[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 121, May 2002 - America's Greatest Driver[/h] Monday, 10 April 2017


By RACER staff








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We'd left 100 issues in the rear-view mirror a couple years before, but another milestone for RACER arrived in 2002 with our 10th Anniversary Issue. A lot had changed in 10 years, including the rapid growth of new media forms competing for the public's attention with traditionally published works, yet RACER had not only survived but prospered. Reaching such a significant date deserved to be commemorated with an appropriately momentous – even provocative – cover story. Our choice: Who is the greatest American racecar driver of all time?
It was hardly a new question, of course – bench racers have been debating it since the invention of the wheel – but we thought we could get an authoritative take on it by canvassing the opinions of a wide variety of experts including current and former drivers, team owners and racing media members. Somewhat to our surprise, the tallied ballots delivered a clear top choice. Hint: He's the only driver, let alone American, to have won the Indianapolis 500, Daytona 500 and Formula 1 world championship, to name just a few of his accomplishments.
For an appropriate complement to the discussion of the greatest American racer, our Formula 1 spotlight that month focused on Michael Schumacher, whose meteoric rise had reached a level of almost inevitable dominance that no one else in the modern era of grand prix had been able to achieve. Yet for all that, few in or outside F1 seemed to understand Schumacher – what made him so great, and how did he sustain the motivation to keep up that tireless quest for supremacy? Maurice Hamilton dug deep for those answers in another of his incisive interviews.
Looking back over the first 10 years of racing as RACER related it, editor Andy Hallbery was struck by how so many of the most significant moments of that time chosen by our F1, IndyCar and NASCAR writers revolved around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. From The Split to the Brickyard 400 to the return of the United States Grand Prix, Indy and its influence had been at the center of many hot-button issues for the magazine's first decade.

Further exploration of Indy's lasting influence came in our historical feature for Issue No. 100, focusing on the dramatic if anti-climactic tale of the awesome STP Turbines. Specifically, John Zimmermann recounted the STP-Paxton Turbocar gas turbine with which Parnelli Jones utterly dominated the 1967 Indianapolis 500 before being thwarted by a mechanical failure. Politics and cost concerns would help to ensure that the turbine would soon be legislated out of existence – not the first or last time that technical innovation would prove a double-edged sword at Indy.