Both Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn are on record saying that without Luca, Ferrari would not have won 5 world championships. Michael also said that he trusted Luca's feedback and setup help when testing the car. Also, Luca visits Michael regularly after his accident. So, that tells you all you need to know. Don't give Luca a hard time. Yes he never achieved much in F1 racing, but he was a VERY good test driver - and Ferrari giving him a free car when he retired is a sign that they respected you.
@Mo Elm well, he was used to vastly different machinery. Hadn't properly raced in ten years, man. He hadn't driven the car properly, he hadn't driven on the circuits. Several f1 drivers themselves defended him. They know what they're talking about. It's easy to sit behind a screen and criticize someone, but badoer was a good driver at least when he was young. He repeatedly drove backmarker cars into the top ten. He raced in a period when only the top six scored points. He nearly scored points, but had reliability issues. He even beat Barrichello in F3000 and even won the title! Now am I saying he's the greatest ever? No. But calling him the worst driver ever is just unfair, and that's what the video's trying to say. No one who gets to f1 purely on merit is a "bad driver."
@Mo Elm if you read my comment, you'll see that I never said anything about the car. But, you do realise that Fisichella also struggled, right? Did you even watch the whole video? Also, I want to add that I personally think Stoffel wasn't treated very fairly in f1.
He's considered an unsung hero in Italy - pretty much as the various people involved always said (from Schumacher to Todt to Brawn), he was instrumental in the Ferrari utter and complete dominance of the sport in the 2000-2004 window. In a way, it can be said that the ban on private testing was partly Badoer's making - other teams lacked the financial power to test as much as Ferrari AND a driver like Luca to undertake the work in the way he did. The 2009 F60 was an absurdly difficult car to setup and drive and which required a lot of adjustment time - at the beginning of the season it was regularly at the bottom of the grid. Only as the drivers and engineers started to figure it out (and what to improve on it), it started moving towards the front. Any new driver dropped in that car would've struggled - as proven by Fisichella who, on his last race for Force India in Spa, took pole position and came home 2nd - only to end up at the bottom of the order in the Ferrari. The Scuderia should really have put Badoer in the car in 1999, when he had plenty of knowledge of it from thousands of miles of testing.
Finally a fair and balanced article about Luca! Fisichella only did moderately better without being race rusty. Luca was placed at Minardi in 1999 to keep him race ready should the need for him to fill in at Ferrari. When the need did arrive, he got overlooked. He turned down a Sauber drive for 2000 to remain loyal to Ferrari testing duties.
The part of the story people often leave out is that Fisichella, despite far more recent F1 experience and being a 3-time race winner, didn't score a point in the Ferrari either.
If you win the International Formula 3000 championship beating the likes of Barrichello, Coulthard , and Panis you cant be all that bad and if they had the points system then like now where finishing in the top 10 gets points he would have scored at least 1 point in every year he raced except the 2 races for Ferrari
That's the fairest commentary I've heard on Luca. I was at the 2009 Italian GP, and I was hoping to see Luca race as at the time I believed he was going to perform a lot better there. I bet he would have out performed Fisi too given that by then he was more familiar with the car, and that he was very good at Monza (it's not the toughest track, I know). While it was a great thing for Ferrrari to have offered Luca the drive, they really should've left him in the seat as instead of enhancing his reputation, they destroyed it. Ferrari are good at that lately! Besides, I think Fisi would've had more good results with the Force India that year had he stayed.
Thanks Joey! Absolutely, you've only got to look at the pace of Sutil and Liuzzi at Monza to wonder how much more Fisichella could've achieved that year.
So glad to see the sub count triple since last time I watched one of your videos. Wow this was well researched, narrated, edited-the whole shebang! People and the RU-vid algorithm, give this man some much deserved recognition! Also forgot to say--excellent storyteller! Giving poor Luca a fair shake.
Badoer's son Brando has followed in his father's footsteps, currently racing in Formula 4 (he even participated in one of the Ferrari Driver Academy's training camps).
My first F1 experience was watching a few laps of a Grand Prix in the V10-era 2000s (5 at most) before I got bored of seeing Schumacher in the lead and flicked over to my native V8 Supercars if available. However, one person that kept me awake and glued to the screen was a little-known Italian called Luca Badoer. I was confused as an 8 year old as to why he was so slow (and so much slower than his teammate), so I did what any 8 year old with nothing to do would do - scour over this fancy thing called "the internet" and do some research on him. To find out that he was working with Ferrari for a literal decade (and was truly a sight to behold in the years prior when he was racing), made me so emotional that he finally got to race for the team he adored and dedicated his life to for so long. That 1999 race where he and the car broke down simultaneously got the waterworks going when it was replayed to me in the early 2010s or so. I'm not the kind of person to get too emotional, either (That cameraman better have gotten a bloody award for that, it was perfect). The F90 proved to me that Ferrari was vulnerable to the catastrophic implosions we saw in 2009 for many years. The people behind the prancing horse were crucial in keeping it on the knife-edge, and wrangling it into heights it should never have been in.
Not much would've been achieved that year. The Force India was perfectly suited for Spa and Monza, but thereafter, moved back towards the lower midfield.
Back in the day when he got the Ferrari drive and it became obvious that he would be so far off the pace, people started making fun of him, calling him Look-How-Bad-You-Are. Kinda funny to see how his signature reads L. Bad. Personally, I think that all things considered, he did a decent job. Fisi's outing in the car proved that. He was an active F1 driver with a very recent success to his name and only marginally better. Pit we didn't get to see Schumacher drive the car to see if he could've at least matched Räikkönen's speed. His stint with Mercedes was ill-fated from the start because that car was co-developed by Button whose driving style off all drivers had the least in common with that of Schumacher and quite a lot in common with that of Rosberg. Ferrari was a team he helped build and knew very well, he occasionally even tested the cars. It's probable that he would've done better in the Ferrari - and it could've meant that he would've looked into a permanent comeback with the prancing horse - which also might've been a bit more successful.
He was a good driver but the Ferrari drive sadly came 10 years too late . He definitely deserved to score points in 1995 and 1999 and showed great promise you cant judge him for his drive in 2009
In his defence. Fisichella, whom had just driven some amazing races for Renault or Benneton I can't remember. He was really on the rise. He took over from Badoer. Oh what an honor to drive for Ferrari. It killed his career instantly. He was a backmarker in the seemingly difficult to drive Ferrari and next season he was gone from F1.
Very nice video. I just discovered your channel :) But when talking about the worst driver, Luca Badoer would never cross my mind. There are so many adepts ahead of him.
One thing that really held him back was the lack of a proper race simulator. Ferrari were quite late to the party and didn't build theirs until the end of this season, so he couldn't even fall back on that. He truly got thrown in the deep end from the start.
He had a great career if you really look at it. He was a test driver that contributed to 8 constructors championships and 6 drivers. Awesome if you ask me. And he raced in F1. Most people could only dream of that
Great video, stats really don't tell the story, as was said a number of times, he was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of a number of drivers who deserved better.
Well, he was ok to be a test driver, otherwise he wouldn't stay. And he got his chance to race. One thing that was unfair is when his Minardi have broke when he almost got the 4th place.
Luca is probably the most unlucky drivers in F1 ever, in terms of bad timing in his career. Going from one backmarker team to another, never being able to show his true potential. And then losing out on the Ferrari drive to Mika Salo, who apart from his podiums at Hockenheim and Monza did a poor job. Ferrari expected the impossible in '09 from a driver not racing in F1 for a full decade and had no experience in the car, which was a diva on four wheels, very difficult to drive and took a lot of time to get used to, which Luca unfortunately didn't get. The fact that Fisi did only slightly better than Luca shows that he was treated very unfairly by Ferrari, whose car was absolutely nowhere after Monza.
I'm from Belgium and I found it painfull to watch both D'Ambrosio and Vandoorne. They both had slow cars, but when you saw what Alonso could and what stupid things D'Ambrosio did it's fair to say they are contenders for that spot.
I'm from Belgium as well and have actually worked with d'Ambrosio. He's definitely better than his F1 stint implied, and Vandoorne suffered from a relatively hostile team environment and not being able to get used to the cars. With more seats on the grid, both would have deserved a second shot, but they both eventually got to show their worth in FE so it's not all bad!
Really good video on Luca. I remember thinking in 09 he needed more time in the car rather than more talent and to not allow him to run at Monza was unfair.
in my opinion, the worst was Jean-Louis Schlesser. a great rally driver but, once in F1, he wasted one of Senna's race by crashing him and was booted and never came back.
Luca is probably one of the least traditionally successful drivers in F1, but he is far, far from the worst driver. Compared to some of the characters that teams like Minardi often found he was probably right in the middle. If I had to pick, I'd probably go with Taki Inoue - he says so himself, after all.
Luca did a better job than Fisi who’d about 10 straight seasons of driving every race yet was arguably worse. I remember watching Fisi in the Ferrari and he looked even more hopeless.
Luca seems like a nice guy, but Ferrari should have put Gene in that car instead. He performed respectably in stand in roles for Williams, and, whilst he wouldn’t have set the world alight, would have probably been a little more competitive.
It's just so strange that Ferrari, the most successful F1 team of all time, didn't have a reliable reserve driver they could call upon in a situation like this. Imagine Real Madrid losing their main striker through injury and responding by calling Raúl out of retirement.
@@TheMobileChicane True, though in my analogy Schumacher is Raúl (successful retired star). I suppose Badoer's Real Madrid equivalent is probably someone like Perica Ognjenović.
Well, he's no Deletraz or ide that's for sure. I think Luca performed so poorly, because he didn't drive an F1 car against the clock for 10 years when he got that Ferrari drive. In testing he wasn't really going for speed, but for knowledge and consistency to develop the car, plus I think somewhere around 2007 or 2008 testing got very very limited and by 2009 I'm not even sure that Luca had driven the F60 ever prior to Spa. His performances were awful and embarrassing for sure, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt in this case. Had it been his prime and had he driven the car extensively in testing, I think he would have done much better. Fisichella was doing very poorly in the Ferrari too after taking Badoer's seat. I think Fisico failed to score points aswell. For some strange reason Kimi was a total beast in the F60 and had a stormer in a very poor car. I say strangely, because Kimi had a quite poor season in the excellent F2008.
Was awful seeing him break down. A solid driver who didn’t get a decent chance until way too late. But don’t feel too bad for him. He got paid to drive F1 cars and be Ferrari’s factory development driver.
Ah Luca got to drive some of the best rawest f1 cars ever. Only other car of 00s id wana drive is the unreliable mclaren. But yeah sad he didnt get the shot in 99. Should have. The shot he got was way to late and crazy to throw him in that long after his prime. Im sure he made good $ at ferrari and has memories of best ferraris ever made when test teams ran non stop all year. Until 08/09 mclaren/ferrari ran duplicate test teams that ran allmost non stop its crazy. What a time to be a test driver
For Kimi hater's 2009 Ferrari became a Schrödinger's Ferrari. The best car and the worst car in the grid conveniently whether it was Kimi winning and scoring podiums or everyone else struggling and being dead last.
So this guy was instrumental in Ferrari’s championships due to his testing and feedback skills. But could not qually out of 20th pos in a Ferrari? Are you serious? This might be a nice guy but he sucks at racing, imagine Leclerc qualifying at the bottom, he’d be fired on the spot if there were no mechanical issues with the car.
True, he did his best, but Gene had more recent F1 experience (2004) and had been racing sport cars since 2007, so wouldn’t have had the same race rustiness as Luca had. That said, whilst he would’ve been closer to the pace, I think he still would’ve be in and around last place too.
Luca was one of the best test drivers around along with Pedro De La Rosa. for worst f1 driver i have three words: Andrea De Cesaris. or Mahaveer Raghunathan
My vote is Stafan Johansson or David Couthard, both spent plenty of time in top teams for no championships. Nico Hulkenberg, not far behind millions of GP's for the same number of podiums as I have........duck egg
Under the modern top 10 points structure he would've gotten 14 points finishes from 50 starts that's 28%. More than 1/4 of your career in the top 10 in the most woeful cars in F1 history and nothing to show for it
Yeah but that doesn't mean anything when more than half of the grid was regularly being struck with reliability problems at every race throughout these years, even the most desperately woeful driver would score points if the top 10 was eligible for points back when Badoer used to race regularly
Likewise, When I saw him slumped over the car I felt so bad for him. Makes me more angry and ashamed how badly he was treated by the public and the media in 09!
@@HotRodRacer463 people are so quick to criticize and judge based off of what they see through the media and online - especially for athletes. It really sucks
The greatest test driver of all time along with Pedro de la Rosa. Came extremely close to scoring points in a Minardi ffs. But because he was older and off the pace after not racing in F1 for 10 years, idiotic armchair expert "fans" are like wORsT dRIvEr EveR. The fact Ferrari continued to treat him with such respect and admiration speaks volumes - especially given their internal politics. A great driver, no question, just a different kind of driver than what people automatically think of.
You're right. He was a promising driver in his active years and a very solid test driver that Ferrari kept for over a decade. It's an awful shame he only gets known for this. What does anyone expect from a guy who hasn't raced in a decade?
@Mo Elm because he was in a fukin minardi and a forti, which were slow cars when you needed to finish p6+ for a points finish. He was once running p4 in a minardi (which is very good) and had to retire
@Mo Elm It doesnt matter how many starts you have if youre only driving shitty cars. Look at George Russell: no points in a Williams to almost winning in a Mercedes. Also, the 10 year gap without racing IS relevant because the driving one does in testing isnt the same one does in a GP weekend. F1 went through multiple changes during the time Luca was away from competing. Think about it: F1 drivers need hundreds of laps to get used to a car. There is private testing AND winter testing. You cant compare him to Kimi because Kimi had all of this testing plus multiple race weekends to understand how to deal with a complicated car (also the guy is fucking Kimi Raikkonen. You can be slower than him and still be a good driver. Fisichella is a much better comparison because he also had 0 experience with the Ferrari and struggled just as much but he was an active F1 driver who just had put the Force India on pole and the podium. All of the examples you mentioned refer to F1 drivers who where in equal footing to their team mates context wise. Luca wasnt. It is simply unfair and unreasonable to compare him to Jos or Stofell because these two were ACTIVE F1 drivers.
@Mo Elm George was an active F1 driver, Luca wasn't. The Mercedes was top of the field, the Ferrari wasn't. What's so hard to understand about that? Do you think Fisichella sucks as well? He's the closest to Badoa in terms of context for comparison and he barely did any better despite being active for years. The crux of your argument is that the 10 year gap doesnt matter, right? If Badoa was good he should do well in a fast car. BUT THE FERRARI WASNT FAST!!! A driver who had pole position and P2 one race prior could not do anything with It. Only Kimi, a world champion with way more laps in the car than Badoa and Fisichella, could do something with it and it wasnt much.
Agree. And Fisichella didnt so better than Badoer when he took that F60. The lacking of test days ruined both drivers and Badoer even didnt know that car. Ferrari should give a chance to Badoer 10 yers early!
i also have a massive f1 spreadsheet, and what so many people don't appreciate about 2009 given the initial dominance of Brawn GP is that the 2009 grid from front to back was, I think, the closest of all modern times. so whhile Badoer definitely did suck, the closeness of the 2009 grid left him nowhere to hide (same as FIsichella).
I mean if you look at Belgium he was less than 2 seconds off pole. There have been times in F1 where 2 seconds would have got you solidly in the top half of the grid
badoer didn't deserve all the shit he got during his prime of career and the 2009 retry, though at least he got to play a big part in ferraris age of domination with schumacher in the end
Luca's a good example that, sometimes, even if you try your hardest, it's not meant to be. However, he never gave up, he drove some awful cars but he still became an F1 driver and he drove for Scuderia Ferrari. Most people only dream of having that opportunity. And that's a good thought, he was succesful in his own way.
Testing is not racing. Badoer was put in an impossible position. The 10ths, or 100ths of a second less per lap come from a physical and mental familiarity with car and track during intense racing action of which he was completely deprived
Trying and failing to figure out who is the greatest F1 driver of all time through an endless series of spreadsheets... yeah, relatable 😂 All I've managed to do is narrow the shortlist down to: Fangio, Clark, Stewart, Prost, Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton. But yes, Badoer is one of the contenders for least successful 😂
@@anthonyxuereb792 And the only time he beat Fangio in the same car, he believes Fangio let him win. Moss is an all-time great, but in my view Hamilton, Senna, Clark, Schumacher, Fangio, Prost, Stewart, Lauda, Ascari, probably Alonso, and arguably Häkkinen and Mansell were better.
He should have been given the chance to race at Monza in 09. Sure the two previous gp's weren't great, but I still think he might have been able to score points in that car there. We'll never know.
Agreed, especially since he'd had time to acclimatise to the car by then, and it was a circuit he knew well. Since Fisichella finished just out of the points that race, in his first race in the car, it's not unreasonable to think he could've been close to the points.
@@TheMobileChicane I hadn't known this until yesterday, but did you know that Fisi had tested once already with Ferrari? In 1995 Fisichella and Luca both tested the Ferrari F1 car at the same test.