F1 Fanatic

I am a fan of the site F1 Rejects. Their profiles on obscure drivers and teams that just haven’t been up to scratch are often hilarious and make for good reading. I was on the site the other day, and while re-reading the “You lucky B**tard” article (about drivers who should have been on the site, but aren’t because of a flukey result) I got to thinking: “Who of the current drivers, qualifies for a profile on their site?”

The criteria for avoiding a profile are that the driver must have scored:

• a 4th, 3rd, 2nd or 1st place; or
• a 5th place, plus any other top-6 result; or
• three or more 6th places.

Incidentally, Narain Karthikeyan, who was my first candidate, avoids a profile because of his 4th place at Indy in 2005, possibly making him (and Tiago Montiero) the luckiest b**tards ever!

P.S. I hope Keith doesn’t mind me plugging a rival site on his forum! I assure I have no links to the site whatsoever!

maybe the criteria are a bit out of date? an 8th place gives points for quite some time and since last year even a 10th place is “good”..

Monteiro had a strong drive to finish 8th in a grand prix (France?) that year. The main reason why tenth place gets a point as opposed to sixth place only getting one point in the past is due to imcreased reliablility.

Monteiro did seem good when he drove for Jordan, but I think the fact that he was so comprehensively outperformed by Christijan Albers proves that in reality he was pretty crap. Although, if the two Ferrari’s had’ve collided and taken each other out at Indy 2005- and they so nearly did- he would’ve won the race! It’s probably a good job he didn’t though, because the universe may well have imploded.

Also, on the subject of Monteiro, consider this:

Monteiro beat Karthikeyan
Albers beat Monteiro
Sutil beat Albers
Di Resta is beating Sutil

So, either Di Resta is really amazing, or the other three are really terrible! Or, more likely, the truth is somewhere between those two extremes

One driver that I think about is Sebastien Bourdais. Sure, he did score points, but as a 4-time CART champion you should be able to score more than 4 points while your (Less experienced) team-mate score 35 (Yes I know it’s Seb Vettel, but come on! “4-time CART champion!”), not to mention that STR even sacked him for a 19-year-old. Also, I think Karthikeyan should be No. 1 on the “You lucky b**tard”-list.

definitely Bourdais is the opposite of what we are talking here, or, in other words, he should be on the “you UNLUCKY bastard list”, because, of those who have a profile on the site, he’s definitely the most unlucky one and shouldn’t be there; he was an unlucky bastard for not getting a podium on SPA (7th), for not moving from 4th on the grid on Monza (where Vettel won and he, starting 1 or 2 laps down matched Vettel’s race pace) and a couple of other shunts he suffered (being thrown off the road, for instance (I think in Brazil and some other GP)) on that end of 2008 where Toro Rosso was being competitive. No, he was no Sebastien Vettel, but he’s a damn good driver as his curriculum shows, not just the CART championships, but also his Le Mans series results and performances.

EDIT: sorry for “repeating” your post, Ned; it wasn’t there just now (yeah, I also forgot that Australian performance, retiring from 4th ended up classified as 7th, but one more time his bad luck avoids him from avoiding a profile on F1 Rejects).

I think that that 2nd place by Piquet is one of the most-forgotten, certainly by myself! Ridiculous!

It was a good drive, but he was driving the race winning car that day so let’s not get too carried away