The closest title fights in F1: one was decided by half a point

A Formula 1 season runs for eight months and gets remembered for one Sunday. We ranked all 77 world championships held since 1950 by the points separating champion from runner-up, and the spread looks nothing like the story people tell: 8 titles were settled by a single point, one by half a point, and at the other end one was won by two hundred and ninety.

One by half a point, and 8 by one

Start with the one that has no rival. In 1984, Niki Lauda beat Alain Prost, his own McLaren team-mate, to the championship by half a point. It is the smallest margin any title has ever been decided by, and it came from the Monaco Grand Prix being stopped before half distance and paying half points.

After that come 8 championships separated by a single point, which today is the gap between seventh and eighth place, and less than that under several of the scoring systems that came before:

• 1958 · Mike Hawthorn over Stirling Moss
• 1961 · Phil Hill over Wolfgang von Trips
• 1964 · John Surtees over Graham Hill
• 1976 · James Hunt over Niki Lauda
• 1981 · Nelson Piquet over Carlos Reutemann
• 1994 · Michael Schumacher over Damon Hill
• 2007 · Kimi Räikkönen over Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso
• 2008 · Lewis Hamilton over Felipe Massa

There are seventy years between the first and the last of them, and several different scoring systems in between. What they share is that, measured in points, they are mathematically indistinguishable: each came down to the smallest margin its era allowed.

Half an hour short at Monaco

It was raining in Monaco on 3 June 1984. Prost started from pole and was leading when the race was stopped on lap 31, just past the one-hour mark. The rules award half points if less than 75% of the scheduled distance has been covered, so the winner took 4.5 points instead of 9. That half point decided the championship six months later.

Two things were happening behind him that nobody had pencilled in. Ayrton Senna had started thirteenth in a Toleman and was second after thirty-one laps: his first podium in Formula 1, in his sixth race. Until that afternoon his best result was two sixth places. And the other McLaren was already out: Niki Lauda had spun off on lap 23 and was classified eleventh, with no points.

The red flag came from Jacky Ickx, clerk of the course that weekend, who showed it without consulting the stewards. What keeps the afternoon in dispute forty years later is what was going on when he did: Senna was closing on Prost lap after lap, and further back Stefan Bellof was faster than either of them. In the order it was stopped, Prost won. Ten more laps and perhaps not.

Bellof crossed the line third and appears in no 1984 classification: Tyrrell was excluded from the entire championship that summer and its results were wiped. In the official table the third place at Monaco belongs to René Arnoux.

What would have happened without the red flag

This one can be answered without simulating anything, and it comes out clean because in 1984 neither Lauda nor Prost lost anything to the dropped-scores rule: their best eleven results added up to exactly their season total. Had Monaco paid full points with the same finishing order, Prost would have scored 9 instead of 4.5, and Lauda would still have taken nothing from that race.

So the red flag did not take a win away from Prost, it handed him one: he was in front when they stopped. What it took was half of what the win was worth, and the championship with it. Prost won seven grands prix that year and Lauda five, and the title went to the man with five.

The full table

The twelve closest of 77 championships. The median across the whole period is 13 points, so half of all championships are decided by less than that. Formula 1 is fought over far more often than the sense that the same driver always wins would suggest.

And at the other end

The ugly end of the table is worth looking at too, because it explains why the general impression does not match the spread:

Walkover seasons are few, but they are the ones remembered as an era, because they run for several years in a row and because a single image sums each one up. The close ones get remembered as individual races instead.

A warning about comparing points across eras

The scale has changed several times. A win was worth nine points until 1990, ten until 2009 and twenty-five from 2010 onwards, so a three-point margin in 1988 carries more weight than it looks and a twenty-point one in 2020 carries less. That is why this article does not claim to name "the closest championship in history" and simply ranks by margin.

If what interests you is closeness itself, measured without depending on the scoring system, we come at it from another angle in how many races it takes for the best driver to win, replaying whole seasons with calendars of different lengths.