Start, Zolder, 1978 Belgian Grand Prix

F1 now has 13 race-winning drivers – but when were there more on the grid?

Formula 1

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There were no new winners in Formula 1 last year but we’ve already had two this season: Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

But last year now looks like a blip in a sequence of seasons where several drivers have claimed their maiden victories. Carlos Sainz Jnr and George Russell did in 2022, it was Esteban Ocon’s turn the year before that, Sergio Perez and Pierre Gasly broke through in 2020 and Charles Leclerc likewise in 2019.

As a result, F1’s 20-car grid is now packed with winners. Piastri’s victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix means 13 of the 20 drivers now have at least one win to their names.

This pushes F1 past the high of 12 seen at the end of 2022. In addition to the drivers who scored their first wins since 2019, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas were already race winners.

Start, Spa-Francorchamps, 2024
F1 had 13 race winners on the rid at Spa
F1 has seen similarly strong fields in the past, albeit with larger grid sizes. In the lauded 2012 season finale at Interlagos 11 drivers had previously won races, albeit in a field of 24 cars.

Further back in F1 history, a handful of grids featured even more than 13 winners. That number was last reached at the penultimate race of 1980 in Montreal. Two rounds earlier at Zandvoort the grid included 14 winners on its 24-car grid.

Two years previously, the grid boasted its largest contingent of previous winners. This first happened in the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder, the sixth round of the championship.

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When the season began at Argentina’s Buenos Aires circuit in the middle of January, 13 of the 24-strong entry were prior winners. They included reigning champion Niki Lauda and fellow title winners James Hunt and Emerson Fittipaldi.

Start, Anderstorp, 1978 Swedish Grand Prix
Ickx didn’t qualify at Anderstorp so 14 winners started
The other race winners when the season began included Lotus team mates Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson, who dominated that season. Ferrari’s Carlos Reutemann already had five wins to his name and ex-Ferrari driver Clay Regazzoni, now at Shadow, had four. Wolf’s Jody Scheckter had won seven times.

Other drivers had picked up sole wins with an array of different teams. Lauda’s Brabham team mate John Watson gave Penske their only win in 1976. ATS driver Jochen Mass scored the only win of his career for McLaren in grim circumstances the year before when the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuich Park was cut short when a car was launched into the crowd, killing four.

Vittorio Brambilla took his only win the same year at the Osterreiching. Two years later it had been Alan Jones’ turn, for Shadow, and that season Jacques Laffite gave Ligier their first triumph.

To those 13 grand prix winners a 14th was added in Monaco. Eight-times grand prix winner and two-times championship runner-up Jacky Ickx returned to the championship with Ensign.

For the next round on the grid, the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder, there was another race winner on the grid – though he’d been there since the start of the season. Patrick Depailler triumphed for Tyrrell in Monaco, becoming F1’s latest race winner, and boosting the contingent to 15.

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There were only 24 places on the grid, and 32 drivers vying for them, but all the past victors qualified. They all made the cut a second time for the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama two weeks later.

But for the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp, despite a reduced field of 27 cars looking to make the race, Ickx failed to qualify. Unhappy with the uncompetitive Ensign, he did not return for the rest of the season.

F1 has never had as many race-winning drivers on a grid before or since that two-race spell in the middle of 1978. With the smaller grid of today, hitting that height again would require three-quarters of the field to be race winners. Will we ever see that happen?

Race winners at the 1978 and 2024 Belgian grands prix

1978 Belgian Grand Prix 2024 Belgian Grand Prix
Niki Lauda Charles Leclerc
James Hunt Sergio Perez
Emerson Fittipaldi Lewis Hamilton
John Watson Lando Norris
Patrick Depailler Oscar Piastri
Mario Andretti George Russell
Ronnie Peterson Carlos Sainz Jnr
Jochen Mass Fernando Alonso
Clay Regazzoni Esteban Ocon
Vittorio Brambilla Max Verstappen
Jody Scheckter Pierre Gasly
Jacky Ickx Daniel Ricciardo
Jacques Laffite Valtteri Bottas
Alan Jones
Carlos Reutemann

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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26 comments on “F1 now has 13 race-winning drivers – but when were there more on the grid?”

  1. 1978 was one of the greatest F1 seasons ever!
    Lauda in Brabham vs Andretti in Lotus vs Hunt in McLaren was amazing.

    Most F1 fans have heard about the ventilator Brabham, but very few seem to know it was Lauda himself driving it.

    1. Disagree with you on 1978. Yes there were lots of winners on the grid but most of them not that year. In fact, the ground effect Lotus was so dominant the races were boring at the front unless Andretti and/or Peterson had unreliability problems. If they ran reliably which, surprisingly for a Lotus they mostly did, the next best car was 30sec behind at best by the end. It wouldn’t be so bad if the Lotus drivers were fighting tooth and nail for the championship but Ronnie having fallen behind early on through unreliability and out of utmost respect for Mario basically accepted the rear gunner role later on. The only chance of an interesting fight in the sevond half of the year was extinguished when the Brabham fan car was banned.

      I’m not saying 1978 was bad by any means but neither was it a vintage season that the stats might make it look like it was. What’s the saying about lies and statistics?

      1. There are lies, damn lies and statistics. A great saying that is also a paradox since sometimes they are perfect for illustrating reality and sometimes they are extremely unrepresentative of the truth.

      2. What are your favorite seasons by decade?

        1. 2021, 2018, 2003, 1994, 1986 and didn’t really get the chance to see much on previous decades, and just looking at points can give a very distorted picture, especially with reliability back in the early years.

  2. Scotty (@rockonscotty)
    6th August 2024, 13:12

    It’s seasons like ’78 and’ 24 that truly show the brilliance of the dominant seasons like ’23. If one team doesn’t get it just right, the whole pack will catch you. While they may not be as exciting as close seasons, you have to be impressed by the execution of a masterpiece. I have been watching F1 for twelve years now and coundnt be happier!

    1. At 65%, the proportion of race winners at Spa seems to have been higher than at any point in F1 history, including Zolder 1978 (15/24 = 62.5%).

      In some ways that is not so surprising. With so few seats available in F1 now, and teams’ increasing preference for experience over raw speed, it was always likely that the grid would start to fill up with established drivers leaving very little space for others. We saw one consequence of that phenomenon at the start of the year, with no rookies starting an F1 season for the first time ever, and this unprecedented saturation of winners is another.

      1. This wasn’t meant to be a reply. I blame Red Bull, for some reason.

        1. How can you blame a team for winning.
          Strange..

          1. He wasn’t blaming them for winning, which obviously will upset some people, he was blaming them for being Red Bull, which is entirely reasonable.

          2. You can blame Red Bull has they have 2 seats of the 20 tied up driving a B car that is not competitive.

          3. Jim, I would say we can blame them also for insisting on perez, who is less competitive atm than the drivers driving their B car, so they keep potentially 3 unworthy drivers in, over 1\7 of the grid.

            Not saying ricciardo or tsunoda have been terrible, but nothing stops them from having a mazepin, perez, sargeant line up, apart from verstappen.

      2. The reality is that today there are 24 races in a season, which is 150% of the 16 there were in 1978.
        Today’s drivers participate in 50% more Grand Prix’s, the entire field has 50% more chances for producing race winners.

        Comparing F1 seasons that are over 40 years apart yields extremely inaccurate results.

        1. the entire field has 50% more chances for producing race winners

          I don’t think that’s true at all, the level of reliability improvement in the past few decades greatly counteracts that. What the higher number of races allows is a chance for the drivers in the dominant/top teams to score more race wins per season, not for more different drivers to win any. I think the factor that can help in this regard is the longevity of careers, which means established race winners hang on longer (Alonso, Hamilton), while also allowing time for drivers waiting a long time for a first win to switch teams over the years and get into a top car (Perez, Sainz, both taking over 150 races/7 seasons for the maiden win). Ocon and Gasly pump the numbers with their fortunate single wins in unusual circumstances, which I guess is the sort of chance you are suggesting, but I feel like nowadays these are more rare if anything.

          1. notagrumpyfan
            6th August 2024, 16:01

            didn’t see your reply before answering along these lines (below).

          2. Yes, I would say the difference of reliability is more massive than the difference in amount of races compared to the 70s at least, which makes one-off wins like ocon’s or gasly’s rarer.

        2. notagrumpyfan
          6th August 2024, 15:57

          The reality is also that 40 years ago retirements were much more common; mostly half the field or less made it to the finish.
          Thus for those who did finish, they had a bigger chance of winning.
          e.g. in 1978 only seven race winners made it to the finish, whereas in 2024 it was all of them (albeit 1 being disqualified afterwards).

        3. Indeed F1 in the 60s (my favorite era) was so strange compared with now cars failing on the strangest moments. Starting fields of 30 but 40+ cars entering the Saterdays were epic during qualiflying.
          Still it made a impression why i still follow F1 today.

          To give my vision of the past I found the era 1975-1985 the worst as the teams had to much money due tobaco sponsors and could field a race car an qualifly car and 2 spare cars for both drivers and all parts were made for 1 race…. this was the end of the private team entries William lasted long but still they are lost. (current Williams isn’t the old Williams as they went from private to corperated)

    2. I agree with your point but 1978 is poor example of said point. The 1978 Lotus 79 car was one of the more dominant on pace ever. It won 8/16 GP and would have won many more if not for unreliability which was much worse than now across the field. If they ran reliably no one was even close to them except at Monaco which was their Singapore 2023 moment the only gp of 1978 when they were beaten on pace. Their drivers finished 1-2 in the WDC despite not scoring a single point at last 2 gp(aka garbage time). One had unreliability the other was killed but still was p2 in the standings. And despite this appalling and sad end of the season they still scored 50% more points than the next best team. And there were only 5 winners across 16 races when 1976 had 7, 1977-8, 1979-7, 1980-7. So 5 was a very low number.

      1. Yeah, I didn’t understand this comparison as well.
        Red Bull was dominant in 2023 but not anymore the next year, ok.

        Ferrari was not dominant in 1977 and Lotus was in 1978, so the season to compare should be 1979, in which the previously dominant Lotus 79 was completely outclassed by newer venturi designs, not 1978.

  3. The next new GP winner probably won’t come around for a little while unless Antonelli achieves a similar rookie season to his predecessor & or Tsunoda receives a promotion.

  4. I don’t remember if it was mentioned on this site but I saw on twitter last week that this Belgian GP was the first time ever when the top 10 finishers were all race winners, which would have been top 11 without the Russell DSQ. I also just noticed that the top 16 finishers on the road (including Russell) all have scored at least one podium before, while the rest (Tsunoda, Sargeant, Hülkenberg and Zhou) have none.

    1. Cool stat.

    2. Impressive stats indeed, all 3 of them, not surprised it was the first time, didn’t even nootice they were all past winners\all got on the podium.

    3. notice*

  5. José Lopes da Silva
    7th August 2024, 16:21

    @keith now recall season with previous champions. I believe 2012 was the top, but is it?

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