Season Grades for IndyCar Drivers: Part II

In this article, I have compiled season ratings for all the eleven IndyCar drivers with 7-9 wins who I have not done yet. This includes a lot of drivers that put up some great near-miss seasons. Many of these drivers were the kinds of drivers who delivered championship-caliber performances at least once, but it just never happened for them. While a few of these drivers (most notably Rex Mays and many would argue Louis Meyer but not necessarily me) are flat out greats, these drivers tended to have relatively short and often injury-shortened careers but nonetheless hit high peaks. More recently, this list also includes career compilers like Ryan Briscoe and Alexander Rossi, who probably achieved enough to push them across the line into lock status despite the fact that both of their careers were full of long stretches of meh.

Kenny Bräck

1996: C
1998: C+
1999: C+
2000: C+
2001: E
2002: C+
2003: C-

Cumulative points: 25

Bräck weirdly seems to have less of a legacy than he should. When IndyCar published its 100 greatest drivers list in 2011 from which The Greatest 33 were selected, Bräck somehow didn’t even make the list of 100 even though only 68 drivers had won the race at that point. Not only is Bräck nowhere near one of the worst Indy 500 winners in my mind, but even if you erroneously thought he was the worst, I certainly couldn’t come up with another 33 non-winners I would rate over him. While I didn’t think Bräck belonged on the Greatest 33 by any means, his not even making the 100 was a huge diss (especially when you look at some of the people who did make it). I get that IndyCar historians don’t really know what to do with the IRL era yet, and those years had some of the least competitive fields since the ‘30s, but Eddie Cheever and Buddy Lazier both made the 100 and there’s no doubt in my mind that Bräck was better than them in an IndyCar (and he proved he could dominate even against the 2001 CART field which I think was the best IndyCar field of all time), so what gives?

The only reason Bräck only barely attains lock status is because his career was so short, but he nonetheless made a big impact. In 1996, Bräck won the Formula 3000 championship on track when that was the leading F1 feeder series but was disqualified from his apparent season-ending win for rough driving, which cost him the championship. He made an unusual pivot to the all-oval IRL and struggled until he overtook Tony Stewart to win the 1998 IRL title thanks to three straight wins; he’s almost the only driver to ever come on top over Stewart in a head-to-head championship battle. I toyed with making that an E- season but Bräck only ranked 3rd in lead shares, I believe a couple of the wins were fuel mileage, and Foyt’s cars were fast enough that Billy Boat won six poles. Nonetheless, he was consistentl a very good driver from 1998 to 2002 and you could argue his 2001 was better than the rest of his career combined. His 7.16 lead shares that year rank fourth behind only Michael Andretti’s 1992, Paul Tracy’s 1993, and Juan Pablo Montoya’s 1999 in the CART era and as I said, I think CART 2001 had the best IndyCar field of all time (as evidenced by the CART drivers lapping the entire IRL field). Even more impressively, he did so for a Rahal team that has pretty much always been hit-or-miss. His main issue is that none of his other seasons comes even close…

Alexander Rossi

2015: C-
2016: C-
2017: C+
2018: E
2019: E
2020: C
2021: C-
2022: C
2024: C

Cumulative points: 32

When I was originally trying to work out locks for this list, I had Rossi as a lock. As he settled into his last half-decade of blah mediocrity, I started to doubt myself. However, as unimpressed as I have been with him lately, he has still attained enough points to surpass the 25-point threshold I consider lock status. I do think his 2018 and 2019 were both full elite seasons: he led in wins, CRL, and races with the most laps led in 2018 and natural races led, lead change record, TNL, and lead shares in 2019 for a shaky Andretti team even if I suspect the main reason he did this is because the late 2010s IndyCar fields weren’t very good. When you consider that eleven historically above-average drivers emerged in the 2019-2022 period alone (Colton Herta, Felix Rosenqvist, Marcus Ericsson, Santino Ferrucci, Pato O’Ward, Rinus VeeKay, Álex Palou, Scott McLaughlin, Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Lundgaard, and David Malukas, and that’s not even counting Romain Grosjean who is no longer in the series), the driver I once thought would become Newgarden’s chief rival suddenly looked a lot more mundane, and he really fell off when Newgarden didn’t (until recently...) This makes me wonder if I should downgrade Rossi’s 2018 and 2019 for lack of competition but I’m not inclined to do that… yet. I might change my mind on this.

Bruno Junqueira

2000: C
2002: E
2003: E-
2004: C
2005: C-
2007: C-
2012: C-
2013: C-
2015: C-

Cumulative points: 24

Junqueira is very similar to Bräck in that his career legacy seems to rest solely on one banner career year while nothing else came even close. Unlike Bräck, Junqueira won the Formula 3000 title in 2000 and even beat Fernando Alonso to do it. Junqueira never put up the absurd numbers Bräck did in terms of lead change data, but he did actually lead my open wheel model globally in 2002 because he beat Bräck and Scott Dixon both badly the year after Bräck’s epic 2001 and the year before Dixon’s epic 2003 (which as you will recall I rated first). Although Junqueira wasn’t even close to Cristiano da Matta for the championship, which is why I didn’t consider him for the top five, that year amazes me since he outscored even Michael Schumacher in my model and considering what his teammates did the surrounding years, boy howdy. He even won the pole for his second Indy 500. However, even though he also finished second in points in 2003 and 2004, those years were substantially worse. Although Junqueira did beat his rookie teammate Sébastien Bourdais in points in 2003 (and also in nearly all my advanced statistics), Bourdais was certainly progressing faster and looked faster; I still placed Junqueira in a higher tier. However, the next year, Bourdais won 7 races to Junqueira’s 1 and Junqueira could no longer compete. He was leading in Champ Car points in 2005 whe he had his season-ending crash at the Indy 500, but he never seemed to recover. His three straight podiums for Dale Coyne Racing in 2007 were impressive, but even that year he had a putrid rating in my model. One of the biggest casualties of the IndyCar merger, he never had a full-time ride after 2008, got screwed out of two Indy 500s, and settled into sports car racing where he had a few winning seasons in a minor ALMS/IMSA class. For a driver rubbing shoulders with Alonso and Button at a certain point, he ultimately had a disappointing career, but I still think his 2002 is amazing.

Rex Mays

1933: C+
1934: C+
1935: E-
1936: E-
1937: E-
1938: C+
1939: C+
1940: 1
1941: 1
1946: 5
1947: C+
1948: C+
1949: C+

Cumulative points: 139

Easily the best of this group of drivers (yes, he is far better than Louis Meyer in my opinion) Mays was the dominant IndyCar driver in the years surrounding World War II. In both 1940 and 1941, only three races were held, the Indy 500 and two dirt races each year. In those six races, Mays finished second in both Indy 500s and led all four of the other races start-to-finish. That’s right: over an entire two-year period, he had an average finish of 1.33. Sure, average finish is an overrated statistic and you don’t need to tell me that, but at that level, daaaaamn. Since there was no racing in Europe those years since Europe was at war and the US wasn’t, Mays was easily the #1 driver both years. Even though I award fewer points for the World War II years, the 100 points he earned in 1940 and 1941 are still equivalent to one post-war #1 season. Mays kept it up in 1946, winning 3 of his 5 starts although he somehow had a DNQ also. I remain uncertain about what grades I’m going to give some of Mays’s early seasons as he won two AAA Pacific Big Car (sprint car) championships in 1934 and 1935 and two AAA Midwest Big Car titles in 1936 and 1937. Mays is supposedly tied with Bill Holland for third all-time with 65 sprint car wins but I won’t be able to evaluate a lot of those seasons properly until I know his precise win counts each year. I do think he was elite for a lot of that period also though.

Buddy Lazier

1996: C
1997: C
1998: C
2000: C+
2001: C+
2002: C-
2005: C-

Cumulative points: 14

Perhaps you might think this too generous given the IRL’s weaker competition. However, even though I was a CARTisan in the split years, Lazier is one of the IRL drivers I definitely respected and I bumped a couple of his seasons up because I honestly feel he belongs on this list. First off, his Indy 500 win where he hunted down and passed Davy Jones less than a month before he scored an overall Le Mans win with a broken back was more impressive than Jimmy Vasser’s U.S. 500 win where he caused the 15-car pileup on the pace lap and was allowed to win the race in his backup car. Was Lazier as naturally talented as some of his early IRL contemporaries like Tony Stewart, Kenny Bräck, Arie Luyendyk, or Scott Sharp? Of course not. But what I’ll say for him is that I think no driver in the early IRL had better racecraft than him. He took a Hemelgarn Racing team that never won without him and consistently punched above his weight for years. He was one of the most clutch drivers in IndyCar history. Despite only winning one pole and leading the most laps one time, he had eight wins, eight TNL, and an astonishing 8-1 record on the final lead change of the race. He may not have been as talented as those other drivers, but he was absolutely lethal and nearly unbeatable in a battle for the win, and I’m not sure whether anybody even noticed. This also held against CART drivers as well. Although he was obviously no match for Juan Pablo Montoya or Dan Wheldon in the 2000 and 2005 Indy 500s, he did pass their teammates, passing Vasser for 2nd late in the 2000 race before he ran out of fuel and passing Tony Kanaan and Dario Franchitti to ultimately finish 5th in 2005. He proved he could fight with the big CART stars albeit not on road courses. And he also became the last IRL driver to win an IROC race too in 2002 (although admittedly he led the entire race after starting on pole due to a field inversion because he was last in points). Lazier is definitely a borderline selection without question, but he’s a borderline selection I want to make.

Eddie Sachs

1955: C-
1956: C
1958: C+
1959: E-
1960: C
1961: E
1962: C-

Cumulative points: 24

A.J. Foyt’s biggest rival of 1961, Foyt and Sachs had an epic duel in that year’s Indy 500 before Sachs gave up the win while leading with three laps left because his tire was worn and he felt it was unwise to nurse it to the finish. That year, he also won two races in the USAC Stock Car Series. With eight total IndyCar wins, a USAC Midwest Sprint Car title in 1958, 16 sprint wins, and 9 midget wins, Sachs was a reliable star but not really one of the biggest stars outside of 1961. His seasons after that don’t impress me much because he was driving for Al Dean’s powerhouse team that had dominated both before with Jimmy Bryan and after with Mario Andretti, but he generally struggled before he died too soon in a fiery crash at the 1964 Indy 500.

Ryan Briscoe

2003: C-
2007: C+
2008: C+
2009: E
2010: C+
2011: C-
2012: C-
2013: C
2015: C-
2016: C+
2018: C+
2019: C-
2020: C

Cumulative points: 34

Much like Junqueira and Bräck, Briscoe’s career largely hinges on one banner year in 2009 when he became the Penske IndyCar team leader very briefly after Hélio Castroneves missed the start of the season due to his tax evasion trial before Castroneves’s substitute driver Will Power unleashed a can of whoop ass over both his teammates and the rest of the field over the next half decade. Briscoe’s numbers in 2009 were pretty much comparable to the other two championship contenders Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon, but Briscoe really blew it by crashing after leaving the pits at Motegi. Since he would have inherited the lead after his final pit stop (and probably the win since there was almost no passing that season), he went from probably needing only to start the season finale at Homestead to win the title to having to come from behind and he lost. Although it was one of the worst championship chokes in history, I think the season was still good enough for a full E. Most of his other seasons weren’t that impressive, and honestly I think outside of 2009, he impressed me more as a sports car driver than as an IndyCar driver. I haven’t gone through all his sports car seasons to look at lap times yet, so I may adjust these up or down based on who the team leaders were for his sports car teams. I also thought 2003 deserved to be rated since he did win the Formula 3 Euro Series title against a field that also included Nico Rosberg.

Louis Meyer

1928: 4
1929: E
1930: C+
1931: E-
1933: E
1935: C+
1936: E
1937: C+
1939: E-

Cumulative points: 26

Old-timers will no doubt find this patently unfair because Meyer was both the first driver to win three Indy 500s and three titles. However, he is overrated in the same way Hélio Castroneves is. I went through pretty much all the races even from Meyer’s era to collect as much lead change data as I could, and I discovered that despite having eight wins (definitely a lot for that era), he only had something like 2 TNL and in almost all his wins, he inherited the lead after someone else suffered a mechanical failure. Since I don’t tend to either blame drivers for their mechanical failures or reward drivers from benefiting from the failures of others, I find him less impressive than the general public does. Still a lock, mind you, and he would have scored a lot more points if he received those grades in the post-World War II era, but the Indy 500 competition in the ‘30s was so bad (I’d say probably even worse than the IRL years) that I do think I need to award significantly fewer points for each given grade for the pre-World War II years, and that is the main reason he scored fewer points than you might think.

Johnny Thomson

1952: C
1954: E-
1955: E-
1956: C+
1957: C+
1958: E
1959: E-
1960: C+

Cumulative points: 36

Probably the most obscure of all these drivers, but definitely not the worst. After becoming one of the rare drivers of that era to win both a Midget (1952) and Big Car (1954) title, Thomson won 7 IndyCar races including 4 in 1958. That year, he tied the champion Tony Bettenhausen for the most natural races led but he wsa arguably a lot better in the races. In both 1957 and 1958, he led the second-most laps to Rodger Ward and both years he actually beat Ward in points. Although Thomson is a driver I don’t know a great deal about and I’ll definitely have to do a lot of research before I write my column on him, I believe he would rank very highly on a list of the best IndyCar drivers to win neither an Indy 500 nor a title.

Harry Hartz

1922: E-
1923: C+
1924: C+
1925: C+
1926: 2
1927: C+

Cumulative points: 36

Although Hartz had a short career, he had one of the best average finishes in Indy 500 history after earning three 2nd place finishes and two 4ths in his first five starts from 1922-1926. This was not as impressive as it would be later because only one of those races had a full 33 cars while the others only had 22-28 starters. However, Hartz was certainly one of the best drivers of his era. This is best exemplified by his 1926 title when he narrowly won the title over that year’s Indy 500 winner and rookie Frank Lockhart. Hartz won 5 of his 7 races that year and he and Lockhart tied for the most wins. While Lockhart led Hartz in a 1-2 finish at Indy, Hartz beat Lockhart for the championship; since Lockhart was a rookie, I decided he was more impressive but this season was also more impressive for Hartz than arguably the rest of his career. What also impresses me is that almost all of Hartz’s career took place as an owner-driver. He definitely belongs on the list, but as usual I have to dock him for the inferior pre-war competition. Although Hartz failed to win the Indy 500 as a driver, he did later win it as an owner for Billy Arnold in 1930 in what turned out to be the most dominant Indy 500 win in history.

Joie Chitwood

1939: E
1940: E
1946: E-
1947: E-

Cumulative points: 16

Although better known as a swashbuckling stuntman, Chitwood was one of the best Big Car drivers of his era, winning an estimated 44 races. In 1946, the AAA was worried that there wouldn’t be enough suitable tracks after World War II and randomly added over 70 Big Car races to the IndyCar schedule, so he is technically listed as having won seven IndyCar races that year, all in Big Car races. While he was definitely highly competitive with Ted Horn and Bill Holland (who along with Mays were the best IndyCar drivers of the era) in sprint car races, he was unable to adapt to the more prestigious pavement races like the other two did, so I have to rate him lower. But that level of sprint car dominance still seems like it should be reflected on the list. Since I don’t have complete sprint car win counts for any of these seasons, it’s possible that I may adjust some of his season ratings or rate him in more seasons based on how many races he won each year, but I simply don’t have the data yet.