1,000 Greatest Drivers: Giancarlo Fisichella

It's unfortunate his best years didn't coincide with the years he had winning cars.

I had Fisichella planned for March 6 because this is the date of his first Renault victory. He was actually born on my mom’s 25th birthday, which is kind of weird. I was also born on the 25th birthday of another 1,000 greatest drivers lock in Scott Pruett. I originally had selected 2004 as his best year when I was first planning this, but then I looked more deeply at it and I have no idea why I picked that year. If I’m not going to pick any of his sports car years as his best (which was definitely a possibility) then his best year is entirely obvious. I was going to mention that his win at the 2003 Brazilian GP for Jordan came for the team that finished ninth in the Constructor’s Championship, so I looked up to see when the last time a winning team finished that low in the championship prior to that. The answer is 1982, but that deserves a big asterisk because the Brabham-Ford team did win a race and finished 9th in the championship but Brabham-BMW was listed as a separate entrant and they also and won and finished 7th in the Constructor’s Championship. Obviously if you count all Brabham entries, they would not have finished 9th. I ended up excluding all of that from what I wrote but I figured I’d at least share the fruits of my research here. I mention that Fisichella is one of “only” 28 drivers with a rating over .1 in both my open wheel and touring car models. That might seem like a lot to you, but F1 drivers in Fisichella’s era rarely crossed over and raced anything else so he’s only one of 6 drivers on that list who actually won F1 races. he others are: Felipe Massa, Gerhard Berger, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, Jim Clark, and Rubens Barrichello. So that’s actually a pretty elite group and while I do have the vast majority of these 28 drivers as locks there are some who have no business making the list (Peter Dumbreck, Joel Eriksson, Liam Lawson (yet), Franck Perera) and other who feel to me like they’re on the bubble (Norberto Fontana, Felipe Giaffone, Timo Glock, Stefano Modena, Nelson Piquet, Jr.) so I would say Fisichella is indeed something of a standout within this group. I wanted to come up with some kind of “Air Jordan” pun but I couldn’t get it done before midnight and I wanted to send this off, so I wrote a more mundane subtitle.