Has Lewis Hamilton’s seventh world title finally cemented his place as F1’s greatest driver of all time?

Hamilton equalled Michael Schumacher’s record of seven world titles and has already eclipsed his record number of wins, but statistical evidence suggest he is not the greatest driver of all time … yet

Lewis Hamilton cemented his place among Britain’s greatest ever athletes on Sunday with victory in the Turkish Grand Prix securing a record-equalling seventh world championship, tying Michael Schumacher’s tally 12 years after winning his maiden title.

With Hamilton already taking Schumacher’s all-time win record, his 94th Grand Prix victory at the weekend ensured that his greatness within the sport cannot be doubted by any, and questions have already turned to ask where Hamilton will set the mark for future generations to aim for.

But one question remains unanswered: is he really the greatest of all time?

With the same number of titles as Schumacher and three more race wins to his name than the legendary German, there is concrete evidence to back up Hamilton’s claim to being the greatest of all time. But it has never been a question that anyone could answer with conviction, given the influencing factors across different eras of motorsport and the dominance that a car can give a driver. Greatness in sport is open to opinion and bias, after all.

What can’t be argued though is statistics. Using quantitative analysis of the last 70 years of Formula One racing, dating way back to the very first Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1950, each and every minute detail can help to form an educated argument over who really is the greatest F1 driver of all time.

Read more: Hamilton wins seventh world title

Carteret Analytics has taken its leading-edge quantitative analysis research model developed from the investment banking world and applied it to the sports sector, first within football to aid player recruitment, manager assessment and team performance analysis around the world, and now when it comes to F1. By measuring 40 different metrics to assess every world champion across every race ever competed, it aims to draw one clear objective conclusion: who really is the greatest of all time.

The study takes five key factors into account to determine a rating that can then be applied to every driver within the sport: expected wins, speed, agility, dominance and consistency. Using this method, the age-old argument of ‘he was in the best car’ can be thrown to the wayside, and although titles and wins are not completely ignored, they are normalised in order to try and assess what really makes a driver great.

It is not quite as simple as taking those five attributes and coming up with a rating though. A driver’s Carteret Rating involves six tiers of algorithms, including adjustments for success, era variability, contemporaneous conditions, race structure, championship structure, number and level of competitive drivers among other more intricate details.

From lights out to the chequered flag, there are moments that help to determine a race result, something that Carteret Analytics label Key Race Events (KREs), and it’s these KREs that enable an unbiased assessment to be made to decipher the greats. Recently, Sir Jackie Stewart caused a stir by suggesting that Lewis Hamilton could never feature in his top three drivers of all time because those that went before him took greater risk at a time when the sport demanded more skill, with the likes of Juan Manuel Fangio and Jim Clarke featuring higher in his estimation than the two seven-time champions of Schumacher and, now, Hamilton.

But put them all in the same cars, in the same era, and who would emerge on top?

Well it seems that Stewart may be on to something. Though Hamilton and Schumacher both feature in the top three, neither of them are able to topple Fangio, the five-time world champion from Argentina who dominated the first decade of the sport. Though Hamilton edges Schumacher on expected wins, speed and dominance, Schumacher possesses greater agility by some way. The pair share a similar consistency that comes as no surprise given they possess the exact same number of titles and wins.

However, no matter how you look at it, neither are able to statistically surpass Fangio, who dominates all five attributes among F1’s three most successful world champions in history.

It also accounts for the argument of ‘what could have been’. With death an unfortunate yet very real threat throughout the first 40 years of the sport, many have asked what could have been for those who tragically lost their lives behind the wheel. There are few, for example, that believe Ayrton Senna would have remained a three-time world champion had he not been killed in 1994, yet the Carteret analysis is able to show how their level of success would have translated in the future.

It’s no surprise to hear that Senna would have been higher than his surprising position of sixth. But to learn that Alberto Ascari rated higher than Fangio in four of the five key attributes comes as an educating revelation for a younger generation unaware of the Italian’s talent, and had he not lost his life in a testing accident at Monza in 1955, he could easily have challenged Fangio for the claim of being F1’s greatest of all time.

While Fangio’s and Schumacher’s records are set in stone, Hamilton’s admission on Sunday that he feels like he’s “just getting started” is an ominous warning to his rivals that he is not planning on leaving the sport anytime soon. "I'm really hopeful for a better year next year and I would love to stay. I feel like we've got a lot of work to do here, we've only just started our work to make ourselves accountable as a sport,” he said, with contract talks expected with Mercedes imminently.

Hamilton may no longer be motivated by the quest to break records so much as he is to change the face of the sport he loves so dearly, but at this current rate of success he will surpass Fangio’s rating at some point next season, making him statistically and objectively the greatest racing driver of all time. How fitting would it be for that to occur during a record-breaking eighth world championship win next season, which is exactly what is expected of him given the rules currently in place will continue due to the coronavirus crisis and crippling costs that this year generated.

It’s going to take a drastic rule change in 2022 for Hamilton’s reign of dominance to be ended, but by then he is highly likely to be an eight-time world champion and sitting out in front on his own as the greatest driver in history. Like him or loathe him, it is hard to dispute.