1,000 Greatest Drivers: Louis Wagner

The accomplishments of early 20th century drivers seem superhuman sometimes.

A lot of times I have more fun writing about these ancient drivers than the more recent ones. The late 1800s and early 1900s seemed to be notable for spawning an insatiable supply of Renaissance men with a staggering array of seemingly unrelated accomplishments. Take Wagner for example. Soccer champion, test pilot, war hero. It’s almost beyond belief for one person to achieve all this in this much more specialized era. To be sure, as a driver, he faced a lot less competition than any of the post-World War II drivers did, which is why I award fewer points to the post-World War II drivers’ seasons, but since I rated him #1 for 1906 and #2 for 1908, he still easily attains lock status.

I went to the Neurodivergent Support Group on Wednesday, but I was a little disappointed. I was looking for a group therapy type of social group to have some people to vent to so I would stop doing it either here or worse with a chatbot, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. It was more of a lecture where we listened to a YouTube video on the “fork” and “spoon” theories of a disabled person’s energy levels. I didn’t really relate to that, as I know almost all times I’m lacking energy are as a result of poor nutrition, which is certainly indirectly related to my autism since that can be a trigger for ARFID. But mostly I found it a little silly, and I could just watch a YouTube video at home. When I’m actually going out, I want to socialize, not just listen to a YouTube video. I was finally able to get a word in edgewise about this in the final ten minutes, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I’m still planning on going in future months though.

I’m actually a little cold on the IndyCar Arlington race. It seems like a lot of the acquaintances in my online racing circles are excited about this, but I’m annoyed by it almost as much as Thermal Club and the Trump GP much to my surprise and I can’t say I really get the hype. I think it’s because it feels like the series is rubbing it in our faces that they aren’t racing at Texas Motor Speedway anymore. This isn’t an opinion I expected to have since I was never a big fan of Texas as a track nor its President Eddie Gossage, but there’s no getting around the fact that it had become a traditional venue, that it was the second-most prestigious IRL race after the Indy 500, and that there were a bunch of classic IndyCar races there (even if I tended to like the Chicagoland, Michigan, and Fontana CART or IRL races more) while there were exactly zero classic NASCAR races at Texas, yet the Cup Series is still racing there and IndyCar is not and that feels wrong. And returning to a street circuit in the same market just rubs me the wrong way, especially since most of these races are fly-by-night operations that last three years at most before disappearing. Another thing is the fact that while street courses are frequently boring, I get the idea of bringing the racing to the fans and racing in front of glamorous backdrops of iconic city skylines. The problem here is that Arlington is just a suburban outpost of Dallas with no real history and iconic status of its own. If you’re going to race on city streets in a glamorous locale, shouldn’t it at least be a city I’ve heard of? I had never heard of Arlington, Texas until this race was announced although it’s apparently 2.5X bigger than Syracuse. I know there are all these tertiary cities in California and Texas that are really huge that have no cultural cachet whatsoever. It would be like racing in Rancho Cucamonga, California or Overland Park, Kansas if you know what I mean. These sorts of suburbs are really just industrial parks and have nothing in the way of glamour whatsoever. (I had also never heard of Markham, Ontario until that race was announced and at least I knew where every city that had a street race was in the past.) Actually, come to think of it, I think I had heard of the UT-Arlington college, so I guess I had heard of it, but still… I suppose that’s what the race in Long Beach was and that worked. But it’s like the series was just fixing to leave TMS for years and just waited until Gossage’s death to leave IMMEDIATELY, and that really bothers me. I get that the drivers didn’t really want to race on intermediate ovals anymore after Dan Wheldon’s death at Las Vegas, but I’m honestly not entirely convinced they were less safe. Dario Franchitti had his career-ending crash on a street course, after all… It’s interesting that Marcus Ericsson won his first pole of any kind since 2013 there yesterday (I was pretty sure he’d never win a pole in his IndyCar career), but who really cares when we all know Álex Palou is just going to jump him on the first pit cycle and lead the rest of the race if he doesn’t pass him on track?

I fell asleep immediately after the O’finity race (that’s what I’ve been jokingly calling it since “O’Reilly Auto Parts Series” is too long and unwieldy a title in my opinion, hearkening back to the Pep Boys Indy Racing League) and was hoping I could adjust my sleep schedule to something adult, but then I woke up only three hours later before it was even midnight and decided to finish this. I decided to sign up for a one-week free trial for Apple TV to watch today’s F1 race and last week’s before I probably unsubscribe for a bit since the two Middle Eastern April races were canceled due to the war in Iran. But at least I got this done first and while I didn’t quite finish this by March 14, I’m going to have another one later and it will also be free because it’s Tom Chilton, another deserving driver who has next to no gravitas as opposed to Wagner, who does have gravitas or would if anyone still remembered him… I didn’t even really have room to discuss Wagner’s aeronautics career or his Indy or Le Mans attempts…

LOUIS WAGNER…………………FRANCE

Born: February 5, 1882
Died: March 13, 1960

Best year: 1906
Best drive: 1906 Vanderbilt Cup at Nassau County, NY

Although Wagner was one of the first drivers to remain continuously relevant over a quarter century, he only earned three major wins. However, those victories all came in historically important races including the first ever United States and British Grands Prix. In 1899, he became an engineer and test driver for Darracq, the third French car manufacturer after Renault and Peugeot, while simultaneously playing for the AC Milan soccer team that won the 1901 Italian Football Championship. He began racing in 1903, earning voiturette wins that year and in 1905.

Wagner scored his biggest win in the third Vanderbilt Cup in 1906, then the United States’s biggest race, and that year’s running was the first major race to utilize a checkered flag. Possibly the most dangerous race ever held, the 29.7-mile Long Island proto-street circuit had extremely lax security as pedestrians strolled about the circuit all race while drivers had to dodge them under wet conditions. Wagner led from start-to-finish, but that was overshadowed by driver Elliott Shepard killing pedestrian Curt Gruner, which led to the 1907 race being cancelled.

Wagner left Darracq after the 1907 Targa Florio when Alexandre Darracq falsely accused him of wrecking the car after a mechanical breakdown. He next drove for Fiat, winning the inaugural American Grand Prize (now USGP) in 1908 at Savannah, Georgia by 56 seconds over onetime Darracq teammate Victor Hémery. He won sparingly after that, but set a record for French Grand Prix starts, finishing second three times in 1912, 1914, and 1925. In 1914, he drove for Mercedes only six days after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Although Wagner earned a Légion d’Honneur for serving in the French artillery, the government held off until 1955 because he had raced a German car. He also finished second in the 1924 Italian Grand Prix and 1925 Targa Florio, where he sacrificed the win to take Christian Dauvergne to the hospital after a fiery crash. Wagner’s final major win came at the 1926 British Grand Prix, where he relief-drove the final quarter of the race for Robert Sénéchal although both received full credit. Despite severe burns to his feet, he periodically rested them in a bucket of cold water and still won. After his retirement, he lost his left leg in 1944 due to tuberculosis but still managed the Linas-Montlhéry test track after World War II.

Although Wagner might not have won often, he made his few wins count as one of only four drivers to win the first running of multiple current Formula One Grands Prix. However, his Vanderbilt Cup win impresses me most because he led flag-to-flag amidst some of the most treacherous conditions ever faced. He was also very much a renaissance man as a soccer champion, test pilot, and war hero. Even when he wasn’t winning, he remained relevant as almost none of his peers had 20 years before their first and last wins. While I think Hémery was the best driver of the 1900s, Wagner certainly wasn’t far behind.

Year-by-year: 1905: C+, 1906: 1, 1907: C+, 1908: 2, 1910: C+, 1912: C+, 1914: C+, 1924: C+, 1925: E, 1926: E-