Leading the F1 title race almost all year and losing it: Piastri, Lauda and Prost, three times
F1 Legend Sim · Redacción · 5 de noviembre de 2026 · 5 min de lectura
Oscar Piastri left 15 races of 2025 as championship leader, from the fifth to the nineteenth, and finished third. We went through the standings after every Grand Prix since 1950: only one other driver has led that many races in a season he did not win, and it is Niki Lauda in 1976.
Twenty-five drivers, and Piastri is the exception
Across whole careers, 25 drivers have left 15 Grands Prix or more on top of the championship. Hamilton leads with 126, followed by Schumacher on 111, Prost on 79 and Verstappen on 78, and Antonelli already has 17, all of them this year. Of the 25, 24 have been champions. The other one is Piastri.
To find another driver without a title you have to go down to Carlos Reutemann, with 13 spread over three years (one in 1977, one in 1978 and eleven in 1981). After him nobody gets past six: Moss, Alboreto, Webber, Regazzoni and Bruce McLaren. Leading for a long time and never winning has barely ever happened.
What has happened many times is the other thing: leading almost a whole year and losing that year. And there the list changes, because it is full of champions.
The seasons that got away
| Driver | Year | Races as leader | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oscar Piastri | 2025 | 15 of 24 | 3rd, 13 behind Norris |
| Niki Lauda | 1976 | 15 of 16 | 2nd, 1 behind Hunt |
| Nico Rosberg | 2014 | 12 of 19 | 2nd, 67 behind Hamilton |
| Lewis Hamilton | 2007 | 12 of 17 | 2nd, 1 behind Räikkönen |
| Sebastian Vettel | 2017 | 11 of 20 | 2nd, 46 behind Hamilton |
| Carlos Reutemann | 1981 | 11 of 15 | 2nd, 1 behind Piquet |
| Alain Prost | 1988 | 11 of 16 | 2nd, 3 behind Senna |
| Alain Prost | 1984 | 11 of 16 | 2nd, 0.5 behind Lauda |
| Fernando Alonso | 2012 | 10 of 20 | 2nd, 3 behind Vettel |
| Alain Prost | 1983 | 10 of 15 | 2nd, 2 behind Piquet |
Piastri and Lauda share the number and little else. Lauda led after 15 of 16 races and lost the title in the last one. After the sixth he was 33 points clear of second place, with nine points for a win: more than three and a half races. He had the Nürburgring crash, missed two Grands Prix, came back six weeks later and still arrived at Fuji in front. There he pulled out in the rain after two laps, James Hunt finished third and beat him by a point.
Piastri lost it more slowly. His biggest lead was 34 points over Norris, after race 15, and in Mexico, race 20, his team-mate went past him by one (357 to 356). Four races remained and he ended the year third, because Verstappen passed him too: Norris 423, Verstappen 421 and Piastri 410. He is the only one in the table who did not finish second.
Since a win became worth 25 points, the biggest lead lost belongs to Fernando Alonso in 2012: 40 points after race 11, and three short of Vettel at the end.
Prost appears three times
Three of the ten rows are his, and together they add up to 32 races as leader in years he did not win. Each one was lost in a different way.
In 1983 he led until the penultimate race and retired at Kyalami, where third place was enough for Piquet. In 1984 he won more races than Lauda (seven to five) and lost by half a point, the shortest margin in history. And in 1988 he scored more points than Senna, 105 to 94, but only the best eleven results counted: on that count, 87 to 90.
In 1986 he was on the other side of it. Mansell arrived in Adelaide as leader, a tyre burst with 19 laps to go and Prost won the race and the title.
Leading into the last race and not winning
Of the 76 seasons from 1950 to 2025, in nine the leader going into the final race did not become champion: Fangio in 1950, Graham Hill in 1964, Lauda in 1976, Reutemann in 1981, Prost in 1983, Mansell in 1986, Irvine in 1999, Hamilton in 2007 and Alonso in 2010.
2007 is the most extreme. Hamilton reached Brazil on 107 points, Alonso on 103 and Räikkönen on 100, and the man in third took the title by a point from the other two. Reutemann reached Las Vegas one point ahead of Piquet: he started on pole, lost fourth gear, finished eighth and ended a point short.
If you want to see how a long season comes apart, the 1981 page and the 2025 one tell both in full.