In 1982, eleven different drivers won. In 2023, three

In 1982, eleven different drivers won across sixteen races. In 2023, three won across twenty-two. It is the same competition forty years apart, and that distance says more about what Formula 1 has become than any argument about who is best. We counted the winners of every one of the 77 seasons since 1950.

The years when anyone could win

1982 is the record and will probably hold it for a long time: eleven different drivers stood on the top step across sixteen Grands Prix. Almost two thirds of the races were won by somebody who had not won the previous one.

And the years when two or three won everything

Look at the right-hand column, because that is where the uncomfortable part sits: the years with the fewest different winners are also the ones with the most races. In 2023 there were twenty-two Grands Prix and only three drivers won any of them. More opportunities, fewer people taking them.

Decade by decade

The decline is not an impression, it is a sustained trend. And it has a cause you can name: reliability. In the seventies and eighties fewer than half the grid finished, so one retirement by the favourite opened the door to anyone. Today almost everybody finishes and races end the way they start.

We put numbers on that in how many cars used to finish, and how many do now.

The ones who won once and never again

There is another way to look at the same thing, and it is the one with the most stories behind it. Since 1950, 116 different drivershave won a Grand Prix. Of those, 34 won exactly one in their whole career, which is 29%. Almost one in three race winners in F1 history won only once.

The ten most recent. None of them ever won again, and in several cases the win came in a race that fell apart: Panis at Monaco in 1996, Gasly at Monza in 2020, Ocon in Hungary in 2021. That is not coincidence. When a race breaks, somebody wins who was not going to.

And here is the detail that closes the circle: the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix that Panis won is the race with the fewest finishers in history, three out of twenty-two. The only win of his career came from the day everyone else broke.

That season has another surprise in it once you run the whole thing a hundred times: it comes out as the closest season we have simulated, with Hill and Schumacher two titles apart in every hundred.

What it does not mean

It is tempting to read this as Formula 1 having been better before. That is not what the numbers say. A year with eleven different winners is also a year in which the fastest car broke every other Sunday, and that is not competition, it is chance. What the data does say is that variety of winners does not measure parity: it measures fragility.

Real closeness is measured differently, and we have measured it: in the closest title fights you will find the ones decided by a single point, and there are as many in each era.