Formula One began in 1950 on a wartime airfield and has been arguing with itself ever since, about wings, fans, skirts and computers, and about who was really the fastest. These stories take in the drivers, the teams, the circuits and the machines, including the famous corner almost nobody names correctly and the car that retired unbeaten after one race.
Every tile in a Formula One game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
The world championship's first race had a king in the crowd. King George VI watched at Silverstone on May 13, 1950, the only time a reigning British monarch has attended a motor race in Britain. Nino Farina, then 43, won it for Alfa Romeo, and by the end of the season he had edged his teammate Juan Manuel Fangio for the title by 30 points to 27. Alfa drivers took the top three places in the standings.
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The five-time world champion spent the day of the Cuban Grand Prix as a hostage. On February 23, 1958, rebels loyal to Fidel Castro took Juan Manuel Fangio from his hotel in Havana, hoping to embarrass the government of Fulgencio Batista, which had staged the race to show the island off to the world. Fangio never started. He was released unharmed a few hours after the race had run, and Batista's government fell the following January.
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Stirling Moss lost the 1958 championship by a single point, and he helped his rival win it. Moss won the Portuguese Grand Prix at Porto that year; Mike Hawthorn finished second and was then excluded after a spin. Moss went to the stewards and argued that Hawthorn had done nothing wrong. The exclusion was lifted, Hawthorn kept the points, and at the end of the season he was champion by one point. Moss finished runner-up four times and never won the title.
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In 1965 Jim Clark passed up the Monaco Grand Prix, the most glamorous race of the season, and ran the Indianapolis 500 instead. He won it in a Lotus, then took the Formula One title as well, and he is still the only driver to have won both in the same year. Clark described himself as a Scottish Borders farmer who raced as a hobby, but he was serious about the hobby: 25 wins and 33 pole positions from 72 starts.
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John Surtees won seven world championships on motorcycles for MV Agusta between 1956 and 1960, then climbed into a Formula One car and won that title too. The 1964 championship came down to the last race, in Mexico: Jim Clark's Lotus sprang an oil leak, Graham Hill's BRM was accidentally shoved out of contention by Surtees' own Ferrari teammate Lorenzo Bandini, and second place was enough. He remains the only world champion on both two wheels and four.
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Motor racing's triple crown is the Indianapolis 500, the Le Mans 24 Hours and, depending on who is counting, either the Formula One world championship or the Monaco Grand Prix. One driver has it both ways. Graham Hill was champion in 1962 and 1968, won Monaco five times, won at Indianapolis in 1966, and completed the set at Le Mans in 1972. Fernando Alonso has won Le Mans twice and raced twice at Indianapolis without winning, and Mario Andretti and Jacques Villeneuve each finished second at Le Mans.
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Lella Lombardi qualified 24th out of 26 at Montjuic Park in 1975 and was running sixth when the Spanish Grand Prix was stopped early after a serious accident. Because less than 60 percent of the race had been run, only half points were awarded, so her sixth place was worth 0.5. More than fifty years later, that half point is still the only score by a woman in the history of the Formula One world championship.
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Niki Lauda's Ferrari crashed and caught fire at the Nurburgring on August 1, 1976, and four other drivers, Arturo Merzario, Guy Edwards, Harald Ertl and Brett Lunger, dragged him from the wreck. Forty-two days later he was racing again at Monza, and he finished fourth. The title came down to the last race, at Fuji, in torrential rain. Lauda pulled into the pits on the second lap and retired. James Hunt finished third and became champion by a single point.
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Jordan needed a stand-in for the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix and hired a 22-year-old German who had managed about 20 laps of testing and had never seen Spa. Michael Schumacher learned the circuit on a folding bicycle, then qualified seventh, four places ahead of his experienced teammate. His race lasted a few hundred meters before the clutch gave out, and it was still enough. Benetton signed him in time for the very next Grand Prix, and he went on to win seven world championships.
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Ferrari is the only team that has competed in every season of the world championship, which began in 1950. Plenty of famous names have come and gone in that time, and Ferrari has never taken a year off. Its best spell came half a century in: with Michael Schumacher driving, it won five consecutive drivers' and constructors' doubles, from 2000 to 2004, a run no team had managed before. The record no rival can touch, though, is plain attendance.
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Jack Brabham took the 1959 title race to the last round at Sebring, and his Cooper started on a minimal fuel load. On the final lap it spluttered to a halt within sight of the flag. He got out and pushed it about 400 yards to finish fourth, then slumped exhausted on the ground. The push was not needed: Tony Brooks finished only third, so the title was Brabham's anyway, and teammate Bruce McLaren had won the race. Cooper had put the engine behind the driver, and every champion since has sat in front of his engine.
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The constructors' championship was new in 1958, and the first team to win it was not Ferrari but Vanwall. Its founder was Tony Vandervell, whose company made Thinwall bearings, and in the early 1950s he had entered modified Ferraris in races under the name Thinwall Special. The team's name was a splice of Vandervell and Thinwall. In that first title year, Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks won three championship races each for the team. Vandervell's failing health made it the last full season, and after a handful of later entries the team stopped racing in 1961.
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Grand Prix cars used to wear national colors: green for Britain, red for Italy, blue for France. That changed in 1968. On New Year's Day a private Brabham at the South African Grand Prix ran in the colors of Gunston cigarettes, and by the Spanish Grand Prix in May, Team Lotus had become the first works team in a sponsor's livery, the red, gold and white of Gold Leaf. Graham Hill won that race, and Lotus took both of the year's championships in its new paint.
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Jack Brabham is the only driver to have won the Formula One world championship in a car bearing his own name. He had already taken two titles with Cooper when he set up as a constructor, and in 1966 he won four Grands Prix in a row, the French, British, Dutch and German, in the Brabham-Repco BT19. That made him champion for the third time. Sixty years later, nobody has repeated it.
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Bruce McLaren won his first Grand Prix in 1959 at the age of 22, the youngest winner the sport had seen, and nobody beat that mark until 2003. The New Zealander founded his own team in 1963 and did everything in it: designed the cars, raced them, drove the transporter, swept the factory floor. Seven years later he was killed testing a sports car when its bodywork came loose. The team still carries his name, and ten constructors' championships.
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Rob Walker, a member of the Johnnie Walker whisky family, ran a private racing team. On January 19, 1958, his Cooper won the Argentine Grand Prix with Stirling Moss driving. It was the first Formula One win for a privateer, and the first for a car with its engine behind the driver. Moss gambled on running the whole race without changing tires, even though they were rated for only 40 laps, and he took the win with the canvas showing through the tread.
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Honda quit Formula One in December 2008 and left behind a full factory with nothing to build for. Ross Brawn bought the team for one pound, fitted Mercedes engines to the car Honda had already developed, and arrived at the first race with a double diffuser, a clever reading of the aerodynamic rules that only Toyota and Williams had also found. Jenson Button won six of the first seven races. Brawn GP won both championships in its only season, the first team ever to do that on debut.
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Ford put Jaguar Racing up for sale in 2004 and reportedly asked a symbolic one dollar for it, on the condition that the buyer invest hundreds of millions in the team over three years. The buyer was an energy drink company that had spent years in Formula One as a sponsor, backing the Sauber team from 1995. Red Bull Racing took its first podium in 2006, then won the drivers' and constructors' championships four years running from 2010, and won again in the 2020s with Max Verstappen.
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The Monaco Grand Prix was the idea of Antony Noghes, a civil servant in charge of the principality's tobacco distribution. Monaco's automobile club had been refused full national status because no major motor race was held wholly inside its borders, so Noghes proposed one on the streets. The first was held in 1929 and won by a Briton racing under the name W Williams. The Grand Hotel hairpin and Sainte Devote were in the earliest plans and are still on the lap, and the final corner carries Noghes' name. He is also credited with proposing the checkered flag.
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From 1950 to 1960 the Indianapolis 500 counted toward the Formula One world championship. The third round of the very first season, on May 30, 1950, went to Johnnie Parsons in a Kurtis Kraft Offenhauser. In 1952 Alberto Ascari brought a Ferrari to Indianapolis. He qualified 19th and was running eighth when he lost a wheel and spun out of the race. It hardly slowed his season: Ascari won all six of the championship rounds that followed.
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The old Nordschleife at the Nurburgring was a lap of about 14 miles through the forests of the Eifel hills, and Formula One raced there until 1976. In August 1968 it rained almost without a break for three days, and fog hung over the track. Jackie Stewart won the German Grand Prix by four minutes, a margin that would be absurd almost anywhere else, and one lap of that circuit explains it. The circuit's nickname, the Green Hell, is usually attributed to Stewart.
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Most people call the plunge and climb at Spa Eau Rouge. Strictly, Eau Rouge is the stream at the bottom, named for the rusty color of the iron-rich springs along its course, and the name belongs to the corner where the track crosses it. The steep uphill sweep that follows, added in 1939, is the Raidillon. The original circuit was a triangle of public roads through the Ardennes linking Francorchamps, Malmedy and Stavelot. Today's track is less than half as long, and at 7.004 kilometers it is still the longest on the calendar.
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Silverstone was built for war, not racing. Its perimeter road was laid in 1942 for the airfield at RAF Silverstone. In 1947, with the base disused, a group of friends staged a race there, remembered partly because a local sheep was killed during it. The Royal Automobile Club held the British Grand Prix on the old airfield in 1948, and on May 13, 1950, Silverstone hosted the very first round of the new Formula One world championship.
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Monza was built in 110 days in 1922, the world's third purpose-built race track after Brooklands and Indianapolis. It has held the Italian Grand Prix every year but one since the championship began. Its steep and notoriously bumpy banked oval was joined to the road course for four championship races between 1955 and 1961, then left out for good. The concrete is still there: as the cars leave the Parabolica, the old banking stands in the background.
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Suzuka exists because Soichiro Honda wanted a test track of his own, and in 1962 the Dutch designer John Hugenholtz laid one out. He drew a figure eight: the long back straight passes over the front of the circuit on a bridge, so the lap crosses itself. His original drawings were bolder still, with the track passing over and under itself three times. Honda's test track then waited 25 years for its first Formula One race, in 1987, and drivers have loved it ever since.
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The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve runs on Notre Dame Island, a man-made island in the St. Lawrence River created for the Expo 67 world's fair. Gilles Villeneuve won the first Grand Prix held there, in 1978, at the track that now carries his name. Its best known feature is the wall on the exit of the final chicane. At the 1999 Canadian Grand Prix, Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve all put a car into it, and three world champions caught out in one weekend earned it a name: the Wall of Champions.
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In 1981 and 1982 the world championship was settled in Las Vegas, on a temporary track at Caesars Palace. The pit straight and the first few corners sat on the hotel's parking lot, and the rest of the course cut across undeveloped desert ground next door. In 1981 Alan Jones won the race. Nelson Piquet finished fifth and had to be helped from his car, but that was enough to make him world champion. A year later, in heat near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Keke Rosberg clinched the title there.
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In 1981 McLaren's MP4/1 became the first Formula One car to race with a chassis made entirely of carbon composite. John Barnard's design had a single major aluminum part, where a typical car of the day had around fifty, and he flew to Salt Lake City to work with Hercules, a Utah company with a skunk-works research section. Many skeptics expected a carbon car to explode into black dust in a crash. At Monza that year John Watson's car was cut in half at about 140 miles an hour, the monocoque held, and he walked away.
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Colin Chapman's engineers shaped the underside of the Lotus sidepods like an upside-down wing, so air rushing beneath the car lost pressure and pulled the whole machine down. Skirts sealed the gap to the road and kept the suction in. The Lotus 78 won five races in 1977. With the Lotus 79 that followed, Mario Andretti won the 1978 drivers' title and Lotus took the constructors' championship.
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Derek Gardner's Tyrrell P34 ran on four tiny 10-inch wheels at the front, tucked inside the width of the bodywork, where they created less lift than ordinary front wheels. Gardner reckoned the gain was worth the equivalent of 40-odd horsepower. It looked like a publicity stunt. Then, on June 13, 1976, in only the car's fourth race, Jody Scheckter put it on pole for the Swedish Grand Prix and led Patrick Depailler home in a one-two. Tyrrell remains the only team to race and win with more than four wheels.
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The halo became compulsory in 2018, and it was not love at first sight: Mercedes technical chief James Allison called it an acquired taste. It is a curved bar of grade 5 titanium, a metal prized in aerospace for its strength, and to pass its test it must take 125 kilonewtons pressed down on it for five seconds without failing. That is around 12 metric tons, roughly the weight of a London double-decker bus. It must take the same force from the side, and it can deflect a large, full suitcase arriving at 225 kilometers per hour.
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Renault arrived at the 1977 British Grand Prix using a clause in the rules that allowed a 1.5-liter turbocharged engine in place of the usual 3-liter one. The yellow car blew up so regularly, usually in a cloud of white smoke, that rival teams called it the yellow teapot. Two years later Jean-Pierre Jabouille won the French Grand Prix at Dijon, the first Grand Prix victory for a turbocharged engine. Within a few seasons Ferrari, BMW, Honda and Porsche were all building turbo engines too.
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In Formula One, it was John Barnard who moved the gear change to the steering wheel. His Ferrari 640 of 1989 used an electro-hydraulic gearbox, and Nigel Mansell and Gerhard Berger changed gear by pulling two paddles behind the wheel. The system went through major difficulties in testing, and its reliability was far from proven. Mansell won with it anyway, first time out, at the Brazilian Grand Prix on March 26 that opened the season.
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In 1982 Brabham designer Gordon Murray worked out that a car starting on half a tank of fuel would run light enough, and fast enough, to make up for stopping midway through the race to refuel. The sport's governing body banned refueling on safety grounds from 1984. It returned in 1994, when Michael Schumacher used lighter fuel loads to gain an edge over his rivals, and it was banned again in 2010. Since then every car has had to start with all the fuel it needs for the whole race.
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Colin Chapman needed a new engine for Lotus when Grand Prix racing moved to three liters. Keith Duckworth of Cosworth said he would need 100,000 pounds to build one, and Ford agreed to pay. The DFV won its very first race, with Jim Clark driving a Lotus 49 to victory in the Dutch Grand Prix on June 4, 1967. Lotus did not keep it to itself for long. That August the engine was put on sale to teams around the world, and Tyrrell, McLaren and Brabham all won world championships with it.
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By 1992 the Williams FW14B could manage its own ride height. Its computer-controlled active suspension aimed for target ride heights front and rear and could alter the attitude of the car on track, and it carried traction control and a semi-automatic gearbox as well. Nigel Mansell won eight of the first ten races of the season in it. Then, on August 16, he finished second in Hungary and clinched the championship with five races still to run.
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