Is it right to say that only great race drivers make it to Formula 1?
The most prestigious car racing category in the world demands great driving skills plus boldness and strategy. Moreover, car racing is a sport so it requires learning, practicing, dedication and going up the career ladder, starting with less powerful cars.
Well, it is not always like that.
One factor is talent.
There are always star drivers and ordinary drivers, like the supporting actors in a movie. In addition, among the ordinary drivers, there are those who could become a star if they get an opportunity and those who lack what it takes to become a star driver.
However, talent is not the only factor.
Formula 1 teams depend on sponsorships. There are drivers who get a Formula 1 car because they bring sponsors to the team, not only due to their talent. In addition, there are pay drivers. Yes, those who pay a good amount of money to the team to get an F1 car.
In this article, you have a list of the worst drivers of Formula 1 and the drivers who were, or still are, great driving stars. Several criteria have been considered to prepare this list including achievements, driving style and contemporary opinions both for the worst and the best drivers.
Here you have a list of the 10 worst Formula 1 Drivers and the 10 Best.
20 Worst: Michael Andretti
His father Mario was a Formula 1 champion driving the incredible Lotus wing car. Michael himself showed his driving abilities with the Indy Cars where he got the championship in the 1991 season, winning eight out of eighteen races in that season.
However, in his only Formula 1 season, he deserved to be on this list. It is not only that his results were very poor, it is also that he could not achieve anything important when he was driving a McLaren and his teammate was the great champion, Ayrton Senna.
To make it worse, after his last race, he accused that his meager results were part of the plan of the Formula 1 bosses to show the Indy drivers as poor performers.
19 Worst: Tarso Marques
Brazil has had great Formula 1 champions but Tarso Marques was not, definitely, among those stars. In three seasons, he could never achieve a significant result.
You can argue that he has always driven for Minardi, a team with very little resources. Well, in the 2001 season, his Minardi teammate was Fernando Alonso, who was making his debut in Formula 1 and could show his talent even with a lousy car.
Marques could not qualify for half of the races he was supposed to have in the three seasons. And in at least two of his races, he retired due to his own mistakes.
18 Worst: Luca Badoer
Italian driver Luca Badoer participated in the Formula 1 championships of 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999 plus two races ten years later, in 2009. In a total of 67 races, he could never call the attention of any major team to his driving skills.
Luca had raced in karts, Formula 3 and Formula 3000 but the only success he could achieve in Formula 1 was a job as a test driver for the Ferrari team which means no racing, just testing.
In 2009, when Ferrari driver Felipe Massa had to be absent due to an accident, Badoer had the opportunity to drive a competitive car in actual races.
How was it? After only two races, the team decided to replace him.
17 Worst: Piercarlo Ghinzani
During eight years in Formula 1, with more than one hundred races, this Italian driver accumulated 2 (two) points. Yes, we put it in number and letters to make it clear the points were only two.
To his poor performance, he added a terrible crash in the warm-up session for the South African Grand Prix of 1984. He hit the wall with the car fully loaded with gas, apparently due to a rear suspension failure. Piercarlo had burnedhis face and hands.
The curiosity of his Formula 1 career was that he got his only two points right in the following race after his accident, in Dallas Grand Prix of 1984.
16 Worst: Marco Apicella
This Italian race driver had four seasons in the European Formula 3000 with some good but not outstanding results. So much so that he had to move to the Japanese Formula 3000 in the years of 1992 and 1993.
Apicella got his great Formula 1 debut opportunity in his home country in the Italian Grand Prix of 1993.
Why is he on this list? Certainly for his result and also for having one of the shortest careers in Formula 1.
In the qualifying session, Apicella got the 23rd positionon the grid. As soon as the race started, he crashed with his teammate in the first curve. End of the race, end of his career in Formula 1. The Jordan team replaced Apicella in the following race.
15 Worst: Alex Yoong
This F1 driver from Malaysia was in the category for the final three races of the 2001 and the whole 2002 seasons. However, the Minardi team replaced him in one race of 2002, in Hungary, so that he could practice for the final races.
His F1 career had a total of 18 races, of which he qualified for fourteen. His lap times were always three or more seconds higher than those of the better drivers.
By the way, he got the position to drive an F1 thanks to the sponsorship of a company that belongs to the Malayan government.
14 Worst: Paul Belmondo
Apparently, after a love affair with Princess Stephanie of Monaco in 1981, Paul Belmondo became interested in race driving. The son of famous French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo arrived in the highest category in 1992 driving for the March team.
Paul Belmondo was one of the pay drivers. Exactly, he paid with his personal money to have a position in the team.
He entered the qualifying sessions of 27 races but could only participate in seven of them. Then he realized this kind of amusem*nt was getting way too expensive and abandoned Formula 1. His best finish was a ninth place in the Hungarian Grand Prix in 1992.
13 Worst: Taki Inoue
Taki Inoue does not agree to figure third in this list. According to his own messages through Twitter, he was the worst Formula 1 driver ever!
He had a short career in the highest category in 1994 and 1995.
His first race? The Japanese Grand Prix of 1994. Did you expect something different? Thanks to his sponsorship from Unimat, the giant vending machine company of Japan, Inoue got a car in Simtek in his first season and in Footwork in his second.
So, Taki Inoue was kind of a pay driver because he brought sponsorship to teams that were hungry for money.
His races? Well, his Twitter tells it all, but you may want to know that Taki got hit by a safety car.
12 Worst: Rikky Von Opel
The great-grandson of the founder of Opel, the German car manufacturing company, is a millionaire who decided to race in Formula 1. The first F1 driver from Lichtenstein.
He paid his way into a newly created team called Ensign in 1973. Rikky stayed in the category for two seasons.
After only three races in 1974, he replaced the second driver of Brabham and became the teammate of Argentine Carlos Reutemann whose driving performance he could not get even close.
How many points? None.
To make matters worse, in the Monaco Grand Prix of 1974, he wasthe only driver not to qualify for the race. And he was driving a Brabham!
11 Worst: Yuji Ide
This Japanese race driver got in Formula 1 in 2006 driving for the Super Aguri team, which belongs to Aguri Suzuki. He became the teammate of Takuma Sato, another Japanese F1 driver. Ide could not speak English and could hardly understand it.
His career in the highest category lasted for only four races.
What happened? Well, this is the reason why he is here in the first position of our list.
After four races, the FIA revoked his license to be a Formula 1 driver based on the grounds that his presence in the races was a risk to other drivers.
This is his well-deserved first place.
10 Best: Nigel Mansell
British superstar Nigel Mansell is in this top ten list due to his 31 wins, 32 pole positions, and 30 fastest laps. Those numbers alone prove how fast and consistent his driving was.
However, Mansell got only one Formula 1 world championship in 1992. In the following season, due to a disagreement with his team, he decided to leave Formula 1 and join th Indy Car Series, of which he became champion in 1993, returning to F1 in 1994.
A noteworthy record of Mansell is that out of the 16 races of the 1992 season, he got the pole position in 14 of them.
9 Best: Jim Clark
This great British driver won the Formula 1 championship in 1963 and 1965. In his first title, he won seven out of the ten races of the season.
He had an elegant driving style making the curves with a perfect line. It was once described that seeing Clark racing was like listening to classical music.
When he died in a Formula 2 crash, at the age of 32, he was the Formula 1 driver with the highest number of victories by then, with 25 wins.
Clark had a career of 72 races and wason the podium in 32 of them.
No other driver ever has won the Formula 1 championship and the Indianapolis 500 race in the same year. Jim Clark did that in 1965.
8 Best: Jackie Stewart
This British star, born in Scotland, was the first to break Jim Clark’s record number of wins. In his last year in Formula 1, 1973, Stewart got his victory number 27, a record he kept for 14 years until Alain Prost took it from him.
Stewart had a competitive driving style and a great ability to adjust and develop cars. So much so that he still is the only driver who got the championship with a French-built car, the Matra in 1969.
In what would be his 100th, and last race, the American Grand Prix of 1973, Stewart decided not to race due to the fatal crash of his teammate Francois Cevert in the last qualifying.
7 Best: Fernando Alonso
Spanish champion Fernando Alonso has many reasons to beon this list among the ten best Formula 1 drivers ever.
Along with his career, Alonso showed the skills to fight for top positions even when he had less competitive cars.
He got the world championship in 2005 and 2006. Alonso has also got 22 pole positions and 32 victories. With his aggressive driving style, Alonso gets a lot more out of the car than an ordinary driver, even if the car is not the most competitive one.
His place in this list, ahead of Clark, Stewart, and Mansell is very well deserved.
6 Best: Sebastian Vettel
The youngest world champion ever. German Sebastian Vettel is among the ten best drivers because he is fast, has a great style and got his first title at the age of 23.
He got his first F1 win at the age of 21. Vettel has an amazing record, achieved in 2013, of nine victories in a row.
Unbeatable!
Only three drivers have won more races than Vettel, and he is still racing!
How come he got all those achievements at early ages? Since the age of eleven years old, Vettel got the driver support from the Red Bull Junior Program.
Vettel got four world champions. The four in a row, beginning in 2010.
5 Best: Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton may have a strong personality but one thing is for sure: he's fast.
Never has a British driver had so much success in Formula 1. Hamilton is also the second driver ever when it comes to the number of race victories having been the first to see the checkered flag 64 times up to June 2018 when this article is dated.
To his four world championships, Hamilton adds a remarkable record. Never has any other driver been the pole sitter as many times as he has.
He leads this ranking with 74 pole positions, ahead of Schumacher with 68 and Senna with 65.
To some people, Hamilton´s record numbers are boosted by the fact that he has never driven for a team with limited resources.
4 Best: Juan Manuel Fangio
Five times world champion in 1951, ’54,’55, ’56 and ‘57, Fangio was setting records at the beginning of Formula 1.
There are two important considerations when analyzing Fangio’s results. First, in his time, each Formula 1 season had only eight or nine races and, second, drivers were much older than what they are today.
Still, the Argentine champion had 24 wins and 29 pole positions in the 52 Formula 1 races of his career.
Amazing, isn’t it?
And Fangio was 40 years old when he got his first championship in 1951. Not older than his competitors. He had a terrible accident in Monza in 1952, of which, many thought he would never recover.
In fact, he got back to Formula 1 and won the championship four years in a row.
3 Best: Alain Prost
Technical skills, race strategy, and speed. With those three ingredients, Alain Prost has become one of the best Formula 1 drivers ever. He is the only French driver to be an F1 champion.
Probably there is no top ten driver list without his name.
Prost got the F1 championship four times in 1985, ’86, ’89 and ’93. Other important results of his career are also incredibly impressive. He drove in 202 races, of which he won 51, got the pole position 33 times and was one of the three in the podium 106 times.
Those results are even more amazing when you take into consideration that Prost was a contemporary of Senna, Piquet, and Mansell and had an intense rivalry with those three stars.
2 Best: Michael Schumacher
German Schumy is the greatest champion of Formula 1 with seven titles and is also the greatest race winner with 91 victories.
Schumacher had a long career with 308 races and had great cars like Benetton and Ferrari. No other F1 driver has ever had five championships in a row like Schumy did in 2000 through 2004 driving for Ferrari.
Definitely, his results could place his name in the top of the top ten list. However, he did all those achievements in an era when he was the only superstar driver as Prost and Mansell had retired and Senna passed away.
There has been little information about his health condition since he had a terrible ski accident in 2013.
1 Best: Ayrton Senna
Three times world champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991, the Brazilian driver was the greatest ever.
Senna was the fastest driver holding the record of 65 pole positions from 1989 until 2006, that is twelve years after his last race.
Even when he had a less competitive car, it was very difficult for any other driver to get passed him.
If it rained, Senna was unbeatable.
In a rainy Sunday in Donnington Park in 1993, Senna started the race in the fifth place and, at the end of the first lap, he was already the leader.
Ayrton Senna crashed to death in Imola, Italy when he was in the first position on the first of May, 1994.
Sources: autoclassics.com, diariomotor.com, motorsport.com
