing at ramshackle tracks for minimal money or media attention, would eventually overtake the then-more prestigious USAC Sprints in popularity; it helped that the USAC/CART split diminished USAC’s prestige. From 1978-1994, Kinser won every championship except for 1981 and 1982 when his closest rival Sammy Swindell won, and 1989 when all the top WoO drivers instead raced in the United Sprint Association.
Kinser peaked in 1987 with an astonishing 51 wins and earned even more respect when he outdueled Dale Earnhardt to win a 1994 IROC race at Talladega the day before the Cup Series race in a field that also included Al Unser, Jr. at his peak. That led to an opportunity to drive NHRA champion Kenny Bernstein’s Cup Series entry in 1995, but he had too much of a learning curve and was fired after seven races. He returned to the WoO shortly thereafter while his cousin Mark replaced him at Karl’s team. Although Mark actually outperformed Steve at first, Steve ultimately showed who was boss with four consecutive titles from 2002-2005. Later on, Steve replaced himself with his son Kraig and instead drove for three-time NASCAR champion Tony Stewart.
Although Kinser spent most of his time in WoO, he won numerous other sprint car races in other tours as well, including 14 United Sprint Association races and back-to-back titles in 1988 and 1989, 35 All Star Circuit of Champions races, three USAC Silver Crown races, four USAC Midget races, and the 1986 Australian Speedcar Grand Prix, a prestigious midget race. What stands out most about Kinser beyond carrying outlaw racing almost entirely on his back is both his modesty (he seldom touted his own accomplishments and usually gave his engineers more of the credit) and the fact that in most other disciplines of motorsports, you can at least debate who the greatest driver was. In sprint car racing, there is no debate.
Open wheel model: #334 of 931 (.024)
Teammate head-to-heads: 18-12 (18-12 vs. Tony Stewart)
Year-by-year: 1978: E-, 1979: E-, 1980: E-, 1981: E-, 1982: C+, 1983: E-, 1984: E-, 1985: C+, 1986: E-, 1987: 5, 1988: E-, 1989: C+, 1990: E, 1991: E, 1992: E-, 1993: C+, 1994: E-, 1995: C, 1996: C, 1998: C+, 1999: C, 2000: C+, 2001: C-, 2002: C+, 2003: C+, 2004: C+, 2005: C+, 2007: C-, 2010: C-, 2011: C-
MARK KINSER………………………USA
Born: May 5, 1964
Best year: 1996
Best drive: April 30, 1988 World of Outlaws race at Knoxville Raceway
The son of Karl Kinser, the most successful car owner in the history of sprint car racing, Mark will always be the “other Kinser” to most fans since his third cousin Steve was the best sprint car driver ever, which makes Mark significantly underrated since his 203 career wins rank fourth behind only Steve, Sammy Swindell, and Donny Schatz, he is one of only three drivers besides them to win multiple titles, and Mark’s 35-win 1996 was the winningest WoO season for any driver other than Steve. As a ten-year-old, Mark sold copies of the National Speed Sport News at local tracks before playing keyboards for the short-lived Indiana band Country Expressions as a teen.
Initially, Karl would not even let Mark touch the cars because his world-class engineers were so good, Mark had little to contribute until he began racing himself. He debuted in the World of Outlaws in 1984 driving Steve’s backup car for Karl, but Mark left the team in the middle of the 1986 season after Steve started racing Mark’s cars. This decision to branch out on his own apart from his family team ultimately reaped dividends and made him a better driver. He began proving his cred in 1988 when he won six races for car owner Jim Reid including outdueling Steve for the win at Knoxville. In this period, his career highlight was probably saving Doug Wolfgang’s life from a burning car in a WoO race at Lakeside Speedway, but as a driver, he was still typically regarded as merely good until he caught the break of a lifetime when Steve left the WoO after the 1994 season to pursue an unsuccessful NASCAR career.
Mark took over Karl’s car, while Steve started his own WoO team after his NASCAR career flopped. After Steve poached engineer Scott Gerkin from Karl’s team, there was bad blood across family lines. Nonetheless, Mark actually outperformed Steve in this period. While both cousins won two titles from 1995-2001 with Mark’s coming in 1996 and 1999, Mark won 157 races to Steve’s 87 in this period, although Steve eventually overtook Mark again starting in 2002 before he abruptly retired after the 2005 season to seek a more modest career as a bus driver.
Mark’s career arguably ultimately proved Steve’s argument that the car played a significantly greater role in success than the driver, as Steve likely would have continued to outperform Mark for his entire career if he had not vacated Karl’s car during his ill-fated NASCAR stint, but Mark had already outdueled Steve in slower cars before, suggesting that Mark was not much worse than Steve at his peak, even if he didn’t sustain it nearly as long. One thing Mark lacks compared to Steve is success in other types of cars. Mark’s NASCAR crossover in the Craftsman Truck Series was even less successful than Steve’s as he DNQed in all four of his attempts, but he nonetheless had a high enough peak to justify placement on this list.
Year-by-year: 1995: C, 1996: E, 1997: E-, 1998: C+, 1999: E-, 2000: C+, 2001: E-