AS MUCH as racing is about talent and tenacity, there’s also a giant side-order of luck involved in the career of every rider; the roll of the dice can mark one out for greatness while another disappears and deny some hard-working, race-winning riders from ever having the championship trophy on their mantelpiece.

The same luck can work the other way, too. Riders with fewer career race wins than anyone on our top 10 list have walked away with the championship, whether due to ill fortune of others or the ability to sustain a string of solid podium finishes while more flamboyant race winners throw points away.

Of course there are endless question marks over the unfulfilled potential of riders with careers cut short by injury or worse. Would Marco Simoncelli have been a champion? Could Daijiro Kato have been Japan’s first top-class title winner? These are impossible questions, so we’ve stuck to a list that’s supported by fact; race wins. We’ve looked purely at wins in the top class – 500cc or MotoGP – and at riders who never took a title at that level.

10. Tadayuki Okada – four wins (500cc)

A man with ‘Honda’ written through him like a stick of rock, there has never been a shortage of people prepared to claim that other riders would have made more of his opportunities, particularly when he helmed Repsol Honda from 1996-2000. But the bare statistics show that he took four race wins in his top-line career. The first, in 1997, was during an impressive podium run that took him to second in the championship, playing a distant wing-man to the unbeatable Mick Doohan that year. Three more came in 1999, but in a more closely-fought championship they were only enough to bag third place overall despite a bigger points haul than in '97. Bear in mind that Nicky Hayden, with a longer Repsol Honda career, took only two wins on his way to the 2006 world title (runner-up Rossi won five races that year) and, with only three wins overall to his name, wouldn’t have made this list if Rossi had pipped him that year.

Image credit: Rikita, under license from Creative Commons.