Here are the top three race car drivers of all time.
Alain Prost
Alain Prost is a well-known race car driver from France. He has been a Formula One Drivers’ Champion on four occasions (his record only broken by Michael Schumacher). Alain Prost was the top Grand Prix champion from 1987 to 2001. He was awarded the World Sports Awards of the Century in the motor sport category in 1999.
Often called “The Professor” for his intellectual attitude to the sport, he proved to be a fierce rival to his contemporaries Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell. Senna and Prost have had a series of notorious clashes, including one at the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix that won Prost his third Drivers’ Championship.
Mario Andretti
Mario Gabriele Andretti is a retired Italian American race car driver. He is considered America’s hero and was named United States Driver of the Year in three decades (1967, 1978, and 1984). He is one of only two racing drivers to have won at Formula One, IndyCar, World Sportscar Championship and NASCAR. No9 other American has only won the Indianapolis 500 (1969), Daytona 500 (1967) and the Formula One World Championship. Andretti, along with Juan Pablo Montoya, is the only driver to win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, Formula One, and an Indianapolis 500.
His record at the 1978 Dutch Grand Prix stands unbeaten by another American driver. Andretti has a total of 109 wins on major circuits in the span of his career. In 1993, his IndyCar win made him the first race car driver to win IndyCar races in four different decades and the first to win automobile races of any kind in five.
Michael Schumacher
Retired race car driver, Michael Schumacher is a German legend who has been a seven-time Formula One World Champion. Named the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year twice, Schumacher is the holder of many Formula One’s driver records.
2002 saw him become the only racing driver in Formula One history to stay in the top three in every race in one season. The Formula One official Website calls him “statistically the greatest driver the sport has ever seen.”
In November 2014, Schumacher was paralyzed and wheelchair-bound due to an accident.
