Why winner of first F1 race this year probably won't be champion

How do I know all this? Only because I was stupid enough to suggest to my editor I look into what can be read into the opening round of the Formula 1 championship, specifically to see what likelihood or otherwise the result conferred on the winner of that race. So I went back through all previous 73 years of the drivers’ championships and compared first race winners in each year to that year’s ultimate champion. And once I’d done that, and because I’m a complete glutton for punishment, I went and did it all over again throughout the 64 years that the constructors’ title has been in play.

And yes, I know, you can prove anything with statistics. For example the numbers show that in the last 73 seasons only 46.6% of the drivers who won the opening round went on to become that year’s world champion, hence my rather headline grabbing first sentence. Of course what these stats don’t reveal, and my head already hurts far too much to go looking for those that do, is what chances you’d have if you’d finished, second, third, anywhere else or, heaven forbid, DNF’d. But a lot less than 46.6% I’ll warrant. So while you may not be likely to win the title this year, at the same time you’re far more likely to do so than anyone else. After all someone, whether it is likely or not, will take that title. So I hope there is some comfort in that.

Also it is to be remembered (ok, counted out, recounted and written about still in blind terror that you’ve added it up wrong), that all those 73 titles have been won by just 34 drivers, which seems to suggest that if you win one title, you’re likely to win another. The odds, however, are 50/50: there have been 17 drivers who have won more than one title since 1950 and 17 who won just once.

The picture is rather more rosy if you’re a constructor: in the 65 seasons since Vanwall won the first in 1958, exactly 60% of constructors whose car has won the first round of the season have gone on to take the title by the end of the year. And if you win one title, you’re very likely to win another. In all those years, just six title-winning constructors failed to become multiple champions: Vanwall of course, plus BRM, Matra, Tyrrell, Benetton and Brawn.

But there is considerable variance across the eras, reflecting often as not a period when one driver became utterly dominant. In the 1950s, for example, eight out of the ten opening rounds were won by that year’s eventual world champion, but five of those were Fangio who never failed to win the opening round of a championship-winning season. Yet by the 1970s if you won the first round your chances of becoming champion that year were tiny: indeed it was done just once by Mario Andretti in 1978. Yet in the ‘90s and ‘00s, fully 80% of first race winners would become champions that year.

It’s interesting (to me at least) to look at individual drivers too. As already stated, Fangio came into every championship year at full throttle. Lewis Hamilton, by contrast, appears to need a warm up phase: he has won seven titles (to date) compared to Fangio’s five, but in those seven years has won the first round only twice – in 2008 and 2015. So if Hamilton lucks out this weekend, do not write him off for the season. Michael Schumacher, the only other driver with five or more titles, is much more from the Fangio mould: he won seven titles and in all those years only failed to win the first round once – in 2003 if you’re interested.

What can be read into this? Very little I suspect. But it is perhaps worth remembering that whoever wins this weekend is still statistically not likely to win the title and that it will go to one of the other far less likely drivers out there…

1950s

*Shared car with Musso

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s