My Gf is a F1 stat freak and just hit me with this. Apparently if you only include race winners Spain has the best average as there has only been one Spanish driver to win a GP and he won 33 of them.
As a fan of David Foster Wallace, someone who works in a field based around competition that has had a strong push towards youth in the last decade, and a fan of F1 I’ve been interested in the seeming phenomenon of drivers starting their careers younger and younger, and have been looking into running some numbers on the question but never quite figured out how to do it. Inspired by the recent Verstappen announcement, however, I put my mind to it and figured out a way to start quantifying the question by using /u/whatthefat ‘s ranking of drivers.
After thinking through a number of different approaches to what I could do, I boiled down my interest to three distinct questions:
First, has the age of entry into Formula One significantly declined?
Second, has the age of peaking in skill level significantly declined as well? That is to say, are we seeing better younger drivers. Coupled with that, if drivers are starting younger and driving much more than previous generations are they peaking earlier in their careers in F1 or does it still take as long for them to ‘get good’?
Third, if drivers are getting good at a younger age are they then being forced out earlier or do they linger along with other teams well past their prime?
To get the data I went to the sixty best F1 drivers and compiled a spreadsheet that included the age* of every driver when they competed in their first race (including qualifying/prequalifying where they were eliminated, but not including test or practice driving), the age they were during the second year of their three year peak range (to measure when they became ‘consistently’ good), and the year they competed in their last Grand Prix, excluding drivers who left because of injury or death.
*A quick note: Age, for these figures, is based off subtracting the year in question from the driver’s birth year. In other words, how old they would be at the end of the year. This introduces a margin of error in my figures because they could all, conceivably, be about a year too old for a driver who was born towards the end of their birth year. I didn’t try to increase the accuracy of this figure for two reasons, first because the figures presented are still roughly accurate and give a sense of how the sport has evolved, second because the peak year I’m basing analysis off of is simply a year lon
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Apartheid South Africa was excluded from the Olympics and other international sporting events for many years, but I was somewhat surprised to see that individual South Africans, like Scheckter, were allowed to compete.
The FIA held an F1 race in South Africa until 1985 (long after Scheckter retired), so the sport's governing body obviously had no problem with his participation. But I've always been curious to know if he was ever given a hard time about his country's racist policies, and whether he was compelled to speak out one way or another.
A bet is what got Maria Teresa de Filippis into motor racing, but her legacy she crafted herself. During her racing career her biggest competition didn’t come from the greats like Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham or Juan Manuel Fangio, but the prejudice that women weren’t supposed to race.
Maria was born and raised in 1926 in Naples, Italy. In her youth she was keen on riding horses and showed little to no interest in cars, let alone racing them. That all changed after the war, when in 1948 her two brothers – Giuseppe and Antonio – mocked her, and bet she wouldn’t be fast in a car since she was a girl.
She stepped up to the challenge, and practiced on the narrow and twisty Italian roads along the Amalfi coast, not far away from her hometown. She made her debut in a hillclimb event, held near Naples, in Salerno-Cava dei Tirreni. Maria drove a Fiat 500B to its full potential and promptly won the race.
While she had won the bet, she was keen to prove herself even more, mostly to herself. Over the year, she participated in many races, including big events like the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia. She kept racing heavier cars with bigger engines, such as a Lancia Aprilia, a Fiat 1100 Sport, an Urania 750, a Giaur, an Osca 1100, and an Osca MT4.
In these years, motorsport was highly dangerous, and a woman behind the wheel was certainly frowned upon. Maria also experienced her fair share of danger. In 1954, while driving in the Giro di Sardegna, she was well on her way to the title in the Italian sports car championship, until she was blinded by straw thrown in the air by two cars in front of her. Maria lost control of her Maserati A6GCS and crashed out of the race. She lost all hearing in her left ear that day, along with her potential championship.
But a consolidation was that Maserati signed her as a works driver, albeit it mostly for testing. She tested Maserati’s high-performance cars – including Formula 1 material – while participating in some races (and actually being paid for it).
She had two more huge accidents. In a 1955 event at Mugello she slid off the road and crashed into a ravine. A tree prevented her from tumbling all the way down, saving her life. And in 1956, in the 1000 kilometres race of Buenos Aires, she tried to avoid a slower participant, but crashed and was thrown out of the car, breaking her arm and losing her fourth place in the World Sports car championship. But Maria could not be stopped.
In 1958, Maria Teresa de Filippis entered t
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