Naming F1's definitive, inarguable, All-Quarter Century grid

What's the ultimate F1 grid of the 21st century? For one thing, the current drivers' championship leader isn't on it.

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It's tricky, isn't it? Human beings are an orderly species, on the whole. We like our street maps to make some kind of sense, we like when things rhyme, and we like nice round numbers.

As we've been reminded to within an inch of our lives this year, it's 'F1 75'. Does that mean this is the 75th season of F1? Well, no, it's the 76th. Last month was 75 years since the first F1 race though, so F1 75 it is.

See what I mean about us liking round numbers? We'll absolutely force it if we have to. But if they're going to do it...why let them have all the fun?

Let's say, charitably, that we're marking the third quarter-century in F1 history. That means we can do some big-picture thinking that we don't normally get to do so neatly, because of the...yeah, the thing about us liking nice numbers. You got that bit.

We're a quarter century through the 2000s, give or take a few races. That's a damn long sample size – hell, long enough that Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone spent more than a combined 26 years in charge of Formula 1 and the FIA between them this century. Long enough ago that they’re relics, but recent enough to nag at the edge of our collective memory.

We're not here to just blather on about the passage of time and F1 governance of the past, as much as a newsletter full of that would delight both me and GPFans historian Dan Ripley. We're here to get into the stuff everyone used to tune into ITV to watch, the reason for hundreds of thousands of Sky Sports subscriptions now. We're here for the racing.

So, let's get down to it. Ten teams have to be represented in the ultimate grid (we love a 12-team grid too, but 2025 rules...) and no driver can be on it more than once. I mean, imagine you tried to put 50% of Sebastien Vettel in a Red Bull and 50% of him in a Ferrari! There wouldn't be a surgeon in the country who'd do the job.

The ten teams and 20 drivers you're about to see laid out in the All-Quarter Century F1 Grid are scientifically, statistically and morally the correct choices. I have no doubt you'll argue with me about that on Twitter anyway.

F1's perfect grid of the quarter-century

Ferrari

As you'll see, some drivers on this list will be career greats who could've been shoehorned into a few different seats. Not so Michael Schumacher, probably the only driver on this list who would've made it onto an all-quarter century team for 1975-1999 without a quibble too. Five straight titles to start the 2000s, and barely a bee's dick from another in 2006. There may be other F1 drivers as good as him, but there will never be one the same.

Speaking of singular drivers, Kimi Raikkonen might be one of the most unique men to win the F1 drivers' title. Beloved for his Scandi-cool and his (let's be honest) abrasive radio messages, The Iceman finished in the top three of the championship in years as far apart as 2003 and 2018. He was defiant, brilliant, and fearless – and took his single championship in his 2007 debut with Ferrari, after replacing Schumi. Nobody has won a title for the Scuderia since.

Mercedes

It was difficult, but the ebbs and flows of the F1 world meant that we had to drop Lewis Hamilton from this spo---haaaaaaaa, yeah, not likely. The first and only Black driver in the sport's history, Hamilton has put himself in the inner circle of the sport's deities along with Schumacher alone. Sorry Ayrton, sorry Juan Manuel, sorry Alain. Your title stack must be more than five high to board this ride. Mind you, Lewis got six of them with Mercedes alone. The only tragedy of his career thus far is that now, in his 19th season, the sport still hasn't found a pipeline and a drive for another Black driver. Another reminder that, top to bottom, this billionaires' sport isn't close to a meritocracy.

...Sorry Nico. That wasn't a deliberate framing for our next entry. But Nico Rosberg has to be Mercedes' second driver in the all-quarter century team, because he won a world championship for them. Not only that, in his last two non-title winning seasons he won 11 races and he finished off the podium just three times when not suffering race-ruining mechanical issues. If you're counting, that's 30 podium finishes from 33 races when his car didn't break. Not counting his title year. If he didn't have yachts to swan around on and Sky Sports co-analysts to look disdainfully at, he could've been a three or four-time champion.

Red Bull

Man, what do you want here? A reason that two four-time champions, all of them won with Red Bull, should be the team's reps in this exercise? Grow up. This is sealed. Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel, take your seats.

McLaren

I don't know how many of you kids remember this but, uhhh, Lewis Hamilton is the only McLaren driver to win a title in the 2000s. And he is not getting in this car over the Mercedes, so we've got our first tough choices to make.

The first tough choice was whether Kimi Raikkonen should be in one of these spots over his Ferrari tenure, but...well, he's the only Ferrari or McLaren driver not named Schumacher or Hamilton to win a title this century, and he did it in red. No contest.

David 'DC' 'The Jaw You Could Set Your Clock To' Coulthard was the next man up and it is sincerely a three-way coin toss between him and the next two men on the list. Jenson Button also won a decent number of races for the team, also came second in a championship, and actually got his own title with Brawn.

That leaves Lando Norris trying to muscle his way into the fight. Bristol's finest may be worthy of bumping one of the two British legends above out of the second McLaren seat by the end of this year, but he's still a pup. He's also had the longest tenure and most backing from the team – could go either way, his rate stats aren’t great. He’s on the border, but has yet to respond to repeated requests to share his haircare regimen. He can either do that now or wait till he's seriously challenged for a drivers' title. His choice.

Renault

Even I'm double-checking my notes and figuring out how it's taken us so long to get to Renault. They've won two constructors' championships and, lest we forget, Fernando Alonso won both of his drivers' titles with the team.

Now of course, Nando gets into this team at a stroll (NOT that Stroll). He won the team's two titles, is one of the all-time greats of the sport and was responsible for 17 of the team's 20 race wins this century. And yeah, if we were setting this grid in individual qualifying order rather than team order, he'd be a lot higher up it.

Weighing him down are...his team-mates. These pages will never hear a bad word about Giancarlo Fisichella, an astonishingly underrated driver who would have been practically deified in the Drive to Survive era, but even we have to admit that 'won two races with the team' is a pretty low bar to being the second Renault driver here. Uh, except that nobody else did that. Ever. Bellissimo, Fisi.

Williams

The real surprise when it comes to Williams is that the choice is as easy as it is. Since Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher left at the end of 2004, only one driver has won a race for the dominant team of the 1990s. That one driver was Pastor Maldonado.

Excusing the podium-finishing efforts of the Felipe Massa/Valtteri Bottas era, this one was locked down 20 years ago.

Sauber

If you came into F1 in what we'll call the 'Hamilton Era' or later, you might be surprised how fondly we grizzled old 30-somethings speak of Sauber. After all, this is the backmarker of backmarkers, the team that hasn't finished in the top half of the constructors' championship since swine flu (no, really).

Thing is, this little Swiss team has always been around – at least since 1993, but so have the Jurassic Park films and we don't question that – in one form or other. Its most successful run came in the mid-2000s with BMW on board, when Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica took that team to second and third in the constructors' championship in 2007 and 2008, with Kubica leading home a 1-2 in Canada in the latter of those years. It's nice to be writing this when the team's just secured their first podium finish in 13 years.

Toyota

Hey, remember earlier I mentioned that Fernando Alonso and Giancarlo Fisichella took 19 out of Renault's 20 F1 wins this century? Well Jarno Trulli, in Monaco in 2004, completes that puzzle.

You'll have to forgive us at this point of the list, because it's where we start delving into 'whooooo remembers?' territory. Toyota only fielded a car in F1 for eight years as a chassis constructor, but evergreen Italian Trulli was their lead driver in six of those – picking up seven podiums.

Ralf Schumacher was clearly Trulli's best Toyota team-mate, but he's already on our hypothetical grid with Williams, so it's time to get creative. We're doing that in the form of Timo Glock, who took three podium finishes in his 2008-09 tenure with the team. Hey, they can't all be winners. Literally!

Toro Rosso

We're splitting Toro Rosso away from AlphaTauri, VCARB, Complex Carbs, Racing Bulls, the Chicago Bulls and the rest of them for one simple reason: Red Bull do. The change from 'junior team' to 'sister team' was pretty much just a semantic one, but if the energy drink moguls are going to insist that it means the new lot are an independently run entity, we're going to play along.

The Toro Rosso roster (Toro Roster?) is F1's 'who remembers this guy' game on sicko mode. Vitantonio Liuzzi? Scott Speed? Hey, Brendon Hartley, get off my lawn!

Obviously the two best drivers to come through this team are Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel. Equally obviously, they're not driving for Toro Rosso on our imaginary grid. Instead, we have Jaime Alguersuari and Carlos Sainz, who got better results than they really should've and serve to show that wow, F1's been top-heavy for longer than the Tumblr tots remember.

Force India

Yeah, seriously. The 10th best F1 team of the 21st century was Force India. We aren't counting Brawn here, because a lighting strike is not a weather system and we're not treating it as such.

As it turns out, the driver selection for Force India is actually pretty simple. Sergio Perez claimed five of the team's six podiums – that's a tick. Giancarlo Fisichella picked up the other, but we've played that card in a better spot already.

Meanwhile, only Perez has had more top-five finishes or points finishes than Nico Hulkenberg, who finally got his first F1 podium finish this month at Silverstone, some seven years after the Force India team shut down. The arc of F1 is long, and bends towards...something. It’s hard to make a deep philosophical point about Nico Hulkenberg.

If you’ve enjoyed this first edition of the GPFans newsletter, we’ll be back later this week to look ahead to the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa. Wait until the summer break, and you’ll find out all about the next American driver to win an F1 race too. We’ve got it all!

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