Seventy-six seasons. A sport that began on an old bomber airfield, nearly destroyed itself, then rebuilt itself into the safest racing on earth.
Cars had been racing for fifty years already. What did not exist was a single world championship that counted them all. That began at Silverstone, a former Royal Air Force airfield in England, with the 1950 British Grand Prix.
Giuseppe Farina won that race and, at the end of the year, became the first Formula 1 world champion, driving for Alfa Romeo. The cars had no seat belts, the drivers wore cloth caps and short-sleeved shirts, and the tracks were lined with trees and hay bales. It is barely the same sport as the one you can watch today, except for one thing: the same idea of taking every fast driver in the world and settling it on points.
Juan Manuel Fangio, an Argentine who had learned to race on dirt roads, won five world titles in the 1950s — and won them with four different manufacturers, which nobody has matched since. He was not the youngest or the loudest. He was simply the driver everyone else measured themselves against.
Then British teams changed the car itself. They moved the engine from in front of the driver to behind him, which made the cars lighter and far better in corners, and within a few seasons every serious team had copied it. Jim Clark, a Scottish farmer, drove those cars with a smoothness people still talk about, and won two titles for Lotus before he was killed in a minor race in 1968. He was 32. Nobody in the paddock had thought it could happen to him.
For twenty years drivers died often enough that a full grid expected to lose someone most seasons, and the answer was usually a shrug. Jackie Stewart, a triple champion, refused to shrug. He campaigned for barriers, medical cars, proper marshals and circuits that were not lined with trees, and he was hated for it by people who thought danger was the point.
The decade's defining image is Niki Lauda. He crashed at the Nürburgring in 1976, was pulled out of a burning car, was given the last rites in hospital — and came back to race six weeks later with his burns still healing. He lost that year's championship by a single point. He won it again the next season, and again years later. Nothing has ever been braver, and he always insisted it was simply a job that needed doing.
The late 1980s gave F1 its greatest rivalry. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were teammates at McLaren and could not stand each other. Senna drove on instinct and refused to lift; Prost calculated everything and was nicknamed the Professor. They collided at Suzuka in 1989 and again in 1990, and both times a world championship was decided by the crash. Between them they took seven titles.
Then came the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola in 1994. Roland Ratzenberger was killed in qualifying on the Saturday. Senna was killed in the race on the Sunday, 1 May, leading. He was 34 and already a three-time champion, and to a lot of people he was the sport itself. Formula 1 rebuilt its safety rules from the ground up afterwards, and it is the reason the cars, tracks and medical response look the way they do now. The halo — the loop of titanium over the cockpit that fans complained was ugly when it arrived in 2018 — comes from that same line of thinking, and has since saved drivers who would not have survived without it.
Modern F1 has been a story of long dominant runs. Michael Schumacher won seven championships and dragged Ferrari from mediocrity into five straight titles in the early 2000s, working the team as hard as he worked himself. Lewis Hamilton, who arrived from a council estate in England rather than a racing family, matched Schumacher's seven, most of them at Mercedes during the hybrid era, and became the most recognisable athlete the sport has had.
Max Verstappen then won four titles in a row from 2021 to 2024, the first of them on the last lap of the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi. In 2025 Lando Norris broke that run and took the championship. And 2026 has reset the board again with the biggest rule change in years.
| Era | Who defined it | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s | Fangio | A world championship exists for the first time |
| 1960s | Clark | Engine moves behind the driver; small British teams take over |
| 1970s | Stewart, Lauda | Safety becomes something the sport fights for |
| 1980s–90s | Senna, Prost, Schumacher | Turbo power, huge rivalries, and Imola 1994 |
| 2000s–2010s | Schumacher, Vettel, Hamilton | Long dynasties; hybrid engines arrive |
| 2020s | Verstappen, then Norris | Four titles in a row, then a new champion and new rules |