Valentino Rossi
Eddie Lawson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Valentino Rossi leads 5 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Valentino Rossi at #2 and Eddie Lawson at #8.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
The case for Valentino Rossi
Nine world titles and 115 Grand Prix wins across 125cc, 250cc, 500cc and MotoGP, plus records that still stand for premier-class victories, 89, and premier-class podiums, 199, from 432 career starts over 26 seasons. Rossi won the last 500cc two-stroke title in 2001 and the first MotoGP four-stroke title in 2002, then made the defining move of the modern era: he joined a Yamaha that had not won a race in 2003, won first time out at Welkom in 2004 and took the championship, then repeated it in 2005. Titles followed again in 2008 and 2009. His durability is the outlier. He was still winning Grands Prix in 2017 at 38, seventeen years after his first premier-class win, and finished runner-up in 2015 after the most bitter title fight of the era. He also did more than anyone to turn MotoGP into a global commercial property.
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.