McLaren has just taken the lead of the Formula 1 constructors’ championship for the first time since 2014. It looks increasingly strong, but Lando Norris is still a long way behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in the drivers’ contest.
There’s a real chance the two big F1 prizes could go to different teams in 2024, so we thought it time to look back at when that’s happened before.
The drivers’ title winner has only come from a team that didn’t take the constructors’ crown that same season on 11 occasions. And the reasons for the discrepancies are varied…
1958 – Ferrari consistency vs Vanwall pace
Drivers’ champion: Mike Hawthorn (Ferrari)
Constructors’ champion: Vanwall
Stirling Moss famously won four of the 10 world championship grands prix in 1958 – with Cooper and Vanwall – yet lost the title to Ferrari’s one-time winner Mike Hawthorn. What’s more, Moss would still have lost the crown had the current points system been in place, underlining the boom-or-bust nature of his campaign versus Hawthorn’s consistency. And, under the current system, Ferrari would have won the constructors’ title as well!
Vanwall had a small pace advantage over Ferrari as they battled for F1’s inaugural constructors’ crown. Moss and Tony Brooks won six races for Vanwall, whereas Ferrari scored just two victories with Hawthorn and Peter Collins.
That was enough for Vanwall to defeat Ferrari, despite the fact the former wasn’t ready for the season-opening Argentinian GP, a race won by Moss in a Rob Walker Cooper.
Moss lost out for a number of reasons. Aside from his four wins, he only finished one other race, whereas Hawthorn racked up five second places. Moss also famously defended Hawthorn at the Portuguese GP, saving his fellow Briton from disqualification, and a miscommunication at Porto meant he didn’t beat Hawthorn’s fastest lap, for which there was a point.
When Phil Hill moved aside to allow team-mate Hawthorn into second at the Moroccan finale, it was enough to defeat race winner Moss by a single point.
1973 – Intra-team fight allows a great to profit, part one
Drivers’ champion: Jackie Stewart (Tyrrell)
Constructors’ champion: Lotus
Reigning world champion Emerson Fittipaldi started the 1973 season brilliantly for Lotus, winning three of the first four races. His new team-mate Ronnie Peterson then got on a roll and finished the year with three wins in the last four races to take Lotus’s overall tally to seven victories from 15.
Peterson underlined the fact that the Lotus 72 was the fastest car of the season with nine poles. But a combination of Fittipaldi and Peterson taking points off each other and some unreliability gave Jackie Stewart an opportunity.
Stewart took the tricky but rapid 006 to five victories in one of F1’s finest campaigns. At Monza, with the Tyrrell arguably now only the third fastest car after the arrival of the McLaren M23, Stewart sensationally charged to fourth following a puncture to secure his third crown and prove his status as the world’s best.
1976 – Gallant Lauda misses out to hungry Hunt
Drivers’ champion: James Hunt (McLaren)
Constructors’ champion: Ferrari
Nothing was going to stop Ferrari’s Niki Lauda from securing a second consecutive world title in 1976. Despite a growing threat from new McLaren signing James Hunt, Lauda reeled off four wins in the first six races.
His comfortable run to the crown completely changed with his near-fatal crash at the German GP. Hunt won that race – and one of the two GPs Lauda missed before his heroic comeback at the Italian GP.
Victories for Hunt at Mosport and Watkins Glen set up the legendary Fuji finale, with Lauda leading by three points. The Austrian pulled out due to the appalling conditions and Hunt’s third place following a late pitstop was enough to give the Briton the title by a single point.
Six-time 1976 winner Hunt was arguably the fastest driver to race the M23 and team-mate Jochen Mass struggled to keep up, scoring just two podiums. By contrast, Clay Regazzoni took a victory and three seconds, helping Ferrari to retain its constructors’ crown.
1981 – A lopsided Brabham and two Williams aces
Drivers’ champion: Nelson Piquet (Brabham)
Constructors’ champion: Williams
Prior to 1979, constructors only scored points with their best finisher in each GP. When the rules changed and both drivers counted, a balanced line-up became even more important, but some teams did a better job than others.
Brabham’s Nelson Piquet won the 1981 drivers’ crown in a tense season finale at Caesars Palace as main rival Carlos Reutemann suffered a bizarre fall from pole to seventh in his Williams.
That race was won by Reutemann’s team-mate and reigning world champion Alan Jones. The Australian had suffered some ill fortune and made the odd error on his way to third in the points, only three behind Reutemann, after both won twice.
Piquet’s team-mate, Hector Rebaque scored just 11 points, with a best finish of fourth. That left Brabham on 61 points, miles behind Williams on 95, despite the BT49’s obvious qualities.
1982 – F1’s weirdest season produces different champs
Drivers’ champion: Keke Rosberg (Williams)
Constructors’ champion: Ferrari
Perhaps the most unpredictable season in F1 history, the 1982 campaign had 11 different winners from 16 races. The year started with a drivers’ strike and had more than its fair share of tragedy and acrimony.
Renault had the fastest car, with 10 poles, but reliability was appalling, while Nelson Piquet and Brabham were in a transitional phase between running the DFV and BMW turbo power.
Fellow turbo runner Ferrari had perhaps the best car and took three victories, but finished the season with neither of the drivers it started with: Gilles Villeneuve was killed during qualifying for the Belgian GP, while Didier Pironi’s career came to an end after vaulting over the back of Alain Prost’s Renault in the rain at Hockenheim. Four drivers raced for Ferrari that year.
So, while Ferrari beat McLaren’s balanced line-up of John Watson and Niki Lauda for constructors’ honours, Keke Rosberg scored consistently for Williams to beat Pironi and Watson to the drivers’ crown. Carlos Reutemann had quit after scoring a second place and Derek Daly was only able to add eight points to Williams’s tally, leaving the squad fourth in the table.
1983 – Ferrari is the most consistent of the turbo brigade
Drivers’ champion: Nelson Piquet (Brabham)
Constructors’ champion: Ferrari
While Renault’s Alain Prost and Brabham’s Nelson Piquet battled for the drivers’ crown, Ferrari pairing Rene Arnoux and Patrick Tambay consistently racked up points.
Arnoux took three wins, as many as eventual champion Piquet and only one fewer than Prost. Tambay scored one victory and helped take Ferrari’s podium tally to 12.
Renault was undone by a combination of Eddie Cheever’s struggles and a fall in competitiveness that ultimately cost Prost the drivers’ title, while Riccardo Patrese suffered appalling reliability and only scored twice for Brabham.
Thus, Ferrari beat both in the constructors’ race and took what would stand as its last F1 crown until 1999…
1986 - Intra-team fight allows a great to profit, part two
Drivers’ champion: Alain Prost (McLaren)
Constructors’ champion: Williams
In a repeat of 1973, two top drivers took points off each other while the best driver in the world put in a brilliant campaign in an inferior car to steal the crown from under the noses of the battling team-mates.
This time it was reigning world champion Alain Prost in the Jackie Stewart role, scoring four wins and firmly putting McLaren colleague Keke Rosberg in the shade. Meanwhile, new Williams signing Nelson Piquet was shocked to find team-mate Nigel Mansell a tougher nut to crack than expected.
Mansell won the intra-Williams duel five wins to four and was on course for the crown at the Adelaide finale. That was until the infamous tyre blowout that put him out. Williams brought in Piquet for new rubber and the Brazilian failed to catch Prost, who took a surprise victory and second title.
Williams won the constructors’ crown by a whopping 141 points to McLaren’s 96!
1994 – Honours shared in controversial campaign
Drivers’ champion: Michael Schumacher (Benetton)
Constructors’ champion: Williams
Another tragedy and controversy-tinged season. Ayrton Senna and Williams seemed like the perfect match but the banning of the gizmos it had pioneered caught out Williams. And Michael Schumacher and Benetton hit their stride.
After three races, Schumacher was unbeaten and Senna had been killed during the appalling San Marino GP weekend. Schumacher’s team-mates – at various points JJ Lehto, Jos Verstappen and Johnny Herbert – struggled to match the German but that probably wouldn’t have mattered had it not been for two factors.
The first was significant upgrades to the FW16 that made new Williams team leader Damon Hill a genuine contender. The other was Benetton’s seemingly regular clashes with officialdom, which ultimately meant Schumacher had to do his scoring from 12 instead of 16 rounds.
When he went off in the Adelaide showdown, returned to the track and then collided with Hill, Schumacher sealed his first crown by a single point. But Williams, with Nigel Mansell and David Coulthard both having scored on their occasional outings alongside Hill, defeated Benetton in the teams’ contest.
1999 – Calamities strike McLaren and Ferrari
Drivers’ champion: Mika Hakkinen (McLaren)
Constructors’ champion: Ferrari
Ferrari had waited a long time for an F1 title – 1979 was its previous drivers’ success and 1983 its last constructors’ title – when it produced the F399. The car was good but, given Ferrari lost lead driver Michael Schumacher for six races following his leg-breaking Silverstone shunt and the fact McLaren took 11 poles, it probably shouldn’t have ended the drought.
But a series of calamities for McLaren, which included driver errors and car problems, kept both titles close.
Schumacher was back in time for the final two races and orchestrated a controversial win for title-contending team-mate Eddie Irvine in the penultimate race in Malaysia.
Mika Hakkinen put it all together in the Suzuka finale, defeating Schumacher to top the drivers’ table by two points. But the combined efforts of Irvine, Schumacher and Mika Salo was enough for Ferrari to beat McLaren duo Hakkinen and David Coulthard’s total by four points.
2008 – Hamilton leaves it late against Ferrari
Drivers’ champion: Lewis Hamilton (McLaren)
Constructors’ champion: Ferrari
Ferrari and McLaren had fought another epic battle in 2007. That would have made it onto this list – with Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen as drivers’ champ and McLaren taking constructors’ laurels – had the British team not been excluded due to the ‘Spygate’ scandal.
The 2008 campaign was more of the same, except McLaren was weakened on the driver side as Fernando Alonso was replaced by Heikki Kovalainen alongside Lewis Hamilton.
Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen scored eight victories and 172 points for Ferrari to defeat McLaren’s tallies of six and 151. But Hamilton did the heavy lifting in the MP4-23 and, thanks to famously passing Timo Glock’s Toyota on the final corner of the last race of the season, pipped Massa to the drivers’ crown by a solitary point.
2021 – Bitter contest ends in drama and a title apiece
Drivers’ champion: Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
Constructors’ champion: Mercedes
We really don’t want to get into the enormous controversy surrounding the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP here, so we’ll keep it simple. Red Bull lost the constructors’ championship in 2021 because Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas outscored Sergio Perez.
And Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton to the drivers’ crown partly – though, of course, not fully – due to the unorthodox way in which the Yas Marina season finale concluded.
Thanks to apparently minor aero revisions, Red Bull gained a small upper hand on the hitherto dominant Mercedes team in 2021. Mercedes battled back, and Hamilton and Verstappen engaged in a sometimes overly aggressive contest for the drivers’ crown.
Red Bull scored 11 wins to Mercedes’ nine and Verstappen took his first title by eight points, but Bottas beat Perez by 36, handing the Silver/Black Arrows its eighth consecutive constructors’ success.
