During the lead up to the 100th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500 in 2011, several media outlets provided their rankings of the top Indy 500 drivers of all time, most notably the 'Greatest 33' list commissioned by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway where a pre-announced list of 100 was whittled down to 33 by fan voting. I had issues with the list but maybe my biggest issue was the Indy-centrism that dominates any discussion of the American open wheel tradition. The first sanctioned races in the series that is today IndyCar came in 1905, six years before the Indy 500 started. The diversity of races that comprised the American national championship has included board tracks (ovals with hardwood surfaces), rallies (point-to-point races and the Pikes Peak Hill Climb), races on the beach, dirt ovals, concrete ovals, road courses, street courses, races on airport runways, and Indianapolis itself which at various times has had a dirt, brick, and asphalt surface. Although not all these types of circuits appeared on the IndyCar circuit at any one time they all reflect important eras of the American wheel tradition. However, the general trend of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the media in general has been to treat any other races as subservient support races to the Indy 500 and diminish their importance. I will not be doing this. The Indy 500 is certainly the most important element to the IndyCar racing tradition, but it is not everything, especially when trying to assess the talent of the IndyCar drivers. As early as the 1970s, Tom Sneva argued that performance at Indianapolis was determined 80% by the car and 20% by the driver (although he also felt that way about the other circuits in general), and modern drivers say it's easier to race with the recent aero packages at Indianapolis than at some other venues. Clearly, considering all this, a list encompassing the top 100 IndyCar drivers seems much more interesting than an Indy-centric list that would largely come down to a list of the drivers who won in the best equipment almost exclusively. Additionally, one of the most compelling aspects to a driver ranking list is versatility (who can win or dominate on many different types of circuits, as opposed to just one type of circuit?) While I didn't necessarily agree with the Indy 500 ranking lists (Ralph DePalma was only 24th on the Greatest 33 list despite being the #2 lap leader of all time?) those lists have already been made. I figured the 100th running would be a good excuse to compile a list of the top 100 IndyCar drivers acknowledging the entire American open wheel tradition from 1905 to present including all types of tracks, cars, and series, not merely the Indy 500 itself. I used several statistics I had previously created as well as some new statistics I created solely for the purpose of aiding me in this ranking. While there have been plenty of overall lists like this for Formula 1 and NASCAR I know of very few for IndyCar racing that are not exclusively about the Indy 500, and I figured few would go into as much detail as I am about to do.
IndyCar's history is rather confusing and unstable. While even many casual sports fans know about the confusion of the CART/IRL split, the era sanctioned by AAA (yes, now more famous as the roadside maintenance organization) is even more confusing. AAA sanctioned championships in 1905, 1916, and every year from 1920-55 excluding 1942-45 when all motorsports were shut down during World War II. However, races happened in 1909-15 and 1917-19 but because there was no sanctioned championship in those years none of these races technically count and even those years' Indy 500 winners do not receive credit on the official IndyCar win list! After WWII ended, AAA was concerned that there would not be enough interest from racetracks and teams to revive the series so they combined six Champ Car races following the traditional prewar scheduling model and a whopping 71 'Big Car' races which were forerunners to today's sprint car racing. These races attracted relatively few entries and rarely lasted more than 20 miles. Modern historians consistently contend that the 71 Big Car races should count toward official win totals and none of the races from non-championship years should count for anything. While I acknowledge and agree with the historical decisions that have been made to shape the current win list, I have chosen to make different decisions in terms of evaluating the drivers. To properly evaluate a 1910s superstar relative to other drivers, I think it is best to have as much information as possible. I am including all races from this period as if they actually counted for points even if they didn't because it is too unfair to the pioneers to assess them without considering these races. While the championships that Arthur Means and Russ Catlin declared many years after the fact were certainly completely bogus, I do not believe the races themselves were, even if they did not count for points. Were the drivers trying less hard to win the races solely because they weren't competing for championships? I hardly believe that. While I certainly agree that these races should not count on the official win list, I also think it's impossible to ignore them in an analysis such as this, especially because there were many important races besides merely the Indy 500 in that era, including the Vanderbilt Cup races, the Astor Cup races, a 500-mile race on a concrete oval in Minneapolis in 1915, and plenty of road course races that lasted 300 miles for four hours or more (one unofficial 1909 race lasted nearly 400 miles, took 8 hours, and took place on a 23 mile road course in Crown Point, Indiana). Most road races lasted far longer than any IndyCar road races today in both time and distance. Additionally, the diversity in that era was unlike almost anything since (except for the late '60s) as drivers competed on road courses, beach courses, dirt ovals, brick ovals, concrete ovals, and board ovals throughout the 1910s. In this era a lot of these races didn't hold much less value than the Indy 500 itself did and many of them carried their own then-prestigious trophies as well, but none of these races lasted. The Indy-centrism of the few people still reporting on IndyCar and the fact that most of these races didn't count for points has caused them to be marginalized historically when in a lot of ways, this was one of the most interesting eras in American open wheel racing, and the versatility of that era has been overlooked. I know the races don't officially count (except for 1916) and I'm not arguing they should, but when evaluating the best drivers in IndyCar racing history, I definitely think they should for this analysis, so for my purposes I am calculating statistics that do include these races for consideration; however, for the years in which there was a national championship, I am leaving out the non-points races (when there is a championship, I suspect people would be somewhat less motivated to win the races that don't count, but when none of the races count, I can't imagine why the drivers wouldn't be as motivated to win every race as they would in any other period). Doing things this way although historically inaccurate should better put each pioneering driver in the proper perspective rather than merely overrating the drivers who happened to do well in 1916 (the season that counted) even if they did worse in other seasons that didn't count. As for the 1946 Big Car races, I would have loved to use the data from these races, but in most cases they are incomplete while I have found complete data for almost everything else, so I am not including them but will certainly mention them for the few drivers it affects who are on my list and competed in these races.
I did thorough research on a variety of websites including racing-reference.info, ChampCarStats.com, newspapers.com (for which I subscribed to a one-week free trial to search old newspapers for information on old races for almost this entire period), and several others. I observed that many of the established canon lap leader data for the early years actually seem to be wrong and I searched for detail for just about all of the pre-1990s races to attempt to understand each race's general importance at the time and put each individual win in context to properly assess its value (by determining whether races were won due to on-track passes, mechanical breakdowns, pit stop exchanges, and so on).
For each driver on this list, I will write a paragraph summary along with a stat line including statistics I find important. A few of these are established but most are not (and some are the statistics I have earlier introduced on Racermetrics in previous columns). These statistics that will appear on my stat line are as follows:
Starts (S): I will be counting all races that counted for championship points for the seasons that held championships and for the seasons that did not (1909-15, 1917-19) I will be counting all races. For 1946, I will generally not because the data for the Big Car races are much more incomplete than the data for any of these other races.
Wins (W): Self-explanatory, given the constraints of the races I will be analyzing, which will obviously lead to discrepancies with the actual win list.
Cumulative races led (CRL): This is the statistic I created to measure career dominance. For all races for a given driver, I add up the percentage of laps led for all races a driver led. Almost all races from the late '20s on have complete lap leader data available in some form although I corrected my initial calculations of this in my earlier column (in that column I did not count any of the unofficial races) to reflect the lap leader data I found in archived newspapers, some of which the official sources did not have and some of which the official sources seemed to have wrong (I invariably tended to trust the contemporary newspaper reports over the box scores which I judged to have been made years after the fact in many cases, although I acknowledge that likely both were wrong often). I also will provide the derivative form of this Average percent led (APL), which is simply cumulative races led divided by starts * 100, which reflects average dominance (although I created the APL statistic on race-database before I converted it to CRL more recently).
Terminal natural leader (TNL): This is the statistic I created to measure how often drivers put themselves in position to win while attempting to ignore luck and team factors as much as possible. The TNL is defined as the last driver to take the lead at full green-flag speed on track in a given race. Usually this will be the winner, but frequently it will not be. If the leader crashes, has a mechanical failure, has to pit due to a cut tire, is penalized, or is beaten out of the pits on a pit sequence (this is the most common, especially lately) the eventual winner can be judged to have been lucky in some sense. In many of these cases, the driver did not play as significant a role in the win as in races when the driver takes the lead on track. I realize this is not a perfect dichotomy as some drivers are more inclined to take risks to set a blistering pace resulting in mechanical failures, and other drivers' strategy (i.e. Scott Dixon) largely consists of making off-track passes via pit stops where the driver does play a role via setting very fast in and out laps to beat drivers out of the pits, but in general I think TNL is often a better measure than the actual winner of reflecting on-track pace in a race, which I think is a better predictor of who will perform in future races. If there are no green-flag passes on track in a race (as was in the case in this year's Phoenix and Long Beach races) I default to the polesitter for the TNL, which was Hélio Castroneves both times. Most newspaper articles dating back to the late '20s were in fact very good at recording on-track lead changes. I had the most trouble with superspeedway races however, especially in the Triple Crown races of the 1970s where a lot of the races were probably decided in the pits but most pit stops (particularly if they were ordinary ones) were obviously not discussed in contemporary reports. I did not have to guess on this nearly as much as you might think though, and I think that most of the times I did guess on the TNL I made the correct decision. If there were basically no data available to help me figure this out, I defaulted to the driver who won the race, and that happened quite frequently in the first 20 years, but almost all reports from the late '20s on gave me enough information to have some good idea who the TNL was for each race.
Rank vs. contemporaries (RVC): Drivers' win totals must be placed in proper context based on the era in which they raced. For most of the Great Depression years, there were 2-6 races. Recently 14-20 is standard. In 1946, there were 77 (since the winners were available for all the Big Car races, I did use these races for compiling this statistic). Obviously win totals are hardly comparable across different eras, but they are often even widely divergent within the same era. When more drivers are winning, an individual win could be argued to be worth less since many other drivers also have a win (of course you could argue this in reverse as well, since having more winners in total means a more competitive field, implying each win means more, not less...arguments like that can end up being two sides of the same coin). Regardless, to best estimate drivers' impacts in their own time, I compiled an all-time win list for each driver only for the races that particular driver started. For instance, for all the 407 races Mario Andretti started, I calculated each driver's win total only among those races. Andretti was 1st in wins among his 407 starts, so his RVC is 1. The vast majority of major stars will have a rank of 1 and I think to be considered a legend you would usually need a rank of at least 3, although in periods of greater competition, a lower rank is obviously more forgivable and I do have drivers on the list with an RVC as low as 10, although I have very, very few outside of the top five for their era (these are inevitably drivers who were burdened with inferior equipment to their peers, and I didn't include many). If a driver is tied in wins with another driver or drivers (for instance tied for 3rd) I simply ignore the tie and would just use an RVC of 3.
Points per race (PPR): For this statistic I do not use any of the points systems that have been used historically for IndyCar points, although I do like both the classic CART points system and the 2000s IRL points system (although I do not like the gimmicks that IndyCar has added to the IRL points system base in recent years). I wanted a measure of consistency that would both reflect the fact that top positions are worth more and account for differences in field size. In the 1910s and 1920s, many IndyCar races were short match races with fewer than ten cars and obviously these should not be weighted as much as Indy 500s, but this is not Indy-centrism. I still care more about drivers showing versatility on a variety of tracks than just performing at Indy with nothing else. Indy has simply had a larger field than most races in most years and as a result greater competitive depth due to the one-off entries. While this will probably never happen again, there have been other races in past seasons that had similar or even larger fields, especially the other 500-mile Triple Crown races in the '70s for instance. Adjusting for field size is the best basic way to adjust a points system for competitive depth, although it is not the only way and I will be getting to that later. To calculate points per race, I convert each driver's finish to reflect the percentage of cars beaten. Let me use the last two races at Long Beach and Barber as an example because it is very easy since the numbers are round. Both races had 21 cars. The winner beat 20 of 20 cars for a percent beat of 100%. Each successive finisher had a 5% lower score by this metric, since they beat 1/20 fewer cars than the previous driver. Percent beat is essentially the equivalent of average finish that adjusts for field size, but like average finish it does not reflect that top positions are worth much more and bottom positions are worth much less. To do that I converted the percent beat scale as follows:
| Percent beat | Points formula |
| 0-50 | 0 |
| 50-75 | 0-25 (subtract 50 points) |
| 75-85 | 25-45 (subtract 50 points and then multiply the difference above 25 by 2) |
| 85-95 | 45-75 (subtract 40 points and then multiply the difference above 45 by 3) |
| 95-97 | 75-83 (subtract 20 points and then multiply the difference above 75 by 4) |
| 97-98 | 83-88 (subtract 14 points and then multiply the difference above 83 by 5) |
| 100 | 100 |
Since no IndyCar fields had greater than 50 cars (the largest field was 45 cars), there is no need for any more distinctions above 98 percent beat. This may look complicated but it is very effective in adjusting for field size and having appropriate proportions between positions. So for a 21-car field like Barber, drivers would score points as follows using my system:
| Finish | % Beat | Points |
| 1 | 100 | 100 |
| 2 | 95 | 75 |
| 3 | 90 | 60 |
| 4 | 85 | 45 |
| 5 | 80 | 35 |
| 6 | 75 | 25 |
| 7 | 70 | 20 |
| 8 | 65 | 15 |
| 9 | 60 | 10 |
| 10 | 55 | 5 |
| 11-21 | 0-50 | 0 |
This looks reasonable and does largely reflect the historical CART/IRL proportions between positions, although with a few more extreme jumps than those points systems actually had. For a 33-car field at Indy, the top 16 would score points so each position behind the winner is worth more, which makes sense. For a 3-car field (yes, there were some in the early years; there were even a few 1-car fields) 2nd would have a percent beat of 50 so only the winner would score points. Taking an average of this statistic for all races (regardless of field sizes) does an excellent job at reflecting drivers' career consistency while also taking into account that top finishes are worth more, and consistency is worth more within larger fields (but rarely double unlike what the double points imply). For all the calculations I use based on these points per race (and there were many), I base average scores based on races in a calendar year (so for the USAC and IRL seasons that spanned multiple calendar years, I include only the races in a given calendar year together) and I average in all races together regardless of field strength to start with (so if a driver competed in both CART and IRL races in a year, all are averaged in together even though the CART fields were stronger, but I do account for this later).
Elite (E): To measure a driver's longevity I wanted to determine how many seasons a driver had elite performance and I wanted to have a valid statistical measure. However, just being there is not what I care about. Drivers who hang around completely uncompetitive are not really in any sense contributing toward their longevity, although this is not something you are as likely to see today as in the '80s and '90s because of the declining number of teams with actual sponsorship and the diminishing return on investment within auto racing in general. I judged that an average score of 30 in this measure was suitable for a season to be considered elite by this measure for IndyCar racing. All drivers with an average score of 30 or higher in a given season and two or more starts are judged as elite for that season (two starts is to remove outliers due to somebody having a top finish in one race, and most outliers were removed in this fashion, but some did remain). However, if a driver started only the Indy 500 in a given year and won, I will count that as elite status as the one exception (so Mauri Rose's 1947 and 1948 count as elite because he won the Indy 500 even though he did not enter any other races, for instance). However, I do not award elite status to every Indy 500 winner automatically. You still need to maintain an average of 30 points, and not all Indy 500 winners or race winners in general get it. For the record, this year has five elite drivers at the moment through four races: only the four Penske drivers and Scott Dixon. That seems dead on for this year so far. I do not make adjustments for field strength with regard to this statistic beyond the fact that the points to begin with are calculated based on field size.
Versatility (V): To measure a driver's ability to win on a variety of tracks rather than just a few track types, I came up with a basic versatility counting statistic. I award 1 versatility point to drivers who won once and only once on a given track type and 2 points to drivers who won multiple times on a given track type. The track types I considered were: superspeedways, short tracks, dirt tracks, board tracks, road courses, street courses, and rallies. A superspeedway is here defined as any brick, asphalt, or concrete oval of 1.5 miles or greater, while a short track is defined as any such oval less than 1.5 miles in length. NASCAR makes 1 mile the official boundary for this distinction, but people in IndyCar racing tend to consider the mile ovals like Milwaukee, Phoenix, Nazareth, Trenton, and Loudon to be short ovals arguing they have more in common to undeniable short tracks like Richmond, Iowa, and Sanair than with the high-speed ovals, and I would agree with that distinction for IndyCar racing, especially because they usually race on fewer short tracks than NASCAR does. Setting the distinction at 1.5 miles also allows for a similar number of ovals in each group per year based on scheduling trends for the past four decades. Dirt tracks and board tracks were grouped together regardless of length, since they each had distinct elements that wildly differed from more traditional asphalt and concrete ovals. Following the lead of ChampCarStats, I grouped airport circuits like Cleveland and Edmonton as road courses, not street circuits, although this is debated and you will find people grouping airport circuits in either category. I also include the Indy 500 as its own category because I acknowledge some Indy-centrism is certainly acceptable and it is an important pillar in reflecting any driver's diversity. This is the main place where I do reflect the importance of the Indy 500, and in eras that are not too diverse like the '20s or '30s Indy wins become especially important, particularly because I count them in both the superspeedway and Indy category. I distinguish between one win at a particular track type and multiple wins because almost anyone can fluke into a single win somewhere due to pit strategy or something, but winning multiple times on a particular track type seems to be what is usually necessary to indicate mastery. For a modern driver from the '80s to present, a versatility score of 10 would be perfect, indicating a driver who has won multiple times on superspeedways, short tracks, road courses, street courses, and at Indianapolis. This has only been achieved by five drivers, who all made the list.
Standings (C): For all drivers who competed during championship seasons for their entire career I list their peak position in the championship standings regardless of sanctioning body. While I care less about championships or any metric (win, CRL, TNL, or whatever) as a be-all and end-all, this is still important in reflecting a driver's overall career. Since no championships existed between 1905 and 1920 except for 1916, for the drivers who peaked in this period but had their best points finishes in the post-facto bogus championships, I am going to leave this field blank.
Single Year Peak (SYP): This is the highest average points per race a driver attained in a single year in a career. For drivers who competed in CART and IRL or CART and USAC simultaneously, I took an average of all points across all series without adjusting for field strength. I only accept a year as a SYP if the driver made two or more starts or won an Indy 500, as I previously mentioned in the Elite section. Unlike elite status, a SYP of 30 or higher is not necessary to be listed, but obviously the drivers with a SYP < 30 will always have 0 elite seasons by definition.
Career Peak (CP): This is a weighted average of single year peaks over a time period of up to five years to attempt to reflect that driver's career performance trends at a given moment (season) in time. Results can fluctuate wildly within a given year, but much less over multiple years. Career peaks reflect sustained top-level consistency, which is also important to determine a driver's career peak for a year. I weight the current year four times, the previous and following years twice, and the years two before and two after one time each. If certain years are unavailable (for instance at the start of a career or in the current season) I omit those years (hence since there have been no 2017 or 2018 races, the 2016 career scores will only include the years 2014-16). However, if there is a gap between nonconsecutive seasons in a driver's career, for instance Juan Pablo Montoya's gap between 1999-2000 and 2014-2016 and Alex Zanardi's gap between 1996-98 and 2001, I evaluate career peaks as if they were separate careers. Once again, I do not distinguish between different sanctioning bodies or field depth for this statistic, nor do I take equipment into account but I still believe this statistic does have value, especially when comparing contemporaries. I also use the career peak statistic as the basis for measuring competitive depth.
Clutch (CL): To determine whether drivers were clutch ('closers') or not ('chokers') I took an average of wins and terminal natural leads and compared this average to the driver's cumulative races led. Drivers who had an average of wins and TNL higher than their CRL either won or put themselves into position to win (or both) more often than would be expected from the level of their dominance. Drivers who had a higher CRL than their win/TNL average put themselves into position to win less than you would expect based on how much they dominated in the races. This is rather intuitive and most of the drivers you would expect on either side of this measure do come out the way most fans would expect. I use a ratio between the win/TNL average and CRL to measure this statistic...an average over 1 implies a driver is clutch, but an average under 1 implies a driver is not. This doesn't mean just because someone is a closer means they are by definition better than someone is a 'choker' if the choker is significantly more dominant though.
Competitive depth (D): Field size is hardly the only thing that matters when determining how deep a given field is. There are certain eras when only a handful of cars were capable of getting top finishes and there are others where many are (although this is relatively rare). Adapting an idea from Adam Steele of Football Perspective, I calculated field strength for each race by taking an average of all drivers' career scores for that given year, dividing by a standard deviation of those career scores, and multiplying this value (which in technical terms is called the coefficient of variation) by the field size to measure the strength of the field. This has problems when the field size is very small or in recent years (since 2015 and 2016 career scores are not based on a full 5-year period, the career scores are generally more extreme and unrealistic than those based on 5-year intervals hence the standard deviations are higher and the competitive depth appears lower. This does not necessarily mean competitive depth has decreased but that more data in future seasons are needed to put the current seasons into context, which obviously makes sense.)
For the CART/IRL split, I estimated the gap in field depth by comparing the season scores of the same drivers across both series, this time with the races distinguished and not grouped together. I compared IRL season scores for each year to average points per race for the same drivers in CART over a period starting 3 years prior and ending 3 years later than that given IRL season. For instance, Arie Luyendyk's 1996 IRL season score was compared to his average points per race in CART from 1993-1999, and I used a similar 3 year spread for all IRL drivers from 1996-2001, a period where in my opinion the depth of the IRL field did not change much since it largely had continuity among the same drivers until the CART teams switched to the IRL in 2002-2003. By taking the median ratio between CART and IRL season scores from 1996-2001, I estimated that the CART field was about 3.70 times stronger than the IRL field in 1996, but this varied slightly in the following seasons based on the competitive depth of the CART years that each IRL season was being compared to. I adjusted the IRL competitive depth statistics for each race to reflect this. I also made slight adjustments for the 2000-2002 Indy 500s to reflect the CART-based entries in the race which made the races stronger than the other IRL races in those years. For the later split seasons (2002-07) I made crude adjustments to reflect teams switching series (for instance, attempting to calculate what percentage of CART's competitive depth score came from Ganassi the year before it left the series to attempt to quantify how much CART lost and the IRL gained from Ganassi's switch). For 2003-06 these adjustments meant the IRL had a slightly stronger field, but in 2007 CCWS actually surpassed the IRL again even shortly before it began to fold (the DP01 clearly improved the depth considerably from the direly uncompetitive 2006 Champ Car season). Still, both series clearly had below average historical competitive depth from 2003-07 at this point, which makes sense, and I don't rate that period highly in general. For the merged series in 2008 and years following I make no such adjustments as the competitive depth for 2008 comes very close to matching my estimation of each team's contributions to the 2007 CCWS and IRL seasons. For the CART/USAC split, since there were many fewer races on the USAC side, I compared the same drivers' average points in CART races and USAC races excluding the Indy 500 (since that race lost no depth from the CART/USAC split since everyone continued to compete there) for the period 1979-83, and coincidentally I got a very similar ratio in field difference here as well, which I also took into account for those USAC races outside the Indy 500 after the top teams had shifted to CART.
Once I had competitive depth scores for every race and season, I could now adjust drivers' win totals and points per race to reflect differences in career competitive depth, as I previously attempted here, but I think my calculations in this attempt are more accurate than the previous ones were particularly because the average season scores I am using are now more or less continuous instead of discrete. I did these calculations on a race-by-race level, not an aggregate career level. I did not want to reward drivers who were uncompetitive against deep fields but strong against shallow ones. To do this, I multiplied wins by normalized field strength (the field strength for each race divided by the average field strength for all races) and added these adjusted win totals together, and for points per race, I multiplied each driver's point total for each race by the competitive depth for the race and added those together before dividing by the driver's number of starts times the field depth for an average race. These results do not always agree. For instance, A.J. Foyt has fewer adjusted wins than actual wins (barely, because of the shallowness of his USAC wins after the CART/USAC split), but more adjusted points per race than actual points per race, indicating that using a race-by-race model does create more interestingly complex results than if I merely took the average field depth for all races in a driver's career and multiplied everything by this aggregate statistic.
I don't believe any of these statistics by themselves are sufficient to assess a driver's career. There is certainly no single statistic that puts a driver's career into perfect perspective, but looking at things from a variety of different perspectives as I am doing with the statistics I have created definitely comes closer to doing this than merely looking at a win list or a championship list or worse, an Indy 500 winners list. All these statistics have some sort of bias or shortcoming that needs to be considered. Adjusted points per race is biased towards drivers that competed against deep fields because I already calculate points per race using an adjustment for field size and my competitive depth measures also take into account field size. This doesn't bother me a lot as there are other statistics like it (college basketball's RPI also takes strength of schedule into account multiple times, for instance) and because other statistics I am considering are biased towards smaller fields, such as rank vs. contemporaries (it is a lot easier to have an RVC of 1 if you regularly competed against fields with fewer than fifteen cars). For cumulative races led and terminal natural leaders, I sometimes had to guess lap leaders and the reasons for the lead change that ultimately determined the winner from informative but sometimes slightly vague archived newspaper articles, but I am quite confident in these statistics for the vast majority of races from the late '20s on for the most part. No statistic trumps everything else and everything should be considered, not to mention things like equipment strength, driver injuries, and the like which would be outside the realm of pure statistics but still clearly worthy of consideration. The stats help me to make my decisions, but the ranking is hardly based on stats alone.
All statistics and data in this project are up to date through last Sunday's race at Barber. I intend to introduce two groups of ten drivers starting with 100-91 with a summarizing paragraph and a stat line containing all these aforementioned statistics each week from this point on until the week prior to the Indianapolis 500. I may revise this to be every 3 days or something later since I finished writing this later than I intended. Let the ranking begin.
