1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dominique Dupuy

He slithered out of France on the scales of a Viper.

Dupuy was somewhat frustrating to evaluate since while I know he is a legend, he primarily raced in Porsche Carrera Cup France (which never had reliable teammate data until the last couple years) and also Porsche Supercup in the ‘90s (while I have teammate data for that series for all seasons in the 2000s, I don’t have any for the two seasons in the ‘90s that he raced there). Furthermore, it can be difficult to determine which driver was doing most of the work for a factory sports car powerhouse, so determining how much credit to give Olivier Beretta vs. Dupuy vs. Karl Wendlinger for those wins is not necessarily easy, particularly since this is long enough ago in the past that there’s almost no chance in hell that I will ever be able to find lap times from those races to distinguish them. From what I have read, Beretta was generally regarded as the team leader (he apparently did the race-deciding final stint of their Daytona win while sick with chicken pox). Beretta had eight overall sports car championships and they were all international while Dupuy’s seven championships were all domestic. Wendlinger only had one major league sports car championship so while it seems like all these guys deserve to be locks, the correct ranking should be Beretta > Dupuy > Wendlinger I think. That’s why I decided not to give Dupuy any top five seasons even though his combination of the French GT title and the sports car triple crown in 2000 is absolutely amazing. I chose Beretta for my top five for that year instead since I feel his American Le Mans championship was more prestigious than Dupuy’s French GT championship that year, but if you want to argue that Dupuy was better, be my guest. They’re definitely both legends.