Who’s Your Favorite Underrated Racing Driver?

Not because I am an Aussie, but it has to be currently Daniel Ricciardo and before him Mark Webber!!

So many names to remember:
From the fifties: castelloti and dePortago
From the sixties: scarfiotti and chris amon
From the seventies: regazonni and Pinto (rallies)
From the eighties: bellof and bettega(rallies)
From the nighties: alesi and pedro lamy
From the 2000: serrazin and nick heidfeld
Current: romain dumas and alvaro parente

David Donohue

I’m going to say Ronnie Peterson.

Takuma Sato

Someone mentioned Carlos Pace, what about his teammate in Brabham, Carlos Reutemann, fast on F1 cars, but also, on Prototypes and even rally cars (3rd place overall in argentinean International rally as a guest driver with a peugeot 205 T16 the first time he drove one), and also gerhard berger…

Jose Carlos Pace, a talented, young, and very promissing driver who died on a plane crash before he could fight for the F1 championship. That would be inevitable, just like Bellof. Nowadays, the Interlagos circuit is officialy called “José Carlos Pace Circuit”.

there is clearly a semantic issue with the question; none of the drivers named below are unknown and the fact that many careers have been cut short (often tragically), does not make the drivers underrated.

an underrated driver to me is somebody like moss (due to his success in so many different categories) or prost (eight times in a position to win the F1 championship)

Leo Kinnunen – won the world championship with Porsche 917 – set the lap record in Targa Florio – won the Interserie three times in a row – rallied everything from Porsche to Volvo 66 – briefly tried F1 too with his own team

Patrick Depailler was a shy, diminutive, chain-smoking Frenchman who carried a BIG stick in Formula 1 in the 1970’s. He drove with an almost fearless confidence and style and would probably have been a Word Champion in the right car. He was very much like Gilles Villeneuve and Stefan Bellof……..it is unfortunate that he met with the same fate.

Bellof’s name is there not to be forgotten. Very good. I grew up with stories about a Dutch racing driver: Carel Godin de Beaufort. He passed away 14 years before my birth, at the Nurburgring. And with the help of some friends we set up a website about 12 years ago to pay tribute to this man. http://www.carelgodindebeaufort.com and it’s amazing how much response we got during those years. My garage is turning into some kind of mini-museum and I still love to hear each and every story about Carel and to share these with others.

I remember my dad and his close friend watching F1 races back in the 70s. Both hailing from Argentina they used to cheer for Carlos Reutemann, who is the first driver I can recall from my childhood. Here’s what Wikipedia has on him:

As a racing driver, Reutemann was among Formula One’s leading protagonists between 1972 and 1982. He scored 12 Grand Prix wins and six pole positions. In 1981 he finished second in the World Drivers’ Championship by one point, having been overtaken in the last race of the season. He became the second Formula One driver after Leo Kinnunen to be at the podium of a World Rally Championship event, when he finished third in the 1980 and 1985 editions of Rally Argentina. He was also for three decades the only Formula One driver to score drivers’ championship points in both F1 and WRC, until Kimi Räikkönen’s eighth place at the 2010 Jordan Rally.

I was not at the track, but was watching a live presentation on cable. Back then, there was not much coverage of motorsport like this in the U.S., especially from Europe. Group C, however, was thankfully and incredulously shown briefly to the very few die-hard fans who followed. I was certainly in the minority of my peers, and would follow each race, imagining myself in one of those racing cars.

After Bellof and Ickx collided, Ickx’s car came to rest facing Bellof’s car, which ignited. Ickx’s car was the factory car (I think Bellof was actually in a private entry, but I can’t remember), and carried a camera for the feed. The camera kept rolling while Bellof’s car went into flames. It was horrifying and surreal, to say the least. I grew up around motorsports, but I clearly remember bringing my mother into the room and explaining what had just happened and how horrible it was, especially to be televised. Yes, impossible to forget.

A few years earlier, at age 11, I had seen just Ickx shoot the earlier 936 around Laguna Seca at the Monterey Hitorics during a year for the Porsche marque. I think this was 1982.

Seeing any driver or personnel in an accident is never a good experience. More recently we have lost brilliant drivers like Earnhardt, Wheldon, Wilson, and more.

I’m glad you have chosen to show Stefan Bellof. I have always told my young son about him, as he was one of the true racers.