Mike Hailwood
Eddie Lawson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mike Hailwood leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mike Hailwood at #4 and Eddie Lawson at #8.
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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.
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.