Chris Bristow is a racing driver from United Kingdom who last raced in Formula 1 for Cooper-Climax. Bristow has recorded 0 wins and 0 podiums from 4 starts.[1]
A Racer Rating of 4,238 ranks Bristow 901th of 15,348 indexed drivers, on an Elo scale where the strongest reach the low five figures. It is built from every indexed race in the driver's file, decayed for time since their last race.
| 1960-06-19 | Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps | DNF | −7 |
| 1960-06-06 | Circuit Park Zandvoort | DNF | −51 |
| 1960-05-29 | Circuit de Monaco | DNF | −104 |
| Season | Series | Team | Races | Wins | Podiums | DNFs | Poles | Points | Pos | Gain/Loss | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | ▸Formula 1 | Cooper-Climax | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | P28 | −162 | 4,238 |
| 1959 | ▸Formula 1 | Cooper-Borgward | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | P20 | +34 | 4,368 |
Chris Bristow was a British single-seater driver who competed in Formula 1 during 1959 and 1960, driving for Cooper-Climax. Across four championship starts, he failed to score points or finish on the podium. His average finishing position of tenth from classified results shows he operated at the back of the grid in races he completed; his sole season of meaningful activity came in 1960, when he started three rounds and finished twenty-eighth overall in the championship standings. The calibre of drivers he occasionally beat, Henry Taylor and Ivor Bueb, both established professionals with ratings comfortably above his own, came in isolated results rather than sustained competitive patterns, and were outweighed by the stronger drivers who regularly out-raced him.[1]
Bristow's brief career marked the tail end of the era when private entrants could still field drivers of modest ability in world championship races. Cooper-Climax was a winning team by any measure, with Stirling Moss among its drivers and a dozen race victories to its name, yet the grid was sufficiently deep and the quality of equipment sufficiently varied that a driver of Bristow's standing could still gain entry. His Racer Rating of 4,238 places him in the upper-amateur tier of professional racing, comparable to a strong driver in a national or feeder championship rather than a genuine front-runner at world level. The headlines attached to his record point to the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, an event that has become historically significant in Formula 1 discourse, though the record supplied here contains no specific detail of his involvement in that race.[2]