Ahead of this new F1 season, Lewis Hamilton went so far as to suggest he and Charles Leclerc represented “the strongest pairing F1 has probably ever had”.
F1’s seven-time champion joining forces with a driver many feel is one of the sport’s brightest talents at Ferrari, on paper, is a formidable duo.
So at RacingNews365, we decided to put that theory to the test with one of our traditional polls, and, sorry Lewis, but your claim was overwhelmingly rejected by our readers.
In fairness, Hamilton and Leclerc managed to clinch second place with just over 15 per cent of the vote, just over six per cent clear of Hamilton’s partnership with Nico Rosberg at Mercedes that claimed third spot.
It is perhaps no great surprise, though, the pairing voted F1’s greatest is, of course, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost from the late 1980s at McLaren.
They were two tempestuous years, and although both men won a title apiece – and McLaren the constructors’ championship on each occasion – they were in highly controversial circumstances. But what a glorious two years they were.
Senna and Prost were runaway winners with almost 60 per cent of the vote.
Other pairings – Michael Schumacher/Rubens Barrichello; Juan Manuel Fangio/Sterling Moss; Jim Clark/Graham Hill, and Nigel Mansell/Nelson Piquet – picked up only small percentages.
We offered the option of ‘Other’, which managed two per cent, but, sadly, there was no comment in the comments section to help us offer any insight.
We would loved to have read which other pairings people thought were better than those we had proposed. But we will never know.
