Once upon a time, sportscar racing was an old man’s game – one where a driver’s ability to nurse a car home was as important as outright speed. But with time and technology, all that has changed.
The advent of carbon brakes removed the need for a soft application of the middle pedal, paddle-shifting has reduced concerns of damaged gearboxes and engine overrevs, modern clutches can withstand 30 hours or more of extreme punishment, tires can take triple and quadruple stinting without surrendering their effectiveness, engines are no longer a sources of unreliability, and endurance drivers have worked themselves into a collective state of fitness that exceeds any other form of the sport.
And with the concerns of mechanical failure all but forgotten, endurance racing has become less about enduring and more about sprinting to the finish line
That’s not to say modern endurance racing drivers can get away with being mechanically unsympathetic to their cars, but now more than ever, they’re able to push their cars at qualifying speeds for stint after stint, if not an entire 10, 12 or 24 hour race.
This new dynamic – one where mercurial speeds can be tolerated for hours on end – has changed how teams recruit or retain their driving talent. Drivers once hailed for being “Safe and Steady” have been replaced by a newer guard of pilots deemed “Blindingly Fast and Steady.”
An influx of single-seater drivers into the ALMS and LMS raised the stakes for the quality and caliber of drivers, and the prototype and GT ranks have never been the same. F1 and IndyCar drivers moving over to pilot sportscars is a familiar happening, but those career changes usually came when a driver was in his mid-30s, if not edging closer to 40.
But that too has changed. Top single-seater drivers are finding their way into sportscars in their 20s, and bring the pace and hunger that comes with youth. Le Mans will see a number of sportscar veterans this year – men in their late 30s – who’ve made a living in the category for many year, but like the young stars they’ll race, those older drivers also came into sportscars directly from F3, F3000, F1 and IndyCars in their 20s.
It has built a strong driving corps that drive from a place of intense motivation – the same place that fuelled their years in single-seaters, and fans have been enjoying the fierce battles seen at Le Mans, Sebring and Petit Le Mans ever since.
Which got me to thinking: if sportscar racing has become a nearly unbridled contest of speed, what would be the ultimate pairing of brutally fast teammates? It’s a question many were happy to answer and yielded a number of surprise nominees.
But determining the criteria on how to determine the “Two Fastest” wasn’t easy. Sportscar racing is different from other forms of motorsport that are singular exercises – one car, one driver.
It’s easy to pick the fastest F1 drivers – look at pole positions, fastest laps, race performances, and if necessary, handicap the list a bit by taking impressive speeds from a driver in a mid-field car into account.
But sportscar racing isn’t a “man against man” competition. Singling out the fastest from a squad of drivers in the same car make using poles, fastest laps and the normal data one would draw from somewhat hard to work with.
The fact that drivers often race at different times of the day in the same event, will experience weather changes between driving shifts, and face changing track surfaces from one stint to the next makes quantifying relative performances incredibly hard.
Add in the fact that drivers usually alternate qualifying duties and different tire compounds will be used throughout a race and finding a formula to normalize data becomes a challenge. Simply put, it’s tough to compare who’s fastest in equal equipment because a car is rarely equal for its drivers in an endurance race.
So I asked our panelists to use the criteria that the top sportscar teams use when selecting a driver:
Can the driver run at a qualifying pace throughout a complete stint?
Can the driver run at that breakneck speed with a minimum of errors?
Can the driver avoid abusing the car while racing at maximum speed?
Can the driver maintain his ultimate pace in adverse conditions?
In the interest of non-partisan voting, I asked drivers and team members to make their picks from outside their own programs. It was hard for some to not choose their teammate or another driver from within their manufacturer’s fold, but everyone stuck to our rules and delivered sharp and insightful reasoning on how and why they made their picks.
As you’ll see, many of the credible drivers chosen by our panel were tied with an equal number of votes. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how those that are tied should rank amongst their rivals.
