Sebastien Loeb
(15 November 2011)
The World Rally Championship has issued a press release claiming that Sebastien Loeb has become "the most successful man in motorsport history" after securing his eighth WRC title. It's tempting to be slightly churlish about this, and point out that other people have gained a greater number of seasonal motorsport honours, but at this level it is, to say the least, unusual.
Until Loeb won the 2011 WRC last weekend - in the unfortunate circumstance of his main rival, Ford driver Mikko Hirvonen, crashing out of the Wales Rally GB - he was one of several seven-time champions. Michael Schumacher, in F1, is another. So is MotoGP rider Valentino Rossi. And in NASCAR, both Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt won seven titles, which I do not consider a lesser achievement merely because NASCAR drivers compete on only one content and specialise in turning left.
Similarly, I am lost in admiration for Tony Schumacher, seven times the NHRA Top Fuel dragster champion, even though he competes on only one content and specialises in not turning at all.
There are some great achievements in that list, but what distinguishes Loeb from all the others named is not only that he has won more often than the others; he also did it in consecutive years. Nobody else achieved seven in a row. Loeb beat it. History will record that, from the end of the 2004 season until, at the very earliest, some time in 2012, there was no such person as a World Rally Champion who was not Sebastien Loeb.
Furthermore, we might now be talking of him as a nine-time champion, and it's not his fault that we're not. He could have been champion in 2003, but events in that year's Wales Rally GB confirmed that his employer, Citroen, would secure the manufacturers' title as long as Loeb remained in second place and stopped trying to beat Subaru's Petter Solberg.
If he did beat Solberg, he would be champion driver, but if he crashed out trying Citroen would not be championship manufacturer. So, in an unusual display of team orders, Loeb was told to ease off. And that is why Citroen won the 2003 manufacturers' crown, a statistic about which you probably knew nothing and almost certainly cared less.
I expect somebody will shortly express the opinion, if they haven't already, that Loeb's achievement will never be beaten, and that he will be forever known as the greatest rally driver of all time. I'm not so sure about this. It can't be too controversial to suggest that he has been the greatest of the first decade of the 21st century, but conditions change.
Assuming that Loeb doesn't keep winning until he retires at the age of 104, somebody else may surpass his achievement - possibly his younger team-mate Sebastien Ogier, who is very, very good. Ogier might win the next ten titles. Or maybe Kris Meeke, currently driving for MINI, will snap up the next dozen. It's not very likely, but it's possible.
This sort of thing has happened before. There was quite a lot of fuss when Michael Schumacher equalled Juan Manuel Fangio's run of five F1 World Championships. Fangio had held the record on his own for 45 years, and during that period nobody else claimed more than three titles. There must have been times when people thought that Fangio had set the bar at an impossibly high level.
Actually, Fangio's achievement, like Loeb's, isn't as good as it might have been. He was World Champion in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1957. For most of 1952 and 1953 he was out with a broken neck (sustained when he crashed heavily at Monza, which he reached only just in time for the race after a mad dash from - yes, really - Northern Ireland).
So Fangio might have played seven, won seven within the first eight years of the Championship's existence. That still wouldn't have matched Loeb's run, but it would have put Schumacher's seven victories from eleven attempts in the "must try harder" category. Except that during the lean years Schumacher was playing his part in promoting Ferrari from Second Spear Carrier to Hamlet when he might well have been racking up titles annually with another team.
Complicated, isn't it? And there's someone I haven't mentioned yet. I've been saving him up. It's John Force, who, like Tony Schumacher, is a drag racer, except that Force competes in those freakish saloon-lookalike Funny Cars, which are as staggeringly powerful as the Top Fuelers but much shorter and correspondingly less stable.
Well, Force (pictured) has been NHRA Funny Car champion no fewer than fifteen times since 1970 as a driver, and seventeen if you count his status as team owner for other drivers. He gained his most recent title in 2010, immediately after a disastrous 2009 season in which he failed to win a single race. What a comeback. What a driver.
And don't tell me that Force and T Schumacher don't count because they're not required to drive round corners. Tennis champions aren't required to skate, but that doesn't make them inferior to ice hockey players.
All of the above makes me wary of describing Loeb as "the most successful man in motorsport history". But a great competitor, a phenomenal driver, a master of his craft? Oh yes. And then some.
