The surprising F1 first race win trend its new era may alter

Looking back on the 2021 Formula 1 season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, it really set the tone for the campaign to come. Max Verstappen’s stunning speed, Lewis Hamilton’s tenacity in a slower car, Red Bull and Mercedes falling out over a minor rules gripe. It had comfortably more and greater real drama than the Christian Horner Netflix soap opera Drive to Survive.

Now, 2022’s first race has finally arrived. And where last year’s opening event attracted intrigue because of Mercedes’ testing struggles, that is a secondary factor this time around.

F1 is entering a new rules era and it’s the first one that has been instigated by owner Liberty Media. Given the formula of 2017-21 finally produced a titanic multi-team title battle last year – with some not inconsiderable help from the pandemic cost-saving measures – it rather needs to be a hit for the media giant that bought the championship back in 2017.

The new cars look the part. Aggressive and beautiful, with considerably different design philosophies produced across the grid. That last bit won’t last. As soon as it becomes clear one approach is definitively superior, the teams that don’t have it – be it wide, sculpted sidepods, sliced ones or even no sidepods at all – will be scrambling to adapt their designs and gain lap time.

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The question will quickly be about whether the convergence happens in 2022 or if the teams that find themselves behind will have to wait until they can produce all-new cars for next year.

But the result of the 2021 Bahrain race was actually an anomaly in recent F1 history.

Hamilton won against the odds in the 2021 Bahrain season-opener after Verstappen's late pass outside track limits forced him to give the position back

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

For the only time since 2000, the winning driver from the curtain raiser did not go on to win the drivers’ championship in a title battle with a rival from another squad (so a different scenario to Giancarlo Fisichella, Nico Rosberg and Valtteri Bottas winning the openers in 2005, 2014 and 2019-20 when their team-mates subsequently clinched the crown) but their team did take the constructors’ crown. This sets 2021 apart from the Ferrari/McLaren split during Hamilton’s first title year in 2008.

Now, there is a very specific reason for this – the Abu Dhabi debacle stealing Hamilton’s eighth crown. But with so much interest in how the F1 pecking order might have been reshaped with the rules overhaul, it’s worth looking at how often a race one winner has gone on to secure the title.

In all F1’s history since the world championship started in 1950, the driver that has won the season opener has indeed taken the crown 47% of the time. This naturally rises to 61% for the constructors’ equivalent (since 1958) given each pacesetting team has generally had more than one driver to call upon and it’s 52% for teams taking title doubles if they’ve won the first race.

Since 2017, only twice has the team that won a season’s first race gone on to take the constructors’ championship

But using the 2000 season as a handy round watermark, we can see that in the 22 championships that have been completed since that year began the team that won the first race went on to clinch the title double 14 times. That’s a higher strike-rate of 63%, which emphasises again how all-conquering the modern superteams (Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes, which has one bonus title double from Brawn in 2009 in its DNA) have been.

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When we consider how many constructors’ championships those teams have won, this rises to 15 and 68%, with Mercedes’ ultimately painful victory last year, an accolade which is often overlooked.

A similar high strike rate for first race team winners continues when just looking at the turbo hybrid era in isolation from the period we’ve considered. Since 2014, the team that won the first race went on to secure a title double five times (63%) and took six constructors (with the same 2021 anomaly as above). All went to Mercedes.

But the mini-era just gone, which married the V6 engines to an ultra-high downforce aerodynamic formula, surprisingly bucked the trend. Since 2017, only twice has the team that won a season’s first race gone on to take a world championship double. Again, both of these went to Mercedes, although neither of those wins were Hamilton’s – they were Bottas’s triumphs in Melbourne and Austria in 2019 and 2020.

Valtteri Bottas won the 2020 season opener in Austria after doing likewise in the 2019 Australian GP

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

But Hamilton returned to win the season opener for the first time since 2015 a year ago, with the other seasons where the initial winner lost the title being 2017 and 2018 - Sebastian Vettel’s false dawns at Ferrari.

And so, while looking ahead to the new season and the new era with these stats and trends in mind, we can reflect on two key elements.

Based on its testing form, Ferrari may finally be in a place to better its underachievement under the last ruleset. The team is thought to be in a good place in relation to the car weight issue that has struck all the teams as some of the standardised parts on the new machines – such as the wheel covers – have arrived unexpectedly heavier on cost grounds.

Alfa Romeo is understood to be the only able one close to hitting the 798kg limit, but Ferrari is thought to be lighter than Mercedes, for example, and could be gaining considerable lap time as a result. How the Scuderia matches up to testing pacesetter Red Bull will hopefully become clear this weekend…

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The other important takeaway concerns the 2021 anomaly and how Hamilton’s win ahead of Verstappen in Bahrain heralded a fantastic campaign, although one overshadowed by major toxicity between the contending squads and how that permeated their respective partisan fanbases.

The 2021 Bahrain race ebbed and flowed, had a bold and decisive strategy call (Mercedes’ early first stop for Hamilton) and contained brilliantly precise driving and one very costly minor mistake. All of that was repeated, with Red Bull getting in on the great race tactics as the year developed, many times as the year wore on.

Hamilton's Bahrain 2021 victory was an outlier in recent F1 history as he didn't go on to win the title in a battle against a different team - although that can be explained by the Abu Dhabi officiating

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

In the end one irregularity bred another, with the Abu Dhabi officiating controversy leading to the first split drivers’ and teams’ titles since 2008.

It’s just possible that for the first time since 2013, Mercedes is going into a new F1 season without the ability to fight for wins – as Hamilton has predicted. The Bahrain race is likely to be a multi-stopper on the abrasive track surface, with the layout overall lending itself well to overtaking, which will also be under big scrutiny since improving race action was part of Liberty’s push to overhaul the design rules.

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Come the chequered flag falling on Sunday night, F1 will know exactly which of the three leading teams that says another is the true pacesetter has been telling the truth.

Back in 1998 after a major car rules change the McLaren drivers lapped the field in the opener before Michael Schumacher and Ferrari engaged them in a championship battle that went down to the wire

But, as these stats show, there’s still a healthy chance of a good, multi-team title fight developing. Back in 1998 after a major car rules change the McLaren drivers lapped the field in the opener before Michael Schumacher and Ferrari engaged them in a championship battle that went down to the wire.

As 2022 goes on it will understand if the new era will return the championship to the rather regular consistency of race one winners going on to take the title, or if the surprising trend from 2017-21 continues.

Will the outcome in Bahrain revert to the previous trend or continue to follow the course set in 2017-21?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images