Formula 1 History

Juan Manuel Fangio was, for over four decades, simply regarded as the greatest racing driver who had ever lived. Born in Buenos Aires in 1911, he did not arrive in European Grand Prix racing until he was already nearly 40 years old — yet he proceeded to win five World Championships in seven seasons, a record that stood unbroken until Michael Schumacher and was matched by Lewis Hamilton only in 2020.

Fangio's greatness was not merely in his results — remarkable as they were — but in the manner of his driving. He possessed an uncanny sensitivity to his car, a mechanical empathy that allowed him to extract the absolute maximum from whatever machine he sat in. Uniquely in the modern era, he won world championships with four different teams: Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, and Maserati. He could identify what a car needed, adapt his style accordingly, and then drive it to perfection.

His most celebrated performance came in the 1957 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring — the original 22-kilometre Nordschleife, a terrifying snake through the Eifel mountains. Fangio had started from pole in his Maserati 250F, pulled into the pits midway through the race for fuel and tyres, then emerged in third place with a deficit of nearly a minute to the two Ferraris of Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins. Over the next few laps, the 46-year-old Argentine proceeded to break the lap record nine times in succession, hunting down both Ferraris to win by barely three seconds. Even Hawthorn and Collins, his beaten rivals, climbed from their cars and applauded. Enzo Ferrari reportedly considered it the greatest drive he had ever witnessed. Fangio himself later said: "I have never driven so fast in my life and I will never drive so fast again."

No driver in the history of Formula 1 has occupied the mythological space that Ayrton Senna holds. The Brazilian, who died in a fatal accident at the San Marino Grand Prix in Imola on 1 May 1994, has been elevated to something approaching sainthood in his homeland and commands a devotion among fans worldwide that four decades of time have done nothing to diminish. It is a devotion that is entirely deserved.

Senna arrived in Formula 1 in 1984 with Toleman and immediately announced himself as something extraordinary. Qualifying on pole for the Monaco Grand Prix as a rookie and then carving through the field in the rain until the race was controversially stopped while he was catching the leader — it was a debut that announced a talent that operated on a different plane. His rivalry with Alain Prost during their years as team-mates at McLaren (1988–1989) is perhaps the most intense, psychologically charged, and ultimately tragic inter-team battle in the sport's history. The two men were polar opposites: Prost clinical, analytical, diplomatic; Senna mystical, emotional, and possessed of a terrifying will to win at any cost.

Senna's qualifying performances were the stuff of legend. His pole lap at the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix — a lap he later said he drove in a trance state, dissociated from the physical world — remains one of the most celebrated laps ever put in. His wet-weather driving was of a category entirely his own; his 1984 Monaco charge, his 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix victory, and his 1993 European Grand Prix at Donington Park — where he passed four cars on the first corner in the rain — are performances that motorsport will never forget. When he died aged 34, he left behind an unrepeatable legacy and a void in the sport that has never been fully filled.

Michael Schumacher transformed Formula 1. Not just through his results — though those are staggering — but through his total reimagining of what a Formula 1 driver could be. When Schumacher emerged from karting and the junior formulae in the early 1990s, racing drivers were expected to be fast, brave, and leave the engineering decisions to the engineers. Schumacher changed that completely. He immersed himself in the mechanical workings of his car with a depth that was almost unprecedented, working through the night with engineers, attending technical briefings at a level of detail that surprised even seasoned professionals, and then translating his car knowledge into extraordinary sensitivity at the wheel.

After winning back-to-back titles with Benetton in 1994 and 1995, Schumacher joined Ferrari — a team that had not won a Constructors' Championship since 1983 — and embarked on the greatest dynasty the sport had seen. Working with technical director Ross Brawn and designer Rory Byrne, he rebuilt the team into an unstoppable force, winning five consecutive Drivers' Championships from 2000 to 2004. During the 2002 and 2004 seasons in particular, the Schumacher–Ferrari combination was so dominant that the sport struggled to retain competitive interest. He won 11 of 17 races in 2004.

Records tumbled throughout his career. When he retired for the first time after 2006, he held every significant record in the sport. His comeback with Mercedes from 2010 to 2012 was less spectacular, but the intellectual curiosity that drove his return was entirely consistent with the man. In December 2013, he suffered a devastating head injury in a skiing accident in the French Alps. He has remained largely out of the public eye since, but his legacy — 91 race wins, 7 world championships, 155 podiums — endures as a monument to total dedication and extraordinary talent.

Nicknamed The Professor, Alain Prost was the supreme racing strategist of his era — and perhaps of all time. Where Senna sought perfection in a single flying lap, Prost sought it across the full ninety minutes of a Grand Prix. He was a thinker, a calculator, a man who believed that a race won by a tenth of a second while preserving the car was superior to a race won by twenty seconds with the machinery ruined. This philosophy made him deeply unpopular with many fans in his era — they found his efficiency cold — but it was a philosophy vindicated by four World Championships.

Prost won his first championship with McLaren in 1985 and his second in 1986 in one of the most dramatic season finales in Formula 1 history — at the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide, where a tyre blowout while leading demoted him to third, only for his rivals to also suffer mechanical failures, allowing him to take the title with points he had already accumulated. His third championship came in 1989 — shared with his team-mate Senna at McLaren in the most poisonous team rivalry F1 had ever seen — and his fourth with Williams in 1993, by which time he was widely regarded as the most intelligent racing driver alive.

What separated Prost from lesser drivers was his ability to manage a race. He would set a pace that was exactly as fast as necessary to win and no faster. He would protect his tyres, manage his fuel, study his mirrors. He turned Formula 1 into a kind of prolonged chess match, and he played it better than almost anyone before or since. His record of 51 wins stood as the all-time record until Schumacher surpassed it in 2001.

Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton is the most statistically decorated Formula 1 driver in the sport's history. He holds the all-time records for race wins (104), pole positions (104), and podium finishes (201). He is one of only two drivers to win seven World Championships, equalling Schumacher's seemingly unreachable record in 2020. And yet to reduce Hamilton to statistics is to miss the extraordinary scope of his story.

Born in Stevenage in 1985, Hamilton grew up in a working-class family in a sport that, at the time, was almost exclusively the preserve of privilege. His father Anthony worked multiple jobs to fund his karting career, and his arrival in Formula 1 with McLaren in 2007 — where he came agonisingly close to the championship as a rookie — announced a driver of breathtaking ability. He drove with a combination of Senna-esque instinct and Schumacher-like physical precision, allied to a racecraft and tactical awareness that allowed him to perform under pressure in a way very few drivers ever have.

His period of dominance with Mercedes from 2014 to 2020 — six Championships in seven seasons — is arguably the greatest sustained period of success any driver has achieved in the sport's modern era. But beyond the track, Hamilton has used his platform to advocate for greater diversity and inclusion in motorsport and beyond, has spoken openly about mental health, and has become a cultural figure far beyond the paddock. His move to Ferrari in 2025, at the age of 40, is either the most audacious or the most poetic final chapter of a remarkable career — and perhaps both simultaneously.

Max Verstappen is, at the time of writing, the dominant force in Formula 1, and history will likely regard him as one of the three or four greatest drivers the sport has produced. He made his Formula 1 debut in 2015 at just 17 years of age — the youngest driver ever to start a Grand Prix — driving for Toro Rosso (now Racing Bulls). From his very first lap, it was apparent this was something different. His car control, particularly on the limit of adhesion in wet conditions, was of a kind that most drivers spend a decade developing.

Promoted to Red Bull Racing mid-season in 2016, he won on debut in Spain — becoming the youngest Grand Prix winner in history — and proceeded to establish himself as the most aggressive, uncompromising, and flat-out fastest driver of his era. His first championship in 2021, decided on the final lap of the final race in Abu Dhabi in the most controversial circumstances the sport had seen in years, was hard-fought. What followed was something else: 2022 saw him win 15 of 22 races, rewriting the record books. 2023 was even more extraordinary — 19 wins in 22 races, including an unbroken run of ten consecutive victories.

Verstappen's driving style is defined by absolute commitment at the limit. He brakes later than almost any driver in history, carries unbelievable speed through high-speed corners, and manages his tyres with a sensitivity that belies his aggressive appearance. His career is still in its early stages. He enters 2025 aged 27, and there is no natural ceiling visible.

Jim Clark is, in the judgment of many of the sport's greatest engineers and competitors, simply the fastest and most naturally gifted driver Formula 1 has ever produced. The Scottish farmer from the Borders won two world championships with Lotus in 1963 and 1965 and was so utterly dominant in his era that the question was not whether he would win, but by how far. In 1963, he won seven of ten races and the championship with three rounds to spare. In 1965, he won six of nine rounds and the championship so early that the mathematics were settled with races still remaining.

What made Clark extraordinary was the effortlessness of his speed. Other great drivers of his era — Graham Hill, Dan Gurney, Jack Brabham — drove with visible effort, wrestling their machines around circuits that offered no protection whatsoever. Clark appeared to be doing less than everyone else and going faster than all of them. His hands moved subtly on the wheel. He was never seen to make an error. Colin Chapman, who built the cars he drove, said that Clark was the only driver he had ever worked with who could tell him exactly what the car was doing from every corner, every lap, in precise technical language — and then go out and set another fastest lap.

Clark died in a Formula 2 race at Hockenheim in April 1968 — a crash whose cause was never definitively established. He was 32 years old. The sport mourned him as it had mourned no one, and has perhaps never fully recovered from the question of what more he might have achieved. Jackie Stewart, who regarded Clark as his greatest friend and competitor, was never the same after his death.