1,000 Greatest Drivers: Teo Fabi
A fitting driver for the month of March.
I’m turning on charges starting March 10 and it is now March 10, but unlike last year, I’m still going to have lot of free posts. As I’ve said multiple times, I’m going to charge for the household name drivers while making the more obscure drivers free. While the publication is unpaused and I could charge for this (I do consider Fabi a household name), I’m making this one free too since this is the post for March 9 and I was a little late with it, so I thought it would only be fair, but the next two (Rex Mays and Red Byron) will definitely be paywalled. I was going to do one on the very early pioneer Léon Théry from auto racing’s first decade on Sunday, but I decided I needed to work on my paid work after the NASCAR race was over. While I thought the IndyCar race was better (and I did not expect to), the NASCAR race was also better than I expected and that was an epic drive for Ryan Blaney. I’m not sure whether I’d call him the best NASCAR driver overall (though I did last year), but he has so much bad luck and it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone better at overcoming bad luck in NASCAR than him. Really, I think Christopher Bell would have won if the #20 team hadn’t given the race away with their 4-tire pit stop just as Denny Hamlin’s team infamously did in the previous Phoenix race. Bell (who had five on-track lead changes in the race) certainly would’ve been an equally deserving winner.
After I was reading up on the Iran situation, I was seriously thinking about buying a small amount of some penny oil stocks and I even signed up for E*TRADE last night, but the fact that I needed to wait for them to deposit money into my bank account ended up serving as a guardrail that means I might never do it. I visited Mom today and our room didn’t have any television, so I was not expecting when I came home that stock prices would be up today and oil prices would be down since the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly closed. Probably too unstable for me to get in on this, and I probably still need a little more stability with my regular bills before I even think of that, although that is happening as I finally set up my last payment arrangement for the last credit card in which I’m in default. It’ll probably be better for my credit rating to eventually find an apartment after I lose the house when Mom dies if I do payment arrangements instead of declaring bankruptcy again. Right? Right?
Finally, the contractor for the ramp has scheduled an appointment to come over tomorrow (well, technically today) at 11 am for me to sign the paperwork I need to sign to start work on this. Maybe it’s good that nothing happened until basically all the snow has melted. Next thing I need to do is donate the car that hasn’t been running for six years to somebody to clear some space to make the house more navigable, since obviously Mom will never be driving again. Really looking forward to the neurodivergent support group on Wednesday after missing it the last two months, but with all that going on, I’m going to cut this off right here for now.
Edit: Oh, yeah. I slightly adjusted some of Fabi’s season grades. I basically flip-flopped 1982 and 1989, downgrading the former from E- to C+ (despite his four sports car wins, the F1 season was too bad for E-) and elevating the latter from C+ to E- (because that’s a quite impressive season for a Porsche team that did basically nothing else (although it certainly would’ve done more if the CART owners hadn’t been so money-grubbin’ with their conflicts of interest and such).
TEO FABI……………………………ITALY
Born: March 9, 1955
Best year: 1983
Best drive: 1989 Red Roof Inns 200 at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course
Primarily known for a magical IndyCar rookie season that he never quite lived up to, Fabi had more longevity than is sometimes realized. Fabi earned an aeronautical engineering degree from the University of Milan while also competing in motorcycles and on the Italian National B ski team. Nearly all his early success came with the March chassis. In 1981, he raced one Can-Am season for Paul Newman, winning four of ten races, but lost the title to a more consistent Geoff Brabham. Nonetheless, he landed an F1 ride with Toleman in 1982. Their Hart engines were terminally slow and Fabi missed seven races, but he was very successful in the World Sportscar Championship. The Forsythe brothers hired Fabi for their CART team in 1983, where he became the only rookie Indy 500 polesitter between 1950 and 2025 and won five other poles and four of the last seven races to nearly make up a 70-point deficit to Al Unser, but lost by five points.
Fabi’s CART dominance caused F1 teams to take a second look. He signed with Brabham as defending champion Nelson Piquet’s teammate in 1984 while still competing in CART full-time with younger brother Corrado filling in when necessary, making him the last active F1 driver to start the Indy 500 until 2017. However, his CART results suffered and he committed to F1 fully in mid-season. After Brabham dropped him, Fabi took a six-month hiatus to operate his father’s talc mine after his death before reemerging with Toleman in 1985 shortly before Benetton bought the team. In his three Benetton seasons, his one-lap speed remained but his race pace was lacking as he won three poles yet never led a lap.
Fabi returned to CART in 1988 with Porsche’s factory team. After a rocky first season, Fabi was an outside championship contender in 1989 when Porsche adopted the March chassis, earning their only win at Mid-Ohio. However, his 1990 was disastrous as Porsche wanted to introduce an all-carbon fiber chassis, but CART banned it ostensibly for safety reasons, but really because the owners who controlled the series were afraid it might dominate. Porsche withdrew after that season, and Fabi switched to the World Sportscar Championship, winning the 1991 title in a Jaguar over teammate Derek Warwick solely because Warwick was ruled ineligible for points in their shared win at Silverstone. Fabi had three middling CART seasons from 1993-95 before Greg Moore replaced him.
Fabi’s career is defined by its unrealized potential, primarily because constantly switching series interrupted his momentum. If he’d never left CART or if Porsche’s chassis hadn’t been banned, he might’ve won a championship. Although the deviation between his one-lap pace and his race pace hurt him in F1, winning three poles to his teammates’ zero suggests he could’ve won under slightly different circumstances. His simultaneous F1/CART season was destined to fail, but it certainly demonstrated great ambition. Although his 1983 certainly towers over everything else, the rest of his career is better than people think.
Open wheel model: #445 of 931 (-.047)
Teammate head-to-heads: 13-13 (1-3 vs. John Andretti, 0-1 vs. Michael Andretti, 2-1 vs. Gerhard Berger, 2-1 vs. Thierry Boutsen, 0-1 vs. Mauricio Gugelmin, 0-2 vs. Nelson Piquet, 1-1 vs. Marc Surer, 2-2 vs. Mike Thackwell, 4-1 vs. Manfred Winkelock, 1-0 vs. Ricardo Zunino)
Year-by-year: 1980: C-, 1981: E, 1982: C+, 1983: E, 1984: C, 1985: C, 1986: C, 1987: C, 1988: C-, 1989: E-, 1991: E-, 1993: C-, 1994: C-, 1995: C-