Slipstream Saturdays: The Top 25 Formula 1 Drivers Of All Time, Part 2

The parade of drivers continues, this time counting down 20 to 16.

There have been 15 countries with drivers representing them to win the world championship. If you look at the top five by championships, there’s a fascinating outlier.

The United Kingdom (population per Wikipedia: 68 million) leads the field with 21 or 20 championships, depending on if Lando Norris could pull off a now very longshot championship this year. Germany (82 million) is second with 12, partly thanks to Michael Schumacher’s seven and Sebastian Vettel’s four.

Brazil (200+ million) is third with eight championships among three drivers, one of which will be in this week’s rankings. The great Juan Manuel Fangio’s five alone brings Argentina (46 million) to fourth.

Then there is Finland (5.6 million), with four championships among three drivers. And to add to this, one of the drivers ranked today who won the championship under the German flag had a father who won the championship under the Finnish flag and retains dual citizenship.

How in the world do the Finns produce so many exemplary drivers? We’ll be looking at their two most notable this week.

The Top 25 Formula 1 Drivers of All Time	by Michael Finley	Bonus (Honorable Mentions)
Part 1 (25 to 21)	Part 2 (20 to 16)	Part 3 (15 to 11)
Part 4 (10 to 7)	Part 5 (6 to 4)	Part 6 (3 to 1)

20. Jochen Rindt

The lone posthumous world champion, Rindt’s best years were taken away far too soon, but he also just didn’t produce enough to put him higher than here.

Rindt performed well early in his career driving bad Cooper cars before moving on to Brabham. There, he was able to beat Jack Brabham near the end of the three-time champion’s career before getting into his dream car at Lotus.

Lotus fell behind in 1969, but Rindt was still able to win a race and finish fourth in points with the third-place constructor.

In 1970. Rindt had only five finishes in the first nine races but won all five. This included a legendary win at Monaco starting from eighth with a year-old car.

The Austrian passed away following a crash during practice for the Italian Grand Prix. Including that race at Monza, four races remained in the season. Jacky Ickx‘s valiant effort came up short, and Rindt clinched the championship with one race remaining.

It’s frustrating to put Rindt here because it seemed like his career was just getting when he started driving in top equipment. But it’s not fair to plenty of other drivers on this list to place him much further without knowing just what would have happened next.

19. Emerson Fittipaldi

It’s also hard to put Fittipaldi directly above Rindt because, in some ways, despite losing to him in his rookie season of 1970, his career played out in a way that Rindt’s probably wouldn’t have. But alas, here we are.

Fittipaldi pretty decisively beat Jackie Stewart to the championship in 1972 in a very dominant Lotus. He lost to Stewart in 1973 despite the Lotus winning the constructors title while almost losing to his teammate Ronnie Peterson. Then, he squeezed out another championship by just three points over Clay Regazoni in 1974 after Stewart retired.

Then in 1975, Fittipaldi was beaten to the championship pretty easily by another champion much higher on this list, Niki Lauda.

That’s effectively it as far as Fittipaldi’s competitive seasons are concerned. The last five years of his career were spent having a miserable time racing for his brother’s team, with only two podiums at Brazil in 1978 and Long Beach in 1980.

Fittipaldi won two championships but had only four really competitive seasons, and even then, it was not that fast. The seasons were not that long, but even then, only six poles over four years is not that impressive in any era for a driver who won two championships during it.

Fittipaldi deserves to be on this list, but not much further because he clearly is the weakest of the multi-time champions. Had Rindt stayed alive and Stewart not retired, he probably wouldn’t be on this list at all.

18. Nico Rosberg

It’s genuinely difficult to judge Rosberg for a number of different reasons.

Maybe the most unique stat Rosberg has is just how few teammates he had throughout his career. In 11 seasons, Rosberg only had five teammates, with just two in the last seven – grandpa era Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton.

The only teammate Rosberg did not beat in at least one season was Mark Webber during his rookie season.

Webber is an underrated driver in many aspects, however, and Rosberg still fared very well as a young rookie at Williams. Although he did not win a race until his seventh season, in a breakout performance in China 2012, he made up for it by getting a fairly high mark in his last five seasons on the grid.

Once the turbo hybrid era began in 2014, the championship basically came down to Hamilton and Rosberg for the next three seasons, as the rest of the field was just nowhere to be seen.

Rosberg pulled out all of the stops in 2016, squeaking out a championship in a race that came down to the wire at Abu Dhabi. At the time, his sudden retirement came as a surprise after the race, but now, knowing what he had to do and sacrifice in 2016 to barely beat Hamilton, it’s not as much of one in hindsight.

Rosberg had speed and a great technical mind. He could adapt to the car, but his Achilles’ Heel was the rain. He never won a wet race and stood out pretty dramatically in an era with a number of standout wet-weather drivers.

The one thing Rosberg will always be is the one in six-and-one. From 2014 to 2020, Hamilton won every single world driver’s championship. Rosberg in 2016 by just five points is the only thing stopping him from seven straight.

17. Kimi Raikkonen

Raikkonen is probably best known now as the ha-ha funny meme guy with the ice cream and the radio messages.

But when Raikkonen was at his absolute peak as a driver in the mid-2000s in F1, he was no joke. We live in a timeline where Raikkonen only won one championship when, in reality, he should have won three.

Raikkonen’s old teammate, Juan Pablo Montoya, was on the Beyond the Grid podcast earlier this year and mentioned that in that era, there was very little conservation in F1 cars. You drove qualifying laps every single lap. And although Schumacher was the face of F1 at the time, there was no doubt that Raikkonen was uniquely talented.

People forget Raikkonen only came two points from beating Schumacher for the championship in 2003 in an unreliable McLaren that finished third in constructors. There’s also a case to be made that Raikkonen would have won in 2005 if Renault wasn’t nearly bulletproof that year, allowing Fernando Alonso to build up a big points lead throughout the season.

One of the main things keeping Raikkonen in 17th place is that he only got one championship thanks to luck, as Alonso and Hamilton took so many points off each other. There’s also his return to F1 from 2011 to 2021, where he clearly wasn’t as good anymore compared to his teammates (Romain Grosjean even didn’t look that bad to him), and it didn’t look particularly great for him to lose to Vettel before Vettel fell off a cliff performance-wise.

Still, when Raikkonen was at the very top of his game, few, if any, were at his tier of driver.

16. Mika Hakkinen

Schumacher’s greatest rival, Hakkinen, had a short prime compared to many other drivers.

When he was in it, he was fantastic and could bring the fight to Schumacher. But there are far too many question marks surrounding both of his championships to conclusively say he’d have beaten Schumacher without luck.

The 1998 championship came down to the final two races, with both Hakkinen and Schumacher tied on points entering them. Hakkinen won the first race conclusively, but then in the last race of the season, Schumacher did not finish the race due to a blown tire.

Then, in 1999, Schumacher broke his leg mid-season at Silverstone, and Hakkinen won the championship by just two points over Eddie “Edmund” Irvine. Haikkinen fended off Schumacher once again at Japan to end the season, as a Schumacher win would have dropped him below Irvine in points.

In 2000, Schumacher returned with a vengeance for the full season and easily beat Hakkinen in points, who spent one more season falling behind teammate David Coulthard before “going on sabbatical.”

Hakkinen was a great champion, but I can’t put him in the top 15, given the unfortunate question marks around both of his championships.