1,000 Greatest Drivers: Gary Paffett

4:40 and 41 years ago...

I think this is my favorite logo for a race team ever. Sure, you can argue it’s ugly as shit and graphic design is their passion (as it is mine), but I find it endearingly dorky how they managed to make a logo where you read it one way and you get Larry Hedrick’s initials LH, but you read it another way and it’s their car number 41. I have questions. Did they actually choose that particular car number just for this visual pun? It does give similar vibes to that arrow nobody notices between the E and the x in the FedEx logo. Too bad the logo was really the only thing memorable about this team. They had a couple decent seasons with Ricky Craven in 1996 and Steve Grissom in 1997, but that was about it.

Anyway, I’ve been planning to screenshot this graphic of this long-forgotten NASCAR team for months since today is my 41st birthday (I was born at 4:40 AM if you’re wondering what that was about…) So naturally, I selected probably the second-most prominent driver who was born on my birthday after Scott Pruett last year. Perhaps it is debatable; I imagine a lot of people in Europe consider Paffett more of an icon than Pruett, but I probably don’t. It is pretty unfair that he never got the opportunity to make a single F1 start considering he had one of the most prodigious open wheel feeder series drivers of his era, was a test driver for both McLaren and Williams for over a decade, and went on to become a two-time Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters champion, but I argue here that maybe this was still for the best for him.