1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jacky Ickx

He had arguably the best career among F1 drivers who never won the championship.

Now that I finished the three drivers who died in 2025, I’m going to progress through the remainder of the drivers I had regularly scheduled for this year as quickly as I can. I might not do one every day, but I’m going to try because I still want to see if I can finish this by 2028. I had Ickx scheduled for his birthday on January 1, because I was hoping I would be completely finished with my top 200 list by the end of 2025, but I ended up finishing my top 200 list later than I ever had before. The drivers I originally had scheduled for February 1-4 were the father-son pairs of Stock Car Brasil champions Paulo and Marcos Gomes, and Chico and Daniel Serra, but I don’t think I’m ready to do them yet, since it’s difficult to find information about individual races for those series (particularly to pick a best drive for any of them), so I’m going to put those off and start plugging in the drivers I had scheduled for January to try to catch up.

I didn’t end up releasing one on February 1 because my colleague Ryan McCafferty released his first short book, When Numbers Lie, and I wanted to read it and give him feedback on it, which did not leave me enough time to finish the February 1 post. I kind of do think Ickx impresses me overall more than any driver who competed in F1 and never won a title. I know there is great competition from other versatile cross-series drivers like Stirling Moss, Dan Gurney, and Juan Pablo Montoya, and I totally understand why someone would pick one of them instead. But Ickx was quite distinctive, as you could make the case he was the best sports car driver in history. No driver won more races in the World Sportscar Championship, and that series lasted for 40 years, and he was even crossing over and winning tons of races there while he was a full-time F1 driver. Not only that, he won five titles (more than any of those other guys did; two in Belgian touring cars, one in Can-Am, and two in the WSC, where he became the first two-time champion) and won arguably the most prestigious rally race (Dakar Rally) and the most prestigious touring car race (the Bathurst 1000) in one-offs. I suppose it was fitting I did him right after doing Allan Moffat, since Moffat co-drove his winning Bathurst 1000 entry.

Considering my new job and all the other things I’m trying to do at once, I decided to quit my RotoBaller job for 2026. The Substack is almost making half of what I was making at RotoBaller anyway, and I would rather focus my writing energies on this. I appreciate what they did for me after I’d been unemployed for an entire year, but now that I’m increasingly overemployed while also trying to visit Mom in the nursing home three times a week, I had to cut something loose.