Jim Clark
Niki Lauda
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jim Clark leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jim Clark at #7 and Niki Lauda at #11.
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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 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.