Jackie Stewart
Fernando Alonso
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Fernando Alonso leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jackie Stewart at #8 and Fernando Alonso at #9.
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The case for Jackie Stewart
Three titles — 1969, 1971, 1973 — and 27 wins from only 99 starts, a 27 percent win rate compiled in the deadliest years the sport has known. Stewart's defining drive is the 1968 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring: in fog and rain, with a broken wrist in a cast, he won by more than four minutes. What elevates him beyond the numbers is that he transformed the sport twice over — as its best driver and as its conscience. After being trapped in his crashed BRM at Spa in 1966, soaked in fuel, he waged a relentless and deeply unpopular safety campaign: circuit barriers, seat belts, full-face helmets, medical facilities, boycotts of lethal tracks. Much of the safety architecture that later saved lives traces to him. He retired at the end of 1973, at his peak, after his teammate Francois Cevert was killed in qualifying at Watkins Glen — walking away as reigning champion.
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.