McLaren and Ferrari have shared a Formula 1 grid since 1966, and in 2025 the younger team won the constructors' championship with 833 points while Ferrari finished fourth.1 A year later the order has flipped behind Mercedes: going into the Mexico City Grand Prix on 1 November, Ferrari had 474 points to McLaren's 355.2
The rivalry runs from the 1974 title through Senna and Prost, Häkkinen against Schumacher and the 2007 spy case. The fourteen lists below drag it out of the pit lane and onto road cars, liveries, engine notes, Le Mans and the two men whose names are on the doors.
Ferrari keep the record book and the romance; McLaren keep the single seasons, and the one road car, that changed what fast meant.
Ferrari vs McLaren: the best Formula 1 team of all time
The simplest form of this rivalry is a list of twelve constructors, and both names are on it alongside Williams, Mercedes, Red Bull, Lotus and Brabham.
Ferrari's case is volume. Formula 1's own team page lists 16 world constructors' championships and 251 race wins, and Ferrari is the only team to have entered every season since 1950.3
McLaren's case is concentration. The same site credits the Woking team with 10 championships and 205 wins from a first entry in 1966, sixteen years later than Maranello.4
Williams supporters will point out that Frank Williams' team won nine titles with a fraction of either budget. Mercedes fans have eight in a row from 2014 to 2021, a streak neither of these two has matched.
McLaren vs Porsche: the best car brand in the world
Thirty-two badges compete here, Toyota, Honda, Rolls-Royce and Bugatti among them, so McLaren and Ferrari are judged as carmakers, not race teams.
Ferrari has been selling road cars since the late 1940s, and the badge carries the weight of eight decades of Testarossas, F40s and 250s.
McLaren Automotive is the newcomer. Its modern road-car range dates from 2011, which makes it younger than the Woking race team's first world title by almost forty years.
Porsche is the awkward third name for both. The 911 has been in continuous production since 1964, and plenty of drivers would take its everyday usability over anything from Maranello or Woking.
Scuderia Ferrari vs Real Madrid: the greatest sports clubs
This list mixes football, baseball, basketball and motor racing: 35 clubs, including the New York Yankees, Real Madrid, the Boston Celtics and Manchester United.
Scuderia Ferrari earns its place as the one racing team that crowds treat like a football club. The tifosi fill the grandstands at Monza in red, and the prancing horse sells shirts in countries without a Grand Prix.
McLaren is here too, which says something about how far the papaya brand has travelled since back-to-back titles in 2024 and 2025.
Real Madrid make the case that a club is measured in European Cups and global reach, and neither racing team can claim a fan base of that size.
Tifosi vs the papaya army: the most passionate Formula 1 fans
This ranking asks which team's supporters care the most, across ten teams from the 2026 grid plus Lotus as a historic name.
Ferrari's supporters have the history. The tifosi have followed one team since the first championship season, and a Ferrari win at Monza still ends with fans pouring onto the track under the podium.
McLaren's following is younger and louder than it was a decade ago. The orange comes from Bruce McLaren's Can-Am cars of the late 1960s, and Lando Norris's 2025 title, won by two points over Max Verstappen, gave a new generation its first champion in papaya.5
Cadillac and Audi joined the grid in 2026, Haas fans have Drive to Survive, and Red Bull's support grew with four Verstappen titles.
Ferrari 250 GTO vs Jaguar E-Type: the best car of all time
Sixty-five cars, from the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model S, compete for the biggest title in motoring.
Ferrari brings the 250 GTO, the 1962 racer that has become the most valuable car most people can name, plus the F40 and the Testarossa.
McLaren brings one car. The McLaren F1 of the 1990s, designed by Gordon Murray with a central driving seat and a gold-lined engine bay, was the world's first fully composite road car, according to McLaren's own heritage pages.6
The Jaguar E-Type is the classic counter-argument. It cost a fraction of either and looks as good parked as either does moving.
LaFerrari vs McLaren P1: the greatest hypercars
Here the two companies meet on their most direct ground. The P1 and the LaFerrari were both unveiled at the 2013 Geneva motor show as hybrid hypercars, and together with the Porsche 918 they became known as the holy trinity.
McLaren has three entries: the original F1, the P1 and the three-seat Speedtail. Ferrari counters with the LaFerrari and the Enzo, named after the founder.
McLaren MP4/4 vs Ferrari 641: the most iconic Formula 1 cars
Twenty-eight cars from the Alfa Romeo 158 to the Red Bull RB19 make up this ranking, and four McLarens and six Ferraris are among them.
The MP4/4 is the obvious McLaren pick. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost won 15 of the 16 races in 1988 with it.7 Prost actually scored more points that year, but only a driver's best eleven results counted, and Senna took the title.7
The one race it lost was Monza. Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto finished one-two for Ferrari there, four weeks after Enzo Ferrari's death.
Ferrari's strongest entries are the F2004 and the 641. The 641 is the car Prost took to Maranello in 1990 after leaving McLaren, and he won five races in it. The title went to Senna again, settled when the two collided at the first corner at Suzuka.
The 641's other claim is its shape. A version of it is in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Ferrari 312T vs Lotus 97T: the best Formula 1 livery
A livery ranking judges paint, not lap times. The options run from the bare silver of the 1950s Mercedes to Brawn's white-and-yellow car of 2009.
Ferrari's entry is the 312T in which Niki Lauda won the 1975 title: plain rosso corsa with a white band, the look most people still picture when they hear the word Ferrari.
McLaren's entry is the red-and-white MP4/4, a design so tied to Senna that it is still the default colour scheme on model shelves.
The Lotus 97T in John Player Special black and gold is the case for neither team. It is the car in which Senna won his first Grand Prix, in the rain at Estoril in 1985, before he ever drove a McLaren.
Ferrari F2004 vs McLaren MP4-23: Formula 1 cars of the 2000s
The decade belonged to Maranello, and four of the seventeen cars on this list are Ferraris from Michael Schumacher's five-title run.
The F2004 is the peak of that run, the car in which Schumacher won his seventh championship in 2004.
McLaren's answer is the MP4-23, the car Lewis Hamilton drove to his first title in 2008 by a single point over Ferrari's Felipe Massa. The MP4-20 of 2005 was faster still, but its unreliability handed the title to Renault.
The year in between was the closest of all. In 2007 Kimi Räikkönen took the drivers' title for Ferrari by one point over both McLaren drivers, Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, who had spent the season fighting each other.
The decade also held the low point of the rivalry. In 2007 the FIA fined McLaren $100 million and excluded it from the constructors' standings after Ferrari technical data was found in the team.8
Mercedes W11 vs McLaren MCL39: the hybrid era
The hybrid era began in 2014 and this ranking covers it car by car, which makes it the least comfortable list in this article for Ferrari.
Mercedes dominate it, with eight cars from the W05 to the W12. Red Bull add four, including the RB19 that won all but one race in 2023.
McLaren's two entries are its newest. The MCL38 and MCL39 won the constructors' championships of 2024 and 2025, the first time Woking had won back to back since the Senna years.
Ferrari has four cars here, from the SF70H to the F1-75, and no championship from any of them. Its last constructors' title came in 2008.
McLaren F1 GTR vs Ferrari 499P: the best Le Mans winners
Fifteen cars that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans make up this list, from the Jaguar D-Type to the Toyota TS050.
McLaren's entry is one of the race's great upsets. The F1 GTR was a road car converted for racing, and it won the rain-soaked 1995 race on McLaren's first attempt, beating purpose-built prototypes.9
Ferrari has two cars here and a much longer Le Mans record. The 250 LM won in 1965, and the 499P returned the company to the top step in the race's centenary year of 2023.
Porsche's 917 and Ford's GT40 both won here with stories that neither Italian nor British fans can wave away.
John Barnard's cars: one designer, both teams
John Barnard designed championship-winning cars for McLaren and race-winning cars for Ferrari, which makes this twelve-car ranking a rivalry inside one man's career.
His McLaren work came first. The MP4/1 of 1981 was the first carbon composite Formula 1 design, according to McLaren, and its successors won titles for Niki Lauda in 1984 and Alain Prost in 1985 and 1986.
His Ferrari work changed how drivers shift. The 640 of 1989 brought the semi-automatic paddle-shift gearbox to Formula 1 and won on its debut in Brazil with Nigel Mansell.
Barnard fans tend to split along the same line: McLaren for results, Ferrari for ideas the whole grid copied.
Ferrari V12 vs Lamborghini V10: the most recognizable engine sound
Fourteen sounds compete here, including a Harley-Davidson V-twin, a Rolls-Royce Merlin and a steam locomotive.
Ferrari's naturally aspirated V12 is the reference point for the whole category, and it has powered road Ferraris from the 1940s to the 812.
McLaren is not on this list at all. Its road cars use twin-turbo V8s and, lately, hybrid V6s, which are fast and efficient and nobody's ringtone.
Enzo Ferrari vs Bruce McLaren: the founders
The last ranking puts people on the list instead of machines: 48 figures from Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher to Valentino Rossi and Dale Earnhardt.
Enzo Ferrari founded the Scuderia in 1929 and ran it until his death in 1988, and the team still races under his name and his horse.
Bruce McLaren was a New Zealand driver who won Grands Prix and Le Mans before founding his own team. He was killed testing a Can-Am car at Goodwood in 1970, four years before McLaren's first constructors' title.10
Senna is the name that joins the two founders' stories. He won all three of his titles in a McLaren and never drove for Ferrari.
Maranello and Woking still disagree
Ferrari wins the lists that reward longevity and sound: the team record, the engine note, the livery people picture first. McLaren wins attention where one car or one season had to be perfect, from the MP4/4 to the F1 road car and the GTR at Le Mans.
Each of the fourteen is decided the way this site settles everything, through one head-to-head matchup after another. If your own McLaren or Ferrari question is missing, build the ranking yourself.
More rankings, more angles
- Ferrari Means Something Different on Every List — Maranello's road cars, race team and badge
- Senna vs Prost Rivalry: The McLaren Years on 14 Lists — two champions in one McLaren garage
- Hamilton vs Verstappen Head to Head: 7 Titles to 4, 14 Lists — Hamilton's move to Ferrari included
Sources
- Formula 1 — 2025 constructors' standings: formula1.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Formula 1 — 2026 constructors' standings: formula1.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Formula 1 — Ferrari team profile (titles, wins, first entry, every season since 1950): formula1.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Formula 1 — McLaren team profile (titles, wins, first entry): formula1.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Formula 1 — 2025 drivers' standings: formula1.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- McLaren — MP4/1 heritage page (first carbon composite F1 design; the F1 as the first fully composite road car): mclaren.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Motor Sport — McLaren MP4/4, 15 wins from 16 races: motorsportmagazine.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Sky Sports — FIA fines McLaren $100 million, 2007: skysports.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Motor Sport — How McLaren won Le Mans at its first attempt: motorsportmagazine.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Motor Sport — McLaren's 10 constructors' titles, 1974 to 2025: motorsportmagazine.com (checked 2026-10-31)