F1 1000 matters - but it's the 1001st race staged

The Chinese Grand Prix - Formula 1's 1000th 'birthday' - is no more or less important than the one in Bahrain that preceded it or the one in Baku that follows. But while the 1000th world championship race has no greater intrinsic value than the other 999, it does have a wider significance that makes it worth celebrating.

Because we have a combined total of 10 fingers and thumbs and therefore created a base 10 mathematical system, 1000 is a nice round number and people can't help but enjoy celebrating such milestones. And it's worth marking as a remarkable feat of endurance, one that has defined motorsport for the past 70 years.

But what Autosport has dubbed 'F1 1000' and a celebration of the 1000th GP is a landmark laden with semantic troubles. China will be the 1000th world championship race, but only the 974th race you can append 'Formula 1' to in a literal sense. There were 11 Indianapolis 500s that counted for points from 1950 to 1960, which were not F1 races, while a total of 15 world championship races were run to F2 regulations in 1952 and 1953.

If you say 'world championship grands prix' then you can bring the 15 F2 races back, but not the Indy 500s. So, that produces two more possible numbers - 985 and 989. Add to that the curiosity that the Chinese GP will actually be the 1001st race staged for the world championship, thanks to the 1980 Spanish GP being retrospectively stripped of its points status, a victim of the FISA-FOCA war, and it all adds up to numerical befuddlement. And that's ignoring the several hundred non-championship F1 races that took place up to 1983.

But whatever phraseology you use, and 1000 world championship races is the most accurate, it's a lot of races and a remarkably long time. And that's at the heart of why this celebration does matter. Moments like these are a time to take stock and a reminder that the world championship is a remarkable creation that is often taken for granted.

That's not to say that it's the first world championship in motorsport. The Association International des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACAR), which later became the FIA, ran a manufacturers' world championship starting in 1925 that ran for six seasons and was won by Alfa Romeo, then Bugatti, then Delage. But it was not awarded for its final three years because of insufficient races.

AICAR then put on the European Championship from 1931 to 1939, which probably would have evolved into the first genuine world championship but for the intervention of the Second World War.

Under the leadership of Jehan de Rohan-Chabot, the FIA announced in 1949 that the world championship would start in 1950, which it did with its first race taking place at Silverstone (above). The idea is often credited to Antonio Brivio - the Marquis Sforza - a racing driver and Olympic bobsledder. A decent driver, he was stuck in limited machinery in his pomp but won some significant races - including the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio. But, in reality, the idea was probably a group effort even if the exact thought process is lost to history.

The British, French, Belgian and Italian Grands Prix comprised the 1950 calendar, along with the Indianapolis 500. Despite being run to entirely incompatible rules, Indy appears to have been thrown in to justify the 'world' tag. To put into context how irrelevant the Indy 500 was to the world championship, not one of the 33 drivers who scored world championship points at Indy in that era scored one anywhere else, while hardly any grand prix drivers went there.

The most famous exception was Alberto Ascari, who skipped the 'real' opening round of the 1952 championship in Switzerland to race at Indy but retired early from that event.

Even today, F1, with its endless navel-gazing, problems, existential threats and crises, still holds together

The first title was won by Alfa Romeo driver Giuseppe Farina at the 1950 Italian GP. Usually, the significance of the early world championships is downplayed. That's not without reason because if you glance at Autosport's report of Monza '50 the title being clinched warranted barely more than a footnote. But it had been a big enough deal to persuade Alfa Romeo to come back to grand prix racing.

Alfa had withdrawn early in 1949, which is usually blamed on the deaths of Jean-Pierre Wimille, Achille Varzi and Felice Trossi - the first two to accidents. In reality, the need to spend more on the roadgoing Alfa 1900 was more significant in the withdrawal. But with a championship to win, the need to promote the 1900 then drew the manufacturer back in.

Mercedes, too, wanted to return and legendary team boss Alfred Neubauer was tasked with running a pair of pre-war Mercedes W125s in two races in Argentina in early 1951. Although it became clear that the cars struggled on twisty circuits, Mercedes did return to racing - initially in sportscars - before dominating F1 with the W196 in 1954-55 (below), which was a direct result of the creation of the world championship.

Those early years were difficult and the world championship might have again run out of steam. There weren't enough competitive F1 cars to populate a championship in 1952 and 1953 after Alfa Romeo withdrew, but in 1954 F1 was back for good.

This means you can draw a straight line from the 1950 British GP, the first of the world championship era, through to today. There's no other road-racing championship in the world that can boast that kind of run (although the British Hillclimb Championship, it should be noted, started in 1947). That's the real significance of the 1000th F1 race.

You could argue that what might be generically termed Indycar racing has a longer history, but this was run under multiple governing bodies, which led to discontinuities, breakaways and several instances of parallel series.

You can say similar things for other categories that have had patchwork histories. For while there are what might be known as some 'technical' discontinuities along the way in terms of identity and organisation, the run of 1000 world championship races is coherent and unbroken.

The F1 world championship has grown to become, for better or worse, the pre-eminent global motorsport competition - aided by the fact that its status has made it a natural fit for television coverage in many countries. No championship can match it, so much so that it's impossible to imagine the global motorsport landscape without it.

It's common to bemoan the status of grand prix racing and how it blinds many to the existence of other categories, but who is to say that without this focal point motorsport would have ever become more than a backwater. Perhaps it dragged other, ostensibly lesser, championships, with it? We can't know without rerunning history.

Over the years, a lack of F1 cars, the 1955 Le Mans disaster and the resulting threat to European motorsport, political machinations, multiple breakaway attempts, regular economic downturns, the coming and going (and coming and going and coming and going) of manufacturers, an oil crisis, repeated tragedies, the FISA-FOCA war and any number of other threats have disrupted it. But still it endures.

Even today, with endless navel-gazing, problems, existential threats and crises, it still holds together. It's that robustness that ensures that, in many parts of the globe, the leading form of motorsport is single-seater prototype racing to Formula 1 regulations when there was no inherent reason why this format should have become pre-eminent. Other categories might have had the chance to do this, but never proved coherent or stable enough to do so.

You can argue this might not be a good thing, given grand prix racing's current problems. Although there is a possibility that motorsport might have been healthier without the world championship becoming monstrously all-pervasive, chances are that worldwide it would be less prominent without such a successful focal point.

That's why it has held up so well - and also why it's so important that its custodians ensure they achieve a sustainable long-term future.