1,000 Greatest Drivers: Edoardo Mortara
The less lucky version of Pascal Wehrlein.
I wasn’t able to come up with a significant driver in racing history who was born on October 29 (the three best are probably Chris Buescher, Aurélien Panis, and Harry Tincknell; while there’s a chance I might include any of those guys near the very bottom of my list, they’re hardly locks by any means). The only significant driver who died on October 29 was Louis Rosier, who I already covered, so it took me a while to fill this slot. I decided to plug Edoardo Mortara in here because he was one of the best current drivers I couldn’t find room for elsewhere as there are two other drivers born on January 12 (Emanuele Pirro and Lloyd Ruby) who I think were better than him. Thanks to Mortara beating ex-FE champion Nyck de Vries 7-1 this year, he was the highest-rated FE driver in my model. While I think I should always include the highest-rated drivers in each major league on my top 200 list, I can’t rate him too high since he only finished 16th in points, de Vries actually had a higher speed percentile, and I suspect de Vries isn’t as good as he was as he is probably somewhat demoralized after his F1 failure.
I’m sort of repeating myself here as he has had a very similar career to Pascal Wehrlein (who I recently covered) in that they were both major stars in both Formula E and DTM. Even though Wehrlein won both titles and Mortara won neither, they’re pretty interchangeable in my book and Wehrlein was just luckier (he needed a lot of luck to win this year’s Formula E title, that’s for sure). Together, they are two of the five drivers who are rated above .2 in both my open wheel and touring car models. The others are F1/BTCC champion Jim Clark, and (much more bafflingly) Peter Dumbreck and Timo Glock. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to list those other guys or not and they’re both on the bubble, but I think Glock is leaning yes and Dumbreck is leaning no.
If you’re wondering why Mortara has a teammate record with a half race, there was a DTM non-points event I counted at the Munich Olympic Stadium in 2012 that had knockout eliminations. Mortara and his teammate Filipe Albuquerque were eliminated in the same round, so they were both listed as tied for 9th.
