1,000 Greatest Drivers: Geoff Brabham

Being the third-best Brabham still isn't bad.

Brabham is one of three sons of F1 champions that never competed in F1 who I considered worthy for the list. He is the best of the three as I do consider him a lock unlike the other two (Juan Manuel Fangio II and Tomas Scheckter), who I am likely to list (yes, I’m serious about Scheckter) but in both of those cases there is something in his career that makes me go “Yeah, but…” Brabham’s sheer level of dominance does take him into lock status for sure, but the more research I’ve done into his career, the less I’m impressed. He has an extremely bad rating in my open wheel model, which I guess shouldn’t be very surprising since he only led 51 laps in his IndyCar career and you can’t really say he was lacking equipment so much because Al Unser, Jr. and Michael Andretti both had dominant seasons for the teams he drove for in CART. Nonetheless, as with Scott Pruett, I guess his CART stint is almost a sidenote in his career and doesn’t matter because his most impressive stuff is the sports car stuff he did directly before it and after it in Can-Am and IMSA, although I’ve got to say that a four-time consecutive IMSA champion having no 24 Hours of Daytona is a mark against him when many people would consider that more important than the IMSA title and he also had a surprisingly low rating in his Australian touring car stuff. Geoff’s brother David was vastly higher in both my open wheel and touring car models and now I think he was clearly the best of the three brothers, but I’m not going to say Geoff didn’t do enough for lock status even though I find him a little overpraised. I came so close to picking his 1981 Can-Am title season for his best year especially because he won his only CART pole that year and finished 2nd in USAC IndyCar points, but I guess that wasn’t enough to rate it over a nine-win rookie IMSA season.