Talk of racing tends to dwell on the heroes, the ones who make the sport glorious and exciting. However, as in the rest of life, racing has its share of cretins and idiots and villains. Who's the biggest dick that's ever messed with racing?
For someone who was the sport's global administrator for decades, Jean Marie Balestre is one of the more unsympathetic figures in motorsports history. Disregarding his questionable involvement with the Nazi occupation of France, this dour-looking native of Provence was a major cause of the political turmoil that wreaked the sport in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He also imperiously (and perhaps prematurely) banned Group B rallying immediately after the Henri Toivonen crash, and may have manipulated race rulings in favor of countryman Alain Prost to the detriment of Ayrton Senna. He's gone now but his smelly legacy still lingers.
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