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, which makes the intra-team duel the cleanest comparison Formula 1 offers. We counted every one since 1988: 243 pairs who shared a full season, and who actually won each one. Fernando Alonso has won 14 of his 18, the best record in the series. And there is something no standings table shows: in 11.9% of duels, the driver who wins more Sundays ends the year behind in the championship.

Who beats their team-mates

You win an intra-team duel by finishing ahead on more Sundays than the other driver. We only count races where both were classified, because a retirement says nothing about who is better: it says a car broke. These are the fifteen drivers with the most duels won since 1988.

The table rewards two things at once, and they are worth separating: winning a lot of duels and lasting a long time. A driver with twenty seasons gets twenty chances. What sets the top apart is not the wins column but the losses one, which is the one you cannot inflate by racing more years.

The fifteen whitewashes: winning every Sunday

Across 243 pairs, only 15 times has a driver finished ahead of his team-mate in absolutely every race where both made it to the flag. It is as close to a proof as this sport gets.

The closest of all

At the other end there are 23 pairs who finished the year level on Sundays. These are the longest ones, which is where a draw means something: the more races, the less likely it stays level by accident.

Winning the Sundays and losing the year

Here is what no standings table tells you. In 29 of the 243 pairs, that is 11.9%, the driver who finished ahead more often ended the championship with fewer points than his team-mate. One in eight.

The extreme case is Williams in 2019: George Russell finished ahead of Robert Kubica on sixteen of the eighteen Sundays where both reached the flag, and ended the year nil points to one. The car could not score, so the only result that made the table was one chaotic race that fell to the other man. The championship says Kubica won that duel. The sixteen Sundays say otherwise.

And some of them decided things that mattered. At Ferrari in 2021, Charles Leclerc finished ahead of Carlos Sainz 14-6 and lost the year by four and a half points, because the other man's consistency scored on the days he did not.

Why the two counts measure different things

The Sunday score answers who was faster more often. The points answer who scored more, which also depends on which races you were ahead in: winning the internal duel when both are tenth and eleventh is not worth what it is worth when both are second and third. When the car is good, the two counts almost always agree. When the car is bad, one stray result takes the whole year.

All of this is what actually happened, with cars that are equal only in theory: inside the same team the two machines carry parts of different ages, different strategies and different luck. If you want the other half of the question, what happens when the machinery really is identical, that is in the twelve duels in exactly the same car, which a simulator can do and reality cannot.