1,000 Greatest Drivers: Sam Bird
His career might have flown away, but it had a lot of substance.
After I got home from visiting Mom today, I went through all my remaining lock drivers who I hadn’t evaluated season-by-season yet. Having done that, I have 724 locks currently (although I imagine I could change my mind on some, especially with some of the grassroots drivers I put in there or a couple others like Felix Rosenqvist who I am not as impressed with as it seems like my numbers are) and 299 drivers in my bubble tier. After that, I still need to go through all the pending current drivers and score them. I have at least 85 more of those, but most of these guys will likely not make the list yet (a few of them like Jack Aitken and Ayhancan Güven probably should be on it already). Then, I have 478 drivers I have not evaluated left in my near miss category. Obviously, most of these names will fall short but I know there are definitely names in there I need to move up to the bubble like Dave Blaney, Jorge de Bagration (probably should be a lock), Jorge Recalde, Gus Schrader (probably should be a lock), Charlie Wiggins, etc… and I bet I’ll find 50 or more names to promote from there. After that, I should have this pretty nailed down and at least know what the contours for the bottom of the list will look like, and then I can work on deciding which of several hundred similarly placed drivers to go with. There are tons of names in this near miss tier that I’m looking at now and I can’t believe I had them there in the first place (particularly a lot of short-lived sports car drivers who I’m certain will fail to meet my ten-point threshold even for the near-miss tier), and I doubt there will be many drivers in the tiers below that I move up onto the list, but there might be at most a handful. I’ll also of course need to clean up my tiers that are overextended. I currently have 13,730 of my 19,555 single-season rating slots filled back to 1894, putting me just above 70% with the roughly 1,800 drivers I have gone through but there are also 789 “extra drivers” who I could not place in tiers for particular seasons because the tiers were already filled, so the remainder of this is going to be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t think I will fill all 19,555 of those slots, because I don’t think there are enough drivers to fill them prior to a certain point. I expect all my slots to be filled in every season starting around 1960, but I don’t want to bump up seasons that I don’t think deserve it just to include 25 E drivers every year, so I still have some blanks, while I need to get rid of a bunch of drivers I have rated for a number of 21st century seasons.
Even though I don’t watch it, I’ve always been a Formula E defender. Almost no open wheel series in history has ever had better competition (maybe late ‘70s/early ‘80s F1 comes close) and so many of the races are barnburners with nonstop lead changes, but the series also lacks that je ne sais quoi that causes people to take it seriously. I know the racing is better than IndyCar nearly all the time lately, and yet I don’t watch. The series has no compelling narratives or marketing, but the manufacturer interest is sky-high because a lot of manufacturers believe electric racing is the future of motorsport and electric cars are the future of cars. Because the manufacturers almost entirely fund the teams, there are essentially no ride-buyers so as a result the average field strength is pretty much always better than IndyCar (which typically has a couple awful drivers every year), even if you could justly call it a series of F1 castoffs. But it’s also easy to argue that part of the reason the field is so even (only one repeat champion in 11 seasons, and that’s even with the series’s all-time win leader Mitch Evans never winning a title, and 12-time winners Bird and Nick Cassidy not doing so either) is because all the drivers are very good and no one is great. I can see that argument. I happen to disagree with it since Formula E drivers typically compare favorably with IndyCar drivers in my model, but I’ll also admit there certainly isn’t a Max Verstappen or Álex Palou in there (even though Cassidy beat Palou for the Super Formula title when both of them were competing there). I decided to discuss my thoughts on the series in the Bird entry specifically because as the most career-compilery of Formula E’s big stars, he is probably the least interesting to talk about, so it’s a good opportunity to talk about the series as a whole, while whenever I get to one of the series’s true greats like Jean-Éric Vergne or something (Vergne’s two titles + 11 wins > Bird’s zero titles + 12 wins, especially since he’s still the only two-time champion), I will want to put more emphasis on his actual races and less on that stuff.
Maybe this is giving short shrift to Bird because I know he was one of the series’s most exciting drivers, with a lot of gallant passes for the win. But I haven’t gone through all the lead changes for a lot of those seasons yet, so it is what it is…
SAM BIRD………………………………UK
Born: January 9, 1987
Best year: 2015
Best drive: 2024 São Paulo ePrix
One of Formula E’s most consistent superstars, Bird tended not to receive a great deal of attention because he never won the championship, and the series itself won few casual fans because electric cars had minimal appeal to gearheads, it had few historic venues, its street races were unpopular with television viewers, and its embrace of NASCAR-esque gimmicks made it uncouth to open wheel purists. This means Formula E stars tend to be underrated relative to comparable but more famous Formula 1 or IndyCar drivers. Bird was never really the best Formula E driver, but he remained a constant presence as the only driver to win in its first seven seasons.
Bird never won an open wheel championship, but showed potential with a season-high five wins en route to finishing second in F1’s then-top feeder series GP2 in 2013. Nonetheless, F1 teams weren’t interested, but Formula E and sports car teams were. In 2014, Bird won class poles in his first two World Endurance Championship starts, then began competing in Formula E from the drop. Record mogul Richard Branson launched Virgin Racing and hired Bird, who won the series’s second race in Putrajaya, Malaysia, then inherited the 2014-15 season finale in London after Stéphane Sarrazin was penalized for using too much energy, becoming the first driver to win his home race.
Bird peaked in 2015 when he competed in Formula E while simultaneously winning the WEC LMP2 title with four class wins and eight podiums in nine starts in a G-Drive Racing Nissan, utterly dominating their team car, led by eventual superstar Pipo Derani. In 2016 and 2017, Bird won four Formula E races and four WEC class wins for AF Corse Ferrari, but he never won at Le Mans. In Formula E, he peaked with three wins in 2017 and a third-place points finish in 2018, but he subsequently fell off and switched to Jaguar for the 2020-2021 season. Although he unexpectedly won twice while his teammate, Mitch Evans (the then-highest-rated Formula E driver in my model), went winless, Evans then won eight races the next two seasons while Bird went winless. Bird next switched to McLaren for the 2023-2024 season and gave them their only win in São Paulo, getting the last laugh by passing Evans on the last lap. However, that would be his final win. After rookie Taylor Barnard dominated Bird the next season and McLaren withdrew, it seems unlikely Bird will race again unless he returns to sports cars.
Bird is tied for fifth with 12 Formula E wins and tied for second amongst non-champions with Nick Cassidy, although Evans, the all-time win leader with 16, still hasn’t won a title either, and both of them were much more dominant. Bird might’ve mostly been a career compiler, but from 2015-2017, he made himself into something more via his successful crossovers. Although he’ll probably never have the profile that his talent level deserves, he has had enough great seasons to merit a place on this list.
Open wheel model: #179 of 931 (.126)
Teammate head-to-heads: 109-98 (1-0 vs. Valtteri Bottas, 4-1 vs. Jaime Alguersuari, 2-10 vs. Taylor Barnard, 8-7 vs. Jules Bianchi, 14-3 vs. Tom Dillmann, 3-12 vs. Maro Engel, 7-8 vs. Marcus Ericsson, 9-15 vs. Mitch Evans, 7-8 vs. Robin Frijns, 1-0 vs. Brendon Hartley, 2-4 vs. Jake Hughes, 1-0 vs. Fabio Leimer, 2-4 vs. Jose Maria Lopez, 8-1 vs. Alex Lynn, 13-1 vs. Mario Moraes, 10-5 vs. Kazuya Oshima, 2-1 vs. Bruno Senna, 7-8 vs. Alexander Sims, 4-7 vs. Koudai Tsukakoshi, 4-3 vs. Jean-Eric Vergne)
Year-by-year: 2012: C-, 2013: C, 2014: C-, 2015: E, 2016: E-, 2017: E-, 2018: E-, 2019: C+, 2021: E-, 2024: C-