🇬🇧 Mike Hailwood

Mike Hailwood was an elite professional racing driver and holds a Racer Rating of 7,219, placing him among the strongest drivers outside the very top echelon of international motorsport. This rating reflects a driver who won regularly at the highest level and whose peers were champions and race winners across Europe and the world. Hailwood competed in Formula 1 from 1963 to 1974, a career of eleven seasons that saw him make 51 starts. He scored two podium finishes but never won a Grand Prix, and averaged a finishing position of seventh across his classified races. His best season came in 1974, his final year, when he scored a podium among eleven rounds to finish tenth in the championship.[1]

Hailwood's record against the elite fields he raced in shows a driver capable of beating multiple champions and strong professionals on individual occasions and across sustained head-to-head records. He finished ahead of Denny Hulme, the 1967 Formula 1 champion, in six of sixteen shared races. Against Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Carlos Reutemann he held winning records, beating Reutemann five times across ten meetings and Beltoise seven times in twelve races. He met Jackie Stewart, winner of three Formula 1 championships, once and finished ahead of him. Against Graham Hill, a three-time champion, he split eighteen races evenly, nine victories and nine defeats each. However, he lost consistently to two other front-running rivals: Emerson Fittipaldi, the 1972 and 1974 champion, beat him twelve times across fifteen races, and Ronnie Peterson finished ahead of him nine times in fifteen shared outings.[2]

Hailwood's Formula 1 career was built primarily at Surtees, where he made 27 of his 51 starts. The team itself did not win races during the period it fielded him. Before his motorsport career, Hailwood had been a dominant force in Grand Prix motorcycle racing, where he won nine world championships and 76 Grand Prix races across ten seasons between 1958 and 1967, earning the nickname "the Bike." He retired from racing in 1974 and has since become a notable figure in motorsport history, with recent cultural attention including a biographical film project announced in 2020.