Season Grades for IndyCar Drivers: Part IV
A high-five for five-time winners.
There are a surprisingly large number of five-time IndyCar winners: 20 of them in fact (more than the number of three and four-time winners). I have already covered five of them (Johnny Aitken, Nigel Mansell, Greg Moore, Dario Resta, and Jacques Villeneuve). Here are the rest, plus Barney Oldfield (who actually has six wins! I knew that, but was lazy and looked at the Wikipedia page, which lied to me). Admittedly, you can argue Earl Cooper should have 21 wins because most of his wins came in years that didn’t have seasons, and you can also argue that Walt Ader should only have 1 because adding over 70 sprint car races to the regular IndyCar schedule in 1946 was a baffling idea. This includes drivers who I consider to be underrated (Roger McCluskey), drivers I consider to be overrated (Scott Goodyear), drivers the world considers to be underrated but I really don’t (Mike Mosley), and drivers that are widely mocked who I think deserve a better reputation (Greg Ray). It’s quite a wild grab-bag in this one. I managed to get this done a little early since neither of my bosses had given me work for a few days. I also made another visit to my mom today. A couple days ago, the nursing home lost a pair of dentures she’s had for about sixty years. That was outrageous, but the nursing home said they’d be willing to replace them. I hope I’m not on the hook for that…
With this entry, I have now upgraded Teo Fabi, Eddie Cheever, and Mike Mosley to lock status. This morning, I also updated my master driver list that I’m using for the list. I’ve renamed some of the categories. My Near Lock category now reads Bubble (Lean Yes), my former Bubble (Yes) category is now Bubble (Lean No), my former Bubble (No) category is now Fringe, and my former Fringe category is now “Sub-Fringe”. I think this list includes everyone who might conceivably have a C- season at some point, and I will keep going through it. The drivers I have already gone through are in bold. I realized my former Near Lock category was in fact my Bubble when you consider that the top two categories consist of 1,093 drivers. Obviously, I will have to make cuts and there probably isn’t much room to consider anyone in those bottom three categories, but I might bump some people up who are currently in the middle category and include them on the list at some point. Oscar Piastri and Broc Feeney do not have 25 points yet, but I assume they will both end up in my top five, which will put them over the line. I’ve similarly elevated a few other hot drivers based on recent success (and in my opinion likely future success) beyond the number of cumulative points they have scored to date. I’ve also factored in all the drivers I haven’t covered yet but earned enough points from single-season top fives to achieve lock status (this mostly involves a bunch of pre-World War II drivers I haven’t mentioned yet…) There are now 592 drivers in my lock tier, although I imagine a few might be demoted (like John Rhodes, Johnnie Parsons, and Billy Winn were) for not scoring enough cumulative points. It would be nice to see if I can tentatively fill out the other 408 by the end of the year. I think I’m going to continue to take a break from daily driver posts and pivot to this for a while. And I once again have paused payments for the month of July so I won’t be charging this month either.
Earl Cooper
1912: C+
1913: 3
1914: E-
1915: 2
1916: C+
1921: C+
1922: C+
1923: E-
1924: 3
1925: 4
1926: C+
Cumulative points: 89
Probably the second-best IndyCar driver of the 1910s behind only Ralph DePalma, Cooper never won an Indy 500 or a title and he only scored five points wins since there wasn’t a championship in the majority of his best seasons. However, many years later, AAA Contest Board secretary Arthur Means and sportswriter Russ Catlin invented an imaginary championship for “seasons” that had never taken place. Cooper was listed as a three-time champion for the 1913, 1915, and 1917 seasons, but that is entirely bullshit since those seasons never happened. Nonetheless, that does give you some impression how dominant he was in his heyday. I decided not to rate him (or anyone) for 1917 even though he won four races that year because there was so little racing in the world that year due to World War I. When including all the non-points events (which you kind of have to for this era in evaluating drivers’ legacies) his 21 wins are second to DePalma’s 25 from this era, although they only had 5 and 6 officially. Although he won multiple times on almost every track type, he was snakebitten at the Indy 500. He did dominate the race in 1924 but lost the lead after he blew a tire. Just as he was retaking the lead from Joe Boyer, he blew another tire and was relegated to a second-place finish. The next year, he set the closed-course speed record of 141.5 mph at Culver City Speedway.
Roger McCluskey
1962: C
1963: C+
1965: C
1966: E
1967: C+
1968: E-
1969: E
1970: E
1971: C+
1972: E-
1973: E
1974: C-
1975: C
1976: C
1977: C-
1979: C-
Cumulative points: 70
McCluskey has a reputation as one of the worst IndyCar champions in history, but that seems to me patently unfair. Not only was he the only driver other than A.J. Foyt to win USAC titles in IndyCars (1973), stock cars (1969 and 1970), and sprint cars (1963 and 1966), he is also (no joke) the highest-rated driver of all time in my stock car model. That is because he beat his car owner/teammate Norm Nelson by a staggering margin of 20-3 and Nelson was no slouch since he was a three-time USAC Stock Car champion and Cup winner himself (Nelson is also well above average in my model and a lock himself). Although Nelson was admittedly in his late 40s and in decline, he still won five races in those years from 1968-72 so he wasn’t totally washed up, but McCluskey won 18 over that timespan. While his stock car stuff impresses me most, I think his IndyCar career is fairly impressive also. He won his title driving for Lindsey Hopkins. Who’s Lindsey Hopkins? Right. While he did win 11 races as a car owner, one would be hard-pressed to argue that his team had the same quality of equipment as Roger Penske, Pat Patrick, McLaren, or Dan Gurney in that era; in fact, the team never won a race after that season so I think McCluskey was doing a lot of heavy lifting there. McCluskey has a solid rating in my model just shy of .1 even if his best strengths were elsewhere, and he demolished all-time midget great Mel Kenyon when they were teammates (although admittedly he had a dominant McLaren chassis and Kenyon had a weaker one, so maybe this is an unfair comparison). Nonetheless, in my opinion, one of the most underrated drivers of all time.
Teo Fabi
1980: C-
1981: E
1982: E-
1983: E
1984: C
1985: C
1986: C
1987: C
1988: C-
1989: C+
1991: E-
1993: C-
1994: C-
1995: C-
Cumulative points: 46
I didn’t originally have Fabi as a lock because something about his career felt wanting, but in retrospect, it should have been obvious. It’s easy to reduce his career almost entirely to his rookie CART season in 1983 when he dominated the series with four wins and 521 laps led for the brand new Forsythe team as a rookie, but while that was certainly his career highlight, he had a number of other accomplishments in a wide variety of series. In 1981, he finished second in the Can-Am championship and won a series-high four races. Since I gave both the driver who beat him (Geoff Brabham) and finished behind him (Al Holbert) in the championship E seasons, obviously I did the same for him. He also had two very productive seasons in the World Sportscar Championship, with four class wins including one overall win in 1982 and he even won the title overall in 1991, although that carries a big asterisk because his co-driver Derek Warwick did not score points for the Silverstone race that they won and if he had, he’d have won the title. Fabi wasn’t terrible in F1 either, although that wasn’t his career peak. He did win three poles but somehow never led a lap. He also gave Porsche its only CART win. He had a long, wide-ranging, versatile career certainly worthy of recognition, but somehow it feels like he should’ve done more.
Eddie Cheever
1977: C
1979: C-
1981: C+
1982: C+
1983: C-
1984: C-
1985: C
1987: E-
1988: C+
1989: C
1990: C-
1992: C-
1995: C-
1997: C-
1998: C
1999: C
2000: C+
2001: C-
Cumulative points: 35
I also didn’t have Cheever as a lock at first. Because of when I became a fan in the mid-to-late ‘90s, I was introduced to Cheever as an IRL driver. Even though I’d watched the 1995 Indy 500 and a bunch of CART races by then, I had never heard of or taken notice of Cheever until his Indy 500 win, and since I was on the CART side of the split at the time, I found him to be a pretty laughable driver and it was hard to take him seriously, calling him “Underacheever” and shit. I was completely ignorant about the better part of his career and was gobsmacked when I saw F1metrics ranking him in the top 50 overall and #1 for 1982 (his previous model even had him as the best American driver over Mario Andretti and Dan Gurney). Having done my research, I now take a more measured middle position. I begrudgingly admit his F1 career was solid. Although I see no greatness in it, he definitely had a number of pretty good years and his 1981 and 1982 were more than that. His 1987 I find especially impressive since he ranked 10th in points while his highly-regarded teammate Derek Warwick only finished 16th; Cheever also won three World Sportscar Championship races for Jaguar in 1987. He was the main co-driver for the champion Raul Boesel, but he couldn’t run the full schedule because of his F1 commitments, and he did this at a time when most other F1 drivers only raced F1. In 1988, he was again the main teammate at Jaguar for champion Martin Brundle, winning four races but again he missed out on the title because of his F1 commitments. That now impresses me a lot and I can see why there was still hype for him entering his IndyCar career. His CART stint for Ganassi was pretty meh especially since he was replacing defending champion/500 winner Emerson Fittipaldi, but I like his 1995 when he got a TNL for Foyt at Nazareth and passed eventual 500 winner/champion Jacques Villeneuve for the lead before running out of fuel. I’ve come around on his IRL years a little, mainly because he was one of only three owner-drivers to win a race in the last 30 years along with Adrián Fernández and Ed Carpenter and the only winning Indy 500 owner-driver since Foyt. His best season in the US was clearly 2000 when he led the IRL in lead shares and made a three-wide pass on both Earnhardts to win an IROC race at Michigan. Ultimately, while I don’t see much greatness here, his longevity and versatility are enough to make him a lock despite never winning an F1 or CART race.
Mike Mosley
1968: C-
1969: C
1970: C+
1971: C-
1972: C+
1973: C+
1974: C
1975: C
1976: C+
1977: C
1979: C-
1981: C
Cumulative points: 25
Old-timers like Robin Miller loved to hype Mosley as the definitive example of a driver who would have won a championship if he’d had a competitive car. Miller always used to share the quote allegedly from Gary Bettenhausen that “if Mosley had a McLaren, everybody else would be competing for second place”. I must admit I don’t exactly get it, and this feels very much an instance where you had to be there. I assume that quote was from 1973 when McCluskey won the title in his McLaren for Hopkins and Johnny Rutherford became a superstar after years of futility when McLaren launched their IndyCar team; I know people in the garage in those days disrespected McCluskey and Rutherford’s talent so that’s probably underlying this. But how were both of those drivers not infinitely superior to Mosley? Rutherford obviously needs no explanation, but I just mentioned that McCluskey was one of two drivers to win USAC IndyCar/stock car/sprint car titles and the all-time leader of my stock car model. In fact both Rutherford and McCluskey were also USAC Sprint Car champions while Mosley won a grand total of 3 Sprint Car races in his career. McCluskey might have had a McLaren, but he won his title for the shaky Lindsey Hopkins team while Mosley started out as a teammate to Bobby Unser at Leader Card Racers in 1968, the year he won the Indy 500 and title. While it sucks that Mosley got screwed out of his first win at Michigan as a rookie when they forced Unser into the car for points in a year when relief drivers actually scored points, Unser still blew the crap out of him before he abruptly left the team. While Leader Card got significantly worse after Unser left and Mosley put up some good seasons against that backdrop, it’s hard to see the greatness all these old-timers see perhaps because I wasn’t there. I reluctantly made Mosley a lock anyway, but he feels overrated to me. It reminds me of all the NASCAR fans who talked about how Ward Burton would have totally been a champion if he had a Hendrick car. Yeah, no.
Barney Oldfield
1905: 3
1913: C+
1914: C+
1915: C+
1916: C+
Cumulative points: 24
Oldfield is a weird one. He won the first-ever IndyCar title in 1905 (and the only one prior to 1916), but his six wins all came in five-lap races on one-mile dirt tracks in races that only had either 2 or 3 cars. He did win back-to-back street course races in 1915 against larger fields but also missed the Indy 500 that year. He was solid at Indy with two fifth-place finishes in his only starts, but he has this ridiculous reputation where his name became a pop culture meme as a synonym for speed in terms of the American public. I kind of get it: he was pioneering in the same way Roger Bannister was pioneering. From what I have read, he was supposedly the first paid race car driver in the US (but I don’t know whether I find that credible yet). A lot of his legacy at the time seemed to come from match races, gimmick races, and similar events and I have no idea how to realistically evaluate that. It’s like he was the racing equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters: more similar to Evil Knievel than to A.J. Foyt. He definitely gains a lot from being there first and that is something I value (I want to list Red Byron too even though a lot of people in my circles dismiss him and they’d dismiss Oldfield even harder). I feel like based on his reputation, I should list him but I also feel like his career is more hype than substance.
Jim McElreath
1962: C
1963: C+
1964: C-
1965: E
1966: C+
1967: C
1970: C
1971: C-
Cumulative points: 24
McElreath isn’t particularly interesting to talk about, but still deserving. In 1965, his best season, he finished third in points behind only Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt, and he tied for second in wins and ranked third in laps led also. In 1966, Foyt was injured and he thereby improved to second in points, but he had nothing for Andretti. He fizzled out pretty quickly after that, but gained another distinction by winning the first-ever USAC Silver Crown race in 1971.
Wally Dallenbach
1969: C
1971: C-
1973: C+
1974: E-
1975: C+
1976: C
1977: C
1978: C
Cumulative points: 20
Dallenbach had a respectable career in the latter years of USAC sanctioning IndyCar racing, but while I don’t think McCluskey was a product of his cars, I definitely think Dallenbach was. He spent almost his entire heyday driving for Patrick Racing, Penske’s chief rival at the time and he wasn’t even close to his teammate Gordon Johncock. In the years they were teammates, Johncock won 14 races to Dallenbach’s 5. Moreover, Johncock led 250 or more laps every year from 1973-1978, while Dallenbach only really came close to him once in 1974, a winless season that I think was actually better than his three-win 1973. Dallenbach had much more success as CART’s chief steward later on. I honestly think his son was better, but don’t quote me on that just yet.
A.J. Allmendinger
2003: C-
2004: C-
2005: C-
2006: E-
2010: C-
2011: C-
2012: C-
2014: C-
2017: C-
2018: C-
2021: C-
2022: C
2023: C-
Cumulative points: 18
Allmendinger’s defection to NASCAR certainly got him more money and a longer career than he likely would’ve managed if he had remained in IndyCar (especially because like Paul Tracy, he’d have been screwed over by Forsythe Racing’s decision not to compete in the merged IndyCar; I suspect he would have quickly fizzled out like Ryan Briscoe). However, even though he’s actually higher in my stock car model than my open wheel model now, he never had a year like 2006 in NASCAR. He had a lot of pretty good years but rarely ever seemed like someone who deserved to be in the playoffs, you know? I think what stands out to me is that unlike his contemporaries Juan Pablo Montoya and Marcos Ambrose who were fast on road courses right away, Allmendinger just… wasn’t. It took like 6 or 7 years before he really did much on them in NASCAR and that’s why I struggled to be impressed by him (he didn’t really get good until Montoya/Ambrose/Robby were on their way out the door and Jeff Gordon/Stewart were fading from relevance). To watch some of the NASCAR press start hyping him as one of the best NASCAR road racers ever just because he got a bunch of Xfinity wins on road courses late in his career seemed really bizarre to me. I think he would’ve been a lock if he had done IndyCar or sports cars his full career, but I have to mostly judge on the NASCAR years, so meh. I like his 2010 and 2011 because the evolution from when Gillett-Evernham Motorsports became Richard Petty Motorsports was kind of a dumpster fire. I rated 2012 solely for his 24 Hours of Daytona win. I like his 2017 and 2018 because he was one of the rare teammates to beat Chris Buescher, and I do think he did his best stuff late in his career (I think I like his 2021 and 2022 Xfinity seasons more than any of his Cup seasons). But I think much like Robby Gordon, his pivot to NASCAR resulted in a career that was less than it should have been (Allmendinger did still end up with higher ratings in both models than Robby though).
Patrick Carpentier
1996: C-
1999: C-
2000: C-
2001: C-
2002: C+
2003: C
2004: C+
2005: C
Cumulative points: 14
Carpentier is actually really high in my open wheel model (.155, in a tier surrounded by many championship-caliber talents). This is because he was one of the few teammates to ever beat Tony Kanaan and in 2003-2004, he tied Paul Tracy in their head-to-head also. However, it was hard for me to take him that seriously because it seemed like he was never truly relevant in CART until the drivers who were better started defecting to the IRL. He was fine, but he never seemed like a star and I think he is one of the drivers who my model most overrates. In 2005, he belatedly joined a lot of his ex-CART sparring partners in the IRL for the aforementioned Cheever’s ill-fated and collapsing Toyota entry. That year, he did beat all the Ganassi Toyotas including Scott Dixon, but he wasn’t close to the Penske Toyotas. I do think it’s funny he beat Dario Franchitti in the Rookie of the Year battle in both CART and NASCAR though.
Scott Goodyear
1990: C-
1991: C-
1992: C+
1993: C
1994: C-
1995: C-
1997: C-
1999: C
2000: C
Cumulative points: 14
Goodyear has never really impressed me, and much like Cheever I came to him late in the early IRL period, which gave me a distorted view (like I said, the first IndyCar race I watched was the 1995 Indy 500, which also gave me a distorted view). He got way too much hype for “almost winning the Indy 500 three times”. But he DNQed in 1992 before the photo finish and only started the race because his teammate Mike Groff did a swap with him. He passed the pace car in ‘95 and he blew his shot at ‘97 by warming his tires on the penultimate lap, thinking the race would end under caution. This is so much of his legacy, but we don’t do this for other drivers. Nobody goes on about how Marco Andretti could have easily won three Indy 500s (or Carlos Muñoz or Vitor Meira), but it’s literally true. Was Goodyear really that much better than them? I’m not sure. His two CART wins came at Michigan, when he outdueled Paul Tracy in 1992 when he was still a part-time driver, then in 1994 when anybody else who possibly could’ve won the race blew an engine. Then, a prepubescent Sam Hornish replaced him at Panther Racing and utterly demolished everything he did for them before that. He also is very low in my model thanks to two stints of being blown out by Arie Luyendyk in 1990 and 1997. Admittedly, Luyendyk had the superior Chevy engine in 1990 while Goodyear had the inferior Judd, so maybe it was unfair to compare them as teammates that year, but then he swept him in ‘97 when they were teammates again. And the fact that he talked about himself like he was this huge legend when he was in the booth made it even harder to take him seriously. While I learned to appreciate Cheever over time, I don’t think I can get there with Goodyear. Having said that, he ended up exactly tied with Buddy Lazier in cumulative points and even though I like Lazier much more and am higher on him personally, I guess them coming out tied makes sense…
Jud Larson
1948: C-
1956: C
1957: C+
1958: C+
1964: C
1965: C+
Cumulative points: 14
Larson was one of the absolute best IndyCar drivers in dirt races for a very short period, but he was terrible on pavement. In the roadster years, IndyCar had a good mix of dirt and paved oval races, and his dirt dominance was enough to carry him to top five points finishes in 1957 and 1958. However, he also DNQed from the Indy 500 in four of his six attempts, so I don’t really consider him a big star or anything. I guess he still belongs in that bubble with Carpentier, Goodyear, Lazier, James Hinchcliffe, etc… But if 14 points ends up being the bubble (I still haven’t figure that out yet) and you forced me to pick one and only of those drivers, I think I’d actually pick Lazier.
Kyle Kirkwood
2018: C-
2019: C-
2021: C
2023: C+
2024: C
Cumulative points: 9
Obviously, his case is pending because he is exploding into superstardom right now in a year when he and Álex Palou have swept the entire season (zzzzzzz; yet so many people will still go on about how IndyCar has “the best racing in the world”, lol… it’s been so bad it’s made me actually become a NASCAR Next Gen defender by way of comparison). I personally find him rather bland and dull much like Palou and that’s also made IndyCar harder to follow. On a personal level, it frustrates me now that he’s won five times when my personal fave David Malukas (who looked dead even with him in Indy Lights) has still not won yet. But even though Malukas was better when they were rookies, I will concede that Kirkwood is better now. That doesn’t really come as a surprise or anything since he was the only driver to win all three of the minor-league championships on the IndyCar championship as a rookie in succession (although they didn’t come in consecutive years because the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 Indy Lights season), and he also tied Greg Moore’s single-season record with 10 wins in 2021. I originally had 2021 as C+ like I did for Moore, but I downgraded it. Moore’s 10/12 wins is a lot more impressive than Kirkwood’s 10/20 and Malukas kept it close with 7 wins and even led the points much of that year, even though he is three years younger (admittedly, he was in his second year while Kirkwood was a rookie). Since he almost certainly is having an E season right now, that will elevate him to 19 points and near-lock status. If he ends up running roughshod over the late-season ovals and catches Palou in the championship, which I suppose is possible after how they performed at Gateway (albeit still very, very unlikely), he could enter top five consideration I suppose, and if I end up rating him in the top five, he’s a lock.
Bennett Hill
1922: C+
1923: C+
1924: C+
1925: C+
1926: E-
Cumulative points: 6
Although he won five races, earned four top five points finishes, and set the closed-course speed record of 146.7 mph in 1926, I’m not very knocked out by him. He was definitely good on the wooden “board track” ovals where he won all his races, but he was a second-rate talent in a period that was fairly shallow. At Indy, he never led a lap and only had a single top ten finish. Nobody has ever talked about him as a star or even knows who he is now. If he did what he did in the USAC, CART, or modern IndyCar period, he might have a stronger case. However, I think the pre-World War II competition across the board was too shallow to seriously consider the second-rate talents of this period, and he was a second-rate talent.
Greg Ray
1999: C+
2000: C-
2001: C
Cumulative points: 6
He doesn’t belong on the list, but he gets too much shit. Ray became the butt of jokes as he alternated between blinding speed with 14 poles and one of the worst crash frequencies of all time (16 crash DNFs in 73 starts). His six Indy 500 crashes in four years from 1999-2002 were especially embarrassing, but it seems that modern fans argue that the finish is the only thing that matters and I think they are wrong to do so. It seems nowadays drivers are judged by their worst or most meme-worthy moments to the point that people get schaudenfreude whenever Kyle Larson crashes or act like Corey LaJoie is the worst NASCAR driver of all time when I honestly don’t think he was ever bad until last year or NASCAR fans acted like Juan Pablo Montoya was a bust just because he accidentally crashed into a jet dryer. This is a particular element of the fan psyche that I kind of despise, and that is I suppose part of why I end up coming around to defend drivers who crash too much. A lot of people online (particularly those NASCAR fans who want to go back to the Winston Cup points system as if it was actually good) seem to think the best driver is whoever crashes least, when I think drivers should be judged primarily based on their best moments rather than their worst. Ray had blinding speed at times and let’s not forget it. He beat Kenny Bräck for the 1999 title when Tony Stewart failed to do so in the same cars the year before. He outqualified Montoya at Indy in 2000 and stayed ahead of him for most of a stint. He battled Michael Andretti hard the next year. Yes, he ended up overdriving and crashing in many of these situations because he was trying to drive beyond his second-rate talent to compete with the CART stars, but he did have talent. If he had adopted a slightly different driving style, he probably could’ve done something similar to what Lazier did, but I acknowledge he didn’t.
Walt Ader
1946: C-
Cumulative points: 1
Sort of the opposite of Earl Cooper, he only ended up winning five races because IndyCar randomly added 70 sprint car (or as they were then called “Big Car”) races in 1946 to the schedule and Ader won four of those, which did not exactly have the same level of competition as the points IndyCar races. He did win a regular race in 1947 but he only led a single lap and DNQed for the Indy 500 and I… didn’t feel like rating that season.