1,000 Greatest Drivers: Lloyd Ruby

The driver who boomers most overrate, but I get the hype more than I used to.

As we approach the month of May, I wrote about Lloyd Ruby today, one of the most venerated drivers by ‘60s fans and especially writers. It has always been conventional wisdom among the IndyCar literati (particularly those from the Robin Miller generation) that Ruby was unquestionably the best driver to never win the Indy 500, and I always looked at his record and said, “Huh?” I mean lots of great drivers never won at Indy: Earl Cooper, Harry Hartz, Rex Mays, Ted Horn, Tony Bettenhausen, Joe Leonard, Michael Andretti, Sébastien Bourdais, and Álex Palou stand out here just for starters. That’s not even considering the CART stars who never raced there (Alex Zanardi, Greg Moore, and Cristiano da Matta), F1 and NASCAR stars who crossed over (Alberto Ascari, Jack Brabham, Dan Gurney, Jackie Stewart, Nigel Mansell, Fernando Alonso, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Tony Stewart, Kyle Larson), one driver I’m neglecting to mention here both because he’s an asshole and because I don’t want to open that can of worms just yet, and even the Indy specialists who weren’t exactly stars over the entire schedule but consistently brought it at Indy (Roberto Guerrero, Scott Goodyear, Vitor Meira, Marco Andretti, Carlos Muñoz, etc…) While I definitely take Ruby over all the guys in that last group, and he’s probably better than a few of the earlier names I listed, can you seriously argue that most of the earlier names I listed aren’t better?

Ruby basically seems to be overrated by boomer nostalgia as I see it. Now, I’m not one of those people who says “OK boomer” all the time and in fact I despise that phrase, but I almost want to here. I think there’s no driver boomers overrate more than him, and it was hard for me to look past that for quite some time. It is obviously impressive that he passed Jim Clark and A.J. Foyt for the lead at Indy when both drivers were only a year or two past their peak, and I guess this is the main reason people hype him. But his career was kind of all over the place as he had a lot of brilliant moments but seldom really put together entire seasons, as he cherry-picked races, changed teams constantly, had a lot of DNFs, was almost never any kind of championship threat despite a very long career… It’s impressive that he won seven races for a bunch of pretty lackluster teams, but he’s not exactly alone in that respect either, as you could argue that other boomer faves like Jim Hurtubise or Mike Mosley did the same thing at a similar time. If he really was the best driver to never win the Indy 500, in my opinion he would’ve at least had to be a championship contender somewhere at some point and he really never was. He was a scrappy underdog who constantly punched above his weight, but there are plenty of drivers like that and I don’t see most of them called all-time greats. Having said that, I think it’s starting to swing back and now I think younger generations are probably underrating him (thinking about how he basically got left out of Ford v. Ferrari, which I will admit was unfair, even while acknowledging Ken Miles was obviously the leader of the team).