SPO: What makes a Great Champion – Part 1

Hello and welcome back to Steve’s Motorsport Blog! Today we have the latest edition of a segment I call “Steve’s Personal Opinion” or SPO for short. This is where I give a more opinionated, sometimes controversial post relating to a specific topic.

I want to talk about something that has been irking me for a while now whilst I’ve been watching Formula 1. I will get this out of way immediately, in that this will be very controversial, especially if you are a fan of a specific team/driver that I am going to mention.

This post is going to be split into two parts, one going over the reasons and drivers who I call “Great” champions, the second part will entail a tangential topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now.

Without further delay, here is Part 1:

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What makes a good champion? There are some obvious traits; must be quick, must have won quite a bit and is very memorable. Using these criteria there are quite a number of drivers in Formula 1 (in no particular order); Schumacher, Senna, Hamilton, Prost, Vettel, Fangio, plus perhaps, a few others. There are other champions, which I could argue that have some but not all of these traits. These could include (in my opinion) Piquet, Fittipaldi and Villeneuve.

However, what makes a great champion? It needs to be all of those things plus a few other traits. These traits in my opinion relate to things outside of the car. These could include how much they do for the team, for the sport and for society at large.

Now here’s where my controversial opinion comes: Some of you might be thinking “where’s X driver on your list? Certainly X driver is a good or great champion”?

Putting together my variables mentioned above, and whether or not I am a fan of theirs is unrelated, you have this list of my great champions: Fangio, Graham Hill, Stewart, Lauda, Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton.

Why these drivers? In my opinion, these drivers have done the most outside of the race car, or in some cases, outside of a Formula 1 race car. Let’s go through each one.

Fangio was the first multiple world champion who claimed championships with different teams. In his case, nearly every championship was with a different manufacturer. He won with Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Mercedes and Ferrari. Yet, he won 5 championships. To this day, this feat is unrivalled. His final trait, is that his legacy is that of being the first superstar/legend of the sport. This is important to factor in, as being that he is first legend; that comes with it, a certain bonus factor.

Next; Graham Hill. He is perhaps one of my favourite and most respected champions. Firstly, he won multiple championships in Formula 1. However, it was what he did outside of a Formula 1 car that garners my respect the most. Not only did he win a bunch in F1, but he regularly competed in other series with some success, and often at the same time.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, this is just not done anymore. He competed in sportscar racing as well as what would eventually become Indycar. To this day, Jack Brabham is the only Triple Crown winner; that is winning the Formula 1 title (alternatively, just the Monaco Grand Prix), the 24hrs of Le Mans, and the Indianapolis 500. Considering he did this 50 years ago and it still hasn’t been repeated, it’s a huge feather in his cap.

Up next is Jackie Stewart. He did everything and more; a thrice world champion and an arguably successful team owner (the team he started after changing hands a few times is now the most dominant team in Formula 1, Red Bull Racing). However, it’s what he did for the sport during his career is why I put him here on this list. He was chair of the Grand Prix Driver’s Association, trying his best to increase the safety in the sport, where nearly every event would suffer a horrible incident that often claimed the lives of the drivers that competed in them. He may not have been appreciated for his efforts at the time, but he is celebrated now for it.

Next up, Niki Lauda. He was not only an incredible driver, he was instrumental in bettering the teams he was apart of. He helped lift Ferrari in the mid-70’s, becoming the first champion for them since John Surtees over a decade previous. He continued to lift McLaren while he was there, starting the run of dominance that they would have in the mid to late 80’s. Last but certainly not least, as a team consultant to Mercedes when they returned as a factory works team in 2010, laying the groundwork for their record-setting run of 8 team championships in a row from 2014 thru 2021, while also plucking Hamilton from McLaren for 2013.

Now for another of my favourite champions, Ayrton Senna. Ayrton is the first on my list where his accolades outside of the sport drew wide acclaim. Not only was he one of the fastest and most successful drivers of all time, he could have been maybe even THE greatest of all time, had it not for his tragic death in 1994. What wasn’t known at the time was his philanthropic work back in his native Brazil. The charity in his name today does that country a lot of good. Not only that, but he helped develop one of the best driver’s road cars of all time; the original Honda/Acura NSX. He also tried to better the sport on the safety side, combating with Belestre on occasion to get it done.

Here is the final driver on my favourite champions list: Michael Schumacher was one of the greatest talents of all-time. Of course there needs no mention of all the records before Lewis Hamilton started claiming them for himself. It was this, coupled with his ability to help better the team around him, is what makes him one of the great champions in my mind. He mirrored something Lauda before him did, which was that he made Ferrari a championship winning team again. He took Ferrari’s first driver’s and team’s championships in over a decade (in his case it was over 20 years).

As we’ve learned since Michael, that feat is something that is perhaps the hardest in all of Formula 1. Many champions have tried, but not many have succeeded.

Despite his early career being somewhat stained from some…questionable acts (Hill in ’94, Villeneuve in ’97 for example) those largely gave way in the prime of his career and we don’t often think lesser of him for it.

Finally on this list of my great champions, we have Lewis Hamilton. I’ll start this section by saying that I am not personally a fan of Lewis Hamilton as a driver. So what I say here is not from a biased perspective.

We can’t deny Lewis’ talent. We have to remember that his rookie season had him paired with the reigning double world champion in Fernando Alonso, and beat him. Since then, he’s got the most wins, most poles, most podiums and most points in Formula 1 history.

Up until this past year, he was able to win a race in every year he competed, back to his rookie year in 2007 at McLaren, despite not having a championship winning calibre car in each of those years after 2008. Yes, he had the most dominant cars with Mercedes, in the most dominant era of Formula 1 history, but he’s followed Schumacher and Lauda in helping build the team around him into the force it was during that run.

With the exception of times when he had his infamous clashes with teammates Fernando Alonso and Nico Rosberg (whom we can consider rivals for the title who happen to share a car), he has been a pretty courteous teammate.  If Russel, Bottas or Button were quicker, he’d be the first to congratulate them in parc ferme or back in the garage. Lewis doesn’t escalate tensions with others (or at least to the same degree as some others). He’s been monumental in speaking up for Black Rights and other humanitarian efforts, which he often gets unjust backlash for.

He does complain a lot at times, so much so it’s now become a meme. And as much as I find it old and eye rolling, it often helps the team out and it can be used as a base of constructive feedback to better the team. For these reasons, I think Lewis deserves to be considered a Great champion.

These Great champions are easily ones that I think that Formula 1 aspiring young drivers can look up to as role models for how to conduct themselves on and off the track. If I had a kid who wanted to make it to Formula 1, these are the kinds of drivers I would want them to end up like.

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Thanks for another edition of SPO, if you liked what you read, please comment and hit the buttons below!