When choosing the greatest driver, I think it's tough to compare drivers across too many decades, especially if you haven't seen them, or their careers were over before you were born. So I'm going to look at who I consider to be the best F1 driver of my life time, which starts in the late 70's when I first started to follow Formula 1 (as best you could with only the occasional glimpse of F1 on Wide World of Sports and a little newspaper coverage).

Funny thing about my choice for the greatest F1 driver of my lifetime is he wasn't a favourite of mine at the time, in fact I was never really a fan during his career. Sometimes you need the luxury of hindsight to truly appreciate things. Looking back, and comparing what he did, to what those who came before and after, I really think it's a pretty obvious choice.

The greatest Formula 1 driver of my lifetime is Alain Prost, hands down.

As I said, he was never a favourite of mine while he was active. Early in Prost's career I was a Gilles Villeneuve fan, and after Villeneuve it was Senna and Mansell as my favourites, so why would I suggest that Prost is the best ever? I think we need to look at what he did, who he did it with, and who he did it against.

The numbers for Prost are impressive, with 4 World Championships and 51 wins, although both of those numbers were eventually surpassed comfortably by Michael Schumacher with 7 championships and 91 wins.

So why Prost over Schumacher?

I'm a firm believer in the saying, “to be the best, you have to beat the best” and I'm not convinced Schumacher did that. At no time did Schumacher ever have a true title contender as his team mate, and I don't think that was by co-incidence. Schumacher always put himself in a position where he was the entire focus of the team.

Prost, on the other hand, and more often than not, seemed to have a World Champion, past, present or future, sitting in the team car beside him.

Early in his career, first with McLaren then with Renault, Prost had good drivers, but not great drivers, as team mates for perhaps the only time in his career. When he joined the series with McLaren, John Watson was his team mate, followed by Rene Arnoux for a couple of years at Renault.

Although not the most accomplished team mates he would have to contend with, Watson and Arnoux, between them, posted 12 wins and 30 podiums in their F1 careers, never in truly dominant equipment. Still, not too shabby.

In 1984 Prost jumped from Renault back to McLaren to race along side then 2 time World Driving Champion Niki Lauda. Lauda would claim his third championship in Prost's first year back with the team.

Say what you want about Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine, they are maybe, MAYBE, the equal of Watson and Arnoux, but nobody that sat in the other Ferrari (or the Benetton for that matter) during Schumacher's tenure was anywhere near the realm of Niki Lauda.

Lauda went on to record 3 World Driving Championships, 25 race wins and hit the podium 54 times in his career and is an absolute legend in Formula 1. Prost and Lauda were team mates for 2 years, and Prost went on to score his first World Championship the following year, his second back with McLaren, with Lauda still as his team mate.

Towards the end of the 1985 season, Lauda let it be known he was going to call it quits for good this time, so Prost was in for new team mate.

Lauda's replacement at McLaren for 1986 was 1982 World Driving Champion Keke Rosberg, said to be one of the flat-out fastest drivers of his era.

Having beaten Lauda to take his first World Championship in 1985, Prost became the first driver to record back-to-back championships in 25 years (Jack Brabham last did it in 1959-60) by beating another World Champion team mate, Rosberg, in 1986.

So Prost's first 2 World Championship titles came at the expense of former World Driving Champion team mates. That's only been done before by Alberto Ascari, in 1952 and 1953, in a very different era.

Rosberg retired at the end of the 1986 season, and was replaced by Stefan Johansson. 1987 wasn't a banner season for the team. The TAG-Porsche was getting long in the tooth, and definitely not competitive with the Honda. As well, Johansson didn't put up the results McLaren was hoping for and so he moved to Ligier, while McLaren announced Honda would replace the TAG-Porsche engine for 1988.

You'd think at this point Prost would be happy, having the best engine in Formula 1 and two World Driving Champion team mates retired and well in the rear view mirror.

Unfortunately, Prost went from the frying pan into the fire with the arrival of Ayrton Senna as his new McLaren team mate. While Lauda was already a legend by the time Prost joined him, and Rosberg, while still fast, never settled into the McLaren, Senna was right in the midst of creating his own legend.

And there was another problem for Prost. Senna came from Lotus, a team that was using the Honda engine, with whom Senna had already developed a strong relationship. In some ways, Senna was the returning driver and Prost was the new-boy.

1988 was a dream season for McLaren. They had the best engines, the best chassis and the 2 best drivers in the world. They went on to win all but a single race that year, the Italian Grand Prix where Senna was leading with 3 laps to go when he was knocked out lapping Williams sub Jean-Louis Schlesser. The Ferrari's of Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto swept to a very popular win in the first Grand Prix after the death of company founder Enzo Ferrari. How different history might have been had Martin Brundle been allowed to fill in at Williams instead of Schlesser...

Senna went on to take the championship for McLaren during that near-perfect season, despite Prost putting up 7 wins, 7 2nds and 2 retirements from 16 races.

For 1989, the Prost-Senna relationship deteriorated, culminating in the famous collision between the two in Japan, and Senna's subsequent exclusion for cutting the chicane afterwards. After the Senna exclusion, and with only a single race to go, Prost's lead was unassailable, and thus he claimed his third World Driving Championship. Again, defeating a World Champion team mate.

So Prost's first three World Championship titles came at the expense of former World Driving Champion team mates. I don't think that's ever been done before.

With the relationship with Senna broken down, and the favour Senna seemed to curry with both McLaren and Honda, Prost left the team and carried the #1 with him to Ferrari.

And who was going to be teamed with Prost in his first season with Ferrari? Nigel Mansell. And while Mansell hadn't yet won his title (he would do so two years later with Williams) he was still one of the top three or four drivers in F1, and just as tough a team mate as Senna and Lauda.

The 1990 Ferrari was a pretty decent car. The 641 was a development of the previous year's 640, designed by John Barnard, with it's ground-breaking semi-automatic gearbox.

The car kept Prost in the championship hunt all season, until he and Senna met up once again in Japan, with the 2 drivers again colliding, this time into the first corner on the first lap. This time, going into the final race of the season it was Senna that held an unbeatable lead as he claimed his second World Driving Championship.

1991 proved to be a difficult season, as Prost was joined at Ferrari by former Tyrell sensation Jean Alesi, while Mansell had left to return again to Williams, which turned out to be a wise choice.

After scoring 5 wins with Ferrari the previous season, the best Prost could do in 1991 was a trio of runner-up spots, a distant 5th in the championship, and ultimately ended up being fired by Ferrari before the last race of the season for bad-mouthing the team and the car.

With all the top seats already filled, Prost took the 1992 season off, coming back in a dominant Williams for 1993 and scored a comparatively easy fourth World Championship win over runner-up Ayrton Senna, while recording 7 more wins. Prost's team mate in 1993? 1996 World Driving Champion, Damon Hill.

So Prost's first 3 World Championship titles came at the expense of former World Driving Champion team mates, and his fourth at the expense of a future world champion. Again, I don't think that's ever been done before. All 4 of Prost's World Championship titles came with a past or future World Champion as his team mate. And 2 of them came when the defending World Champion was his team mate.

And with that, the career of Alain Prost, that started with McLaren in 1980, came to an end.

In all, Prost took part in thirteen Formula 1 seasons. In that time, Prost had five different team mates that were past or future World Driving Champions, and in 7 of his 13 seasons, and 7 of his last 9 seasons, he had former or future world champions as a team mate.

2 drivers won the World Championship while Prost was their team mate, Lauda in 1984 and Senna in 1988, and Prost got his revenge on them both by returning the favour with Lauda in 1985 and with Senna in 1989.

Over those 13 seasons, Prost's team mates scored 28 wins, 30 podiums and two World Driving Championships, not in their career's, but while they were Prost's team mates.

Career statistics, for all of Prost's team mates are 137 wins, 168 poles, 347 podiums, and nine World Driving Championships.

Prost's numbers over his career are 51 wins, 33 poles, 106 podiums and four World Driving Championships.

Prost is often referred to as the Professor, and from what I've read he really doesn't like the nick-name as it makes him sound like he's never the fastest, just somehow finds a way to win. Nothing could be further from the truth. During his era, the 1980's and early 1990's, there was nobody faster during the race than Prost. Everybody knows Senna was the qualifying master with 65 poles, but Prost put up 31 poles over his career, behind only Senna and Nigel Mansell’s 32.

And when it came to fastest race laps, when it really counted, nobody was faster on race day than Prost. Prost put up 41 fastest race laps, more than double Senna's 19 and well ahead of the next best of 28 and 30 for Jimmy Clark and Mansell respectively. I agree with Prost, he doesn't get nearly enough credit for being a really, really fast race car driver. He was.

(Prost's record for fastest race laps has since been eclipsed by Schumacher's 77, Hamilton's 47 and Räikkönen's 46)

I think, above all the numbers, the most impressive part about Prost is his toughness. He's been teamed with some of the toughest drivers in Formula 1 in Lauda, Senna and Mansell. Twice he's been teamed with drivers who captured a world championship with him as a team mate, and both times he came back the next season to take the championship away from his team mate. It can be tough to bounce back after losing to a team mate, and Prost not only did it, he did it twice.

The really sad thing is Schumacher might be everything Prost was, and more, but we'll never know. Schumacher refused to have top drivers as team mates through out his career.

The only time Schumacher had a World Champion for a team mate was for four of his first five races in Formula 1 when he jumped from Jordan to Benetton where Nelson Piquet was the lead driver, and during his post-retirement return to Mercedes when future champ Nico Rosberg was his team mate for three years. In those final three years Schumacher didn't win a race, reached the podium only once, and was beaten in the standings in all three seasons by Rosberg.

We will never know how a Ferrari duo of Schumacher-Häkkinen or Schumacher-Villeneuve would have worked out. Another season of Prost-Senna maybe? Who knows.

And who wouldn't have wanted to see Jacques leave Williams after their downturn and take up his fathers seat at Ferrari along side Schumacher? At that point in his career, Jacques was truly one of the fastest drivers in the world, and, in my opinion, the equal of Schumacher. Unfortunately, we'll never know.

To be the best, you have to beat the best and Prost did that, every time. He was undoubtedly the best Formula 1 driver of my lifetime.