Getting the opportunity to interview a racing legend is one thing, but receiving life advice from them is next level. It’s safe to say I learnt a lot from Jacky Ickx.
I always felt like Jacky Ickx never got the recognition he deserved just because he never won a Formula One world championship, but his legendary status goes far beyond that.
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The man is a multi-time 24-hour Le Mans winner and outright Dakar winner, was part of the Bathurst Ford 1-2 as Moffat’s co-driver, a Williams/Ferrari/McLaren/Lotus/Tyrrell F1 driver, two-time World Sportscar Championship winner, and holds a Can-Am title (just to name a few).
Yet, his is not a name you think of when considering one of the greats. Maybe Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna, or even Lewis Hamilton pops into your head instead.
But the truth is that Jacky Ickx is far above them when it comes to dominating multiple disciplines of racing. I mean, he would jump in a Formula One car one weekend, a Le Mans Prototype the next, and then smash through the desert in a Dakar car to round it out.
Our Features Editor, Rob Margeit, recently covered his amazing history (and the fact that Ickx wanted to be a gardener instead) in his feature, which you can read here. But I also had the opportunity to sit with him at Genesis’s showroom in Sydney, a brand with which he has a long-standing relationship.
Immediately, the Belgian legend, who is now 80 years old, made me feel at home. He was in no hurry to get out of there and wanted to sit to chat all day, which is high praise for someone as esteemed as him.
Despite his interesting past, Jacky Ickx is less interested in talking about his history and rather excited about the future.
That’s because he isn’t done with racing. The legend has been employed as a racing adviser/brand partner and, among his other roles in the company, he is tasked with helping Genesis’s assault on endurance racing.
“I’ve gone from being a brand partner to a racing adviser because Genesis is entering the 2026 World Endurance World Championship. As I have a certain experience in motor racing and in driver strategy,” said Ickx
“It’s just fascinating because you are part of a group which has decided to face a real challenge, which is [for Genesis] to challenge Toyota, Porsche, and Ferrari with its own program and to have also its own identity at the same time. It’s a mountain to go up. But that’s the challenge.”
“The most difficult thing is to unite and to build up a group of people, because all of them will have to be some sort of maestro as the competition is in a matter of millimetres in a way. There are many challenges in every direction to choose the right partners for it.”
Saying he has “a certain experience” is ultra-conservative, yet when I asked him what he considered to be the magnum opus of his career, his response shocked me.
“The biggest success, in my opinion, is only the fact that you survive. And this is not a matter of talent; it’s about surviving that era. Because it was more complicated than it is today, but it’s not a matter of talent; it’s a matter of luck,” continued Ickx.
Despite his incredible career driving the most dangerous cars on the face of the planet for decades, you’d certainly expect him to be bored now.
“There’s still plenty of action. I recently celebrated my birthday in Saudi Arabia and followed the Paris-Dakar. The off-road racing, I’m tempted to say, was the most interesting part of my life,” he said.
It’s not the one you believe, like Formula One and long-distance at Le Mans. No, it’s maybe the last part when I did the Dakar, and that made me have a different vision of the planet and the time on it.”
You’d think that at 80 years old, after a life of dodging death, you’d want to sit down with a cup of tea and read the paper. But as he mentioned, Dakar was such an important time in his life that he actually went back at the start of 2025 and ran the course in a Genesis GV80.
When I asked him if he still enjoys racing despite a lifetime of being around it, a yes or no would’ve sufficed. Instead, he offered some profound advice.
“The answer is easy because you have to leave the present. At some point, you have to retire. And then if you don’t have any hobby or any passion, life becomes, well, you feel useless in a way,” he said.
“It’s just a perfect question because I’m not only living on the dividend of my past life, but I live the present.”
After a small pause to reflect upon his past and what the future holds for him, he looked me up and down before asking how old I am.
“You have no idea how short life is, and it’s a privilege when you are young because you have no calculation on anything. You think you are there for the eternity. But no, you are not there for an eternity. You are just a very fraction of time into the life of the planet, a millisecond. You will discover that time is very precious, and the way you use your time is also very precious.”
Expecting to leave the interview with a closer insight into the life of a racing legend, I instead spent the drive home having an existential crisis.
But I suppose you have a different outlook on life when you spend your life doing nearly 400km/h in a car that weighs less than a Kia Picanto.
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