Mick Doohan
Eddie Lawson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mick Doohan leads 5 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mick Doohan at #5 and Eddie Lawson at #8.
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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.
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.