Juan Manuel Fangio
Fernando Alonso
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Juan Manuel Fangio leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Juan Manuel Fangio at #3 and Fernando Alonso at #9.
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The case for Juan Manuel Fangio
Fangio's numbers look small until you convert them to rates, at which point they become absurd: 24 wins from 52 championship entries, a strike rate around 46 percent that no driver since has approached, plus 29 poles and five titles in the championship's first nine seasons. He won those five championships with four different constructors — Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Ferrari, Maserati — proving the results travelled with the man, and he did it in an era when cars killed their drivers routinely and Fangio himself broke his neck at Monza in 1952. His masterpiece is the 1957 German Grand Prix: 46 years old, hunting down the Ferraris of Hawthorn and Collins after a disastrous pit stop, breaking the Nurburgring lap record repeatedly, winning by three seconds. He retired at 47, still the best driver alive. Adjusted for era and risk, a legitimate case exists that he is number one; he sits third only because the fields he beat were shallower.
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.