Giacomo Agostini
Mike Hailwood
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 Mike Hailwood at #4.
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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 Mike Hailwood
Nine world championships in ten seasons: 250cc in 1961, 1966 and 1967, 350cc in 1966 and 1967, and four consecutive 500cc titles from 1962 to 1965 with MV Agusta. He took 76 Grand Prix wins from just 152 starts, 37 of them in the premier class, and 112 podiums, all before his 28th birthday. Hailwood's range is what separates him: he won world titles on MV Agusta and Honda, competed across four capacity classes in a single weekend, and won 14 Isle of Man TTs. After leaving bikes he raced in Formula 1 across 50 entries with two podiums, and was awarded the George Medal for pulling Clay Regazzoni from a burning car at Kyalami in 1973. In 1978, aged 38 and eleven years out of the sport, he returned to the Isle of Man and won the Formula One TT on a Ducati.