Welcome to our Staturday Night Fever, a collection of pure filler sporting stats stories for our Gurgler website for a Saturday night in between the weekly previews and post weekend analysis. This week we are heading into Formula One territory for a F1 Race Winners History.
Our Staturday Night Fever is our way of diving deep into a sporting stat,
This week inspired by F1 becoming a competitive motorsport category by having more than one winner in 2024, one of them a first time winner in Lando Norris, we’d look into F1 Race Winners and where they come from, which country does best, and how likely a race winner becomes a Champion.
STATURDAY NIGHT FEVER – F1 Race Winners History
For clarity in most of the records below we have excluded the Indy 500.
UK leads the way, but as we’ll find out, they have more drivers and aren’t quite a high for % of champions per win.
Finland is surprisingly high so a small nation. Venezuela took some remembering into how and when they could have happened.
A big surprise that the Monaco Grand Prix as seen the most first-time people.
And that the Australian Grand Prix has seen only one first-time race winner since the first race in 1985.
There’s been as many new race winners in the 2020’s as the whole previous decade before it.
Also, the longest wait for a driver to win a Champion after their first race win is six years. So if the gap between the first win and first race is seven seasons and more, forget about a World Championship. So Sergio Perez is out.
So race wins v starts % is calculating the numbers of wins in total for each country and dividing by the total number of GPs the drivers of that country.
For Race Winners v Actual drivers it is the count of F1 Race Winners vs the count of drivers who have started a race. Robert Kubica helps get Poland across the line in first place for this stat. It’s last place for wins v total starts. A few years injured and in a Williams doesn’t help.
So in the F1 Race Winners History there are 36 one win wonders.
Plus 710 no win slow pokes.
Above that is a list of countries who haven’t won a GP. West Germany is the worst nationality for that surprisingly.
The interesting point here is that if Lewis Hamilton wins his next race he will take over this record. Same for Fernando Alonso but Hamilton is actually likely to win another race.
