Very interesting discussion at the Senna thread. With apologies for being a bit off-topic for 951/951S owners, here's a more difficult topic. Even the least talented driver to win a modern era F1 title was no putz, since he had to score more points than many other talented drivers to win his title.

No doubt the likes of Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve and maybe even the sainted Sir Jack Brabham are bit below the level of Senna, Rosberg, Schumi, Clark, Stewart and Company....but let's consider the reverse question.

Who was the most talented road course driver NEVER to win an F1 championship?

I'll start the fire, how about Dan Gurney? He won LeMans sharing a ride with the king of the good old boys, AJ Foyt, was the last guy to win an F1 race in a Porsche made chassis, won an F1 race in a car of his own manufacture, even won the 24 Hours of Daytona with a lead so big he was able to creep over the line on his starter motor! Had Gurney been in the right camp at the right time he could surely have been champion.

Others?

 

Alesi

 

Sorry, I couldnt get past you mentioning Villeneuve in the same sentance as Hill and Brabham.

 

Bellof

 

Sorry if I offended concerning Villeneuve. He's clearly not a BAD driver But in this day and age, F1 is so much more about the cars and the teams than the driver that it's hard to tell how much raw talent sits behind the wheel. In that context, Jacques' inability to bring BAR to the front was more telling to me than his championship was in a superior car.

Brabham's talent was as much as an engineer, IMO. We'll never know about Damon Hill as he made so much money so fast he didn't really compete for very long.

 

Pedro Rodriguez, his untimely death put a stop a great career in auto racing. hi was a well rounded driver.

also Jacky Ickx comes to mind

Regads,
AL

 

- come again ?

He was brilliant at breaking his drives, that's it.

 

Sterling Moss. Won 194 of 497 F1 races, but no championship.

 

+1 on Rodriquez and Ickx. Their best drives were in FIA sports car races, Ickx at numerous LeMans races and Rodriquez in 6 hour and 1000K events in the early 1970s. Rodriquez was brave and bold in a era where the cars and the tracks offered little protection from disaster, perhaps the reason he didn't grow old.

Beginning in mid to late 1970s...Alan Jones, Rosberg, Alesi, Prost and the like were more jockeys than journeymen and were expected to risk their hides much less than the generation before. I am fortunate the have spent some time with Michael Keyser, photographer, author and producer of the Speed Merchants. In addition to winning numerous endurance races including an overall win at Sebring, Mike was on the European racing scene at the peak of the danger. I am the proud owner of a print or two of Mike's work including a haunting picture at a Watkins Glen F1 driver's meeting. The number of men in the picture who ended up dead or maimed was stunning. Siffert, Revson, Cevert, Donahue, Lauda, McLaren...too many to mention.

Good is good. Fast is fast. Dangerous is still dangerous simply because of the physics of it all compared to the frail human condition, but clearly today's stars have a much better chance of survival to a happy retirement than did the stars of earlier eras.

PS I also have two great pictures of racing Porsches that Mike took. One at Targa Florio with the John Wyer managed Porsche team of 908/3 circled in a little villa courtyard and the famous #23 red and white striped 917 in the pits during the 1970 LeMans race.

 

Great call on Moss, too. Best sedan/saloon driver ever.

 

Clay Regazzoni the Swiss Italian.

Ran 8 of 13 races and still finished 3rd in the points behind his two Ferrari team mates.

Paralyzed in 1980 at the US Grand Prix in Long Beach when his brakes failed.

 

Alesi...........LOL

 

Agreed, it has to be Stirling Moss. Ask his contemporaries, they would agree.

 

Rosberg should never be mentioned with elite drivers, just check with how many wins he clinched in his WC year.

Ickx is a great driver but not a great F1 driver, he was unable to catch a dead man in 1970 despite having a very competitive Ferrari.

GV was good but reck/brainless most of the time.

Reuteman had the mentality of a backstabbing girl.

Chris Amon invented and had the monopoly on bad luck.

DC despite having top drives for most of his career could never back up his predictions of "this is my year"

 

Good call on Moss, But ickx and Bellof are runner up .. Especially Bellof who died at a early age at Spa-Francorchamps

Not F1 ...
Bellof crash

Die grünne hölle in 6:11

copy/paste from Nigel Roebucks colum in "Ask Nigel" @ www.autosport.com

Dear Nigel,

What do you think of Stefan Bellof? I have very limited memories of him, but, it seems to me that in that soaking Monaco GP he was actually faster than Ayrton Senna? Was that true? Was he that good?

Sinisa Tkalcevic

Dear Sinisa,

Long ago, when I was asked to write a story about the great lost talents of motor racing - in terms of drivers who had died before achieving what they should have done - I put Stefan Bellof at the top of the list.

Bellof was a delightful fellow, and a great character. Nothing fazed him. In the appalling traffic on the way into the Dijon circuit, for the 1984 French Grand Prix, he - like everyone else - got badly delayed, but where the rest of us just sat there and swore, Stefan simply drove his Porsche 911 through a farm gate, and proceeded to the circuit across ploughed fields!

For ever after, it became his practice to arrive at a track very early in the morning, then sit down to breakfast with the Tyrrell mechanics. Gilles Villeneuve was very similar in that respect; it was not by chance that both men were so loved by their teams.

Martin Brundle, Bellof's Tyrrell team mate, once described him as 'the fastest driver since Villeneuve', which was a hell of a compliment, honestly paid. In a racing car, Stefan was very much of that school, incredibly fast, with freakish reactions. Like Gilles, too, he was also apparently without a sense of fear.

People have speculated endlessly about how the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix would have finished, had not it been stopped before half-distance. Would Bellof have won? Yes, quite possibly - so long, that is, as he managed to keep it on the road for the duration, and the same went for Ayrton Senna. As it was, the race, in truly dreadful conditions, was stopped after 31 of the scheduled 78 laps.

At that point, Senna's Toleman was on the point of passing Alain Prost's McLaren for the lead, and Bellof was running third, 13 seconds behind. Significantly, though, when the rain became really atrocious, Bellof was catching Senna at a greater rate than Senna was catching Prost.

There were 27 drivers at Monaco that year, attempting to qualify for 20 positions on the grid, and Bellof was the last man to get in. At that time, Tyrrell continued to run the venerable Cosworth DFV V8 engine, whereas every other team had turbo motors.

While it may said that, at Monaco, the throttle response of a normally-aspirated was preferable to that of a turbo, still the fact remains that the Cosworth was massively out-powered - and at Monte Carlo, with its multitude of short squirts between corners, that was a significant disadvantage, even in the wet.

Of course we'll never know whether Stefan would have beaten Ayrton that day, had the race run its full distance. With 47 laps to go, it's quite possible that he would have caught him, but getting by might have been a rather different matter - particularly when Senna was heading for what have been his first Grand Prix victory...

Would Bellof have been Germany's World Champion? Without any doubt, he had the ability, and, although this has never been officially confirmed by Ferrari, there is little doubt that he would have partnered Michele Alboreto in the team in 1986. His death, in the 1985 Spa 1000 kms, was a dreadful loss to the sport, and even more of one to those who knew him.



Another nice clip , here Derek bell is taking us around the ring .. Watch Ickx fly by
Porsche 956 Nurburgring