Ranked: The best driver-team pairings ever as Hamilton leaves Mercedes

Lewis Hamilton has called an end to his partnership with Mercedes but where does it rank in terms of the all-time driver-team pairings?

Drivers staying at teams for a long time is rare but what is rarer is when those two combine for the ultimate success.

Who are the best driver/team pairings of all time?

5.) Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull

He may soon be surpassed by Max Verstappen but Sebastian Vettel was the key driver in the arrival of Red Bull.

Having finished no higher than fifth in their first four seasons, Vettel’s arrival in 2009 marked a turning point for the Milton Keynes outfit and one that saw them go from noisy upstarts to title contenders.

Vettel was dominant in the same way that his compatriot Schumacher was. In 2011, he won more races than the rest of the field combined and more than three times as many as the driver with the second most victories.

He won the 2011 championship by 122 points, a then record before improving on that in 2013.

By the time the new engine regulations had come in 2014, Vettel had cemented himself as one of the best drivers in F1 history and he walked so that Verstappen could run.

4.) Ayrton Senna and McLaren

If Prost was the professor, Ayrton Senna brought the South American fire to McLaren.

Senna’s reputation was already high when he joined the team in 1988 but his time with McLaren propelled him into an F1 legend.

A fierce title battle with Prost was won by Senna before they traded championships the following two seasons.

Senna won 35 races with McLaren but it was the way he did that which has had a far longer lasting impact. The driver many feel had the most innate ability, Senna was ruthless in his pursuit for success.

The image of the white and red McLaren with Senna’s yellow, blue and green helmet sticking out barrelling through the streets of Monaco remains one of the most iconic in F1 history and his untimely death only heightened his legacy.

Senna brought a new excitement to Formula 1 and it was Ron Dennis and the McLaren team that gave him the platform to do that.

3.) Max Verstappen and Red Bull

Of the names on this list, Max Verstappen at Red Bull is the only one still going so this duo may well rise up the order, but there is no denying that they deserve a spot right now.

While Vettel was Red Bull’s first champion, Verstappen is their golden child. Raised through the Red Bull academy, he won on his race debut for the main team before going on to become a four-time World Champion in the winner-takes-all style that Red Bull prides itself on. It is difficult to picture Verstappen in any other car than the red, blue and yellow.

2021 was his greatest achievement but 2023 will go down as a historic season, one that is unlikely to ever be beaten.

Verstappen has a whole section on his Wikipedia page of the records he has broken and at 27, he has time on his side to break a whole lot more. The only question is whether he will want to.

2.) Michael Schumacher and Ferrari

A partnership that seems so obvious now but when Michael Schumacher was contemplating his move to Maranello, success was not a given.

Ferrari had gone 16 years without a Drivers’ title, 12 without a Constructors’ and having finished a distant third in the 1995 championship, there was no guarantee they would get back to the top any time soon.

But Schumacher was a game changer. A two-time World Champion already, Schumacher lured his former Benetton colleagues Rory Byrne and Ross Brawn to the team and alongside Jean Todt, they created a dream team that would dominate F1 for years to come.

Schumacher in a Ferrari is the iconic image of F1 and the German’s domination not only reset the course of Ferrari’s trajectory, it inspired many future drivers from the likes of Sebastian Vettel to Lewis Hamilton.

When Schumacher left Ferrari in 2006, he did so as the most successful driver of all-time and to many, still the best to ever do it.

1.) Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes

Schumacher’s Ferrari may be more iconic but what Hamilton has achieved at Mercedes deservedly earns him top spot on this list.

246 grands prix, 84 wins, 78 poles, 153 podiums, 3,949.5 points, 55 fastest laps, 4,210 laps led but most important of all, six Drivers’ titles.

The Mercedes-Hamilton domination was near unstoppable for seven years and had it not been for Nico Rosberg’s gargantuan effort in 2016, Hamilton would most likely have won seven titles in a row and become the outright Championship leader.

It is a partnership that faltered from 2022 onwards when Mercedes fell off the top of the perch but, regardless of how it ended, it still has to be considered the greatest team/driver pairing of all time.

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