Belgium's greatest racing driver? Olivier Gendebien and his remarkable career

Before there was Jacky Ickx, there was Olivier Gendebien. Which of Belgium’s most successful racing drivers was the best? The easy answer is to jump straight to the younger man and his six Le Mans wins and eight grand prix victories. But even Ickx wasn’t as prolifically successful in sports cars as 2020 Motor Sport Hall of Fame nominee Gendebien managed in an astonishing run of success between 1957 and ’62.

In his infamous book ‘My Terrible Joys’, Enzo Ferrari described his greatest sports car driver as “A gentleman who never forgets that noblesse oblige and, when he is at the wheel, he translates this code of behaviour into an elegant and discerning forcefulness.” Gendebien was a natural gentleman and an artist.

World War II broke up his engineering studies at university, and he found it necessary to swap his books to become a paratrooper and Resistance fighter. Post-war, it was during his time as a forester in the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) that he discovered a skill in driving and upon his return to Europe Gendebien took up rallying. Second place and then victory on the Liege-Rome-Liege Rally in 1953 and ’55 respectively suggests he wasn’t bad.

Ferrari spotted this talent and made one of his most canny signing in 1956, kick-starting a remarkable career that is somehow too often overlooked: three times a winner of the great Sicilian road race, the Targa Florio (1958, ’61 and ’62); a hat-trick at the Sebring 12 Hours (1959, ’60 and ’61, the middle one in a Porsche 718RS); twice a winner of the Reims 12 Hours (1957 and ’58); and conqueror of the Nürburgring 1000Kms in his final season in 1962. In a sports car, only Stirling Moss came close. But it was at the Le Mans 24 Hours where Gendebien gently made his point with his trademark mechanical sympathy and an easy panache. Four wins in five years for Ferrari was a remarkable strike rate by any standard, sharing once with countryman Paul Frére and three times with American Phil Hill, another gentleman driver (in the best and quickest sense) and the team-mate with whom he is most associated. They were Ickx and Bell more than a decade before Le Mans’ most famous pairing even met.