1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dario Franchitti

This is my 200th driver profile.

My brain has been so poisoned by Internet discourse that I couldn’t let myself enjoy Robert Shwartzman’s pole for the Indy 500 even though it was one of the best stories of the year and a refreshing change of pace from the otherwise most boring IndyCar season of my lifetime. I found myself kind of rooting against it both because I dreaded the social media discourse given both of his nationalities and Callum Ilott is my second favorite driver and this definitely exposed him. It’s like I’ve lost the ability to enjoy anything as an anhedonic David Foster Wallace wannabe albeit thankfully without the domestic abuse. I don’t know why I’m so sensitive to social media idiots who I will never meet. It has to have something to do with the semi-viral Ultimate Typing Championship videos and the myriad nasty comments I received. It seems like all anybody wants to talk about online is politics even though none of these people actually have the logistical knowledge to figure out how to make the world a better place. So I just found myself getting irritated at all sorts of racing outcomes based on perceived political reactions, even though there was hardly any backlash to Shwartzman at all. Obviously the All-Star Open was even worse, especially with Noah Gragson winning the fan vote for a third consecutive season, which I continue to not get. Like what if Santino Ferrucci without the talent? That’s how I’ve always felt about Gragson after I read that Reddit post from a kid he’d bullied, which is still the first thing I think about, even over him liking the racist meme. But apparently from what I read, people like Gragson because he interacts with fans at races more than other drivers. I can’t attest to that since I haven’t been to a race since Dale Earnhardt was alive. This is why nobody wants anything to do with me in real life…

Anyway, this marks my 200th driver profile and I’ve got a big one for today: today’s birthday boy Dario Franchitti, the only 21st century IndyCar driver besides Cheater Boi to win both multiple Indy 500s and titles. I controversially ranked him only 28th on my 100 Greatest IndyCar Drivers list in 2016 and my opinion hasn’t changed a lot. I feel Franchitti is overrated because his level of dominance was vastly less than his number of titles and Indy 500s implied, because he was a mediocre oval racer for honestly most of his career until his late-period Ganassi stint when he won three consecutive titles largely because Will Power was even worse on ovals, but don’t get me wrong, Power was absolutely better than Franchitti in 2010 and especially 2011, and then he won his other two titles on fuel mileage. It took me a while to even decide on what his best season was because I felt like almost every season he had had major flaws, but I ultimately went with 2011 because that was his highest year in terms of lead shares and CRL, his second-highest in my model, and the year he had his highest natural races led even though it really pissed me off how Franchitti wrecked Power at Toronto and won the race without receiving an avoidable contact penalty and eventually the title, especially because that was not the only good break he got from the officials that year. Power kicked his ass performance-wise, since Franchitti was better than Scott Dixon but not by a huge amount while Power tied the IRL/IndyCar record with six wins while both his teammates Ryan Briscoe and Hélio Castroneves went winless and Castroneves had the worst year of his prime, so that seemed like one of the major championship injustices to me. I begrudgingly admit though that it was still Franchitti’s best season in retrospect, and at least Power made up for that in 2022 at the more deserving Josef Newgarden’s expense. While Newgarden himself absolutely deserved way more than two titles, I ain’t never feelin’ sorry for his cheatin’ ass again.