1,000 Greatest Drivers: José María López

Motorsports's answer to J. Lo.

It was either that or some George Lopez/”Low Rider” joke. That probably would have been cooler. Although López is still an active driver, I can be pretty safe in assuming I probably won’t need to rewrite this one since it feels like his relevance is over now that Toyota has relegated him to their mediocre Akkodis ASP LMGT3 team in WEC, which doesn’t look like it’ll win any time soon. I doubt he’ll ever have a top 200 season again at this point so this was a good day for a retrospective (in addition to being his birthday). What I find most interesting about López’s career is that he was actually a more dominant driver when competing at the international level in the World Touring Car Championship where he regularly dominated his legendary teammates Yvan Muller and Sébastien Loeb after being more debatably one of the top drivers in domestic Argentine touring car racing. You could argue he was the best, but I would say that within Argentina, both Agustín Canapino and Matías Rossi were better. Obviously, neither of them had the career diversity or the level of competition or the kind of career peak that López did, so I have to rank him as the best Argentine driver of this era. Even his open wheel career is better than you think, as he actually beat Sam Bird 4-1 in Formula E as a rookie, and Bird is still tied for the most wins in the series (although Bird did beat him in points that year). López definitely had one of the most eclectic careers of the 2010s, so it’s kind of surprising he fell off so much in recent years. Once again, I haven’t calculated WEC lap times/lead changes for all the seasons he competed there. When I do, I may adjust some of his seasons from 2017-2020 up or down slightly, but that will be for another day.