Who's on Your Mt. Rushmore of American Motorsports?

Let’s say we want to sculpt the Mt. Rushmore of American motorsports: Who do we include?

On the one hand, there are the people who built the tracks and organized the races, people such as Big Bill France, Wally Parks, Tony Hulman (in Hulman’s case, it was a re-built of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway) and… and here I have a problem as to the fourth and final member of this quartet.

Just as France, Parks and Hulman are the obvious -- the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln of our Motorsports Mt. Rushmore -- it’s not nearly so clear as to who gets the place of Teddy Roosevelt, the less obvious choice.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was commissioned by Congress in 1925 to include four presidents from our nation’s first 150 years, so we ended up with Teddy instead of Franklin Roosevelt, who led the country out of the Depression and to victory in World War II and whose image might be more fitting up there with the Founding Fathers and the president who fought – and who gave his life -- to hold the nation together.

But back to our Mt. Motorsports: While France organized stock car racing and Parks moved drag racing off the streets and onto the strips and Hulman resurrected the Indy 500 and led it through its heydays, whom might we include from sports car racing? John Bishop might seem the most likely choice, for launching the U.S. Road Racing Championship, the Trans-Am and Can-Am series and then starting IMSA.

Or do we include a car owner, say Roger Penske, whose cars have won in seemingly every venue mentioned above except for drag racing, and we only can imagine what his team might have done had it decided to race only in a straight line?

Or should our Mt. Motorsports honor not those behind the pit wall but those who were heroes on the tracks? Who could argue with this foursome: Richard Petty, A.J. Foyt, Don Garlits, Mario Andretti?

Well, I know, perhaps you could argue and offer your alternatives. And I hope you do. I’d be curious to know who you’d include in a Mt. Rushmore of Motorsports.

And just to stir the pot a little, I’ll close with this: You don’t have to restrict yourself to four people, founders or drivers, because long before it was called Mt. Rushmore, that rocky outcrop in South Dakota’s Black Hills was known by the Lakota Sioux as the Six Grandfathers.

That’s right, we have room on our Mt. Motorsports for six people. Who would you include?

Read more from Larry Edsall at iZoom

Photo Credit: Dean Franklin