The Most Famous
RACING DRIVERS from Zimbabwe
This page contains a list of the greatest Zimbabwean Racing Drivers. The pantheon dataset contains 1,080 Racing Drivers, 1 of which were born in Zimbabwe. This makes Zimbabwe the birth place of the 41st most number of Racing Drivers behind Libya, and Luxembourg.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Zimbabwean Racing Drivers of all time. This list of famous Zimbabwean Racing Drivers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. John Love (1924 - 2005)
With an HPI of 49.29, John Love is the most famous Zimbabwean Racing Driver. His biography has been translated into 21 different languages on wikipedia.
John Maxwell Lineham Love (7 December 1924 – 25 April 2005) was a Rhodesian racing driver. He participated in 10 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix, debuting on 29 December 1962. He achieved one podium, and scored a total of six championship points. He also won the 1962 British Saloon Car Championship, now known as the British Touring Car Championship. All but one of his Formula One entries were in races held within Africa, either as championship or non-championship rounds. Love was born in Bulawayo. He attended Gifford High School. He started his car racing career in a single-seat Cooper F3 with a Manx Norton 500 cc engine after racing a Triumph Grand Prix motorcycle, which Love then-allowed Jim Redman to ride when starting his race career, in recognition of Redman's assistance in preparing and maintaining Love's Cooper. Six times South African Formula One Champion in the 1960s, he had originally shone in the European Formula Junior firmament back in 1961–62 at the wheel of a Cooper-Austin from Ken Tyrrell's team. An unfortunate accident at Albi resulted in a very badly broken arm and effectively thwarted his chances of moving into full-time Formula One, but he came close when he was nominated as Phil Hill's replacement in the works Cooper team for the 1964 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. He was a regular contestant in the South African Grand Prix from 1965 to 1972. He was leading the 1967 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami in his 2.7 L Climax-engined Cooper, when a misfire prompted him to make a precautionary stop for extra fuel. He dropped back to finish second behind the works Cooper-Maserati of Pedro Rodríguez. Love would dominate racing in southern Africa in the 1960s, winning the South African Formula One Championship six times in succession from 1964 to 1969. He would also win his home race, the Rhodesian Grand Prix, six times. He owned the Jaguar dealership in Bulawayo and had his own stock car racing team in the 1980s. He died in 2005, aged 80, from cancer, in Bulawayo.
People
Pantheon has 1 people classified as Zimbabwean racing drivers born between 1924 and 1924. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased Zimbabwean racing drivers include John Love.
