🇮🇹 Giandomenico Basso

Voted the greatest driver in European Rally Championship history in a 2023 fan poll, which is the kind of honour that usually arrives after someone has stopped competing. Basso has not.

Born in Montebelluna in 1973 and rallying since 1994, he built his reputation on Fiats. The 2006 season remains the high-water mark: the European title with four wins in a Grande Punto S2000 for Abarth, and the inaugural Intercontinental Rally Challenge in the same year. He took a second European crown in 2009 by winning seven of the eleven rounds with co-driver Mitia Dotta, a margin that leaves little room for argument.

Domestically he is a five-time Italian champion across nearly two decades — 2007, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2025 — and he has said the first of those, won as an official Abarth driver, mattered more to him emotionally than either European title. He added back-to-back Tour European Rally titles in 2017 and 2018.

In 2026 he returned to a full European campaign with Delta Rally in a Fabia RS Rally2, twenty years after the first continental title. The world championship was never really his stage: a Sanremo debut in a Fiat Seicento in 1998, two Junior seasons in a Punto S1600, and then a career spent being the best in Europe instead.