All Formula One Race Winners
The general state of Formula One fan spaces has been hellish, to say the least. It is a cesspool of hate for drivers, hate for fans who just want to watch their driver, and rumors. While I do generally avoid most of it by heavily curating my feeds and timelines, it has been everywhere and nearly unavoidable. It also led me to revisit my original post of Formula One Race Winners and Where They Won From instead of focusing on my somewhat regularly scheduled F1 history posting.
That post had been a slice of the larger pie and focused on just drivers from this season and drivers that I personally liked to watch. This post delves a little bit deeper into race winners as a whole.
So I spent the weekend going through all 113 Formula One race winners and compiling the following information:
Percentage of races won out of their total race starts
I have found what true insanity looks like and it is combing through 113 Wikipedia pages because I was annoyed.
The chart was color-coded for easier viewing.
In the yellow color, we have all the world champions who are no longer racing in Formula One. The three world champions who are still racing in Formula One, they're color-coded in purple. In the pink color, we have all the current Formula One drivers who have not won a world championship. And in white are all the other drivers who no longer race in Formula One and have not won a world championship.
So what does this tell us? It's really hard to win more than one race. 78 drivers out of 113 have won more than one race, which alternatively means 35 drivers have not won more than one race in their entire Formula One career. Or 30.97% of race winners have won one race. It is the highest percentage for any number of wins.
Approximately half of the race winners have won 1 to 4 races (51.31%) with a large bulk of that coming from the 35 drivers that have only won a single race. And while I say only a single race, that is not to discredit their achievement in winning that one race.
Here’s another breakdown of how the difference in number of race wins looks like:
It’s very clear to see that there are a few outliers in the data. The first six to eight data points aren’t a part of that very distinct and stable line of wins. In those top 8, rest some of the most known and well accomplished world champions — Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, Max Verstappen, Sebastian Vettel, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Fernando Alonso, and Nigel Mansell.
The first non-world champion race winner is 18th on the list with 16 race wins. Stirling Moss is described as the greatest driver to never win the Formula One World Championship.
There is the argument that much of the single race winners were from the USA and the race that they won was the Indy 500. The Indy 500 used to be a part of the calendar during the early years of Formula One and a lot of the European drivers wouldn’t make the journey across the Atlantic due to how much time/money it took. But of the single race winners, only 10 were from the USA.
Richie Ginther — won the 1965 Mexican Grand Prix
Rodger Ward — won the 1959 Indy 500
Jim Rathmann — won the 1960 Indy 500
Johnnie Parsons — won the 1950 Indy 500
Jimmy Bryan — won the 1958 Indy 500
Troy Ruttman — won the 1952 Indy 500
Sam Hanks — won the 1957 Indy 500
Bob Sweikert — won the 1955 Indy 500
Pat Flaherty — won the 1956 Indy 500
Lee Wallard — won the 1951 Indy 500
However, even by excluding the nine drivers from the USA that won just the Indy 500 (which is a difficult race to win), there are still 26 drivers that won just one race which is still the most for any number of race wins.
The following is a list of all 34 Formula One World Championship winners:
The visual representation of race winners based on the number of championships:
Other than no championships, the largest category is 1 championship win with a total of 17 drivers. Since 1950, only 34 drivers have won a world championship because it is difficult to have all the necessary factors come together for the entirety of a season to win a championship. Just as, on a much smaller scale, it is difficult to have all the necessary factors come together throughout a race for a win.
The following chart shows how many drivers have won for each country. The UK, USA, Italy, and France have the most race winners (taking out the 9 USA drivers who won the Indy 500 would put the USA in line with Germany and Brazil).
2 out of the 20 race winners from the UK are currently on the grid
The only driver to win from the Netherlands is currently on the grid
2 out of the 14 race winners from France are currently on the grid
The only 2 race winners from Spain are currently on the grid
1 of the 5 race winners from Finland is currently on the grid
1 of the 4 race winners from Australia is currently on the grid
1 of the 2 race winners from Mexico is currently on the grid
The only race winner from Monaco is currently on the grid.
The last data point that I collected was the percentage of races each driver won out of their total race starts.
The top ten based on percentage were:
8 of the 10 names here make sense because they are world champions with a lot of race wins. But 2 names stand out - Lee Wallard and Bill Vukovich. Wallard only started 2 races during his Formula One career and won 1 of those races (the 1951 Indy 500) which got him a 50% win rate. Similarly, Vukovich only entered 5 races during his career and won 2 of them (the 1953 and 1954 Indy 500) which gave him a 40% win rate. Due to this, they were able to rank amongst the top 10 drivers with the highest win percentage.
On the other end are the bottom ten based on percentage:
There is no outlier here like there was with the top ten. All of these drivers won one race and had approximately 100+ race starts. As the number of race starts increased, the win percentage decreased. There is a clear and visible pattern here whereas the top ten does not have that.
In conclusion, winning a race is hard, winning multiple races is hard, winning a championship is hard, and winning multiple champions is hard. We focus so much on how a driver/team can dominate and think that is the norm when based on all the data we have, that is not true at all.
When only 113 drivers out of 775 have won a race in their career and there have only been 34 distinct world champions in almost 75 years, the norm is not the dominance we see with drivers like Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel, Alain Prost, etc. It is drivers fighting for their race win, being at the right place at the right time and on the right strategy. There are so many individual factors that have to come together for a driver to win just one race, much less more than one.
