Jorge Lorenzo
John Surtees
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 Jorge Lorenzo at #10 and John Surtees at #11.
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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.
The case for John Surtees
Seven world championships in nine seasons of Grand Prix racing: the 500cc title in 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1960, and the 350cc title in 1958, 1959 and 1960, taking the double in each of those three years. He won 38 Grands Prix, 22 of them in the premier class, almost all on MV Agusta after starting with Norton. In 1958 and 1959 he was close to unbeatable in both classes he contested. He then walked away from motorcycles at 26 and moved to cars, winning the 1964 Formula 1 world championship with Ferrari, which makes him the only person to have won world titles on two and four wheels. That crossover, together with his later career as a constructor, gives him a place on any list even though his motorcycle career was short.