Mick Doohan
Jorge Lorenzo
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 Mick Doohan at #5 and Jorge Lorenzo at #10.
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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 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.