Who is the best of British?

The quest to establish the GOAT - the Greatest Of All Time - has an irresistible pull in all sports. F1 is no exception, and those countries lucky enough to have produced multiple champions can also argue over their greatest sons. Ten of the 32 drivers to have been crowned F1 world champion are British, but of those - who is the best?

In many ways, it's a fatuous debate that can never produce a truly objective answer. But that's not the point. Such arguments lie at the heart of the enduring appeal of F1. The answer matters less than the journey required to get there.

In terms of victories, reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton is building a strong case to be considered the best of British. Since winning last year's US GP, where he took his 32nd victory, he has been at the top of the British winners table, and will surely add substantially to his current tally of 40 (before the Singapore GP).

But that number tells only part of the story, without taking into account factors such as the era and machinery in which different drivers raced. Simply adding up wins could never alone place Hamilton above Mike Hawthorn, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, John Surtees, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Jenson Button. Finding Britain's F1 GOAT is far more complex. But statistical success is the obvious place to start...

ACHIEVEMENTS

While Hamilton has the advantage in terms of race victories, Sir Jackie Stewart stands above him courtesy of his three world championships - for the next few months, at least, since Hamilton has a strong chance of joining Stewart as a triple champion in 2015. But when considering championship wins, it's also necessary to factor in opportunities to win.

Here, there is a degree of subjectivity, but in the case of Hamilton you can legitimately argue that on top of the 2008 and '14 titles he did win, he also had a car capable of doing so in '07, '10 and '12. In the first two of those, he was in contention in the final race, while in the third he lost an enormous number of points to unreliability and team blunders.

This metric is a flawed one, but Stewart stands out with a 60 per cent win rate. Arguably, he had five shots at the title, missing out only in 1968 and '72 - and in the first of those years he was a long shot, with two wet-weather wins boosting his tally.

Hamilton is arguably ill-served by this statistic, given that one of his losses was beyond his control and another came during a controversial rookie season. Six of the British champions sit at 50 per cent, with Clark probably the most unfortunate of those, since he would surely have won more than two titles had the reliability of his Lotus machinery been better.

When it comes to wins, both the overall number and the win rates are significant. Hamilton stacks up extremely well, winning almost a quarter of his races. But Clark's record is extraordinary: he won more than a third of the races he started. Even more astonishingly, he won more than half of the races he finished; weighed against his 25 victories is just a single second place, at the Nurburgring in 1963.

Nigel Mansell and James Hunt also come out strongly using this metric, but again this is distorted by the quality of their machinery. John Surtees and Jenson Button, for example, drove cars that were not capable of winning more often, which skews their percentages.

Stewart and Clark must be ranked above Hamilton, although Hamilton can legitimately be regarded as the third-strongest, particularly when you consider that the era in which he
races is more competitive than that of Clark.

SPEED

Short of putting the 10 British champions in identical cars in their prime, any evaluation of speed is speculative.

Qualifying is the most relevant metric and, statistically, Hamilton leads the way with 49 pole positions - a strike rate of more than one in four. Again that puts him near the top, but it pales in comparison to that of Clark, who isn't far off achieving a 50 per cent pole rate, with an average margin of almost a second. This reflects just how dominant he was in the 1960s. What stood out about Clark was his ability to carry speed into the corner, essential in the lower-powered era in which he excelled.

Damon Hill also comes out pretty well in this comparison, and while all of his poles were taken for Williams, his ability to deliver a fast lap under pressure belies his undeserved reputation as a 'lucky' winner of the world championship.

RACECRAFT

Where Hamilton does have the advantage over Clark is that he is a driver with superior racecraft in terms of wheel-to-wheel battling. This is generally regarded as Clark's main weakness, although considering he was so often out front, it's fair to say that his speed did the hard work. In other words, he didn't need to battle through the pack all that often.

"He wasn't a fighter," said Clark's 1963 championship-winning mechanic Cedric Selzer. "It wasn't in his character. He was a fast racing driver. He passed cars, but I never saw him actually fighting. He didn't need to."

While Hamilton's overtaking ability is second to none, he is also prone to the occasional error. This year's Hungarian GP was a reminder of that, even though over the past 18 months he has become very consistent. But when balancing a mix of wheel-to-wheel racing ability and minimising errors, it's hard to look past Jackie Stewart, whose mastery of racing situations makes him the stand-out in terms of racecraft.

Button is arguably the modern equivalent of Stewart, with his brilliant ability to grasp his place in a race while it's ongoing. Graham Hill also stands out in this respect.

Mike Hawthorn's finest hour exemplified great racecraft. While most famous for his slightly fortuitous 1958 title, his first world championship race victory at Reims in '53, beating Juan Manuel Fangio in a wheel-to-wheel slipstreamer, has been hailed by many as the greatest race of all time.

DOMINANCE

The truly great drivers define their era. Throughout the history of the world championship, it's almost possible to go from year to year, picking out the standard-setting drivers of the time.

It's a path that starts with Juan Manuel Fangio back in the early 1950s, continuing through to Stirling Moss (who is cruelly ineligible in this particular evaluation of British world champions because he never managed to win the title) all the way through to more recent years and Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel.

Of the British champions, few can be considered to be era-defining. Hamilton may yet become so if he manages to rack up a few more titles, but it's only really Clark and Stewart who tick this box.

Mansell was part of the quartet of big beasts that bestrode the 1980s and early 1990s, alongside Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Nelson Piquet, but for all his qualities, he was never able to dominate for more than his championship-winning season in '92.

WET-WEATHER PERFORMANCES

The legend of so many drivers has been formed in wet races, when they can really show their poise, feel and adaptability. Of the 10 British champions, all except Hawthorn won in rain-hit races. Hamilton has six wins in the rain to his name, most famously his dominant victory in the 2008 British GP, which rightly stands out as one of the greatest wet wins in history.

As Stewart himself put it: "Lewis drove almost flawlessly to win by 68 seconds - an enormous margin - and demonstrated that he's unquestionably the best wet-weather driver of this current generation."

You could add "or any other generation" to Stewart's statement, were you to include one caveat. For while Hamilton is a sensational driver in full-wet conditions, a magician seemingly capable of carrying more speed into and through corners in slippery conditions, in mixed conditions he is less impressive.

At the recent British Grand Prix, for example, team-mate Nico Rosberg was catching him at two seconds per lap on slicks in the damp when Hamilton headed to the pits. That pattern was also seen when Hamilton and Button were together at McLaren; Button generally had the edge when conditions were changeable.

Almost half of Button's wins (seven out of 15) have come in rain-affected races. Often, sound judgement of when to change tyres has been at the heart of those victories. In Hungary 2011, for example, McLaren tried to call both Button and Hamilton in for wets when rain came; Hamilton obeyed, Button overruled and went on to win.

"It's because I feel more through my body rather than through my eyes to get the feeling of the car on the circuit," says Button of his ability. "It's about feeling it rather than seeing it's wet."

Yet Button doesn't have a dominant full-wet victory that can be considered among the greatest in the history of F1. Stewart's win by more than four minutes at the Nurburgring Nordschleife in 1968 is heralded as one of the great wet drives (Graham Hill was second, but only after spinning his Lotus and stalling while battling to hold off Jochen Rindt).

Surtees took a famous win in the rain for Ferrari at Spa in 1966, while among Clark's three wet-race wins are two dominant triumphs in Belgium; the third, at Reims in '63, was merely hit by showers. And who can forget Damon Hill's defeat of Michael Schumacher at a sodden '94 Japanese GP?

Mansell lacks trademark wet victories. Binning it while leading the 1984 Monaco GP for Lotus after touching a white line is arguably his most famous wet-weather moment.

MYTH

This is the most subjective category of all: there is no way to quantify this, save for reflecting on how these drivers are revered today. Clark, taken from motorsport by an accident not of his making in the Deutschland Trophy Formula 2 race at Hockenheim in 1968, still at the height of his powers, is probably second only to Senna in terms of his myth.

What would he have achieved had his career played out in full? None of the other drivers in this list can hope to compete with that - save perhaps for one.

As the statistics we've already examined prove, Hunt could hold his own in every category and thanks to his force of personality and the belief that he typified how people thought a racing driver should be in the 1970s, he is still cited as the template.

While he survived his career, his loss at the age of just 45 in 1993 is still felt. Neither can the indomitable spirit of Mansell be ignored, while Stewart's legacy in terms of improved safety and raising the bar for professionalism, makes him a significant figure.

It's unfair to assess Hamilton in this category at this stage, but his impact on popular culture cannot be ignored. His celebrity lifestyle earns him criticism, but it gives him a global reach no other British racer has experienced.

Surtees also deserves a mention in this category. His success in winning four 500cc motorcycling titles before switching to cars makes him unique as a world championship winner on both two wheels and four.

WORK ETHIC

Drivers succeed through hard work, even those who appear not to be trying. But it's fair to say that some work harder than others. Hunt, for example, was famous for disappearing for hours on end while supposedly testing.

Clark, despite his reputation as a great 'natural' talent, had a far better technical understanding than he's given credit for. His great ability was to be able to connect what the car was doing to its setup and communicate that to the Lotus mechanics. Graham Hill, by contrast, was said to be more effective at indicating how the car should be rather than suggesting a way to achieve that.

Damon Hill earned his unlikely shot with Williams through diligent testing work, while Surtees was a driver with tremendous technical understanding, whose work in creating the famous Hondola with British company Lola - which he took to victory at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1967 - is testament to his force of will and brilliance.

CAREER SAVVY

This category is all about being in the right place at the right time in order to succeed. Internationally, Juan Manuel Fangio is the driver who is so often hailed as the standout in this regard due to his (often enforced) team-hopping in the 1950s. Hamilton also does particularly well in this category, timing his switch from McLaren (who haven't won a race since he left) to Mercedes to perfection.

Stewart also stacks up well, throwing his lot in with Ken Tyrrell after early success with BRM. He was also key to Tyrrell's decision to ditch Matra when the French manufacturer wanted the team to drop Cosworth engines. While that led to a one-season setback with a customer March in 1970, in the long term it allowed Tyrrell to become constructors in their own right and win the '71 and '73 titles.

At the other end of the scale is Surtees, whose prodigious ability behind the wheel is all too easy to overlook, thanks to him ending up in the wrong team at the wrong time. His tally of just six wins and one world championship (on four wheels, that is) does his talent little justice. Had things worked out better for him at Ferrari, he had the potential to score far more wins than he actually managed.

VERDICT

So after assessment in eight categories, which of these 10 champions comes out as Britain's F1 GOAT? Each of the factors mentioned above must be taken into account and statistical success weighed against more subjective criteria. Only one driver features in the top three of every category, and that's Jackie Stewart, whose success, speed, virtuosity and cultural impact make him the real deal. There are no weaknesses in Stewart's armoury.

Next up is Clark, who also scores highly in most categories. We'd rank Hamilton third overall, ahead of Mansell. And given that he potentially still has five or more years left at the top level to add to his already incredible tally of wins and championships, and build on his myth and legacy, Hamilton could well move even higher up these rankings, should we revisit this list in future years.

1st: Jackie Stewart

2nd: Jim Clark

3rd: Lewis Hamilton

4th: Nigel Mansell

5th: Graham Hill

6th: John Surtees

7th: James Hunt

8th: Damon Hill

9th: Jenson Button

10th: Mike Hawthorn

'Who's the greatest?' Ah, that thorny old topic, debated endlessly in grandstands and gin-halls across the land since sporting contests began.

We make no apology for revisiting that theme in this month's F1 Racing - though with a very particular twist. Our quest, undertaken with considerable aplomb by AUTOSPORT editor EDD STRAW, has been to find out which of Britain's 10 - count 'em - world champions is most deserving of the 'number one' accolade.

From Hawthorn to Hamilton, each is spliced and scored in numerous categories, among them speed, wet-weather prowess and individual talent for myth-making. At a moment when Lewis seems unstoppable in pursuit of a third world title, it's instructive to be able to add a little perspective to his achievements.

The issue, currently on sale, also includes a one-to-one interview with Nico Rosberg, Hamilton's closest challenger, plus a disarmingly frank readers' Q&A with Force India boss Bob Fernley. Ballsy Bob has earned something of a reputation for being F1's most outspoken team boss - and if you buy the issue, you'll have no doubt it's fully deserved