A Triple Shot of Drivers

All the remaining drivers with either 2 F1, 3 IndyCar, or 3 Cup wins.

I decided to go through an entire week’s worth of drivers all in one post in part because these all-in-one posts don’t take as long to write as each individual page. The longer posts also tend to do better. As revealed in my subtitle, I went through all the F1 drivers with two wins (scheduled for Friday), all the NASCAR Cup Series drivers with three (scheduled for today), and all the IndyCar drivers with three (scheduled for Wednesday), so now I’m a little ahead. I want to go through all the drivers on all three win lists by the time my colonoscopy is scheduled on August 6, so I can have some closure/preparation time for that. (I still might cancel it.) Right now, I’m enjoying these posts more than the individual driver posts because I can cover a lot more all at once, which I’m going to need to do if I want to whittle this down and determine the remainder of my 1,000 greatest drivers list. I now have three new locks, one each from F1 (Patrick Depailler), IndyCar (Jimmy Davies), and NASCAR (Frank Mundy), although admittedly, I mainly have Davies as a lock because of his midget accomplishments and I mainly have Mundy as a lock because of what he did in the years he wasn’t racing in NASCAR. This takes me to 604 locks right now, along with 493 on my bubble and 549 on my next tier down. It’s unlikely I would list anyone who is not currently listed on the top three tiers unless it’s a breakout star, but I’m definitely keeping up with those (even though I’m still a bit skeptical of Connor Zilisch’s massive overhype, I already have him in tier 3.)

In May, I applied to write for RotoWire, the most famous site in the fantasy sports preview space, because I was at that time looking to supplement my income with some more work after my mom’s Social Security was redirected to the nursing home. I was contemplating leaving RotoBaller, especially because they paid me late the last couple months, and that ended up causing one of my auto-withdrawals to bounce, although I did get the money and the bank reversed the overdraft fee, so that was good. However, when the guy from RotoWire interviewed me last week, he told me they paid $1 per driver post, half the $2 that RotoBaller gives me. That’s how small-time this is because so many people want to do this. To make any money at this at all, you’ve got to be pretty good, but I decided I didn’t want to make even less money just to write for a marginally more prestigious site (especially since I didn’t think it would ultimately give me any additional exposure for my book or the Substack, so I’m sticking with RotoBaller. I want to at least get 1,000 columns in for them, which I should by the NASCAR playoffs. (I just hit 900 last weekend.)

One of the nurses at Mom’s nursing home noticed I had been wearing ragged shoes that were falling apart for weeks. I was fine with them and autistically failed to pay much attention to them, but the nurse decided to get me a pair of shoes. Unfortunately, they are a size or two too small (they are 8s and I wear a 10), so they’re causing me a bit of pain, but I don’t want to complain since it’s so rare for anybody to do anything like that nowadays. Similarly, some Good Samaritan apparently did find my wallet and place it on my front porch last week and apparently nothing was missing. On the other hand, I’m still angry the nursing home somehow lost my mom’s 60-year-old dentures (I don’t really care as much that they lost her cell phone). If I had controlled the hoarding, she wouldn’t have been forced in there against her will and she wouldn’t have lost her teeth, but then if I’d try to control the hoarding, she would have screamed at me. My mom has been much more pleasant since she’s been in there and not only is she no longer saying all that unhinged racist shit, she seems to have entirely forgotten that period of her life and I have no desire to remind her.

Still feeling very, very lonely for real world companionship. I looked for it at Scrabble tournaments but those people don’t seem to want anything to do with me now. I looked for it at church, but the problem is almost nobody my age goes and I totally know why. I looked for it at bar trivia, but even though I’ve gone a bunch of times, I haven’t really connected with anyone and I’m tired of that too. Moreover, it seems like to be really good at that, you have to have like deep awareness of 75-100 TV shows and several hundred movies that you are presumed to have seen, and I was always way more selective, so my knowledge of culture from this century is way too sparse (I do okay with music questions usually…) I’m not really into either the things critics rave about. I’m sure the prestige TV shows about antiheroes who steadily turn into sociopaths are the best things ever written like everybody says they are, but I have enough darkness in my real life to want to embrace that in fiction I guess. If I want to depress myself culturally, I’d much rather read about war crimes or foreboding climate change projections or something real. I guess I look for comfort in art more.

On the other hand, I never got into any of the “geek culture” shit either really. There were a handful of sci-fi and fantasy things I liked, but I was never into comic books (getting into Calvin and Hobbes first probably ruined my chances of ever liking conventional comic books), anime, cosplay, roleplaying games, tabletop games, and so on. It would’ve made it a hell of a lot easier for me to make friends, but I was always more into like the aggressively normie mainstream of the late 20th century: middlebrow, sentimental, slice-of-life pictures about people’s lives, which is not exactly trendy with either the critical or commercial mainstream. I’m sure there are tons of things I’d still like, but they’d probably lean more indie nowadays, and I kind of stopped bothering to look since I can’t afford twelve streaming packages anyway. In some ways, I’m the most boomer millennial, but not in my politics. For me to get as good at bar trivia as I would want to, I would have to consume way too much shit at a time when I want to both create and interact with people more than I want to consume, and I wasn’t having fun either. I guess I’ve got to look for something else.

One thing I do think I want to do someday is start a support group for autistic adults. I’ve desperately wanted one myself for a long time. Although obviously, there’s never enough support for any disability, there does seem to be a lot of support for autistic kids, and particularly the parents of autistic kids, but almost nothing for people who struggle in adulthood. I want there to be something for adults. I did belong to a group in Syracuse but that was more of a play group, and that really wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for some kind of mutual aid group where everyone helped each other. I wish there were things like AA for people who aren’t alcoholics, and I may want to start something. But probably not when all this stuff is going on right now with my mom. Anyway, the drivers…

José Froilán González

1947: C-
1948: C-
1950: C-
1951: 5
1952: C+
1953: E-
1954: 2
1955: C
1958: C
1959: C
1960: C-

Cumulative points: 108

One of the greatest drivers of the ‘50s, González followed his Argentine countryman Juan Manuel Fangio to F1, where he became the first winner for Ferrari in 1951. While a lot of people downplay this era because it did not require as much athleticism as later eras (González was famously bulky and once quipped, “In the old days, tires were fat and drivers were skinny”. However, I honestly tend to rate the ‘50s F1 drivers higher than most people do because a lot of them also won numerous sports car races simultaneously and showed versatility that drivers in later more specialized decades did not. In addition to González’s two F1 points wins and eight non-points wins, he ranks 16th overall, just behind Michael Schumacher and Jim Clark and just ahead of Jackie Stewart and Lewis Hamilton. I don’t think he really gets his due. In addition to finishing 2nd in points to Fangio in 1954, he also won the 24 Hours of Le Mans the same year for Ferrari, where his teammate was…

Maurice Trintignant

1938: C+
1939: E-
1947: C-
1949: C-
1950: C-
1951: C-
1952: C+
1953: C+
1954: 3
1955: E
1956: C
1958: E
1959: C+
1960: C+
1962: C-

Cumulative points: 92

I knew I needed to seize upon my opportunity to deliver that particular segué. Trintignant was indeed González’s teammate is his 1954 Le Mans win, and that might be his career highlight. Trintignant certainly didn’t hit the extremely high career peak of González, but I still ranked him 3rd in 1954 because that year in addition to the Le Mans win, he finished 4th in points, and I decided the Le Mans win, his two other sports car wins, and his three non-points wins, were enough to rate him over third-place finisher Mike Hawthorn. Aside from that, Trintignant is primarily notable as the second driver to win the Monaco GP in 1955 and 1958. Surprisingly, those were his only wins, but he was competitive for a long time with non-points Grand Prix/F1 wins as early as 1938 and as late as 1962. Trintignant held the record for the most F1 starts from 1961-1966 until Jack Brabham surpassed him. While Trintignant was not by any means one of the biggest stars of his era, his cumulative accomplishments make him look better in hindsight than he did at the time.

Pedro Rodríguez

1961: C-
1962: C
1963: C+
1964: C+
1965: C+
1966: C-
1967: E
1968: E
1970: 5
1971: E

Cumulative points: 63

Still the best Mexican driver of all time although I imagine Pato O’Ward will overtake him at some point, Rodríguez is one of several of the two-time F1 winners on this list who had solid F1 careers, but are primarily locks for their sports car accomplishments. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, there were plenty of “dual use” F1/sports car drivers running around, most of whom were better in sports cars. Rodríguez was one of the best of this group. Rodríguez had 23 major sports car wins either overall or in class, including four overall Daytona wins (two 24 Hours of Daytona wins and two at shorter distances), and a 12 Hours of Reims win, an overall win and a class win at Le Mans, two class wins at Sebring. He also became the first two-time Canadian GP winner in the years when the Canadian GP was a sports car race before it became an F1 race. After his death in the 1971 200 Miles of Norisring sports car race and his brother Ricardo’s death nine years earlier, the Mexico City circuit was renamed Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in honor of both brothers.

Wolfgang von Trips

1956: C+
1957: C-
1958: C
1959: C
1960: E-
1961: 4

Cumulative points: 43

Very much like Didier Pironi, von Trips had a not great F1 career that ended in a career-ending crash while they held the points lead. There are two main differences in my view. You can make a strong case that von Trips was outperforming his teammate Phil Hill in 1961 before Hill overtook von Trips for the championship after his death in a way you can’t for Pironi, who was clearly grossly inferior to Gilles Villeneuve until Villeneuve’s death. Additionally, as with most of the Ferrari stars from the ‘50s and ‘60s, he also won a lot of sports car races, which (as I mentioned for the above drivesr) proves a certain level of versatility that drivers in Pironi’s era didn’t really have (von Trips is also higher in my model). Most of von Trips’s wins were admittedly class wins and not overall wins, but from 1956-1960, these class wins included a Le Mans class win, two 12 Hours of Sebrings, an RAC Tourist Trophy, and a Targa Florio. This last event (arguably the most historic regularly-held race in the world) was arguably Italy’s biggest sports car race from its inception in 1906 until it became a rally event in the ‘70s (although it still exists today). In addition to his second-place points finish in 1961, von Trips won the Targa Florio overall, which was maybe the biggest win of his career.

Jimmy Davies

1949: C+
1950: C
1953: C
1954: C
1955: C
1959: C-
1960: E-
1961: E
1962: E-
1963: C
1964: C
1965: C

Cumulative points: 38

Davies started out as the youngest winner in IndyCar history when he won a flag-to-flag race at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in the 1949 season finale at age 20. At the time, the AAA did not allow drivers under the age of 21 to race, but Davies was one of the three major drivers along with Troy Ruttman and the soon-to-come Jim Rathmann who got fake IDs to race. Since the 21-year-old restriction would not be lifted until the early IRL in the ‘90s, no driver would break Davies’s youngest winner record until Marco Andretti of all people in 2006. This record was later broken by Graham Rahal and Colton Herta. Clearly, having a successful parent breaks down the door faster. But despite Davies’s three early IndyCar wins, his true calling came as a midget racer. After USAC replaced the AAA as the main sanctioning body in 1956, Davies shifted his focus to midget cars exclusively and he won 48 USAC Midget races from 1956-1965, which still ranks sixth all time. He won three consecutive chmpionships from 1960-1962 and 30 races in those years, proving to be a better midget racer than IndyCar driver, even though he wasn’t a bad IndyCar driver by any means.

Elio de Angelis

1979: C
1980: C+
1981: E-
1982: E
1983: C+
1984: E
1985: E-

Cumulative points: 38

One of the most overrated drivers by statistical models in my opinion (including my own), de Angelis looks like an all-time great in most people’s models because he utterly dominated Nigel Mansell when they were teammates from 1981-1984. While that’s certainly enough to give him lock status, my personal opinion on the matter is that Mansell significantly improved as a driver at a later age than most of his contemporaries did, so de Angelis gets unjustly rewarded in statistical models for blowing out Mansell when Mansell wasn’t as good as he became. De Angelis is the #1 rated driver globally in my open wheel model for 1981 (F1metrics had him first in 1984), but I hardly believe he was ever the best driver in a season, and Ayrton Senna beating him 13-3 in qualifying in his second season in 1985 kind of proves that. The reason I was very reluctant to rank him higher was because he only made a single pass for the lead in his entire career and had a 1-3 lead change record. I know most people think the finish is the only thing that matters, but I think all that stuff matters too.

Jo Siffert

1963: C-
1964: C+
1965: C
1966: C
1967: C+
1968: E
1969: E
1970: C
1971: E-

Cumulative points: 38

Siffert won two F1 races and is occasionally cited as the last driver to win for a privateer team in the 1968 British Grand Prix. However, as with most of the other F1 drivers on this list, his real legacy is in sports cars. From 1966-1971, he won World Sports Car Championship races every year, winning 14 overall and 5 class wins, including sweeping the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring overall in 1968, winning two Austrian GPs, and the Targa Florio. He also earned back-to-back Le Mans class wins in 1966 and 1967 and another Daytona class win the latter year as well. Siffert was also a successful driver in the early years of Can-Am. Although he never won a race, he finished fourth in points twice. Sadly, during a 1971 season where he got top five points finishes in both F1 and Can-Am, he was killed in an upside-down, fiery crash at the non-championship World Championship Victory Race late that season.

Frank Mundy

1949: C
1951: E-
1952: C
1953: E
1954: E-
1955: E
1956: C+

Cumulative points: 37

Mundy is one of a number of true stock car legends whose NASCAR career alone gives an inaccurate perception of their career. Like Paul Goldsmith, Marshall Teague, Norm Nelson, Dick Hutcherson, and Johnny Beauchamp, he was actually one of the most dominant stock car drivers of his era, but you wouldn’t know it if you just looked at his NASCAR starts. Because NASCAR has successfully suppressed the history of all other stock car series, particularly the rival AAA/USAC Stock Car series that was sanctioned by the series that also sanctioned IndyCar racing but also IMCA and several smaller tours, a lot of stock car legends didn’t get their due just because their series were forgotten and they were only in and out of NASCAR. If there was a stock car hall of fame, they’d definitely all belong in it, but I suppose Hutcherson and Teague are the only ones of those who have a strong case for the NASCAR HoF, and I doubt even either of those will ever happen. If you know about Mundy, you likely know that he is the first NASCAR winner of Mexican heritage. If you know anything else, it’s likely that he appeared at the meeting where NASCAR was formed. But Mundy’s real legacy came when he defected from NASCAR to compete in the AAA Stock Car Series, where he had his best seasons, winning the 1953 and 1955 titles and 18 races overall from 1952-1955, alternating the titles back and forth with Teague. When you consider how highly I rate Teague (I gave him a top five season), you should not be surprised by how highly I regard Mundy, who actully won more AAA Stock Car races than Teague in those years, although I don’t think Mundy hit as high a career peak as Teague did in 1952. In 1956, Mundy returned to NASCAR to race in the Convertible Series where he won six times. That was basically it for him, but that was enough.

Billy Arnold

1928: C+
1930: 2
1931: E-
1932: C+

Cumulative points: 34

The ‘30s were probably the weakest decade for IndyCar competition in history, as the soon-to-come Eddie Rickenbacker introduced the so-called “Junk Formula” at the 1930 Indy 500, which mandated cars that were closer to production cars than the performance cars of the ‘20s and discouraged foreign manufacturers. It was a very proto-IRL move that led to similar results. Although the series did not split, the board tracks that dominated the ‘20s were considered too dangerous to race on and many of the top drivers of that decade died in crashes. The Depression did not help things. As a result, you tended to have two-to-six race seasons for most of that decade, which were so short that whoever won the Indy 500 won the title by default. There weren’t many strong drivers around either (in a decade when European drivers were thriving), but Arnold was certainly one of them. The driver who arguably most benefited from the Junk Formula was Arnold, who set a record for Indy 500 laps led by leading 198 out of 200 laps in 1930. After eventual three-time winner Louis Meyer passed him for the lead on the opening lap, Arnold retook it on lap three and led the rest of the way. He also won two other races to win the title. In subsequent years, he competed at the Indy 500 only. After having his qualifying time disallowed in 1931, he was forced to start 18th. He took the lead in seven laps and crashed while holding a 5-lap lead on lap 162. In 1932, he led 57 of the first 59 laps until another crash, after which he retired. Despite making only five Indy 500 starts, he still ranks 13th in laps led to this day.

Jim Rathmann

1952: C
1954: C
1955: C+
1956: C-
1957: E-
1958: C+
1959: E-
1960: E

Cumulative points: 31

Rathmann is very similar to Bill Vukovich that he was certainly one of the best drivers on ovals in general, and superspeedways (especially Indianapolis) in particular, but just as with Vukovich, I refrained from giving Rathmann any top five seasons because just like Vukovich, he was pretty weak on the dirt tracks that largely propagated the schedule at that point. Neither of them were as versatile as (for example) Rodger Ward, so I kind of find them both overrated for that reason. The Indy 500 was the most important race, sure, but I’m not going to take drivers like these over drivers like (for instance) Jimmy Bryan, who was equally good everywhere even though you could make a strong case that both Vukovich and Rathmann were better Indy drivers than Bryan. Well, so what? Takuma Sato’s a better Indy driver than Will Power too, but that doesn’t say anything about their overall abilities. While that’s a particularly extreme example, I do get tired of the Indy-centrism sometimes especially because it likely weakened IndyCar in general and only benefited NASCAR. Rathmann’s still a lock obviously, even though his career is less impressive the more you look at it. Like his brother Dick, he was a stock car winner with three AAA/USAC Stock Car wins from 1954-56 before he finally became an IndyCar star in 1957. He also showed some versatility by earning a class win at Sebring in 1958. His 1960 Indy 500 is one of the most iconic and famous wins, and his sweep of the Race of Two Worlds against a field of F1 and IndyCar drivers was impressive, but admittedly, none of those F1 drivers had seen an oval before. Rathmann also won the only IndyCar race ever held at Daytona. He was a real superspeedway master, but too weak on the dirt tracks for me to rate him higher than this.

Peter Revson

1966: C
1967: C
1969: C
1970: C
1971: E
1972: C+
1973: E

Cumulative points: 31

The Revlon cosmetics heir had an eclectic career that included the 1971 Can-Am title, two F1 wins, an IndyCar win, three World Sportscar Championship class wins (including two 12 Hours of Sebrings), five Can-Am wins, two Trans-Am wins, and a second-place points finish in the first IROC championship. However, while his 1971 and 1973 seasons were great (and I almost gave him a top five rating for 1973 before deciding not to), most of his other years were more lackluster than I was expecting and he has a well below average rating in my open wheel model. He sort of feels like a road course version of Davey Allison, who had a couple spectacular seasons and nothing else that came close, but like Allison, his best seasons were immediately before his death, which suggests for both of them that they may not have hit their peaks yet, or they may have. I guess we’ll never know.

Robby Gordon

1989: C
1990: E-
1991: C+
1992: C
1993: C+
1994: C+
1995: C+
1996: C-
1997: C-
2001: C-
2002: C-
2003: C

Cumulative points: 27

I ended up not writing my originally scheduled Robby Gordon column in January because I was starting to have doubts that he really was a lock since his NASCAR career wasn’t great and honestly in retrospect his CART career wasn’t very great either. If you compare the three similar drivers who had both a couple Cup and IndyCar wins in my lifetime, A.J. Allmendinger is the highest in both my open wheel and stock car models, Gordon is second, and Andretti is third. Since I don’t have Allmendinger as a lock, I was wondering whether Gordon shouldn’t be either. Ultimately, I decided he should be. Even if Allmendinger’s Champ Car and NASCAR careers were better (and that’s debatable but you could argue it), Gordon is more eclectic than even those other two. Although both Allmendinger and Andretti have overall 24 Hours of Daytona wins and Gordon doesn’t, Gordon has 7 overall IMSA wins and 6 class wins to Andretti’s 3 and Allmendinger’s 1. Even if he didn’t win Daytona overall, he became the first driver to win four consecutive 24 Hours of Daytona class wins in 1990 and 1993, and obviously he had his five consecutive SCORE International Trophy Truck championships in 1986-1990 and two others in later years. His three Baja 1000 wins and two Baja 500 wins also help make his case, although I don’t find those races as hugely prestigious as others do. I actually think Gordon peaked as a 21-year-old in 1990 when he won the SCORE title, five IMSA races including his first Daytona and Sebring class wins, and the Baja 1000 and Baja 500. It was all downhill from there. His CART career was fine. Giving A.J. Foyt his first top ten points finish after Foyt’s retirement was good and he got back-to-back 5th place finishes and two wins for Walker Racing… which is pretty analogous to wht Scott Goodyear did right before him. Yet Gordon gets hyped as a legend sometimes and Goodyear gets regarded as a hack; their CART careers really weren’t that different. His NASCAR career wasn’t bad, but it definitely feels like he wasted his potential. I did still rate his 1996 and 1997 because in 1996 he won another SCORE title and in 1997, he shockingly led my stock car model; in both years, he finished 2nd in IROC points. I absolutely do not take Stadium Super Trucks even the least bit seriously, so sorry, I’m not rating any of that stuff. Ultimately, he was a great driver who should’ve done more, but certainly one of the most diverse drivers of his era.

Patrick Depailler

1974: C
1975: C
1976: C+
1977: C+
1978: E
1979: E-

Cumulative points: 25

I’m not knocked out by Depailler at all really but he was close enough to F1 champion Jody Scheckter when they were teammates that I decided to upgrade him to lock status anyway. This is to some extent a career compiler thing as he did have six consecutive top ten points finishes in an era of F1 that was somehow very deep and very shallow at the same time. There were more good drivers than any other era, but not as many great ones and the great drivers tended not to be as great. Depailler did win the 1974 F2 title while simultaneously competing in F1, then seemed to be really taking off in 1978 and 1979 when he won his first two F1 races before breaking his legs and missing the rest of the 1979 season due to a hang-gliding accident. Sadly, he was killed in a test at Hockenheim as he was preparing to make his comeback the next year.

Eddie Rickenbacker

1913: C+
1914: E-
1915: 4
1916: 4

Cumulative points: 23

Rickenbacker is primarily famous as the greatest American fighter pilot in World War I. He is secondarily famous as the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which he bought from Carl Fisher in 1927 before selling it to Tony Hulman in 1946. He pretty much ran IndyCar racing into the ground during his tenure (see the note about the Junk Formula in the Billy Arnold entry), but as a driver, he was more successful. Rickenbacker won three points races and five non-points races from 1914-1916, making him probably the fourth-most successful IndyCar driver of the period behind only Dario Resta, Ralph DePalma, and Johnny Aitken. Since the onset of World War I shut down racing in Europe, that resulted in me rating Rickenbacker the #4 driver of 1915 and 1916. I still have some doubts about whether I should rate him this high, and I’m wondering whether part of it is simply because he’s one of the most interesting people to talk about. But ultimately, I say no. If you look at his stats for 1916 relative to those others, he’s close enough that I think he should be almost but not quite a lock.

Max Papis

1996: E-
1997: C-
1998: C
1999: C+
2000: C
2001: C
2002: C-
2004: C+
2005: C
2007: C-

Cumulative points: 22

I find Papis to be obscenely overrated, but I’m probably still going to list him anyway. After an extremely brief F1 stint in 1995, Papis became a star in America in the 1996 24 Hours of Daytona when he gained a minute on leader Scott Sharp in the last hour and garnered the nickname “Mad Max”. The only problem: Sharp still won the race but it seemed to do nothing for his legacy while Papis became a superstar solely because Papis raced in CART and Sharp raced in the IRL, even though Sharp was actually significantly better at both open wheel and sports cars. Of course Sharp is going to take it easy and conserve his equipment when trying to win an endurance race! How much should Papis be praised for not winning in a scenario like that? It seemed like he was praised more than he should’ve been. He certainly deserved the CART ride he got after Jeff Krosnoff was killed at Toronto, and he did give Toyota some of its best early finishes when they had a significant horsepower deficit, but I would say he did not do as much to improve them as Cristiano da Matta and Juan Pablo Montoya did, but not being as good as them is no crime. In 1999, he replaced Bobby Rahal upon his retirement. He tended to show explosive dominance at the Michigan and Fontana “Handford Device” races, but he never actually won any of them. Sometimes it was not his fault (Tim Cindric running him out of fuel at Michigan in 1999) and sometimes it was (Papis crashing into his teammate Kenny Bräck, which helped cost Bräck the 2001 championship and ultimately got him fired). After going winless in 1999, his three wins came at other tracks in 2000 and 2001, but in those seasons Bräck destroyed him (especially 2001, when Bräck had 7.16 lead shares to Papis’s 1.52.) After being fired, he never really got his bearings back. He did get some sports car wins including the 2002 24 Hours of Daytona, ten later wins from 2004-2013, and the 2004 Grand-Am Daytona Prototype championship with Scott Pruett, but Pruett, an all-time sports car legend, was clearly the leader of that team and I don’t think Papis contributed as much. Since he was neither as great a CART driver or a sports car driver as people seem to think, I have rated him lower than you might expect, but that will still almost certainly be enough points to make the list.

Jean-Pierre Jabouille

1976: C-
1979: C+
1980: E-
1984: C
1985: C-
1986: C-
1987: C
1990: C+

Cumulative points: 18

The rest of these drivers aren’t worthy of as long discussions. Somewhat similarly to Depailler, Jabouille was an F2 champion in 1976 before winning two races in 1979 and 1980 before a broken leg caused him to abruptly retire in 1981. Jabouille did resurface in the French Touring Car Championship, where he won nine races from 1984-1990, but I don’t think that touring car championship was anywhere near as prestigious as most of the other national touring car championships because it’s almost impossible to even find complete lists of winners from that series and the information available on it on touringcarracing.net (where I obtained most of my data on touring car series through 1993) is way more sparse than for any other series. He could have more FTCC wins than that and I wouldn’t even know.

Len Sutton

1957: C
1958: C+
1959: C+
1960: C
1961: C+
1962: C+
1964: C-

Cumulative points: 17

Although he’s no Ashley Sutton, Len Sutton is interesting because he is one of only five drivers with an above average rating in both my open wheel and stock car models. The others are A.J.s Allmendinger and Foyt, Roger McCluskey, and Juan Pablo Montoya. While Foyt, McCluskey, and Montoya are obvious locks, I’m not sure about the other two. Sutton really does seem like an oval version of Allmendinger in that he was eclectic and pretty good at a variety of disciplines but not really dominant at all. While Sutton doesn’t have a year on par with Allmendinger’s 2006, he probably had more years in the very good range. From 1957-1961, he won 3 IndyCar races, 7 USAC Midget races, and 2 USAC Stock Car races, proving his steady versatility even if he didn’t dominate at anything. From 1959-1962, he had four consecutive top ten points finishes in IndyCar, but none of them were better than 7th. His stock car rating is higher than his open wheel rating, but that also came in the USAC Stock Car Series, which was prestigious but not quite as prestigious as NASCAR. I think I want to list him, but I might change my mind.

George Amick

1955: C+
1956: C+
1957: E-
1958: C+

Cumulative points: 14

Amick had four IndyCar seasons from 1955-1958 where he ran nearly full-time but curiously he never started the Indy 500 until 1958, when he finished second as a rookie. His points finishes progressively got better from 9th to 4th to 3rd to 2nd from 1955-1958, and in those years, he won three IndyCar races and 18 midget races including the Turkey Night Grand Prix. However, he was killed on the last lap of IndyCar’s season-opening Daytona race (the aforementioned race by Rathmann). In the wake of Amick’s death, IndyCar would never race there again, and an already-scheduled race scheduled for July 4 eventually became NASCAR’s Firecracker 400 (originally 250).

Dick Linder

1950: E-
1951: E-
1952: C+

Cumulative points: 13

Linder arguably had the second-best Cup Series season in 1950 to Curtis Turner, as his three wins, series-high five poles, and 460 laps led weren’t far off Turner’s four wins, four poles, and 1,110 laps led. However, Linder dropped off the Cup scene and was quickly forgotten because he switched his focus to the Late Model Sportsman division, where he won an estimated 32 races in 1951 and 19 in 1952. He’s now completely forgotten, but he probably shouldn’t be.

Buddy Rice

2000: C-
2004: E
2007: C

Cumulative points: 13

Is one year enough to make the list? Usually, my answer is no, but Rice is an interesting test case. In 2004, he took a Rahal team that Kenny Bräck had failed to win with in 2003 and won three races including the Indy 500, while his teammate Vitor Meira (who was better than I thought at the time) went winless. That was enough to make him the second-highest rated IRL driver in my model that year behind Darren Manning (who posted a winning record against a struggling Scott Dixon). He did have a higher rating than Kanaan in Kanaan’s title year in my model, and that’s saying something. Sure, Meira was only his second season but Dan Wheldon was too and Rice beat Meira worse than Kanaan beat Wheldon (granted, Wheldon was better than Meira). In any case, I think they were close enough given the context of their equipment for Rice to get the full E. The question is whether anything else should be rated. I rated his 2000 Atlantic Championship season where he beat Wheldon, considered 2002 because I was impressed by him finishing second in his debut race but didn’t do it, and rated 2007 when he somehow placed a Dreyer & Reinbold car ninth in points. Maybe that’s worth more than C, but he was also more consistent than dominant. In the wake of his 2005 and 2006, when he was outperformed by Danica Patrick in her first two years after his injury in his Indy 500 practice crash, it didn’t really feel like a full recovery (much like Bruno Junqueira that same year). I was upset in 2009 when he no longer had a full-time ride, but it now feels like he was done. I decided not to rate that year when he did win the 24 Hours of Daytona because it feels like he was along for the ride, but I’ll probably never have access to the lap time documents to determine this, which I failed to download at the time. I don’t really feel he belongs on the list, but he definitely should be close.

Bill Blair

1949: E-
1950: C+
1952: C
1953: C-

Cumulative points: 11

Blair led the most laps in the inaugural Cup Series season despite not winning a race, then kind of had diminishing returns after that in years when he actually won.

Mark Blundell

1991: C
1992: C-
1993: C-
1995: C-
1996: C-
1997: E-

Cumulative points: 11

His F1 career was respectable, particularly his 1991 and 1993 seasons, when in his first two full-time F1 seasons, he and the almost-rhyming, similarly-named Martin Brundle were teammates for two different teams were very evenly matched despite Brundle being a long-established veteran at that point. But ultimately, he didn’t have many highlights except for his overall Le Mans win in 1992 (where I give Derek Warwick and Yannick Dalmas much more of the credit since they were much more dominant sports car racers) and his out-of-nowhere three-win CART season in 1997. Blundell’s CART career was not as impressive as it could have been because it kept being punctuated by injuries, much like Christian Fittipaldi’s. As a result, Blundell’s teammate Mauricio Gugelmin beat him in points all five years from 1996-2000, but Blundell actually won the head-to-head between them. The CART wins and Le Mans win suggest he’s worthy of consideration, but he’ll probably be on the outside looking in.

Ed Carpenter

2006: C-
2009: C
2011: C-
2012: C-
2013: C-
2014: C
2018: C-

Cumulative points: 9

I had a strong bias against Carpenter for getting into IndyCar because he was Tony George’s stepson much like how I have a strong bias against Conor Daly now for his undeserved longevity since he’s Doug Boles’s stepson, but I can admit both of them got better and eventually became strong oval drivers. While I don’t think Daly ever quite had a strong enough season to rate (although I’ve come close more than once), Carpenter went on a solid run there for a while. After having entirely written him off years prior, I was surprised when Carpenter outperformed Ryan Hunter-Reay at the start of 2009 and even more surprised when he had an epic fight with Ed Carpenter for the win at Kentucky in the bizarre debut of push-to-pass oval racing. Carpenter was most impressive as an owner-driver with three deserved wins and back-to-back Indy 500 poles, and he probably had the best race in the 2018 Indy 500, but he doesn’t belong on the list.

Pat Flaherty

1955: C+
1956: E-
1958: C-

Cumulative points: 9

The Buddy Rice of the ‘50s, Flaherty also won three races including the Indy 500 in a brief time span from 1955-1956 before an injury in a mid-season crash in 1956 effectively ended his career, although he did win a USAC Stock Car race after that. I ended up rating Rice over Flaherty because I like Rice’s full 2004 season over Flaherty’s partial 1956 season, even though Flaherty also had a stock car win and a sprint car win that year as well, but they’re very similar.

Walt Faulkner

1950: C+
1951: E-

Cumulative points: 8

Faulkner had a similar career arc to Flaherty and Rice as well, but actually, I’d say it more closely matches Myron Fohr’s because although Faulkner won three races in a very small timespan and then immediately fell off, it seems like Faulkner just started sucking and it was not due to injury. Much like Fohr, Faulkner’s later career was riddled with DNQs and he quickly disappeared. And unlike Flaherty and Rice, he didn’t win the Indy 500 although he did win the pole in both of his big years.

Lee Wallard

1948: C
1949: C
1950: C-
1951: C+

Cumulative points: 8

One of the weakest Indy 500 winners, Wallard admittedly caught a terrible break when a week after his win, he had a fiery crash in a promotional event at Reading, Pennsylvania, which effectively ended his career. Tony Bettenhausen immediately replaced him and won eight races. Wallard probably would’ve won some of them, but you can’t quite rate something that didn’t happen. Wallard’s Indy 500 win was impressive. He had a 4-3 lead change record there, but Bettenhausen ended up having an 8-2 lead change record in the remaining races, so you could make the case that Wallard underachieved his car. In the rest of his career after World War II, he had only a 1-3 lead change record, four Big Car wins (one of which counted as an IndyCar win), and one additional IndyCar win. He was not a dominant sprint or midget driver unlike many of his peers either, which was an important part of drivers’ legacies in this era. He was also 40, so probably most of his career was behind him as well. It’s unfortunate his career ended as abruptly as it did, but he wasn’t really a legend.

Aric Almirola

2014: C-
2015: C-
2018: C
2019: C-
2020: C

Cumulative points: 7

He did have good seasons in my model when he beat Marcos Ambrose in 2014 and crushed Sam Hornish, Jr. in 2015. He showed bursts of dominance at Stewart-Haas Racing, especially in 2018, when he had an astounding 6-1 lead change record, and 2 TNL, but still probably performed worse than all three of his teammates, even in a year when Clint Bowyer and Kurt Busch weren’t great, but ultimately he wasn’t very special.

Erik Jones

2015: C-
2017: C-
2018: C-
2019: C
2022: C

Cumulative points: 7

I once dubbed Jones the next Sterling Marlin; it turned out he was just the next Ward Burton. Jones is a driver who looks good in most people’s advanced statistics because he always tends to have very strong passing numbers. On that basis, Ryan McCafferty convinced me to rate him over his replacement Christopher Bell, who we both felt had had an overrated 2022. That… did not age well. Bell is unquestionably a star (and much more than the next Ryan Newman as I’d called him in that same entry). Jones has pretty much faded to mediocrity. I realize he had an awful crash at Talladega last year and it was gross that his douchebag teammate John Hunter Nemechek injured him and then joked about it afterward, as opposed to Jeff Gordon, who at least showed remorse when he flipped Ken Schrader at Talladega and gave him a black eye in 1995. But I think the reason he did so well in McCafferty’s models (as well as David Smith’s) was because of his strong passing numbers in the back half of the field. He passes more drivers because he has always been a pretty terrible qualifier, which I think inflates him in this way, much like Newman’s passing numbers looked bad in part because he won so many damn poles. I now think Jones is a driver the analytics community overrates. He’s having a pretty good year right now, but I’m not going to call it a comeback. I might list him or I might not, but I no longer believe what I said about him in 2022, and I lowered that grade accordingly.

Brian Vickers

2003: C-
2005: C-
2008: C-
2009: C
2012: C-
2013: C-

Cumulative points: 7

He had a bunch of okay seasons but they almost seemed entirely random. He was a very difficult driver to predict for most of his career because little of his career made sense. I did rate his 2003 for being the youngest Busch champion. 2005 was his only good Hendrick year in my opinion because he really wasn’t far off Jeff Gordon in the impound races, although he was in the other races. I guess his runner-up finish at Pocono was a standout race, but to me, it’s one of my case studies for the flaws of laps led as a metric as he led 121 out of 201 laps but had a 0-3 lead change record against Carl Edwards. I really didn’t like the way he won the 2005 All-Star Open and to a lesser extent the 2006 Talladega race, which is part of why I left him off in 2006. He was impressive in his early Red Bull seasons, but he missed too many races in 2007 for me to consider rating that. After his bizarrely awful 2011, I thought his Cup career would be over but he managed to resurface with Michael Waltrip, where Rodney Childers briefly revived his career before the Spingate debacle.

André Ribeiro

1995: C-
1996: C
1997: C-

Cumulative points: 4

Ribeiro was the first Honda winner in CART, but mostly, I view him as a product of his cars because the Hondas consistently dominated from 1995-1999, and none of the traditional top drivers had access to the Honda powerplant yet, which inflated him. The Hondas were so fast that Scott Goodyear almost won the Indy 500 as a part-time driver, Parker Johnstone set the closed-course speed record on his oval debut at Michigan, and Jimmy Vasser and Alex Zanardi came out of nowhere to dominate for Ganassi despite never showing anything similar before or since. As a result, I don’t look at Ribeiro too highly because despite his massive equipment advantage, he never finished better than 11th in the championship. When he no longer had that equipment advantage, his 1998 season was maybe the worst Penske season of all time. Probably the worst Penske full-timer, even over Kevin Cogan.

Elliott Sadler

2004: C
2005: C

Cumulative points: 4

Sadler had his moment but it was brief, and I think it had more to do with both Todd Parrott being the best setup guy of his era and Dale Jarrett washing up than it had to do with Sadler.

Gwyn Staley

1955: C-
1957: C+

Cumulative points: 4

Staley won three Cup Series races in a seven-race timespan in 1957 and he also won three Modified races, two Convertible races, and two Short Track races. His stock car rating of .119 is also pretty solid, but I just think his career was too short and the competition was too weak to seriously consider him. After his premature death in a convertible race, the spring North Wilkesboro races was named the Gwyn Staley Memorial for many years.

Chase Briscoe

2020: C-
2022: C-
2024: C-

Cumulative points: 3

Obviously, Briscoe is a going concern, and while he hasn’t impressed me much yet, he continues to have flashes of brilliance interspersed with long stretches of mediocrity and many stupid incidents. Like a modern-day Jeremy Mayfield, he’s a driver I don’t understand and I would not have chosen him over Corey Heim if I were Joe Gibbs, but he’ll certainly have more rated seasons. I might rate this one depending on what he does later, but that Pocono win was admittedly kind of dumb.

Austin Cindric

2020: C-
2021: C-

Cumulative points: 2

Yes, I genuinely do think both of Cindric’s Xfinity Series seasons were better than anything he did in his first three Cup Series seasons and I don’t normally say that. This year has definitely been his best, but again, I’m on the fence whether I’m going to rate it or not and like Jones and Briscoe, it probably depends mightily on how his second half goes. It is weird Cindric started out as a road course ringer and is now basically a drafting specialist, but it will give him some staying power in an era when everybody knows he won’t be able to compete with Shane van Gisbergen and eventually Connor Zilisch on those tracks. The bigger surprise is that he no longer competes with the regular Cup stars on those tracks either. I do question his future after Penske fired Tim Cindric, and I kind of think Scott McLaughlin will be in that car pretty soon. At this point, I think McLaughlin might be able to win more races a year in NASCAR than he currently does in IndyCar.

Bus Wilbert

1946: C-

Cumulative points: 1

Like Walt Ader, all three of his IndyCar wins came in that goofy 1946 season where the 70+ AAA sprint car races (then called Big Car races) all counted for IndyCar credit. Winning those races does not impress me as much as winning one of the full-field, full-distance races, so like Ader, I am only going to barely rate this. (And for the drivers who only won one IndyCar/Big Car race in those years like “Bumpy Bumpus” - I wish I were joking - I’m not going to rate those seasons at all.)