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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Interesting analysis, but the main point remains: You can not compare drivers across different eras. Is Lewis the GOAT? Yes. Is Michael the GOAT? Yes.

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The whole idea of a GOAT is just stupid. Lewis is very good, if he didn't move to Mercedes he'd be another 1 time WDC.

The best drivers make it to the top, but that's it. Alonso only won 2 and he was just as good as Lewis and Schumacher (arguably better considering what he could do in cars of almost any quality, lewis had a bad car once his entire career)

I feel stupid arguing this, but if you watched F1 during Schumacher era it was obvious that Schumacher is really the best driver. While still at Benetton, he demonstrated his abilities, then with the top car he showed enormous consistency. Other drivers haven’t achieved it in the similar cars.

When Schumacher moved to Ferrari, Ferrari was not at all the best car, far from it. But the relentless work he did there improved the car far faster than the other team could. HE made the car better. It was an era with no (or few?) limitations to testing and Schumacher was known for testing a lot more than other drivers.

I would argue that Senna is the GOAT and it’s not even close.

But yeh these GOAT conversations better with beers and stakes and people yelling at each other in person!

I hope you meant steaks...

but agreed, this is true in any sport, there's no real way to compare across eras and in the end it's just opinion.

argh, yeah steaks :-P

Hmmh, I took away the exact opposite point. They developed a model to do exactly this and Fangio from the 1950s came out on top. He raced for four different teams and the driver's contribution (versus the car's and the team's) was 58% compared to 19% today.

There is no way for Lewis to assume that much responsibility even if he wanted to though, to continue this example. I'd go as far as to argue with constant rule changes it's not even the same sport anymore, especially the gap between Fangio and Lewis etc.

I agree, cross-generation driver comparisons are really hard.

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