Current FIA president Jean Todt admits “all the records are due to be broken” as Lewis Hamilton closes in on Michael Schumacher’s two most significant totals.
The Mercedes driver scored his 87th Formula 1 victory last weekend at Silverstone moving him to within four of the German legend’s tally of 91, a figure he could in theory surpass at Mugello, a circuit owned by Ferrari.
His win also put him 30 points ahead of his only realistic title challenger Valtteri Bottas, as he looks to equal Schumacher’s total of seven F1 championships this year.
And Todt, who was team boss at Ferrari when Michael was setting all those historic achievements, was asked about the prospect of seeing Hamilton surpassing them.
“If you have a link to the records, you’d like the records to stay,” the Frenchman acknowledged last weekend. “On the other side, normally a record has a duration in life. All the records are due to be broken.
“Clearly Mercedes and Lewis are putting everything together to bring the record… clearly it’s admirable. If it’s well-deserved, you can only congratulate him.”
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Also praising Hamilton is legendary F1 commentator Murray Walker, who is one of the very few people that has witnessed the entire 70-year history of the sport.
Commenting on who he considers the F1 G.O.A.T., the 96-year-old believed it was better to look at it generationally, naming the likes of Sir Jackie Stewart, Jim Clark, Schumacher and Ayrton Senna, but he admits the stats don’t lie.
“I used to say [Juan Manuel] Fangio but I think I’m going to have to say very shortly Lewis Hamilton,” he told the Australian GP’s In The Fast Lane podcast.
“If you look at it in terms of statistics, he’s already got more poles than Michael Schumacher.
“He’s got at least three years in him if he doesn’t hurt himself or leave Mercedes for some reason or they decide to stop, in which case he’s got at least another three championships ahead of him, so statistically he will become the greatest.”
Walker also believes Hamilton has one quality that places him ahead of the two drivers most compare him with.
“He’s also in my opinion — and this is very contentious indeed — better than either Schumacher or Senna,” he claimed.
“Because both of them, Schumacher and Senna, adopted at various times in their career highly debatable driving tactics.
“Like Schumacher stopping deliberately at Monaco to prevent [Fernando Alonso] getting pole position and colliding with [Jacques] Villeneuve at Jerez in 1997, like Senna with [Alain] Prost in 1990 in Japan.
“Lewis Hamilton has never been anything like that. He’s always driven as clean as a whistle.
“He’s an extremely nice, gigantically talented driver, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen anybody like him before.”
