Eddie Lawson
Geoff Duke
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Eddie Lawson at #8 and Geoff Duke at #12.
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The case for Eddie Lawson
Four 500cc world championships, in 1984, 1986 and 1988 with Yamaha and in 1989 with Honda, making him the first rider to win back-to-back premier titles on machinery from different manufacturers. Rossi did not repeat the feat until 2004. Lawson's numbers, 31 wins and 78 podiums from 127 starts, understate a career built on a specific method: he raced the championship rather than the Grand Prix, taking the available result rather than the maximum one, which earned him the nickname Steady Eddie. In a two-stroke era where crashing was routine, his finishing rate was extraordinary. The 1989 switch to Honda, made to work with engineer Erv Kanemoto on a bike he had never ridden, is the single strongest line on his record: he beat the factory Yamahas he had just left.
The case for Geoff Duke
Six world championships: the 500cc title in 1951, 1953, 1954 and 1955, and the 350cc title in 1951 and 1952. Duke won 33 Grands Prix and 50 podiums from 89 starts, 22 of the wins in the premier class, and was the first rider to take premier-class titles with two different manufacturers, Norton in 1951 and Gilera from 1953. He is also the sport's first genuine modernist: he commissioned a local tailor to make him a one-piece racing suit, replacing the two-piece leathers everyone else wore, and his smooth, low-drag style became the template for road racing technique. In 1956 the FIM suspended him for six months for supporting a riders' strike over start money, which cost him any chance of a fourth consecutive 500cc crown.