Revealed: Formula 1's fastest failure

World championship-winning Formula 1 cars have to be fast, that is obvious. But sometimes that is not enough to get the job done.

Often when a team produces the fastest car, it can be confident of winning the drivers' and constructors' championships. And yet some of the potentially most dominant F1 machines have failed to deliver, particularly in the days when cars were less reliable.

Looking at supertimes gives a good idea of how fast cars are over a given season. This is calculated by converting their fastest lap times over a race weekend (normally set in qualifying) to a percentage, with the outright fastest lap of the weekend expressed as 100%.

On 25 occasions, one car has had a pace advantage of 0.6% or more over its nearest rival. That's equivalent to a 0.6-second gap around a 1m40s lap, which is comparable to Spa

Calculating this for every F1 season since 1950, we can see which cars were the quickest and, therefore, which was the fastest loser.

And spoiler alert: it isn't the 2005 McLaren MP4-20, which did so well in Autosport's recent F1 car 'World Cup' fan vote. Kimi Raikkonen's car was 'only' 0.293% faster than Fernando Alonso's Renault R25 and therefore scrapes in as the 10th-fastest car not to secure the drivers' crown.

On 25 occasions in the world championship, one car has had a pace advantage of 0.6% or more over its nearest rival. That's equivalent to a 0.6-second gap around a 1m40s lap, which is comparable to Spa.

To put that into perspective, the gap between the Mercedes W08 and Ferrari SF70H this season was 0.178%.

Four times, that 0.6+% advantage was squandered to such a degree that the team in question won neither the constructors' or drivers' championships, while a fifth car managed to win the team prize while its drivers were beaten in their standings.

The table below shows those five cars and the supertime advantage they had. In cases where the second-quickest car didn't win the constructors' and drivers' titles, the gap to the car(s) that did is included as well.

F1's fastest failures

1967 Lotus 49, 1.217% advantage over Eagle
Both titles: Brabham +1.359%

1982 Renault RE30B, 0.747% advantage over Brabham
Constructors' title: Ferrari +0.870%; Drivers' title: Williams +1.727%

1974 Ferrari 312B3, 0.716% advantage over McLaren

1968 Ferrari 312, 0.687% advantage over Lotus

1973 Lotus 72*, 0.669% advantage over Tyrrell
*did win constructors' title

At first glance, it's hard to look past the 1967 Lotus 49 as F1's fastest failure. Its advantage over the opposition when it arrived - in round three - was the 10th biggest in world championship history. If the abnormally spread-out fields of the 1950s are discounted, that rises to sixth.

The 49 contested nine of the 11 rounds of 1967, which should easily have been enough to overcome the ground lost in the season-opening South African and Monaco Grands Prix. The car was never beaten to pole position and set six fastest laps, two of the three 'missing' races being thanks to virtuoso performances from Dan Gurney in his Eagle.

But unreliability killed Colin Chapman's 1967 wondercar, which wasn't beaten for pace in a straight fight until the following year. Clark's lightness of touch helped coax the car home six times, four without serious delay and resulting in wins. Graham Hill only finished two races in a 49 during the campaign.

Chapman's 'add lightness' motto cost him, but the innovation of the 49 was so great it changed F1 forever.

The Cosworth DFV, made available to others from 1968, soon heralded one of the most open and competitive eras in F1 history, while using the engine as a stressed member soon became de rigueur in motorsport. Throw in the 49's early use of downforce-producing wings and sponsorship, both of which came in 1968, and it is obviously a landmark machine.

These facts, crucially along with the 49's double title success in 1968, prevent it from 'winning' this contest.

A similar argument could be made for the Ferrari 312B3. Despite its 1974 failure, it brought the Italian team out of the doldrums and was a pointer towards what the Ferrari-Mauro Forghieri-Niki Lauda combination could achieve.

Were it not for Lauda's 1976 German GP crash, Ferrari would have secured a hat-trick of title doubles after the '74 near-miss.

Also forgivable was the original 312's 1968 season, even though on paper things look bad.

Chris Amon and Jacky Ickx scored four poles from the 12 races and Amon led more laps than anyone apart from Jackie Stewart (Matra) and Hill (Lotus). Yet Ickx's French GP win was the car's only 1968 success, thanks largely to the unfortunate unreliability that famously struck Amon (below, following Hill), particularly while leading the Spanish and Canadian GPs.

But it should be noted that the 312's advantage of 0.687% is greatly exaggerated by the huge margins enjoyed at Spa (where Amon took pole by 3.7s) and the Nurburgring (Ickx being 27.9s faster than the best non-Ferrari in a poor weather-affected practice).

Keeping in mind the pace disadvantage Ferrari had to overcome from 1967 (it achieved a swing of almost 2.5%, one of the biggest in F1 history), it is perhaps not surprising that the 312 wasn't entirely reliable.

Of the top 10 fastest cars to have missed out on the drivers' title, five were Ferraris (1966, 1974, 1968, 1983, 2006), but none is quite bad enough to 'win' this contest. That falls to one of its 2017 rivals, Renault.

Like Lotus with the 49, Renault did change the face of F1, with the introduction of turbo technology. But it didn't benefit from it, at least not in terms of an F1 crown.

Unlike Lotus, it never got its act together enough to make the pains of its early innovation pay off with championship success, despite having Alain Prost on its books for three years.

The 1982 RE30B contested every race of the campaign and had competitive predecessors upon which the pioneering technology should have been honed. A 0.747% advantage should have been enough and it seems almost unbelievable that Keke Rosberg could overturn a 1.727% deficit with Williams to become world champion.

It's true that the ability to wind up the boost gave the turbocars a qualifying advantage that reduced in the races, particularly when added to the driveability challenges of turbo lag, but they should still have won.

The drivers played their part in the downfall, but far more damaging were the engine failures that derailed the season as Renault pushed for 600bhp

Prost and team-mate Rene Arnoux took 10 poles from the 16 races and led 463 of the season's 1060 laps (44%). There were only three GPs a Renault didn't lead at some point.

The two closest teams to the French firm on pace also suffered their own tribulations. Brabham ran both Cosworth and BMW turbo power during the season as it tried to get on top of the new technology, while Ferrari won the constructors' title despite losing star drivers Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi during the season.

And yet Renault finished third in the constructors' championship, with Prost and Arnoux only fourth and sixth respectively in the drivers' table with two wins each.

The drivers played their part in the downfall. Prost went off in Long Beach, both made crucial mistakes while leading in Monaco, and Arnoux had several collisions.

Though not uncommon for the period, wear and tear to the ground-effect skirts also meant the RE30B sometimes leaked performance as races progressed.

But far more damaging were the engine failures, particularly turbo and fuel-injection related, that derailed the campaign as Renault pushed towards 600bhp.

Both cars were in contention when engine issues struck at Imola, Prost led in Detroit until a misfire developed, and then suffered an injection failure when nearly 30s clear with just five laps to go at the Osterreichring. Indeed, injection issues were persistent, particularly in the later stages of the season.

And that's just a taster. The duo only recorded 10 proper finishes (as opposed to being classified despite being out or heavily delayed) from 32 starts and were in the running for podiums, if not victories, at most of the events.

These factors help to explain why the 1982 season is remarkable in F1 history - with 11 drivers winning races for seven teams - but they also contribute to the conclusion of this analysis.

With the increased reliability of frontrunning F1 cars in the modern era, it seems unlikely that an advantage the size of those in our table will be squandered in future.

That the RE30B lost both championships - and then begat the RE40 that similarly failed to get the job done in 1983 - secures it the dubious title of F1's fastest failure.