The GOAT

With Lewis Hamilton winning his sixth Formula One World Drivers title at Austin, Texas on Sunday, the world of Formula One has gone into overload trying to decide if Lewis is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).

With the apparent obsession with statistics in sport, especially the world of motor sport, this tends to be a discussion which has been played out in both the popular and specialist media about this time each season, or at least over the past decade. Michael Schumacher achieving 7 world titles, and now Lewis achieving 6 (with the potential to win more than Schumacher over the next few seasons) allows the scale of their respective achievements to be talked about at length.

However from my point of view the discussion is reasonably pointless. With the many aspects of the sport of Formula One (driver skill, car design, engines, tyres, team structures, budget) even if there was an ability to in some way compare drivers of different eras (and I'm a firm believer that this is virtually impossible) if drivers haven't raced against each other at the time any comparison is worthless.

As Martin Brundle has often been quoted as stating "the older we get, the better we were" so the role of our own sentiment in these discussions plays a significant part in what we believe to be a strong argument.

Fangio, Clark, Stewart, Senna, Prost, Schumacher, Vettel and Hamilton have all achieved significant statistical achievements in terms of wins, pole positions, wins to starts ratios and incredible, possibly super human racing achievements. All of these great drivers have achieved their championship wins in cars that were somewhere close to the front of the grid in each of their respective campaigns, with a handful of notable exceptions in individual races where driver and car have defied the form guide.

Senna in the European Grand Prix of 1993 is an obvious example, but Clark, Fangio and Stewart all won races by massive margins; Prost had a reputation of winning at the slowest speed necessary (and won four titles so the plan was effective), and several drivers also tarnished their reputations at times by using more dubious tactics along the way.

Schumacher driving into Damon Hill or Jacques Villeneuve stand out for me; and it is puzzling that a driver with such an abundance of talent ever needed to take out their rivals, but maybe this is more a reflection of their competitive desire than anything else.

As a fan of the underdog I totally admire and respect the achievements of these multiple F1 World Champions (Senna and Fangio in my humble opinion are two of the greatest), but the achievement of drivers and teams simply making it to the F1 circus is significant on its own, let alone the stories of adversity that accompany many of these achievements.

Whilst I'm not about to suggest that Roberto Moreno qualifying the 1992 Andrea Moda at Monaco in 1992 makes him a contender for Greatest Of All Time, how could we compare his performance at this one race compared to the other 25 qualifiers in the same race, let alone the achievements of other drivers in other races. Not everyone was driving for Andrea Moda!

So whilst I don't think its ever possible to identify the GOAT in the world of Formula One, I love the fact that we talk about this idea each year, and I congratulate Lewis Hamilton on his incredible achievement and look forward to seeing what else he can achieve in 2020 and beyond. Maybe Roberto Moreno and the hundreds of other F1 drivers who have dragged their cars onto a F1 grid should all be considered in the same conversation.

Might I suggest Johnny Herbert in the 1994 Italian Grand Prix (at least for the first several hundred metres) should make him a GOAT contender ? :-)