Giacomo Agostini
Jorge Lorenzo
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Giacomo Agostini leads 5 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Giacomo Agostini at #1 and Jorge Lorenzo at #10.
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The case for Giacomo Agostini
Fifteen world championships and 122 Grand Prix wins, neither total seriously threatened in fifty years. Agostini won eight 500cc titles, seven of them consecutively from 1966 to 1972, and seven 350cc crowns, frequently taking both on the same afternoon. His premier-class record reads 68 wins from around 120 starts, a strike rate above 55 percent that nobody in the modern era approaches, and he once won 20 consecutive premier races across 1968 and 1969, including a clean sweep of the 1968 season. The standard objection is machinery: MV Agusta's multi-cylinder fours were often the only genuinely competitive bikes on a thin grid. He answered it in 1975 by leaving MV for Yamaha and winning the 500cc title on a two-stroke at 33, the first two-stroke premier crown and the end of MV Agusta's seventeen-year run. He also won ten Isle of Man TTs before refusing to return after Gilberto Parlotti's death in 1972.
The case for Jorge Lorenzo
Five world championships: 250cc in 2006 and 2007, and MotoGP in 2010, 2012 and 2015. Lorenzo took 68 Grand Prix wins from 297 starts, 47 of them in the premier class, along with 114 premier podiums and 69 career poles. He is the purest exponent of the corner-speed style that Yamaha's inline-four M1 rewarded, a rider whose lap times could be laid on top of one another for an entire race distance. Two moments define him: riding at Assen in 2013 two days after surgery to plate a broken collarbone, and the 2015 championship, won by five points from Rossi in a season that ended in open hostility. His Ducati years from 2017 to 2018 were slow to start but produced three wins once the bike was adapted to him, before a difficult final season at Honda.