1,000 Greatest Drivers: Ernie Irvan

The personification of everything right and wrong with '90s NASCAR all at once.

I’ve always had a lot to say about Irvan because he had one of the most interesting careers since I started watching, although the first race I watched was only a few weeks before his near-fatal crash at Michigan, so I missed most of his highlights and I never watched any of his career wins live (although 1997 was the first year I regularly watched, I missed the Michigan race because I took a trip to Albany with my father that weekend). Because I am an analyst who tends to judge drivers by their best performances rather than their worst, Irvan is an interesting test case for my analysis because few drivers had a larger gap between their best and worst performances. There are many drivers who were much better than Irvan (Mark Martin for example) who had vastly less interesting careers, so I had to cut this from a staggering 1,452 words to get it down to exactly 500 and it took me several hours, but I think I managed to hit all the high points regardless.