Senna, Schumacher, Hamilton? Take your pick!
For me the beauty is that all 3 have talents unique to themselves.
Race craft? Heavens above - Hamilton may just have the finest racecraft of any F1 driver in history. No one, in my lifetime, has balanced aggression and made it look so clean and fair better than Lewis. Cast your mind back to Bahrain 2014. Possibly the finest display of defensive driving I have ever seen from an f1 driver. Against the fresh rubbered car of Nico Rosberg, Lewis showed his superiority in a sensational display of car placement and long term thinking. Nico may have bettered him in 2016 (using a mixture of good fortune and his own raw speed to clinch that particular title) but no event better displayed the gap in quality between Lewis and Nico better than Bahrain 2014. He balances the head with the heart. His driving is of something that is supreme intelligence but that intelligence is informed by his soul - a soul that has an undying love of driving, something that no other driver around him has.
In terms of team dedication and commitment no man has ever displayed that better in my life than Michael Schumacher. He was my idol growing up (and continues to be in many ways!) so naturally I will always put him number 1 but looking back on his career, particularly his Ferrari career from 1996-2006, I will always be struck by how he gelled the team around him. How his dedication to be on first name terms with everyone who wore the prancing horse crest, his obsession with the technical details, that instinctive flick into the corner at the last possible moment...a moment when 99% of other drivers would have believed to have been gone. It's that relentlessness in commitment to the men and women around him, that bravery and trust with the machine he handles on the tarmac that makes his mind boggling displays such as in Spain 1996, Hungary 1998, Monaco 1997 or Brazil 2006 that little bit more understandable. Many mistook his cold exterior for something other than soul. But in his cranial brilliance he exemplified the best of the sport.
But where there's cranial brilliance you can balance that out with soulful brilliance. And of course when it comes to soul, charisma and engima, the display of racing in it's purest form, how can anyone overlook Ayrton Senna? I may have been too young to remember the years of his glory on the racetrack but the evidence is there on the gritty interfered on board footage that has become a favourite of mine on Youtube. Senna dancing round the streets of Monaco? Like Jacob wrestling with God. It is poetic and parabolic beauty that is unmatched. You believe people when they say he was the greatest.
For me, it's just a pleasure to have lived through a period of f1 where Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton defined the sport. Who else will join them in future? Frankly, with those three...who cares?
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