Good news! Lance Stroll will not be the worst F1 driver to start 200 grands prix

Lance Stroll

Good news! Lance Stroll will not be the worst F1 driver to start 200 grands prix

They'll let anyone in this club!

Chris Deeley

Friday 24 July 2026 11:57

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In the 76-year history of the F1 world championship, 24 drivers have made it to the start line of 200 grands prix. In Hungary this weekend, that exclusive club will gain a 25th member.

Nine of the current 24 are former drivers' champions, and a full 75 per cent have been on constructors' championship winning teams. Truly, a collection of some of the finest racers the sport has ever seen.

On Sunday, Lance Stroll will crash the party.

A brief but necessary aside about Lance Stroll

It's very difficult to tell the story of Lance Stroll's career without coming across as somewhat negative, or even mean-spirited. On this occasion, that is not the author's intention. You don't make 200 F1 starts by collecting cereal box prizes, even if the vastly overinflated schedule makes it easier than ever before.

End of brief but necessary aside about Lance Stroll

Where Lance Stroll ranks among 200-start F1 drivers

Article continues under video

The bad news for Stroll is that he doesn't reach the level of those former drivers' or constructors' world championships. He's very much one of the guests invited to the party to fill up the room, in this particular cohort.

There are a few others who sit in that category with him, from over the years. The French stalwart Jean Alesi, whose years at Ferrari and Benetton netted him 32 podium finishes in 201 starts (but only one win), is among them.

Also in the 'decent careers with some time at good teams' bucket are Carlos Sainz and Daniel Ricciardo, race-winners for teams with championship pedigree while never getting a gong while they were there.

Jarno Trulli and Nico Hulkenberg can slide in a rung below the drivers above, with their relative lack of on-track success mitigated by the fact that they spent most of their careers driving for middling (at best) teams and – crucially – regularly outperforming their team-mates.

Finally, you have Stroll and...the worst driver to make 200 grand prix starts, Andrea de Cesaris.

For reasons of historical accuracy, it should be pointed out that De Cesaris was far from the worst driver in F1 history. There are countless dozens of utterly hapless one-season wonders who managed to be both accident-prone and slower than glacial erosion. De Cesaris was only one of those things.

It was the glimpses of raw pace (and his ability to fund his career long after many would've run out of money, which made him valuable to smaller, poorly-funded teams) that kept him in the sport for 200 races at a time when that represented a truly lengthy career, but unfortunately...he was bad at doing the other useful things, like 'keeping his car on the track', 'not running into other cars', and 'finishing races'.

By 1990, two thirds of the way through his lamentable career behind the wheel, former world champion turned commentator James Hunt was openly calling De Cesaris an 'idiot' on BBC broadcasts, adding in one famous moment: “It really is a disgrace that he’s allowed to continue to interfere in Grand Prix racing, and apart from spoiling the race for drivers out there, he spoils it for us spectators.”

Even in an era of poor reliability, 'De Crasheris' and his 70.67 per cent retirement rate were extraordinary.

Fun Andrea de Cesaris stat break

De Cesaris once went 18 races in a row without getting to the finish line. He then finished eighth in Mexico, and immediately embarked on a new 22-race streak - including the entire 1987 season - of failing to finish.

He still finished the 1987 season with more points than 17 other drivers who started races that year (including Martin Brundle) because when he retired from the Belgian Grand Prix on the final lap while in third place, everyone behind him was a lap down. That meant that he was, despite not finishing, classified ahead of them.

End of fun Andrea de Cesaris stat break

Of all the members of the 200-start club that Stroll will join in Hungary, he should be most grateful to the now-departed Italian. Because without De Cesaris...things look bleak.

Qualifying, especially qualifying head-to-head against your team-mate, is often held up in F1 as the clearest indicator of a driver's raw pace.

Stroll has been outqualified by his team-mates 157-45 (he withdrew from two races after qualifying due to crashes, and failed to start the 2024 Brazilian Grand Prix because he decided to drive over a wet gravel trap instead of a tarmac run-off area) over the course of his career.

It's an absolutely heinous number, made worse by a follow-up. He only has a 'winning' qualifying record against one team-mate – 1-0 over Paul di Resta when the Scot filled in for an ill Felipe Massa at the 2017 Hungarian Grand Prix. For the record, Massa held a 17-2 edge over Stroll that year when he was healthy.

The closest he's come to matching qualifying records with a team-mate over a full season was a 13-8 loss to Sergey Sirotkin at Williams in 2018.

That was Sirotkin's first and last season in the sport. Eight seasons later, Stroll's career is still alive and kicking. How? The same way De Cesaris kept being given cars to destroy in the 1980s and 90s. Cold. Hard. Cash.

How do you make it to 200 grand prix starts when you aren't an F1-quality racing driver? It's easy. You can't get sacked if your dad owns the team.

F1 Aston Martin Lance Stroll Hungarian Grand Prix