The Blog
History, analysis and the great hypothetical questions of Formula 1. Original content written to understand this sport better, and to inspire your next simulation.
🇪🇸 Leer en españolWhat is happening right now, with the numbers ahead of the opinion.
Baku is not the crash circuit, and since 2023 it barely breaks cars
Before the Grand Prix we counted retirements at the 23 circuits still on the calendar since 2016. Baku is the second that loses most cars (18.1%), but the place where drivers crash most is Singapore, and the one that breaks most is Melbourne with just 2.7% from contact. Plus a number nobody mentions: Baku had seven retirements in 2018 and exactly one in both 2024 and 2025.
22 September 2026 · 8 min read
Three days at the Madring: faultless organisation, and the race that moved least all season
I spent three days at the first Madrid GP on a 325 euro pass. It took me one minute to leave the venue on Sunday and I never queued once, but from the stands it looked like nobody was overtaking. Back home I checked: Madrid moved 1.50 places per driver, the lowest of the year, and Monaco moved 2.6 times more. Which grandstand to pick, what food costs inside, and why general admission saw more than my paid seat.
15 September 2026 · 9 min read
2026 Madrid GP in numbers: Hamilton loses a 14 race streak and retirements double
The first Madrid Grand Prix ended with four cars stopped, and Stroll’s decided who won. We counted retirements against starts across the 22 seasons since 2005 using one rule: 2026 is running at 19.6% and jumped 8.9 points in a single year, the biggest rise in the whole series. Stroll has retired from 10 of 14 races, three drivers are still scoreless, and Antonelli leads with one retirement.
15 September 2026 · 6 min read
The car is worth 5.4 places, the driver 3.2 and pole 2: why our simulator does not believe Gasly at Monza
Gasly takes his first pole and our 400 Italian GP simulations give him a 0% win chance and an average finish of P12.4. Rather than hide the number we opened it up: changing one thing at a time, the grid slot is worth 2 places, the car 5.4 and the driver 3.2. And we say where we think the model is wrong, because pole at Monza has won 47% of the time since 1988.
5 September 2026 · 6 min read
The F1 seats being decided for 2027, and why none of them can win a title
The contracts expiring in 2026, and what those seats are actually worth. We put every driver in all eleven cars: the three capable of fighting for a title are all taken, and the one that would move the market most is already signed until 2030.
26 August 2026 · 8 min read
Aston Martin have fixed the chassis, not the engine, and Monza will prove it
Alonso started 18th at Zandvoort and finished 9th. The easy reading is that the team has woken up. But the two races where the new car has looked good are the two least power-dependent on the calendar, and Honda is carrying an 80 to 100 horsepower deficit. With the acid test written down before it is run.
24 August 2026 · 7 min read
Zandvoort said goodbye with Verstappen in the wall, and our model saw none of it
We published the odds on Friday: Russell 25%, Antonelli 20%, Norris 18.3%. The podium was those three in exactly reverse order, and Verstappen was gone on lap 1 of his last home race. An opinion piece on what a simulator can see, what it cannot, and why we publish the misses.
24 August 2026 · 6 min read
Zandvoort’s last lap: F1 is back, and a corner says goodbye
F1 restarts its second half at Zandvoort, and it is the last time: the contract runs out and the track is gone from 2027. What the calendar loses, who inherits its banking, how a championship led by Antonelli arrives, and why the new regulations had this coming.
20 August 2026 · 6 min read
The question that comes back every year: is he slow, or is the car?
Knowing which car a driver joins predicts his season better than knowing who he is
A transfer is the closest thing F1 has to an experiment: the driver stays the same and the car changes. We took the 94 team changes since 1988 and pitted two predictions against each other for that first new season. The car he joins misses by 2.15 places, his own previous level by 2.81. Ocon went from P17 to P7.95 on joining Force India, and that car was coming off P8.79.
22 September 2026 · 8 min read
A dominant car lasts 1.4 seasons, and none has ever kept dominating the year after
We counted all 18 runs of dominance since 1958, taking dominance to mean winning 60% of a season’s races. They last 1.39 seasons on average, 13 last a single year and only the 2014-2017 Mercedes reaches four. Of the 17 runs that already have a following year, zero stayed above the threshold: the average drops from 70% of wins to 27.4%, with four falls to zero.
22 September 2026 · 9 min read
Every 2026 driver in every 2026 car: 24,200 seasons on how much the seat is worth
We put each 2026 driver in each 2026 car (242 combinations, 100 championships each) to settle the argument that comes round every year: is he slow, or is the car? Verstappen takes the title 97% of the time in the Mercedes and 1% in his own Red Bull. And the grid’s weakest driver in the best car finishes ahead of the best driver in the worst one.
22 August 2026 · 8 min read
What does a weak second driver cost? 1,200 seasons with the seat swapped
Massa next to Alonso, Pérez next to Verstappen: we re-ran four real seasons changing only who sits in the second car. Ferrari 2010 goes from winning 3% of the constructors’ titles to 89%; Red Bull 2024 leaves 179 points a year on the table and does not care.
18 August 2026 · 8 min read
Talent or car? We simulated 2,000 driver careers to find out
Two thousand complete careers, from karting to retirement, measured one by one. Junior titles barely predict anything; the car decides almost everything: those who never drove a top-three car won no races at all, and those who got the best car became champion two times out of three.
6 August 2026 · 8 min read
How much is the car worth, and how much the driver? 600 simulated seasons
We put Schumacher, Alonso, Hamilton and Verstappen in the worst car on their own grid, and the slowest driver in the best one. 11,400 races later: the car is worth eight places, it does not hand you titles, and talent pays three times more when the machinery is poor.
5 August 2026 · 8 min read
Legends put in exactly the same car, so the track settles the argument.
Alonso has won 14 of his 15 team-mate duels: every intra-team battle counted since 1988
Your team-mate is the only rival driving your car. We counted the 243 intra-team duels with a full shared season since 1988: who won, the 15 whitewashes where somebody took every single Sunday, and the 23 pairs that finished level. Plus a number no standings table shows: in 11.9% of duels, the driver who wins more Sundays loses the year on points.
21 September 2026 · 9 min read
Vettel and Schumacher: 11 titles between them, and what if they had overlapped
Vettel drives a lap at Monza in tribute to Schumacher. Between them they hold 11 championships, 144 wins and 125 poles, and since 1988 Germany has more titles than any other country, eleven of them belonging to these two men. Since they never raced each other on equal terms, we put them in the same car for 150 seasons.
3 September 2026 · 6 min read
Seven transfers that never happened, actually run: four would have changed nothing
We genuinely placed each driver in the car he never drove, against that year’s real grid. Alonso in Vettel’s Red Bull wins exactly what Vettel won: that car won with anybody in it. The one that does swing is Hamilton in the 2017 Ferrari, where Vettel takes no titles at all and Hamilton takes 87%.
22 August 2026 · 8 min read
Senna versus Schumacher, same car, 2,400 championships: length decides everything
We made them team-mates in the same car and ran the championship at six different lengths. Over one race it is a coin toss (48.5%); over twenty-four, Schumacher takes two in three. He does not win more races: he loses fewer. And in the rain the simulator falls short, for a reason we spell out.
22 August 2026 · 7 min read
Eleven legends, one car, 8,250 seasons: the greatest-of-all-time league
We put eleven GOAT candidates in the exact same car and ran them against each other: 55 duels, 150 championships apiece. Verstappen and Schumacher pull clear; Senna, Prost and Hamilton finish in a dead heat no amount of simulation can break. And the rain did something that sent us looking inside the engine.
22 August 2026 · 9 min read
Twelve teammate duels, in exactly the same car
Senna against Prost, Alonso against Hamilton, Hamilton against Rosberg: twelve real pairings, five seasons each, machinery exactly equalised. The most famous duel in history ends in a technical draw; four others finish 5-0.
6 August 2026 · 9 min read
What age is a Formula 1 driver at their best? The curve and its trap
Fifteen hundred careers measured by age. The chart says drivers keep improving until 36, and it lies: between 28 and 30, 74% of the grid disappears. What is left once you correct for survivorship bias.
6 August 2026 · 7 min read
How the sport itself has changed, and what new rules do to it on top.
How many drivers lose their seat mid-season: 163 replacements, and half of them never come back
Hadjar broke his wrist boxing and his absence moved three seats. We counted every replacement of a race driver since 1988: 163 across 39 seasons, and only 2008 and 2018 ended with the same twenty drivers that started. Of those who lost the car for good, 50.7% never raced another season. Plus the 1999 question: with the six races he missed, would Schumacher have been champion?
21 September 2026 · 11 min read
The biggest comebacks in F1: Antonelli at Monza is the second biggest winning drive ever
We counted the places gained between grid and flag across the 1,150 races held since 1950. Only 25 wins have come from ten places back or more, and Antonelli at Monza is the second biggest of them all. But the number we did not expect is another one: in the eighties 95% of races featured a ten place comeback and today 34% do, because almost nobody breaks down any more.
7 September 2026 · 7 min read
Where Grand Prix wins come from: 1,164 races since 1950
Four in five races are won by someone starting in the top three, and only 28 times in history has anyone won from outside the top ten. But the trend is the story: in the eighties pole converted 28% of the time, today it is 57%. The reason is not the circuits.
6 September 2026 · 6 min read
In the eighties four cars in ten finished. Today more than eight do
The biggest change in Formula 1 is invisible, because it happens in the workshop. Four straight decades below 52% of cars finishing, then a climb that has not stopped. And it explains something people do talk about: why fewer and fewer different drivers win.
5 September 2026 · 6 min read
Antonelli starts from the back at Monza, and a championship leader has lined up on the last row only nine times since 1950
He starts nineteenth on a new engine. A championship leader has lined up on the last row only nine times in 1,042 races, and in seven of them he finished: fifth on average. Our 300 Monza simulations give him the top five 68% of the time, almost exactly what he said he thought was realistic.
4 September 2026 · 7 min read
In 1982, eleven different drivers won. In 2023, three
We counted the winners of every season since 1950. Variety has fallen decade after decade, and the years with fewest different winners are exactly the ones with the most races. The cause is not the one usually given: it was not more parity back then, it was that the favourite kept breaking.
4 September 2026 · 6 min read
The closest title fights in F1: one was decided by half a point
We ranked all 77 seasons since 1950 by the points between champion and runner-up. Eight were won by a single point, one by half a point, the widest by 290.
2 September 2026 · 6 min read
The 1996 F1 season is the closest we have measured in 30 years
Hill takes the title in 46 of every 100 simulations and Schumacher in 44. Two points, the narrowest margin across 30 measured seasons. And they were not team-mates: one had the tenth most dominant car ever measured and the other did not.
26 August 2026 · 7 min read
How many races does it take for the best driver to win? 2,700 seasons measured
We re-ran 2007, 2010, 2021 and 2024 a hundred and fifty times each, with calendars of 5, 10, 16 and 22 races. In a lopsided year five races are already enough; in 2007, twenty-two are not, and forty barely help.
18 August 2026 · 8 min read
What new regulations do to the grid: 1,200 seasons measured
A normal year moves a car performance by 2.64 points; the year new rules arrive, 8.49. And 58% of regulation changes produce a new grid leader. The numbers behind why Formula 1 comes in eras.
6 August 2026 · 7 min read
What is the most dominant car in F1 history? 37 seasons measured with the same driver
The 2023 Red Bull RB19, and not narrowly: with an average driver it still wins nine races in ten. We sat the same driver in the best car of every season since 1988 to compare them on one scale. And the seasons that come out closest turn out to be, one by one, the most fondly remembered championships in F1.
5 August 2026 · 9 min read
The engine from the inside, and what it cannot do.
We dropped a car’s reliability from 99 to 60 and it finishes in the same place
Every team has a number called reliability. We covered two thirds of its scale on the 2026 grid, 60 championships per step and identical seeds, and the front-running team loses 0.28 championship places. The consequence shows in our predictions: the model expected 4% retirements across the four Grands Prix it called in advance, and the real figure was 18.2%.
22 September 2026 · 8 min read
Our simulator's scoreboard: four races called before they ran, and the grid still beats us on average
Since July we publish each Grand Prix preview before the race and the result after it, recalculating nothing. Four races in: 2.49 places of average error, 30 of 32 top-8 calls and 32 of 40 points scorers. Plus an awkward number we are not hiding: assuming they finish in starting order misses by less (2.25). Where we do win is Monza, when the grid lies.
22 September 2026 · 7 min read
How much is pole worth? 709 races say half, and that the circuit hardly matters
Pole converts into a win 50% of the time since 1988. The surprise is the other half: a track’s reputation predicts nothing. Monza converts more poles than the Hungaroring, and the correlation between how easy overtaking is and what pole is worth is close to zero. Our own simulator gets this wrong, and we say how.
1 September 2026 · 8 min read
The five seasons our simulator cannot explain
We re-ran 30 real seasons, 100 times each. The engine picks the right champion in 25 of them. These are the five it gets wrong, and three turned on a single afternoon no simulation can see coming.
26 August 2026 · 8 min read
How a Formula 1 simulator works under the hood
From a driver's DNA to a Grand Prix result: how a simulation engine turns attributes, car, weather and strategy into a full race. The logic behind F1 Legend Sim, explained step by step.
24 July 2026 · 9 min read
What if you could put these hypotheses to the test yourself?
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