1,000 Greatest Drivers: Yvan Muller

Did you know there was an ice racing championship before today?

I’m covering another birthday boy today. After Carl Edwards’s 45th birthday yesterday, today is the 55th birthday of Yvan Muller, another French touring car driver with a goat case like Laurent Aïello last week. I personally rate Aïello higher because his teammate record doesn’t even seem real while Muller did not dominate his teammates to the same extent. Aïello led my model globally in both 1994 and 1997 and ranked in the top five seven times, while Muller for all his greatness shockingly never made the overall top five once. If you want to argue Muller was better because he had more titles and his career was much longer, I don’t think I could really argue with you. That even ignores his Andros Trophy dominance. Although Jean-Philippe Dayraut eventually overtook Muller in wins in that series, no one will ever break his record in championships now that the series has been shut down due to climate change. I couldn’t even find room to talk about his 2000 Nations Cup win at the Race of Champions or the fact that he made some World Rally Championship starts (since he didn’t win any of them, I didn’t really feel the need to talk about that.