1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jochen Mass

His one F1 win pales in comparison to his 83-win sports car/touring car career.

Unlike Oliver Gavin yesterday, it’s a little easier to evaluate sports car drivers from Mass’s era because he competed in F1 and sports cars simultaneously and he tended to compete in numerous sports car and/or touring car series at the same time for many different manufacturers and with many different combinations of teammates. For example, in his 12 different Le Mans starts, he had 15 different teammates so it’s a lot easier to ascribe most of his sports car success to him since he also often won in single-driver series like DARM, DRM, and Interserie and he continued to win for numerous different combinations of teammates and teams. As a result, I can largely just look at his win counts in sports cars, his F1 and touring car teammate comparisons to do single-season ratings that seem a lot more accurate. I couldn’t really do that for Gavin or most of the exclusively sports car specialists of that era, so I think it’s going to be easier for me to sort through the sports car drivers from the ‘50s to the ‘80s than it will be for the drivers of the 2000s and 2010s actually. And no, I could not resist the pun on Carlos Pace’s name.