Season Grades for IndyCar Drivers: Part V
Fore! Here are the remaining 18 four-time IndyCar winners, including Fohr.
I startled awake after only four hours of sleep tonight to write this as my bowels woke me up again. I know I probably need to go through with this colonoscopy I scheduled a month from now, but I’m still terrified about it. I realize this was probably not a good use of my time, especially since I also lost my wallet yesterday and after searching for several hours, I still haven’t found it. I was right on my way to visit Mom again but I ended up not going because I couldn’t find my wallet and then when I tried to call her later, I couldn’t beause she’s kept leaving the phone off the hook when various scammers randomly call her room shilling for various medical products. Between not wanting to go in on Monday because there were some bad thunderstorms and the buses not running in North Syracuse either on July 4 or over the weekend, it’s been six days since I’ve seen her and I know she needs me, but I’m definitely going to visit her today even without my wallet or my cards. I’ll walk to the bank and take some money out.
Anyway, here’s all the IndyCar drivers with four wins, besides the two I already did (Sam Hanks and Billy Winn). Most people would consider Bill Vukovich the best driver and I get it. I don’t really because while he is undeniably one of the best Indy 500 drivers of all time, the rest of his record is shockingly mediocre. No, instead I think I’m going to rank Mike Conway highest, but it is almost entirely based on his WEC Toyota stuff he did after his IndyCar career ended. I did not have Jim Hurtubise and Jack McGrath as locks prior to this, but I have upgraded them to locks now. The weirdest thing about these 18 drivers is that only a grand total of four of them were relevant after the ‘50s, so many of these drivers are quite obscure even if some of them in my opinion shouldn’t be (Ray Keech, Chuck Stevenson). I don’t mind that Kelly Petillo became obscure because of what he did after his win, but unfortunately his career is strong enough that I think I need to list him anyway.
Mike Conway
2006: C-
2013: C+
2014: C
2015: C
2016: E-
2017: C+
2018: C+
2019: E-
2020: E-
2021: C+
2022: E
2023: C+
Cumulative points: 43
All the specific letter grades for his sports car seasons are pending because I haven’t gone through the World Endurance Championship PDF files to calculate lap times for the 2013-2020 seasons (I might’ve done 2015 and 2016, but I don’t remember), so I’m not sure I can apportion how much Conway was responsible for Toyota’s success in those seasons and how much Kamui Kobayashi was, for instance. I think Kobayashi was probably the team leader more often than not, although when I did calculate complete WEC data for 2021-2024, I decided Conway was the best Toyota driver of 2022 and I might do so for some previous season as well. His WEC performances are obviously why he is a lock and he wouldn’t be based on his shaky IndyCar career alone. I admit that at the time he was originally hired, I was pissed that Buddy Rice was dumped for him, but in retrospect, I will admit Conway was better. Although I did rate his British F3 title year, most of his early IndyCar years are close misses. While he did sweep Milka Duno and John Andretti as a rookie in 2009, he also got swept by Tomas Scheckter and finished behind Raphael Matos and Robert Doornbos in the ROTY battle, so how much is that really saying? In his partial 2010, he was actually second in my model behind Mario Moraes of all people, but I decided he just didn’t have enough starts for his level of performance. In 2011, he did win the Long Beach GP in a terrible year for Andretti, but he also missed the Indy 500 and was way off Marco and Danica in points, so I didn’t feel that should be rated that year either. He really emerged as a star out of the blue in 2013 when he dominated the Detroit doubleheader and won the first race for Dale Coyne, which blew my mind at the time. especially since I thought his career was probably over after he decided to stop racing ovals. That year he also earned his first four WEC class wins. In 2014, he impressively got two wins as a part-time oval driver for Ed Carpenter (although I find that season a little overrated), but he also earned his first win for Toyota and the rest was history.
Bob Sweikert
1953: C+
1954: C+
1955: 4
1956: C-
Cumulative points: 37
Sweikert inherited the win at the 1955 Indy 500 after Bill Vukovich died in a crash while leading, and he was probably the best driver that year since he added another win at Syracuse, finished no worse than fourth in his first seven starts, and led 368 laps, 115 more than Jimmy Bryan who won six races. I ultimately decided to rate Sweikert fourth and Bryan fifth for the title and the Indy 500 win (especially because he also won the AAA Midwest Big Car champion that year), but it was close. None of his other seasons were even close as he led more laps in 1955 than all his other seasons combined and he never led a lap at Indy outside of his win. He had a consistent start to the season in 1956 before his death in a sprint car crash.
Jim Hurtubise
1959: C-
1960: C+
1961: E
1962: E
1963: C
1964: C-
1965: C+
1966: C+
Cumulative points: 33
Like Mike Mosley, Hurtubise is another guy the old-timers like Robin Miller really venerated. I can better understand this one than Mosley. Hurtubise had an explosive start to his career, winning in his first four seasons from 1959-1962. His 285 laps led in 1961 only barely trailed that of the two dominant drivers of the era, A.J. Foyt and Rodger Ward. In 1962, his natural races led only trailed Parnelli Jones and Foyt and his number of lead changes tied Jones for the most that season. Hurtubise also won six sprint car races both years, but he nearly perished in a crash at the Milwaukee Mile in 1964, where his hands were badly damaged in a fiery crash and needed to be reconstructed. Although he never won another IndyCar race again, he made a successful comeback, winning two USAC Stock Car races and even a Cup race at Atlanta. However, his IndyCar career collapsed when the formula cars overtook the roadsters for dominance in 1965. Hurtubise’s brazen refusal to drive a formula car pretty much tanked the remainder of his IndyCar career, but won him many traditionalist fans.
Jack McGrath
1948: C-
1950: C+
1951: C
1952: E
1953: E
1954: E-
1955: C
Cumulative points: 33
The closest thing Bill Vukovich had to a rival in his ‘50s Indy 500 heyday, Vukovich and McGrath had a number of frantic duels at the Speedway before both died in separate 1955 crashes. In the 1952 500, McGrath started on the outside front row and took the lead from polesitter Freddie Agabashian on the opening lap before Vukovich passed him on lap 7 and led almost the entire rest of the race before a steering failure with ten laps to go. In 1954, he won the pole and led the first 44 laps but Vukovich ultimately passed him for the win. In 1955, McGrath again started on the outside front row, again took the lead from polesitter Jerry Hoyt on lap 1, and he and Vukovich traded the lead back and forth six times in the first 27 laps before on lap 55, McGrath suffered a magneto failure before Vukovich’s fatal crash two laps later. However, while Vukovich was ultimately vastly better than McGrath at Indy, I kind of like the rest of McGrath’s career more. While both of them had four IndyCar wins, McGrath seemed to be faster at other tracks as he had 67 starts and only 4 DNQs in an era when nearly all the top drivers DNQed a lot, while Vukovich had only 22 starts and 8 DNQs. Vukovich had the edge on pavement for sure, but McGrath was vastly better on dirt. He also had seven wins in the AAA Stock Car Series while Vukovich had none. They were roughly even in midget cars, although I would say they were honestly both better as IndyCar drivers. He also broke Leon Duray’s 26-year-old closed-course world record in 1954 (before Sam Hanks broke it two weeks later) and set the Indy 500 new track record in both ‘54 and ‘55 (even if he didn’t win the pole in ‘55). I didn’t have him as a lock until this, but I was pretty sure he was eventually going to be one.
Bill Vukovich
1950: C
1952: E-
1953: E
1954: E
1955: C
Cumulative points: 29
As for Vukovich himself, he’s definitely a legend. I’m not denying that he’s one of the best Indy 500 drivers of all time. He is the only Indy 500 driver in history who had four consecutive TNLs (every year from 1952 to 1955). His 1953 win when he led 195 laps from the pole is one of the most dominant of all time, his 150 laps led in 1952 is one of the most dominant performances for a non-winner. His 485 laps led at Indy still rank 9th to this day, which is astounding for a driver who only made five starts there. The problem is the rest of his record, and that’s why I didn’t give him any top five seasons. To an extent, he’s an even more extreme version of drivers like Arie Luyendyk and Takuma Sato where he was vastly better at Indy than any other track. Obviously, he was a lot better than them at Indy, enough for lock status even despite the rest of his career, but I would say the rest of his career wasn’t as good as even those two. Although he did have his other two wins on dirt in 1952 at Detroit and DuQuoin and a 3-1 lead change record that year, he also had 8 DNQs in 30 attempts as I mentioned (typically on dirt but even once at Indy), which is a staggeringly high rate for a driver who has the reputation that he does. In his two attempts at a full-time schedule in 1951 and 1952 before he mostly went Indy-only after that, he finished 23rd and 12th in points and that does matter to me. Indy centrists understandably consider him one of the best drivers of all time for his Indy dominance, but in my opinion, the other races matter too.
Ray Keech
1928: 3
1929: E
Cumulative points: 23
One of the forgotten Indy 500 winners, Keech and the first three-time Indy 500 winner Louis Meyer exploded onto the scene as rookies in 1928 with Meyer winning twice including the Indy 500 while Keech won thrice. The two rookies combined to win 5 of that year’s 7 races, but I rated Keech 3rd and Meyer 4th that year despite Meyer’s Indy 500 win because he won more often, Meyer had a DNQ and Keech didn’t, Keech appeared to be more dominant than Meyer, and he also set the world land speed record in 1928, breaking Malcolm Campbell’s record before Henry Segrave overtook him the next year. In 1929, Keech won the Indy 500 and seemed to be on track for a truly epic career when he was killed 16 days after his Indy 500 win at Altoona. Keech had led 104 out of 120 laps and was actually leading at the time by a lap over Meyer when the race was stopped after his crash, but AAA rules at that time did not allow him to win the race even though he had completed 120 laps to Meyer’s 119. If Keech had been scored the winner posthumously, he would have won the title (see, it’s stuff like this that causes me to think that Meyer is drastically overrated despite being the first three-time winner). Keech’s 4 wins in 11 starts is one of the best winning percentages of all time, and it could’ve been 5 if they gave him the Altoona win posthumously, but I get why they didn’t. I wanted to rate him higher than Meyer for 1928 to make sure he made the list, even if 23 points is not quite enough for lock status.
Kelly Petillo
1934: E
1935: 3
Cumulative points: 23
Petillo is often considered one of the worst Indy 500 winners and I get why because the ‘30s arguably had the worst competition in IndyCar history (yes, even relative to the early IRL years I think) and also because he was the most loathsome Indy 500 winner as a person. After his win, he was charged with attempted rape and attempted murder. He was arrested in victory lane in 1948 and served seven years in prison, then went missing before being arrested again. If I wanted to just entirely ignore him, it would be easy to. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can. Even though he only had two good years, his two good years were electrifying. In 1934 and 1935, he won four times in eight starts, had a 3-0 lead change record, and was one of the very few drivers in that era to win on both on an oval and a road course. I rated him the third best driver of 1935 when he won the Indy 500 and three races overall, so this gives him the exact same record as Keech in an opposite order with one third-place season and one elite season. Needless to say, I have much more respect for Keech, whose average level of performance was higher. Keech died while he was dominating the sport while Petillo was a flash in the pan who instantly faded to mediocrity for years before becoming a sociopath. Unfortunately, on the basis of his extremely high peak, I think he deserves it.
Eddie Hearne
1910: E
1911: E
1919: E
1920: C+
1921: E
1922: C+
1923: E
Cumulative points: 17
Not counting Alex Zanardi and Cristiano da Matta who never got the opportunity to compete at Indy, only five drivers won an IndyCar title without leading a lap in the Indy 500: Barney Oldfield, Eddie Hearne, Henry Banks, Chuck Stevenson, and (your mileage certainly may vary) Paul Tracy. (Even Buzz Calkins and George Snider did!) The odd case of Oldfield (the inaugural IndyCar champion almost all of whose wins came in 5-lap races with 2 or 3 cars) has already been discussed. Hearne and Stevenson will be discussed here, and Banks is running neck-and-neck with Calkins for the worst IndyCar champion (I think I like Calkins’s IndyCar career over Banks, but Banks’s overall career over Calkins’s). Hearne was definitely better than most of those guys. He did have five Indy 500 finishes of 7th or better at least including a 2nd in 1919. He also had 11 wins, but only 4 of them counted for points and 4 of his other 7 wins came in 1917 and 1918, which I have decided not to evaluate since motorsports was mostly shut down during World War I. Acknowledging his success in those years that I decided not to count, I was a little more generous elsewhere, giving him an E for 1911 even though he only won once (there were only 22 drivers I have listed for that year with any wins globally) and 1919 (a year where he led no laps but had four second-place finishes and top fives in every race he started). His title season of 1923 was also impressive enough for me to give it an E, but I never felt he had anything really close to a top-five season. He’s a below-average champion, but nowhere near the worst. He feels like he should be right around Jimmy Vasser and Adrián Fernández and that is where I’ve placed him. Obviously, I gave him a lot more elite seasons, but I acknowledge an elite season is worth a hell of a lot less in this era and if those seasons had had ‘90s CART level competition, his semi-mediocrity would have been exposed a lot more, so I think this is a reasonable placement for him.
Roscoe Sarles
1919: E
1920: E
1921: 4
1922: C+
Cumulative points: 17
Sarles never won a title or an Indy 500, but at his peak he had a little more explosive dominance than Hearne did. Sarles’s best season came in 1921 when he finished second to Tommy Milton in both the Indy 500 and the championship. That year, Sarles tied Milton for the second-most wins with three behind Jimmy Murphy’s four and Sarles’s average finish of 2.9 was pretty mind-boggling for a season with 18 starts, although I still ultimately rated Murphy and Milton both higher. Although you can’t really go by this because there are so many missing races (and also so many races that didn’t count for points), Sarles has more listed laps led (341) than Hearne (306). I was probably wrong to entirely leave Sarles off my top 100 IndyCar drivers list when I had Hearne 63rd.
Chuck Stevenson
1950: C
1952: E-
1953: C+
1954: E-
1955: C-
Cumulative points: 16
Despite the fact that Stevenson is one of only six drivers to win both an IndyCar title and a Cup race along with Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Juan Pablo Montoya, Johnny Rutherford, and Tony Stewart, nobody ever talks about him anymore and I’m curious why. Sure, he’s nowhere close to any of those guys, but you think he should be discussed more than he is. Part of it I suppose is his rather putrid Indy 500 record. Not only did he never lead a lap there as previously discussed, he only had a single top ten, a 6th in 1961 long after his heyday had passed. Considering all the other races were seen as ancillary to Indy, nobody cares about the champions who didn’t win Indy 500s while on the flip side Bill Vukovich is seen as one of the best drivers of all time (sure, he was better than Stevenson). Three of Stevenson’s four wins came at the Milwaukee Mile, where he was something of a master and I’ll admit his 1952 title seems like something of an outlier, much like Ryan Hunter-Reay’s title was. He was more consistent than dominant although he did get two of his four wins that year and he never had a top five points finish in any other season. Interestingly, Stevenson is the only IndyCar champion to do so for a female owner at a time women weren’t even allowed to enter Gasoline Alley. But he was also a pretty versatile driver as he won the sedan class at the Carrera Panamericana in 1952 and 1953, becoming the only two-time winner in that prestigious event in any class (yes, I know I rated Hershel McGriff lower even though he won the overall race in 1950, but the ‘52 and ‘53 fields were much deeper). Despite never competing on a road course in IndyCar, he also won a Cup race in 1955 at the Willow Springs road course in a West Coast event. It didn’t have great competition, but he still had to beat Marvin Panch, Johnny Mantz, and Jim Reed, who finished second through fourth behind him. Stevenson may not quite be a legend, but he deserves to be talked about more than he is, which is not at all.
Myron Fohr
1948: E-
1949: E-
1950: C
Cumulative points: 12
One of the weirdest IndyCar careers I’ve ever seen, Fohr finished second in points in back-to-back years in 1948 and 1949 despite DNQing in his first Indy 500 attempt in 1948. After 1949, he completely disappeared, making only two starts with five DNQs. After 1951, he never made any attempts ever again. I don’t know what to make of this. I did place him in my top 100 back in 2016, but now I think that was a mistake, especially since in one of his four wins (two each in 1948 and 1949), Tony Bettenhausen pinch-hit for him at Milwaukee. I did give him a C for 1950 despite his IndyCar collapse because he did have one other noteworthy distinction: he was the first-ever winner in the AAA Stock Car Series that year and he finished fourth in points there, but I definitely have to do more research to figure out how and why he disappeared and flamed out so fast, because I’ve never really seen or read about an IndyCar flameout so severe as this with the possible exception of the aforementioned Petillo, and fuck that guy, right?
Bryan Herta
1993: C-
1996: C
1997: C
1998: C
1999: C-
2003: C-
2005: C-
Cumulative points: 10
I can see why some people might want to rank him higher than this because he probably should’ve won more than four races. Like his son, his advanced numbers look a lot better than his win total, but for the opposite reason: while Colton quite often had an unhinged and over-the-top driving style that led to numerous mistakes (until last year I guess), Bryan was one of the most conservative drivers in IndyCar history, and it bit him in the ass repeatedly. Off the top of my head, I can think of four IndyCar races where he was passed for the win in the closing laps (Cleveland 1995, Laguna Seca 1996, Long Beach 1998, Chicagoland 2003), and he certainly never did that in reverse. He was like the anti-Buddy Lazier in that he might have been the least clutch driver in IndyCar history. If he was ever in a contested battle for the win, you somehow knew he’d blow it from a lack of aggression. (If it was uncontested like his Laguna Seca wins, he could certainly lead all day.) It’s telling that one of the best-remembered events of his career was when he intentionally spun himself out at Road America to prevent him from taking out his boss Bobby Rahal in his final season, which resulted in Alex Barron landing on top of him. If Alex Zanardi tried to do to most of the other CART drivers what he did to Herta at Laguna Seca, I suspect many of the other drivers would’ve put him in the wall. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad Bryan was a clean driver and he was probably more likable than Colton, but it seems like he left a lot on the table. Even though he clearly had a lot of speed on paper with 10 poles, 8 TNL, 7.46 lead shares, and 6.04 CRL, indicating he probably should have won more raecs than he did, it seems his conservatism is the reason why he didn’t and I don’t think I can reward that. He was also way too much of a Laguna Seca specialist and didn’t do enough at other tracks. I’ll accept that from an Indy 500 specialist since that race matters so much more, but Laguna Seca? Not really.
Dave Lewis
1915: C+
1916: C+
1919: C+
1923: C+
1925: E-
1926: E
1927: C+
Cumulative points: 10
Most of these remaining drivers aren’t worth a lot of thought as they are mostly second-tier drivers from the pre-World War II period who never won an Indy 500 or a title. While I might have rated some of these drivers as locks if they had put up similar numbers in a more competitive period (as I did with for instance Jim Hurtubise), the pre-World War II period was not anywhere near as competitive, and my decision to award fewer points for each letter grade means I won’t be listing these sorts of drivers accordingly. I’d rather reward second-tier drivers in more competitive periods. I’ll take Lewis over the rest of them because he did at least lead 93 laps at the Indy 500 while the drivers below him mostly never led there at all. Lewis had four top ten points finishes including back-to-back 7th-place points finishes in 1925 and 1926, his career best. I like his 1926 a lot because he won three races and ranked approximately second in laps led with 206 (although there are several races with unknown laps led), but there’s not much to talk about otherwise.
Shorty Cantlon
1930: E
1931: E
1934: E-
1935: C+
Cumulative points: 9
Cantlon won four IndyCar races from 1930-1934, finished second in points in 1930, and his 187 laps led that year were third most. In 1931, he was one of only two drivers to lead twice, but it’s hard to say he was ever really a star. Despite finishing second at Indy as well in 1930, he only had a single finish better than 14th in ten later Indy starts and never led a lap. Billy Arnold was clearly the definitive driver of his era, and that was a very shallow era that might have not even had early IRL-level competition. Next.
Al Rogers
1940: 5
1948: C-
1949: C-
1950: C-
1951: C-
Cumulative points: 9
Rogers won the Pikes Peak Hill Climb five times and his four consecutive wins from 1948-1951 counted towards the IndyCar championship, but the regular IndyCar stars did not actually compete there in this era. I do think all the Pikes Peak winners should probably be rated (although I think I didn’t rate a couple of the recent ones on my top 200 lists) but it’s in the grand scheme of things a relatively minor event that lasts only a few minutes and isn’t usually part of any series schedule. Even though a bunch of major IndyCar stars also won it, I want to include drivers from this discipline very sparingly and I don’t think Rogers was quite dominant enough. I did rate him 5th for 1940, but that was really primarily because there were so few series competing after World War II started and there were only three IndyCar races that season. Rogers’s contemporary Louis Unser, who is tied with his nephew Bobby with a record nine Pikes Peak wins (even if only one of them counted for IndyCar points), has a much stronger case and I think I want to list him actually.
Marcus Ericsson
2016: C-
2017: C-
2021: C
2022: C+
2023: C-
Cumulative points: 8
You might think this is rather harsh, but I don’t really. I used to compare Ericsson to Eddie Cheever because Ericsson’s IndyCar career reminds me a great deal of Cheever’s IRL career, but I guess that was unfair to Cheever, who had a much longer run of decency, was better in F1, also had sports car and IROC wins while Ericsson had one of that, etc… Ericsson astonishingly ranked 43rd in F1metrics’ model, which I find admittedly ridiculous. While he’s always been above average in my own model (I don’t know, maybe he tanked enough this year that he isn’t anymore, but I haven’t checked) he’s never been exactly in the superstar range. I only felt two of his F1 seasons were worth rating. There might’ve been a case to rate 2014, but in 2015, Felipe Nasr outscored him 27-3 when he was a rookie an in 2018, Charles Leclerc beat him in speed percentile by 17.88 points. I did not feel either of those were worth rating. His IndyCar career was certainly a little better, but badly inflated because he kept winning races in stupid ways: Will Power’s car not restarting after the fake red flag to ensure green flag finish at Detroit (freaking egregious, man), sending Sébastien Bourdais airborne which somehow allowed him to stretch his fuel mileage in that Nashville debacle, and inheriting the lead when Pato O’Ward’s car lost power at the 2023 St. Pete season opener. Despite 4 wins, he only has 1 TNL and 0.47 lead shares. Yes, he had the three straight sixth-place points finishes for Ganassi from 2021-2023, which is decent, but bear in mind that Álex Palou was dominating the sport even though he was not as good as he is now. I think he’s pretty clearly the worst Indy 500 winner of the 21st century (it’s between him and Buddy Rice and I definitely prefer Rice). Yes, he did get his one career TNL there when he passed O’Ward for the lead, but he was only even in that position because the two faster Ganassi drivers Palou and Scott Dixon got penalized for pitting before the pits were closed and speeding in the pits respectively. Ericsson did have an overwhelmingly dominant car and did his job with it, but he wasn’t touching his vastly superior teammates otherwise. I think that says it all, right? I’ll begrudgingly admit I’m more willing to listen to people who feel he was robbed of the 2023 Indy 500 as Josef Newgarden makes himself less and less likable, but to be honest, he was extremely lucky to even win one.
Leon Duray
1925: C+
1926: E-
1927: C+
1928: E
Cumulative points: 7
I actually had Duray in my near-lock tier before doing the research for this and asking myself what I was thinking. Duray did admittedly have blinding speed in his heyday, sitting on the Indy 500 front row five years in a row from 1925-1929 and setting new track records during his 1925 and 1928 pole position runs, but he was overall a better qualifier than racer with seven poles and only four wins. Because the Indy 500 awarded a substantial percentage of the points and he only finished it once, he only had a top ten points finish once (although those were not in the same year). Duray was maybe the fastest driver on Earth in 1928. He won poles for four of the seven IndyCar races that year including his Indy 500 track record and he also set the closed-course world speed record at a 2.5-mile Detroit test oval owned by the Packard Motor Company, a record that stood until McGrath broke it in 1954. But ultimately when adjusting for era and competition, he seems like that era’s Greg Ray or something and not one of the big stars. While I do think setting all-time speed records means something to me and I will rate drivers highly for it, I think I care more about the land speed record than the closed-course world record. When you think about some of the drivers who set the closed-course world record in modern times, the fastest qualifying laps in IndyCar history were set by drivers like Parker Johnstone and Mauricio Gugelmin who weren’t exactly legends (although admittedly neither of them broke A.J. Foyt’s actual closed-course world record from 1987), and the list of closed-course world record holders also includes Hans Liebold. Have you ever heard of Hans Liebold? Exactly. Holding this particular record for 26 years wasn’t enough for me to rate him. The land speed record guys like Malcolm Campbell, Henry Segrave, Craig Breedlove, Art Arfons, etc… seem a lot more legendary to me.
Frank Elliott
1921: C+
1922: E
1923: C+
1925: C+
1926: C+
Cumulative points: 7
Sure, he had four wins and one non-points win, five top ten points finishes including an impressive 1922 season when he finished fourth in points and won three races, but he never finished better in points than that, he never finished better than 6th in the Indy 500, and he never led a lap at Indy. End of discussion, right?