Michael Schumacher
Jim Clark
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Michael Schumacher leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Michael Schumacher at #2 and Jim Clark at #7.
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The case for Michael Schumacher
Schumacher redefined what a Formula 1 driver's job was. Beyond the seven titles, 91 wins and 155 podiums, he was the first modern driver to treat the entire team as his instrument — famously fit, relentless in testing, fluent in the engineering, and the organising force around which Ferrari rebuilt itself. After titles with Benetton in 1994 and 1995, he joined a Ferrari team that had not crowned a champion since 1979 and dragged it through four painful seasons before delivering five consecutive titles from 2000 to 2004, the last with 13 wins in 18 races. His 77 fastest laps stood as the record for years and signal his defining trait: sustained qualifying-speed stints on demand, the skill that made refuelling-era strategy work. The stains are real — Adelaide 1994, Jerez 1997, Monaco 2006 — and they cost him the top spot here, but his peak-era command of a race weekend has never been exceeded.
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.