Alain Prost

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• Top 6 Formula 1 Drivers of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Michael Schumacher

  Michael Schumacher won his first two Formula 1 world championships with Benetton in 1994 and 1995, then joined a struggling Ferrari team in 1996 and spent the next several years rebuilding it from the ground up, culminating in five consecutive drivers' championships from 2000 to 2004 — still the most dominant sustained stretch by any driver-team combination in F1 history. Schumacher finished his career with seven world championships, a record at the time that stood alone until Lewis Hamilton matched it in 2020, and 91 career race wins, a total that also stood as the all-time record until Hamilton passed it in 2020 as well — meaning the two drivers' records are directly, repeatedly intertwined across F1's history books. His partnership with Ferrari is credited with transforming the team from a once-legendary but underperforming constructor into the sport's dominant force for the better part of a decade, a turnaround built as much on Schumacher's technical feedback and work ethic in car development as on his raw pace on race day. Schumacher suffered a severe skiing accident in December 2013 that left him with serious brain injuries, and his family has kept details of his condition and recovery almost entirely private since — a stark, quiet contrast to a career that had spent nearly two decades in the most public possible spotlight.

• Lewis Hamilton

  Lewis Hamilton debuted in Formula 1 with McLaren in 2007 and won the world championship in just his second season, in 2008, becoming the youngest world champion in F1 history at the time. He moved to Mercedes in 2013 and, across the team's dominant hybrid-engine era from 2014 onward, won six more championships. Hamilton's seven career world championships tie Michael Schumacher's record, and his 105 career race wins and 104 pole positions are both the outright all-time records, meaning that by the two most fundamental counting statistics in the sport, he's the most successful F1 driver in history. Hamilton is the only Black driver to compete in Formula 1's modern era, and he's used his platform prominently to push the sport toward greater diversity, founding a commission focused on increasing representation in motorsport and consistently raising the issue in a sport that's historically had very little of it. His 2021 title fight against Max Verstappen, decided on the final lap of the final race of the season under controversial safety-car circumstances, is widely considered one of the most dramatic and contested championship battles in F1 history, and Hamilton's response to narrowly losing it after leading for most of the year only added to how the season is remembered.

• Ayrton Senna

  Ayrton Senna won three Formula 1 world championships with McLaren, in 1988, 1990, and 1991, and built a reputation, still widely cited by drivers decades later, as the fastest single-lap qualifier the sport has ever produced — his pole position numbers relative to his era's competition remain a benchmark other drivers are still measured against. His rivalry with McLaren teammate Alain Prost, especially their collisions at the 1989 and 1990 Japanese Grand Prix that each effectively decided that year's championship, is considered the defining driver rivalry in F1 history — two fundamentally different approaches to racing, Prost's calculated precision against Senna's aggressive, sometimes controversial intensity, playing out at the same team. Senna was particularly renowned for his performances in wet-weather conditions, where his car control and risk tolerance gave him an advantage over the field that dry-track pace alone couldn't always explain — his 1993 European Grand Prix drive at Donington Park, gaining five positions on the opening lap in the rain, is still shown as a reference lap in driver coaching. Senna died in a crash during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, a tragedy that led directly to major F1 safety reforms over the following years — car design, circuit barriers, and medical response protocols were all overhauled in ways credited with preventing driver deaths in the sport for decades afterward.

• Juan Manuel Fangio

  Juan Manuel Fangio won five Formula 1 world championships in the 1950s, driving for four different constructors — Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Ferrari, and Maserati — a level of success across competing teams that no other driver in F1 history has come close to replicating, since switching manufacturers usually costs a driver competitive continuity. His career winning percentage remains the highest of any driver in F1 history: Fangio won 24 of the 51 championship races he entered, a 47% win rate that dwarfs the win rates of even the sport's other most statistically dominant champions, most of whom competed in far more races across much longer careers. Fangio didn't begin racing in Formula 1 until he was 38 years old, having built his early reputation racing in South America, and won his final championship in 1957 at 46, still the oldest world champion in F1 history — a late-career dominance that stands in sharp contrast to how young most modern champions tend to be. Fangio's reputation for mechanical sympathy and smooth, calculated driving, rather than the more aggressive style that later defined drivers like Senna, made him the standard other 1950s and 1960s drivers measured themselves against, and many older-generation motorsport historians still argue his win percentage alone makes him the greatest F1 driver ever, regardless of era.

• Max Verstappen

  Max Verstappen debuted in Formula 1 with Toro Rosso in 2015 at 17 years old, the youngest driver ever to compete in the sport, and won his first race for Red Bull in 2016 at 18, becoming the youngest race winner in F1 history as well — a pair of youth records that, unlike most F1 records, are effectively permanent given the sport's minimum age rules. Verstappen won his first world championship in 2021 after a season-long battle with Lewis Hamilton that came down to a controversial final-lap pass at the season's last race, and followed it with dominant title defenses in 2022, 2023, and 2024, giving him four consecutive championships and cementing Red Bull's second era of F1 dominance after their earlier run with Sebastian Vettel. His 2023 season is among the most statistically dominant in F1 history: 19 wins in 22 races, a win percentage that ranks among the highest ever recorded across a single championship-winning season, driving a Red Bull car that was widely regarded as the most dominant single-season chassis the sport had produced in years. Verstappen's aggressive, no-lift racing style, particularly in wheel-to-wheel battles, has made him one of the sport's more polarizing drivers among fans and rivals alike, but it's also central to how he's built a championship résumé that, still in his 20s, already places him firmly in F1's all-time conversation.