Lewis Hamilton
Jim Clark
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Lewis Hamilton leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Lewis Hamilton at #1 and Jim Clark at #7.
Head-to-head FAQ
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The case for Lewis Hamilton
The statistical summit of the sport: seven world titles, tying Schumacher, plus all-time records of 105 wins, 104 pole positions and more than 200 podiums as of the end of 2024. The breadth is the argument — Hamilton won races in every season from 2007 to 2021, a fifteen-year streak no one else approaches, and won titles in three distinct regulation eras with V8 and hybrid machinery. He nearly took the championship as a rookie in 2007, beat double champion Alonso on points in the same car, and his 2020 season — 11 wins, a seventh title sealed with a wet-weather masterclass in Turkey — came at age 35. The counterargument is machinery: Mercedes was the class of the field for most of 2014 to 2020. But he beat every teammate over a season bar Rosberg in 2016 and Russell in 2024, and lost the 2021 title only on the final lap. His 2025 move to Ferrari extended the longest elite career of the modern era.
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.