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Preparing your Formula Dream journey
In 2024, seven different drivers won a Grand Prix. In 2025, only four did.
2025 was the more competitive season, and it is not close. Three drivers won 8, 7 and 7 races. The top driver took 33% of the wins, the lowest share in six years.
In 2023, by contrast, Max Verstappen won 19 of 22 races. Only three drivers won anything all year.
Every race classification from 2021 to 2026, 125 races. The winner of each, by season:
2023 is the outlier of the modern era. Nineteen wins from twenty-two starts is 86% of the season, and the only other drivers to win were his team-mate and one Ferrari.
The number everyone quotes is how many different drivers won. It is easy to say and it is close to useless.
2024 had seven different winners. 2025 had four. Yet 2025 was clearly the closer season.
The reason is that counting winners treats a one-off victory the same as a title challenge. In 2024, four of those seven drivers won twice or fewer. The season still had Verstappen on nine, comfortably clear.
In 2025 the top three won 8, 7 and 7. Three drivers, separated by a single race across a whole season. That is as close as a modern Formula 1 championship has been, and the winner-count metric marks it down for it.
The better measure is how concentrated the wins are. The top driver's share, by season:
2025 is the most competitive season in this window at 33%. 2023 is the least at 86%.
The two measures disagree because they answer different questions. "How many drivers were capable of winning on their day" is what winner-counting measures. "How evenly was the season actually shared" is what concentration measures, and it is the one that matches how a title fight feels.
2021 had six different winners, which sounds open. Verstappen and Hamilton took 18 of the 22 between them, which does not.
That season is remembered as one of the great title fights, and correctly so, but the competition was between exactly two people. Four other drivers won one race each, and none of them was ever in the championship.
A season can be a brilliant contest and a narrow one at the same time. The winner count cannot tell those apart.
Eleven races into 2026 the leading winner is not Verstappen, Norris or Hamilton. It is Kimi Antonelli, with 6 wins from 11, a 55% share.
Antonelli leads the drivers' championship on 219 points, from Hamilton on 169 and Russell on 160, and became the youngest championship leader in the sport's history at 19 years and 216 days. Mercedes lead the constructors' championship.
That fits something else we measured. In 2025 Antonelli was out-qualified by his team-mate Russell 21-2. In 2026 he leads that head-to-head 7-4, the largest year-on-year swing of any driver pairing on the grid. The wins and the qualifying data tell the same story about the same driver.
A 55% share would make 2026 less competitive than the last two seasons, though with 12 rounds still to run that number has plenty of time to move.
Ignore "how many different winners" as a competitiveness stat. It rewards a fluke victory and punishes a genuine three-way fight.
Look at how the wins are split among the drivers who got them. 8-7-7 is a season. 19-2-1 is a procession.
A great title fight can be a two-car title fight. 2021 proves it, and so does the arithmetic.
Watch the top driver's share as the season runs. It is a single number that tracks how open a championship is, and it updates every race.
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