Who holds the record of most races in Formula 1?
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Back when Formula 1 was a new sport, there weren’t many regulations regarding driver safety and rescue procedures if there ever was a scenario where an accident occurred. This led to multiple deaths of drivers every year. F1 careers used to be very short in the past and drivers also used to join the sport in their late 20s which did not allow them to compete for a long time.
With time, the rules have gotten stricter and safety has gotten much better which has resulted in a massive decrease in driver deaths. This changed the whole perspective of how long racers could realistically remain in the sport.
With time, age, and safety problems drastically reduced, it gave a chance to young guns to have a long and entertaining career in Formula 1, the pinnacle of motorsport. Currently, the driver with the most starts in Formula One is Veteran racer, Kimi Raikkonen.
Top 5 drivers with the most race starts in Formula 1
Kimi Raikkonen | 349 race starts
Having been in the sport for almost two decades, Kimi started his 349th Formula 1 Grand Prix during the last race of 2021 in Abu Dhabi. Since then the driver has retired from the sport and is trying his hand in Nascar just for fun. One crazy thing about the Finnish driver is that he is Ferrari’s last driver’s champion where he won the title for them in 2007 which is a long time to go without a title with a team as successful as Ferrari in the past.
Kimi started his F1 career in 2001 with Sauber and ended it with Alfa Romeo which is actually Sauber which is a really wholesome fact. Although there is another driver who has matched this record recently and will break it soon.
Fernando Alonso | 349 race starts
While he is racing for the Alpine F1 team, Fernando Alonso has matched Kimi Raikkonen’s record for the most starts in last weeks Italian GP. This means that they effectively share the record for now but at the Singapore GP 2022, it is a good assumption that the record set by Raikkonen will be broken by the Spaniard.
Fernando won the 2005 and 2006 world championships with Renault and left the sport after 2018 but came back in 2021 after participating in a series of competitions in other genres of motorsport. There are chances that he would be the first driver to have 400 race starts by the end of his career in the sport which is far away as he signed a multi-year deal with Aston Martin for 2023.
Reubens Barichello | 322 race starts
In third place comes Ex-F1 driver Reubens Barichello, a Brazilian racing driver who competed in Formula One between 1993 and 2011. He currently competes full-time in the Brazilian Stock Car Pro Series, driving the No. 111 Toyota Corolla E210 for Full Time Sports.
He scored 11 Grand Prix wins and 68 podiums. The Brazilian driver is best known for his time at Ferrari alongside 7-time world champion Michael Schumacher. He joined the team in the year 2000 and scored his first victory in the sport on his 123’rd race start where he came from 18th on the grid to win the German Grand Prix.
By the end of his stint in the sport, Barichello had amassed 322 race starts which have put him third of all time in the standings. The Brazilian ended his career with Williams as retired from the sport in 2011.
Michael Schumacher | 306 race starts
What many individuals consider to be the greatest of all time, Michael Schumacher has had a very big impact on the sport. The German driver made his debut in Formula 1 debut at the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix with the Jordan team. He continued to race with Benetton, Ferrari, and Mercedes before retiring from the sport after 2012.
He is best known for his stint with Ferrari as he brought the team to glory and won 5 consecutive driver’s championships with the team from 2000-2004. In his glorious career, Michael Schumacher won 91 races, achieved 68 pole positions, and amassed a total of 306 race starts which puts in fourth on the all-time list of F1 drivers.
Jenson Button | 306 race starts
The 2009 Formula One world champion completes the list of the top 5 individuals with the most race starts as he equal’s Michael Schumacher’s record. Jenson Button’s career started with Williams but he didn’t have any standout performances.
Button won the 2006 Hungarian GP after a grueling race starting from 14th place. Although when everything was about to end for the driver in 2008 after Honda planned to leave the sport, a miracle happened in the name of Ross Brawn.
Jenson was so dominant in the Brawn GP car that he won the first 6 of the 7 races and further ended up clinching both titles with the help of teammate Reubens Barichello in 2009. He started his final race in Monaco in 2017 with McLaren as he came in for one stint to sub for Fernando Alonso.
These drivers have made a name for themselves in the sport and have earned a place in the Formula 1 Hall of Fame. Out of these drivers, Fernando Alonso is the only active driver in F1 which means that the record will be set even higher. It’s gonna seem impossible to beat it now since drivers don’t race in the sport for as long as Kimi and Alonso did. But miracles do happen so it will be interesting to see if anyone is able to beat the record.
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Varad Joshi
(940 Articles Published)