Fastest F1 driver of all time?

[FoxHound]

Jim clarke deserving of mention on these pages. We cannot scientifically deduce his speed, but we can all agree he was fast beyond his peers.
And in his day, that means he had cajunas the size of Mozambiquan Mangos.

Old jimmy bob. Pay your respects duly.

[Emerson.F]

Fair enough as it is your opinion. But I would say Hakkinen had Schumacher licked for pure pace over a lap.
The way he made those McLaren's squirm under his boot was roy of the rovers stuff particularly when MSC was in car comparable to Maximum attack Hakkinen.
Schumacher was superior in race trim as he had the stamina and nous for battle. He is renowned as "der Meister" for this and of course "der regen meister" for his rain heroics.

Hakkinen was just your balls to the wall fly machine. Over a lap was like a demented, demonically possessed bat out of hell with rocket fuel for batshit.
Coulthard was fast in his day, and he was decimated by Hakkinen. Senna felt the wrath of the speed on Hakkinens debut.....outqualified.

Villenueve Snr was also the kind of guy that could literally pluck a second from thin air. You only need visit youtube to see the man's absolute devotion to making 600kgs go faster than is plausible. I hadn't the pleasure of watching him race as I was just out of dad's bag if you catch a man's drift.
But I know enough to say the people I've spoken to at event's I attend, attest to the man's absolute genius at making cars do things you will not credit a mortal to do. He was a top gun, one that deserves recognition amongst Senna, MSC et al. And if you are in any doubt about this, please watch his battle with Rene Arnoux in what is a definite example of speed. It was all about speed.

And Ronnie Peterson? A shameful thing about this world is that you can see the man burned alive(youtube), yet you cannot see his prowess at speed.
Speed.

Appreciate your pov.

[ringo]

Jim clarke deserving of mention on these pages. We cannot scientifically deduce his speed, but we can all agree he was fast beyond his peers.
And in his day, that means he had cajunas the size of Mozambiquan Mangos.

Old jimmy bob. Pay your respects duly.

Or was it his Lotus?

[ChrisF1]

Jim Clark was quick in anything, fantastic driver.

[McG]

They say Raikkonen is pretty quick.

[Just_a_fan]

Clark and Senna are the standout quick drivers for me. Fangio could be blindingly fast too when he needed to be - Nurburgring 1957 comes to mind although he was on new tyres when he set his succesive lap records. His philosophy was to win as slowly as possible though.

Many others - from Stewart to Hamilton through Hakkinen, Schumacher, Alonso, Raikonnen, Vettel - come to mind. Rosberg is a lot quicker than he's given credit for too.

And we mustn't forget Moss - he could drive anything quickly as demonstrated by his 1955 Mille Miglia victory (half an hour faster than Fangio remember).

[f1316]

I always liked that Irvine quote (think someone on this forum has it as his signature) about the three geniuses being "Schumacher, Senna and Newey" and only Schumacher and Senna could win without Newey's cars.

I've probably said this somewhere in this exact thread (age...) but you've got to think of Ascari too. Lots of reasons to support him being just as fast as Fangio.

[ringo]

Well shumacher had those fast as hell Ferraris when he was dominant.

[f1316]

Well shumacher had those fast as hell Ferraris when he was dominant.

But he also pushed much faster Williams and McLarens to the final race of the season when the Ferrari was not nearly as fast.

Personally I feel he was the perfect balance of that super-quick guy in quali but who also has the Alonso-esque way of being on it every single lap of the race. Obviously others will argue other things, but I liked and agree with the way Irvine put it.

[mnmracer]

Excluding current drivers, and only talking about fastest (so not necessarily best): my three picks would be Ascari, Clark and Senna.

[mnmracer]

I can say with a little more certainty who isn't.
I've looked at the drivers with the worst team-mate records since 1994.

In the past 20 years, 10 Formula One drivers have never even once outqualified their team-mates:
Yuji Ide, Jean-Denis Deletraz, Philippe Adams, Franck Lagorce, Alex Yoong, Jean-Christophe Boullion, Olivier Beretta, Giovanni Lavaggi, Nicolas Kiesa and Roland Ratzenberger. For of those (Ide, Deletraz, Adams and Lagorce) have also failed to even once finish ahead of their team-mates.

[Powershift]

From Who I have seen, Senna and Hamilton were/are head and shoulders above their WDC peers