It’s arguably the biggest, age-old argument in NASCAR: how do you compare drivers across different eras of the sport?
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And the answer is always the same: you can’t.
Countless fans, media, and drivers have tried to draw comparisons between, say, Richard Petty and David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon, maybe Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson.
But it’s just impossible to do so because cars were different between eras, overall technology was different, and driver talent was different.
NASCAR on FOX lead play-by-play announcer Mike Joy has been calling races for nearly 50 years. And even with the countless number of racers he’s seen over those years, Joy also cannot say for certain why Driver A is better than Driver B or even Driver C. It just can’t be done.
Joy talked about that very topic on a recent episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour on FOX. When Harvick asked Joy to, for example, rank where Kyle Larson would place in NASCAR history, Joy came up with an immediate answer – but then added a caveat.
“Certainly Top 10 and possibly Top 5 (but) it’s very, very hard to compare eras,” Joy told Harvick. “We have no idea how David Pearson would do in this car today, or Richard Petty, or even Jeff Gordon. We don’t know. We’ll never know.”
Joy went so far as to try and quantify Harvick’s own racing career and how he might have stacked up against drivers and cars from 20 or 30 years earlier.
“We have no idea how you might have done in one of those cars in the 70s and 80s, say, before power steering or even before front-steer cars, before Bobby Allison made the front steer car a thing, and everybody was driving rear-steer banjo cars.
“Essentially, they were all racing ‘63 Ford Galaxies with different sheet metal on them, because that was the underpinnings, and maybe different engines. So we’ll never really know.
“The other thing is, sometimes you get a driver that’s so dominant that the success of other drivers pales by comparison. I was looking at your (Harvick’s) stats the other day and not just all the races you won, but all the top fives, all the laps led, all of everything.
“And I’m going, when Kevin was racing, how did we not make a bigger deal out of this?”
Well, there was a good reason, Joy noted.
“Oh yeah, Jimmie Johnson was winning five championships in a row. And everything else kind of was well down the list by comparison. So we celebrate it now. Sorry if we didn’t celebrate it so much then.”
