1,000 Greatest Drivers: Louis Rosier

It's time for my first F1 driver, but I still want to go with someone less obvious.

For my driver capsules on racing weekends, I think I’m going to primarily go for drivers who peaked in the pre-World War II era because they tended to have shorter careers and in general much less was written about them than the post-war drivers. I don’t believe I will be able to get 500 words of material out of most of these drivers, and that is exactly the word limit I have set for myself for each driver capsule. If you count the words for my six previous entries (after the best year/best drive and before the statistics in my driver model), all those drivers’ profiles came out to 500 words precisely, but I don’t think I could get that many words out of a driver like Rosier, which makes this perfect for a race day. Unfortunately, most of what I learned about this era of Grand Prix racing was relatively recent so I still confuse Rosier with Louis Chiron all the time, who is also a lock, but I’ll get there eventually. The seasonal ratings are highly approximate at this point and I will likely adjust them significantly when I do more research into this era and properly figure out how to weight the championship and non-championship Grands Prix against each other.

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LOUIS ROSIER                     FRANCE

Born: November 5, 1905

Died: October 29, 1956

Best year: 1950

Best drive: 1950 24 Hours of Le Mans

Rosier had an unusually late start to his Grand Prix career. While most of his contemporaries were already stars before World War II and either returned to action or didn’t after the war, Rosier did not become a major star until the post-war epoch. While he technically never won an official Formula 1 race, that shouldn’t be held significantly against him since 35 of his 38 starts came for his own relatively underfunded Écurie Rosier team. Additionally, he was 44 years old at the time of the first F1 season in 1950, and he did finish fourth in the championship that year.

Furthermore, he won a total of eleven non-championship Grands Prix (three before the formation of F1 and eight afterward), making him arguably the most successful Grand Prix driver of his era to never win in F1. While the non-championship races did not have quite as strong competition as the World Championship races, many of them were still highly regarded at the time. These included wins in the 1949 Belgian Grand Prix and back-to-back wins in the Dutch Grand Prix in 1950 and 1951. Despite his lack of F1 wins, he won at least one non-championship race every year from 1947-1953 including two wins in each of the first four years after F1 started.

However, Rosier’s biggest accomplishment no doubt was his win in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1950, one of the greatest drives in motorsports history: he became the only driver in Le Mans history to win the great race solo, driving all 24 hours essentially by himself. The race officials discouraged this as co-drivers were required, but Rosier resolved this by having his son Jean-Louis drive for two laps before he took over the car again; Rosier drove all the other laps himself. That performance alone earned him a spot on this list, but his Grand Prix career wasn’t shabby either.

Although he has fallen into obscurity, even Rosier’s F1 career is rated highly by a lot of people: one statistical model ranked him 19th in F1 history. While I wouldn’t go that far, he’s still well above average in my own model, sitting directly between Juan Pablo Montoya and Paul Tracy, so obviously he deserves it.

Open wheel model: #163 of 909 (.136)

Teammate head-to-heads: 15-9 (1-1 vs. Eugene Chaboud, 2-0 vs. Louis Chiron, 0-2 vs. Jose Froilan Gonzalez, 2-1 vs. Yves Giraud-Cabantous, 3-1 vs. Henri Louveau, 1-0 vs. Guy Mairesse, 1-0 vs. Sergio Mantovani, 1-1 vs. Robert Manzon, 1-0 vs. Onofre Marimon, 1-0 vs. Stirling Moss, 0-2 vs. Andre Simon, 2-1 vs. Maurice Trintignant)

Year-by-year: 1947: C, 1948: C, 1949: C, 1950: 3, 1951: C+, 1952: C+, 1953: C+