Alain Prost
Fernando Alonso
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Alain Prost leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Alain Prost at #6 and Fernando Alonso at #9.
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The case for Alain Prost
The Professor's four titles — 1985, 1986, 1989, 1993 — and 51 wins were built on an approach decades ahead of its time: manage the tyres, the fuel, the gearbox and the risk, be fastest only when it pays, and collect points with machine regularity, which is how he retired as the all-time leader in both wins and points. His teammate ledger is the strongest of his generation: he beat Lauda on points as a young driver in 1984 (losing the title by half a point), matched Senna at McLaren in 1988-89 and took the 1989 crown, and won 1986 in a McLaren that was slower than the Williams-Hondas, sealing it in the three-way Adelaide finale after Mansell's tyre exploded. In the turbo era's fuel-limited races, his economy of effort was a weapon nobody could copy. He is remembered as Senna's foil; the record says he was his equal, with a fraction of the drama.
The case for Fernando Alonso
Two titles in 2005 and 2006 that broke Ferrari and Schumacher's five-year stranglehold, won at 24 and 25 in a Renault that was rarely the fastest car — followed by eighteen further seasons that turned Alonso into the sport's benchmark for extracting the impossible from ordinary machinery. He holds the record for Grand Prix starts, passing 400 in 2024, with 32 wins, 22 poles and 106 podiums, but his reputation rests on races the totals miss: dragging a Ferrari to within a handful of points of the 2010 and 2012 titles, and a 2012 European Grand Prix win from eleventh that many rate the finest drive of the decade. Peerless wheel-to-wheel and metronomically consistent, he also won Le Mans twice and the World Endurance Championship during an F1 sabbatical. The knock is a career of catastrophic team choices — leaving or arriving one season too early almost every time — that left an all-time talent stranded on only two crowns.