Fernando Alonso
Niki Lauda
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Fernando Alonso at #9 and Niki Lauda at #11.
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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.
The case for Niki Lauda
Three titles and 25 wins, but no career in the sport's history carries more narrative weight per statistic. Lauda bought his way into Formula 1 with a bank loan, made Ferrari champions again in 1975, and then, in August 1976, crashed at the Nurburgring, suffered burns and lung damage severe enough that a priest administered the last rites — and raced again 42 days later at Monza, finishing fourth with wounds still bleeding under his balaclava. He lost that title by one point after withdrawing from the monsoon at Fuji, a decision he never regretted, then reclaimed the championship in 1977 with clinical points accumulation. Retired in 1979, he returned in 1982 with McLaren and won the 1984 title by half a point — the closest margin ever — over his young teammate Prost. The purest embodiment of the calculating, risk-pricing professional driver, and the sport's greatest comeback, twice over.