Jim Clark
Jackie Stewart
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 Jim Clark at #7 and Jackie Stewart at #8.
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The case for Jim Clark
Clark's rate stats are second only to Fangio's among champions: 25 wins and 33 poles from just 72 starts — winning more than a third of every Grand Prix he entered — with two titles, 1963 and 1965, both sealed with crushing superiority. He still holds the record for grand chelems (pole, win, fastest lap, every lap led) with eight. His versatility has no modern equivalent: in 1965 he won the Formula 1 world championship and the Indianapolis 500 in the same summer, and he won in touring cars, sports cars and Formula 2 almost casually. Contemporaries considered the gap behind him unbridgeable — when conditions were equal, Clark simply drove away, as at Spa 1963, won by nearly five minutes in the rain. He died at Hockenheim in April 1968 in a minor Formula 2 race, aged 32, almost certainly with multiple championships left in him. On pure driving, many period observers rated him the best ever.
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.