Giacomo Agostini
Mick Doohan
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 Mick Doohan at #5.
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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 Mick Doohan
Five consecutive 500cc world championships from 1994 to 1998, a run matched in the premier class only by Agostini's seven. Doohan took 54 wins, 58 pole positions and 95 podiums from 137 starts, all with Honda, and every one of those wins came in the premier class. His 1997 season remains a benchmark: twelve victories from fifteen races, with two second places and a crash while leading his home Grand Prix by more than six seconds. The context makes it heavier. A crash in practice at Assen in 1992 left him with permanent damage to his right leg and close to amputation; he lost that year's title to Wayne Rainey by four points, and rode the rest of his career with a thumb-operated rear brake because his right foot could no longer work the pedal. A crash at Jerez in 1999 ended his career.