1,000 Greatest Drivers: Christophe Bouchut

Capable of winning any sports car race any time with any co-driver.

Here we have another sports car driver who is far more obscure than it seems like he should be, much like his contemporary Dominique Dupuy, who I previously wrote about. Bouchut started out as Dominique Dupuy’s chief rival in the Porsche Carrera Cup France and those two drivers dominated the ‘90s before they became prolific sports car winners elsewhere. The difference is Bouchut was a lot better than Dupuy. Not only did he manage to win seven championships outside of the Carrera Cup while Dupuy won none, Bouchut kept winning titles over and over again with a different teammate each year, clearly indicating he was doing everything himself. By contrast, a lot of Dupuy’s greatest accomplishments (especially his 1999 season where he and his Viper teammates scored class wins at the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, and 24 Hours of Le Mans in the same year) were as part of a single powerhouse team that kept winning repeatedly, and I think Olivier Beretta was the leader of that team. Yet it seems despite his 12 titles and estimated 105 wins (I haven’t verified that number, and I’m still missing some series like French GT on my master driver list) that he doesn’t have the legacy he should have. This is another guy who seriously has fewer Twitter followers than both of my accounts, but I suppose one of the cool things about sports car racing is since the cars are the stars and there are very few sports car racing fans who aren’t racing diehards to begin with that it’s almost impossible to have any kind of cult fan base or stan army, with a few rare exceptions (Jordan Taylor, Connor Zilisch, Doriane Pin). It’s far easier to fade into the background in sports car racing, but that also explains why he and many other sports car stars don’t seem to have the reputation they deserve. He obviously belongs on this list even though I suspect other people might overlook him.