Season Grades for NASCAR Drivers: Part I
I've come up with a new release schedule for the coming months.
Since I now have a lot more paid work to do, I’ve been thinking the past couple weeks about how to divide my responsibilities between my paid work, my personal responsibilities, visiting my mom in the nursing home, and continuing to keep up with this. I’ve decided I’m going to visit my mom on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On those days, I won’t do driver profiles because I don’t think I’ll have the time for those sort of columns, but I do want to continue with daily columns as much as possible, so I’ve decided to do this instead. For all the remaining drivers I have not done yet, I’m going to determine season grades just as I have previously to determine which drivers will make the 1,000 Greatest Drivers list. As before, these grades are based on some combination of consistency, dominance, clutch performance, versatility, impact on teams, level of competition, and performance against teammates. As usual, I need to note that I rate according to impact: if I believe Driver A made a greater impact than Driver B, I may rate Driver A higher even if Driver B posted better objective statistics.
If you haven’t read me before (and I have a couple new people), I rate the top 200 drivers for the years from 1946-present, up to 100 for the years 1905-1941 (starting with 1905 because the first IndyCar season was 1905 and the first French Grand Prix was 1906), and only the top five for the first eleven motorsports seasons from 1894-1904. For each season, I rate the top five drivers separately, the 6th-25th best drivers with the rating E (Elite), the 26th-50th best drivers E- (Elite Minus), the 51st-100th best drivers C+ (Competitive Plus), the 101st-150th best drivers C (Competitive), and the 151st-200th best drivers C- (Competitive Minus). I consider all disciplines of car racing including open wheel, stock cars, touring cars, sports cars, rally, rallycross, sprint cars, drag racing, etc… Obviously I don’t regard all of these equally, but I will make sure to have representation from each on every top 200 list. I have a bias for major league performance over minor league performance, but I will rate the truly great seasons (I actually gave Joe Weatherly a full E below for one of his Modified seasons). For the years 1905-1941, I drop the C and C- categories. You can view this as follows:
E: one of the best drivers in the world
E-: great but flawed
C+: very good
C: good
C-: barely good
For 1946-present, I award 100, 70, 50, 30, and 20 cumulative points for the drivers I rated top five in those seasons, 10 for E, 5 for E-, 3 for C+, 2 for C, 1 for C-. I move the scale down two tiers for 1905-1941, awarding the top five positions 50, 30, 20, 10, 5, along with 3 for E, 2 for E-, and 1 for C+ because there was so little competition then that I feel this period needs to be downgraded to some extent. For 1894-1904, I only rate the top five with 10, 5, 3, 2, and 1 points respectively. From the drivers I have already done, I believe 25 points roughly equates to being a lock for the list. I’m not sure where the bubble is but it feels like it would be around 12-15 points. I’ll have a better sense of this after I’ve done a lot more bubble-type drivers, and I think that’s another reason I’ve decided to do this now.
In each of these articles, I’m going to go straight down the all-time win lists, going through all the drivers I have not done yet for the NASCAR Cup Series on Mondays, IndyCar on Wednesdays, and F1 on Fridays. While this article took a while to write, the other articles should go faster and faster especially when I get down to the drivers who only had a win or two, some of whom may not have any top 200 seasons at all. There are certainly some drivers who raced in these series who never won yet definitely had top 200-caliber seasons, but I’ll probably deal with them later. When I finish one series, I’ll replace it with another until I’ve either gone through all the drivers I might list or until I feel I have time for daily driver posts again. I do plan on making up the Rick Mears and Al Unser posts on Tuesday and Thursday, and then I’ll figure out who I might cover on the weekend.
A couple days ago, I bizarrely received an invitation from a purported film studio executive who seemed interested in adapting my book. Although I think the letter might have been spam because I couldn’t find a website corresponding to the domain name, I couldn’t find any reference to the person’s name as a listed film executive, and the title of my book was improperly transcribed as the word “per” was omitted, I still followed up on it in case it was legit. As long as I don’t have to pay for anything, what the hell, right?
Anyway, let us begin.
Richard Petty
1960: E-
1961: C+
1962: E
1963: E
1964: E
1965: E-
1966: E
1967: 5
1968: E
1969: E
1970: E
1971: 2
1972: E
1973: E-
1974: E
1975: 5
1976: E-
1977: E-
1978: C+
1979: E
1980: C+
1981: C+
1982: C
1983: C+
1984: C+
1986: C-
1987: C
Cumulative points: 250
You might think he deserves more top five seasons or higher rankings, especially in the ‘60s. The problem with that is that in that era, the top drivers were generally open wheel racers who drove and won in everything (including sports cars, touring cars, and/or stock cars). In an era when Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt crossed over and won NASCAR races and Petty did not do the reverse, I don’t think I can rate Petty higher in that period, which is why I only barely ranked him in the top five for his 27-win 1967. I ended up rating his 1971 higher mainly due to weaker competition at the top level since by this point, nearly all drivers were specialists and there were already very few racing crossovers unlike the ‘60s.
David Pearson
1961: C+
1962: C
1963: C
1964: E
1965: C+
1966: E
1967: C+
1968: E
1969: E
1970: C+
1971: C+
1972: E
1973: 5
1974: E
1975: E
1976: E
1977: E-
1978: E-
1979: C+
1980: C+
Cumulative points: 135
The issues with the ‘60s hurt Pearson even worse as all four of his full-time seasons (1964, 1966, 1968, and 1969) came in that same era when the best overall drivers competed in everything while the best NASCAR drivers didn’t. A lot of his ‘70s seasons are hurt to some extent due to the fact that he only competed part-time. I acknowledge he was only cherry-picking more prestigious races in this period and not racing the full schedule and I tried to adjust for that, but I can understand if you think I am underrating some of these seasons (which I do honestly think were better than his ‘60s seasons in his championship period when there were only about three serious contenders even running for the championships).
Jeff Gordon
1990: C+
1991: C
1992: C
1993: C
1994: C+
1995: 2
1996: E
1997: E
1998: 1
1999: E
2000: C+
2001: 2
2002: E
2003: E
2004: E
2005: C+
2006: C+
2007: E
2008: C
2009: C+
2010: C+
2011: E
2012: C
2013: C
2014: E-
2015: C
Cumulative points: 360
Gordon comes out as the highest-rated NASCAR driver based on cumulative points mainly because he had so many competitive seasons and I also gave him three top two seasons, which I did for no other NASCAR driver. So does this make him the goat for me like it does for a lot of other people? No, it doesn’t. I just think 1995, 1998, and 2001 were not especially great seasons for top-tier competition globally. Remember, the cumulative points are only to determine the 1,000 drivers I will be selecting. After that, I will be re-ranking according to a series of criteria. Chances are good when all is said and done I will have Gordon behind Petty (who I gave 18 elite seasons) and Johnson (15) considering I only gave Gordon 12.
Darrell Waltrip
1974: C
1975: E-
1976: C+
1977: E-
1978: E
1979: E
1980: E
1981: 1
1982: 3
1983: E
1984: E
1985: E
1986: E-
1987: C+
1988: C+
1989: E-
1990: C
1991: C+
1992: C+
1993: C-
1994: C
1995: C-
Cumulative points: 253
Much like Gordon, Waltrip also comes out overrated by this particular metric because he is one of the four drivers I gave a #1 season along with Gordon, Jimmie Johnson (2009), and Martin Truex, Jr. (2017). Waltrip is in fact the first NASCAR driver I gave a #1 season because honestly there was a lot of mediocrity in most of the world’s other championship battles, particularly in F1. So don’t think because Waltrip scored 253 cumulative points to Dale Earnhardt’s 252, Petty’s 250, and Johnson’s 244 that I think he’s better than them. I definitely don’t. It’s just that their best seasons came in more competitive years globally. It makes me wonder if I should no longer award separate points to the top five drivers, because this does seem to be creating a weird skew. For the drivers with no top five seasons (like all the following), I think the cumulative points become much more accurate in reflecting each driver’s importance.
Rusty Wallace
1986: C+
1987: C+
1988: E
1989: E
1990: E-
1991: E-
1992: C+
1993: E
1994: E
1995: E-
1996: E-
1997: C+
1998: C+
1999: C+
2000: E-
2001: C+
2002: C
2004: C-
2005: C+
Cumulative points: 92
He had a weird career in that his best seasons (1988, 1989, 1993, 1994) are worse than they look, but he had an equal number of seasons that were much better than they looked (1990, 1995, 1996, and especially 1991). Very few drivers of his stature seemed to have less correlation between how much they dominated and their actual results/points positions, but this looks solid to me and he is currently tied with his non-contemporaneous washed-up Penske teammate Josef Newgarden.
Bobby Isaac
1960: C-
1962: C-
1964: C
1968: E-
1969: E
1970: E
1971: E-
1972: E-
Cumulative points: 39
His best seasons are electrifying (especially his 1969 with 17 wins and 20 poles) but the problems were that he did almost nothing on superspeedways and wasn’t very versatile, the competition in the Cup Series was terrible since for the most part only Petty, Pearson, Isaac, and Bobby Allison were relevant in most races in his brief heyday, and again, the best drivers weren’t in NASCAR. As a result, despite his extremely high peak, I didn’t feel comfortable giving him any top five seasons, so while his cumulative points certainly make him a lock, I think Isaac is one of the most overrated drivers in NASCAR history based on his wins and laps led (although you can just as easily argue he is underrated just because nobody talks about him anymore…) When I attempted to adjust the NASCAR win list based on competitive depth, Isaac dropped from 37 wins to 21 adjusted wins and fell behind the likes of even Greg Biffle, Bobby Labonte, Jeff Burton, Ryan Newman, and Kasey Kahne. A great driver, sure, but his greatness has probably been overblown. His 39 cumulative points ties him with Burton and Sterling Marlin and I honestly don’t feel that’s outrageous… (Yes, I think he was better than those two since he hit a much higher peak but still…)
Rex White
1957: C
1958: C+
1959: E
1960: E-
1961: E
1962: E
1963: C-
Cumulative points: 41
Fewer wins than Isaac, but I think he was better. His era was more competitive than Isaac’s for sure and he lost considerably less on my adjusted NASCAR wins list (in fact, they were right next to each other, so their cumulative points being so close checks out). Additionally, White did almost all of that as an owner-driver as opposed to Isaac who I think was heavily dependent on his crew chief Harry Hyde who I think was the real star of that team (put him in the Hall of Fame, please!) People aren’t really nostalgic about this period, but it was probably the most wildly competitive era in NASCAR history prior to the late ‘80s and deserves more respect.
Joe Weatherly
1951: C
1952: E-
1953: E
1954: C+
1956: C
1957: C
1958: C
1959: C+
1960: C+
1961: E
1962: E
1963: E-
Cumulative points: 57
I had to rate him down a little for the 1956-1958 Convertible Series period because Curtis Turner utterly destroyed him when they were teammates, but honestly, I’m as impressed with his Modified dominance as I am with his Cup titles. He had an estimated 37 Modified wins in 1952 and 33 in 1953 along with the ‘53 championship. Since this was very early in NASCAR’s history, the gap between the Modifieds and the Cup Series was nowhere near as stark as it would be in later decades, so I really do think those were elite seasons. I toyed with giving his 1963 a full E since he won the title despite not having a full-season team and hitching rides with various independent teams (the only time points racing was ever cool). But ultimately he wasn’t dominant enough, and I’ve read about how Bud Moore complained that Weatherly was too conservative at the end of that season to protect his points lead…
Benny Parsons
1968: C
1969: C-
1970: C
1971: C
1972: C-
1973: C+
1974: C-
1975: C+
1976: C+
1977: E-
1978: C+
1979: C+
1980: C+
1981: C+
1982: C
1983: C
1984: C+
Cumulative points: 42
A career compiler to some extent, I really do think he was only elite once. I probably would have rated some of those other seasons higher in other eras, but the ‘70s arguably had the worst competition in NASCAR history so I think you probably need to lead more than 1,000 laps to have an elite season in that era and Parsons only did that once. While it was impressive that Parsons won a title in 1973 for an L.G. DeWitt team that never won a race until he got there, his only win came at Bristol when he had a relief driver and he only led 54 laps outside of that race. I still loved the man. He was a great driver, but he was even a better announcer! And he read one of my questions on the air on RPM2Night once.
Jack Smith
1950: C-
1956: C-
1957: C+
1958: C+
1959: C+
1960: C+
1961: C
1962: E-
Cumulative points: 21
A driver I’ve never paid much respect because of his racism towards Wendell Scott, which I’m sure is why he was never considered for the 50/75 Greatest Drivers lists (not that I think he was as big a snub as Jim Paschal or Fonty Flock or Dick Hutcherson or even Paul Goldsmith to name a few…) However, I still have to be objective and it’s a fairly impressive career. I did mention in my Rex White section that the late ‘50s/early ‘60s were more competitive than any time from the 1965-1985 period, so I have to be consistent here. Additionally, Smith spent almost his entire career as an owner-driver and on the occasions when he didn’t, he fared quite well in my teammate model. His most recent rating of .138 sits right behind Junior Johnson and Carson Hocevar (my model called it again!) and just ahead of Martin Truex, Jr., Christopher Bell, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Buddy Baker, and Tony Stewart (who is significantly hurt by his post-2012 career). With his longevity, this reads like a driver who should be on the list. But there are enough “yeah, buts” here that I also don’t think he should be a lock for the list. So this feels right. If a lock is 25 points, Smith should be just behind that and this checks out.