The single greatest sporting event in the world happens this Sunday in Speedway, Indiana. Me and 350,000 of my closest friends will be in attendance, marking the largest non-religious gathering of human beings anywhere in the world. Nearly one in every 1,000 people in the U.S. will be travelling to the race to see it happen live and in technicolor eyeball-vision. There’s history, pomp, circumstance, gravitas, and alcohol in equal measure, and this is one of the fastest fields in history. One of the 33 drivers on the grid will be marked down in the history books as a race winner, permanently vetting them as one of the best to ever do it.
But that raises the question of which driver rises to the top of the pile of winning drivers? In the history of this incredible sport, stretching all the way back to 1911 when setting a lap average speed of just 75 miles per hour was fast enough to get you an entry to the field, only 75 different humans have the honor of their visage being mounted to the famed Borg-Warner Trophy. What I want to know is who do you think was the best to ever do the damn thing? There are some seriously big names on the roster, so who are you picking?
Spiderman?
Only four men have four career wins at the Indy 500: A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Sr., Rick Mears, and Hélio Castroneves. There isn’t an active driver in the running today with more than two wins, and it’s highly likely that we’ll see a first-time winner at the track this weekend. Whether it’s recency bias or that I watched it happen live, Castroneves getting his fourth win in 2021 after winning two IMSA prototype championships and being fired by Roger Penske will always mark the moment he solidified himself as the greatest Indy winner of all time in my eyes. Hélio ran the perfect race against a stacked field of talent, and put himself in the history books forever. I shed more than a few tears while he climbed the fence for the fourth time. That man is a legend.
So, for whatever reason you want to claim, who is your Indy GOAT? How about Juan Pablo Montoya getting his two wins fifteen years apart? Maybe Bobby Rahal’s 1986 win for Jim Trueman just 11 days before he succumbed to cancer makes him the GOAT? Jim Clark or Graham Hill? Parnelli Jones, Mark Donohue, one of the Unsers, or Emmo Fittipaldi? Whoever your pick is, you probably can’t go wrong. The list of winners is packed with legends, so who did it best?
