1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dany Snobeck
The world's greatest driver without an English-language Wikipedia page.
Okay, I admit that was rather clickbaity as there are actually several other drivers who are either likely or certainly going to make my list who also don’t have Wikipedia pages in English. These include Olimpio Alencar, Jr. (the highest-rated Stock Car Brasil champion in my touring car model), Jean-Pierre Malcher (who actually has FOUR French Touring Car Championships to Snobeck’s three AND also is the only Porsche Supercup champion without a Wikipedia page), and Tyler Courtney (who won the most races combined in the three top tier USAC divisions four years in a row from 2017-2020). I might not list all of them, but as with Snobeck, there is certainly elements of greatness in all of their careers yet Wikipedia disagrees they are notable because they are not famous enough, even though they are certainly all more notable in my view than the likes of drivers like Taki Inoue, Dr. Jack Miller, and Mike Senica who do have pages just because they sucked in series that get a lot more English-language press. As we all know, fame is not necessarily a proxy for greatness and Wikipedia’s decision to define notability as fame rather than greatness is frustrating. Yes, Snobeck does have Wikipedia pages in other languages but I guess I’m going off here because out of all those drivers he might be the most underrated since I would say he was the most versatile of all of them, winning touring car championships, rally championships, and even championships on ice.
I didn’t really have room to mention it here, but the French Touring Car Championship which he won three times did actually have good competition, as most of the champions did have significant accomplishments elsewhere. I already mentioned Malcher’s Porsche Supercup title and Snobeck’s rally and ice titles, but it’s not just them. When looking at the other French Touring Car champions, they include F1 winner Jean-Pierre Beltoise, three-time Dakar Rally winner René Metge, Érik Comas (who was weirdly the highest-rated F1 driver in my open wheel model in 1992), fellow French Rally Champion Jean Ragnotti, and Jean-Louis Schlesser, who won two World Sportscar Championships and two Dakar Rallyes. These guys were good! Even before the series’s glory days in the ‘90s with Frank Biela and the already-covered Laurent Aïello and Yvan Muller, it wasn’t a field of hacks by any means (thereby explaining Snobeck’s extremely high touring car rating, which I actually don’t think is spurious), but because nobody has yet properly digitized the results of this series, all these drivers are regarded more lowly than they should be and Malcher and Snobeck end up not having Wikipedia pages. Bad record-keeping has likely diminished a lot of drivers’ legacies. Luckily, for Snobeck, I was able to find enough data to provide evidence for his greatness, but I definitely had to do a lot of diggin’.
