Formula 1 today often feels like a television drama performed at more than 300 kilometres per hour. There are heroes, villains, rivalries, alliances, spectacular victories, terrible decisions, unexpected transfers and enough radio messages to keep millions of people arguing until the next race.
Behind the drama is one of the most physically and mentally demanding sports in the world. Drivers withstand enormous forces, extreme heat and dehydration while making decisions in fractions of a second. One small mistake can destroy an entire weekend. Sometimes it can end a career, which we have witnessed from time to time.
But there is another reason Formula 1 is so unusual – only 22 people in the world currently hold a full-time race seat. Until recently, there were just 20. Millions of people drive cars, thousands race professionally, but only 22 are Formula 1 drivers.
How Formula 1 became a closed world
When we place every driver from 1950 to today in a single visualisation, the transformation of the sport becomes immediately visible.
The early decades are crowded with names and intersecting lines. In the 1950s, some seasons included close to 100 classified drivers. Many competed in only one or two races. Private entries, substitute drivers and local specialists were far more common, while the Indianapolis 500 was also part of the World Championship between 1950 and 1960.
When you scroll from the 50s to the next decades, the field gradually contracts. By the 2000s, a season usually contained around 22 to 27 drivers. In recent years, the number has remained very close to the number of permanent seats. Formula 1 has become a much more closed, stable and extremely difficult world to enter.
All F1 Drivers 1950 – Now
Select a season, change the ribbon width and follow any driver through teams, victories, starts and relative championship performance.
A career is never the driver alone
Select one driver, however, and the apparent chaos becomes a personal story.
A line rises, falls, disappears and returns. It may suggest triumph, decline, recovery or failure, although it never represents talent alone. A Formula 1 driver competes through a machine designed and operated by hundreds of other people, so the car, engine, strategy, reliability and development programme all move the line.
Fernando Alonso has one of the most extraordinary paths in the entire visualisation. He begins with Minardi in 2001, reaches the summit with Renault and wins two consecutive championships in 2005 and 2006. He moves to McLaren, returns to Renault, fights for titles with Ferrari, then falls dramatically through the standings during McLaren’s most difficult years. His line disappears when he leaves Formula 1 and reappears with Alpine before rising again during Aston Martin’s remarkable 2023 season.
The result looks less like a traditional sporting career and more like an ECG. It records more than two decades of speed, ambition, difficult choices, uncompetitive cars, returns and an almost unreasonable refusal to leave Formula 1 behind.
Lewis Hamilton’s line tells a different story. He arrives near the very top immediately, finishes second in his rookie season and becomes world champion the following year. His move from McLaren to Mercedes in 2013 is the turning point. What follows is one of the longest periods of dominance in Formula 1 history. From 2014 to 2020, Hamilton wins six championships and Mercedes becomes the defining force of the hybrid era. The later decline of the line shows how quickly the competitive order can change, even for one of the greatest drivers the sport has ever produced.
Then there are the careers shaped by unusual continuity.
Lando Norris has spent his entire Formula 1 career with McLaren. His line follows both his own development and the reconstruction of the team, from the midfield to race victories and a championship challenge. Charles Leclerc’s path is almost as concentrated, although he did spend his rookie season with Sauber in 2018 before moving to Ferrari. Since 2019, his career has remained tied to the same team, and every rise and fall in his line also tells us something about Ferrari.
This is one of the most important things the visualisation reveals – in Formula 1, a driver’s career and a team’s history cannot be separated.
The hero chosen by the crowd
The Driver of the Day data tells an entirely different story.
Driver of the Day Calendar
Explore every Formula 1 fan vote since 2016 and compare the public’s hero of the race with the official winner.
The award has been decided by public vote since 2016. At first, it appears logical to assume that fans would usually choose the race winner. The visualisation shows that they frequently do something else – across the races represented here, the Driver of the Day and the winner are the same person only around one third of the time.
The public does not simply reward the final result, most often it rewards the story of the race, which might have another hero.
He may be someone who started near the back and crossed half the field. It may be a driver who defended an impossible position, survived in a slower car, recovered after an accident or delivered a result that nobody expected. Romain Grosjean was voted Driver of the Day in Haas’s first two Formula 1 races in 2016, despite winning neither. Lance Stroll received the award after his podium in Azerbaijan in 2017. Charles Leclerc received it for finishing sixth with Sauber at the same circuit in 2018. Max Verstappen’s recovery drive in Brazil in 2016 became another perfect example of a performance remembered more vividly than the victory itself.
The winner is determined by the stopwatch, but the hero is chosen by the audience.
This is also why Driver of the Day data is so interesting, as it maps emotion, surprise and collective memory. It shows which performances made people feel that they had witnessed something exceptional.
The rise and fall of racing empires
The race-winner visualisation returns us to the machines, teams and great eras of Formula 1.
Grand Prix Winners Calendar
Filter every World Championship Grand Prix winner by season, decade, driver and team to see the colours of dominance change through time.
The 1950s belong to Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Mercedes. The 1960s reveal the extraordinary rise of Lotus. Ferrari and Lotus dominate much of the 1970s, before McLaren and Williams become the great forces of the following decades. McLaren leads the 1980s. Williams defines much of the 1990s. Ferrari overwhelms the 2000s. Mercedes takes control of the 2010s, while Red Bull becomes the dominant presence of the early 2020s.
These blocks of colour show that Formula 1 history is organised into technological empires. A team discovers the right combination of engineering, regulations, management and driving talent. It begins to win. For several seasons, it can appear almost unbeatable. Then the regulations change, key people leave, another team finds a better solution and the colour of the era changes.
Ferrari is the great constant. Other teams rise, dominate, disappear, change ownership or return under another name. Ferrari remains visible across every decade of the World Championship. Its victories are spread through the entire timeline, from the early 1950s to the present. McLaren also connects several very different periods, while Mercedes and Red Bull show how intensely a team can dominate a particular technological era.
Seen separately, every Formula 1 race is a dramatic event lasting a few hours. Seen together, the data reveals something much larger: the shrinking gateway into the sport, the unstable careers of its drivers, the emotions of its audience and the rise and fall of racing empires.