For quite some time now, my attention and research focus has been directed primarily at the waning years of the 19th Century and the first decades of the 20th Century, especially on the North American side of the Atlantic. Among other things, this has created a genuine admiration for Barney Oldfield as both a Racer and a promotional genius. It has also made it clear that many of those competing during those formative years -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- were nothing short of amazing on the tracks that they competed upon and the conditions under which they competed. It has been quite a revelation to closely study this era after the usual nonsense that one tends to read in what relatively little is directed its way.
I have long found that the bestowing of superlatives such as "greatest" and so form upon people or particular events or specific artifacts can can be an interesting exercise, but generally one belongs in the "so-what?" category of endeavors. One "so-what" is that it does have the possibility to allow the discussion of the conditions, the context if you will, under these drivers competed and even -- heavens forbid -- how perceptions of the sport have evolved. And so forth and so on....
If one considers a span of maybe three or at the most four seasons then one might perhaps get a good sense of just who might be the stand-out for that period. However, it also needs to be a rolling sort of look, of course, each span advancing a season at a time. Not the way most would ever wish to do such a thing, but it provides the sort of context that simply does not exist when attempting to compare Lewis Hamilton of 2020 with, say, Jack Brabham of 1960 or Niki Lauda of 1978. I have no idea regarding who the GOAT in GP/F1 might be. Nor do I really care, to be honest. It is simply something that others can argue about and waste time mulling over (after all, EVERYONE knows that it is really -----, of course!).
To go back to what I started off with, the early years of motor sport, for a moment. While much has been written about Oldfield, I now think that much -- if not virtually almost all -- of it at times misses just how good Oldfield really was on the track and how his self-promotion helped create an interest in the sport. I have come to sense that one of the true challenges for the motor sport historian is dealing with the brutal fact that it is a sport that is often at the mercy of technology and as such undergoing what can be seen as an endless series of paradigm shifts, which also are not necessarily uniform given the diversity of the sport, creating an accompanying chorus of what might be thought of as an interesting form of cognitive dissonance compounded by a reluctance to accept that ambiguity rather than certainty is a contextual factor affecting our perceptions. That is, there is a tendency to value certainty, even when it is created rather evolved, over ambiguity. Or, there must be a GOAT because we wish it were so.
I have only met Jackie Stewart maybe a half-dozen times to have anything close to merit calling it an exchange, and each time he was quite gracious and willing to take a few moments to talk and offer his observations or opinion as the case might be. With the understanding that I could NEVER, EVER come even close to achieving what he could do in a racing machine, I listened.
At any rate, back to the usual discussion.....
