Ever looked at one of those ‘Top 100 Grand Prix Drivers In The World Of All Time In The History Of Forever’ books?
If you haven’t, don’t. At best they’re mildly entertaining but otherwise irrelevant, one man sat in front of a computer ranking drivers from different eras with different rules, different cars and different competitors. At worst, they’re the kind of badly written potboiler your well-intentioned great aunt buys for Christmas, seeing the racing cars on the cover and not realising the contents will raise your post-turkey blood pressure to dangerous levels. Louis Hamilton? Damian Hill? Don’t swear on his birthday, there’s a good chap.
A top 10 from a specific season can be made to work because the playing field is level, or as level as it can be in a series that isn’t a spec formula. As you’ll see later, that’s good news for this blog’s Christmas content. The best of all time, though? Way too subjective, way too difficult to fairly judge.
Supposing 217 Formula One drivers past and present were to have a crack, though. With in excess of 9000 starts and 270 wins between the members of the voting panel, would the results be any more credible? Autosport attempted to find out, asking those 217 lucky people (a fabulous sample size given that there are only 375 past and present F1 drivers still with us) to name the best 10 F1 drivers of all time.
The answer? The top end of the ranking has all the right names but demonstrates the subjective nature of these things. Sir Stirling Moss is ranked 8th, which certain petrolheadblog.com writers would call 7 places too low. Senna or Schumacher? Senna wins out, but there’s a case for both men. Few would rank Niki Lauda ahead of Gilles Villeneuve, even if the raw stats say it should be so. Shouldn’t being the only driver Jim Clark ever feared be enough to boost Dan Gurney above 28th? The order can be debated for all of time, but the names are all reasonable enough.
It’s further down the list that the fun reaches Eurovision Song Contest levels of intrigue. The website shows only the top 40, while the full list contains 83 names. A reminder: to make it into the Autosport list, you have to have been named in the all-time top 10 of a fellow Grand Prix driver.
Andrea de Cesaris, 208 starts and 0 wins, is equal 76th with one vote, and I should remind you at this stage that Andrea did take part in the poll. The Japanese vote boosts Kazuki Nakajima in with Andrea – you might well ask if Kaz and his father Satoru were polled, and I might well say that yes, they were.
That same Japanese vote has Aguri Suzuki (a single podium, 8 career points) in 63rd position, directly behind Denny Hulme (1967 world champion) but some 8 places adrift of Henri Pescarolo (a single podium, 12 career points). Pescarolo also ranks ahead of 59th place man Felipe Massa (11 wins, 28 podiums, 1 point away from the 2008 world title), and who in the blue hell voted for Pedro Lamy?
The conclusion? Grand Prix drivers take these things about as seriously as you should.
