2006 Hungarian GP: Facts & Stats

Penalties for the two championship protagonists, omnipresent rain and a succession of collisions led to one of the most unusual, as well as one of the longest, races in recent memory, and the first ever wet Hungarian Grand Prix.

Starting from the top, Jenson Button finally broke into the win column at his 113th attempt. It makes him only the third driver to record a maiden victory after a century of starts, following on from Jarno Trulli (117, Monaco 2004), Giancarlo Fisichella (110, Brazil 2003) and Rubens Barrichello (124, Germany 2000).

Button won't want to follow on from their examples. Barrichello had to wait two years before his next win, while Trulli is still looking. At his current strike rate, it will take Jenson 9,944 more races before he ties Michael Schumacher's 89 career wins, which would take him approximately 552 years!

A more positive stat comes from the last British driver to take his maiden win in Hungary. Damon Hill won for Williams-Renault in 1993, and followed it up by winning the next two races as well, in Belgium and Italy. Hill bowed to the crowd on the podium that afternoon in Budapest, an act that Button coincidentally repeated on Sunday.

His win ended what was the longest win drought for British drivers in the history of the World Championship. David Coulthard was the last British winner, at the 2003 Australian GP, a gap of 66 races. For the last English winner, you have to go back to Johnny Herbert's win for Stewart at the 1999 European GP. Like Herbert, Button's victory came from 14th on the grid.

More obscurely, Button was the first driver to win a race with car No. 12 since the day Ayrton Senna won his first world title, with victory at the 1988 Japanese Grand Prix (using a Honda-powered McLaren). In fact, Senna is the only other man to win with that race number in the past 26 years, in which time we've had 434 Grands Prix.

Button's winning time was 1 hour 52 minutes 20 seconds, making Sunday the longest race of this decade. The 1999 French Grand Prix was the last race to run longer, when Heinz-Harald Frentzen won for Jordan, in another race with persistent rain and a Safety Car period. No race has run to the two-hour time limit since the 1997 Monaco Grand Prix, which remains the shortest full-points race in history (208.692 kms).

Moving away from Button's personal exploits, it was Honda's first Grand Prix victory as a constructor since John Surtees won the 1967 Italian Grand Prix, while it was their first win as an engine supplier since Gerhard Berger won in Adelaide for McLaren-Honda back in 1992.

The Honda team in its current incarnation was formerly the B.A.R team, which in turn rose from the ashes of the Tyrrell team. That therefore means that Sunday was the first win for this team in all its forms since Michele Alboreto won the 1983 Detroit Grand Prix for Tyrrell, the last of 23 wins for the team, and 155 for the Ford DFV and its derivatives.

However, Honda and Jenson Button were not the only people to send the anoraks into a frenzy. Second-placed Pedro De La Rosa has become one of the oldest drivers of the modern era to take a maiden podium.

A total of 32 drivers were older than the Spaniard when they first scored a top-three finish, but 28 of them were between 1950 and 1960, a time where the average age of the field was rather higher than it is now (today the average is under 30, whereas in 1950 it was over 40).

Pedro de la Rosa (McLaren) runs ahead of Fernando Alonso (Renault) © XPB/LAT

Since 1961, only four drivers were older than 35-year-old De La Rosa was on Sunday when they climbed the rostrum for the first time. John Love was second at the 1967 South African GP aged 42, George Follmer was 39 when he was third at the 1973 Spanish GP, Vittorio Brambilla was 37 when he won the '75 Austrian GP, and Jean-Pierre Jabouille was all of 36 years old when he won the 1979 French Grand Prix.

On a matter of national pride, De La Rosa ran second to Fernando Alonso on lap 26, marking the first time in history that Spaniards have run 1-2 in a Grand Prix. Like in the French Grand Prix, Pedro was the quickest Michelin runner in the fastest lap column, beaten only by Felipe Massa.

Third place went to Nick Heidfeld, who gave the BMW-owned Sauber team their seventh podium finish - all of which were third places. It means Hungary is the first circuit on which the team has podiumed more than once, following on from Johnny Herbert's third place in 1997.

It was retribution for Heidfeld, after being overshadowed by rookie teammate Robert Kubica in qualifying. Ninth on the grid for a debut tied the best we've seen by any driver in the past 10 years, as Felipe Massa was also ninth for his debut at the 2002 Australian GP. In an extreme case of deja vu, they were both driving for Sauber, and both outqualified their teammate, which on both occasions was Nick Heidfeld....

Having recovered from an early spin, Kubica eventually ended the day in seventh, which provisionally made him the 55th driver to score points on his debut, and the first debutant since Jacques Villeneuve (ironically, the man he replaced) at the 1996 Australian GP to qualify in the top ten and finish in the points. Unfortunately his great weekend ended with disqualification for being 2kgs underweight in post-race scrutineering.

Rubens Barrichello's fourth place for Honda was rather low-key compared with the exploits of his teammate, but he did pass one obscure milestone of his own. On lap 48 he surpassed Riccardo Patrese's 11,346 laps raced in an F1 career, making him now second only to Michael Schumacher in that category.

Felipe Massa took the points for seventh, and if Ferrari wanted to be really ruthless about helping Schumacher win the 2006 championship, they would have been well-served to withdraw the Brazilian as soon as Michael's car was damaged beyond repair.

Despite not finishing the race, Schumacher was classified eighth, losing what might prove to be a vital point simply because Massa completed the remaining distance. Kubica's disqualification means that Ferrari now trail Renault by just seven points in the constructors' chase.

Alonso has now had back-to-back failures to score in Hungary, bookending a run of 18 consecutive points finishes, and his run of 22 straight finishes is also over. His day was ended when he lost his right-rear wheel nut - the exact same problem that cost Nigel Mansell victory in this race back in 1987. Fisichella crashed out of his second consecutive wet race, having done so at the 2005 Belgian GP, and gave Renault their first double retirement since Montreal last season.

Kimi Raikkonen's afternoon ended even more spectacularly than Fisichella's, when he crashed into the back of Vitantonio Liuzzi in a manner reminiscent of Michael Schumacher's infamous collision with a lapped David Coulthard at the 1998 Belgian GP. In qualifying, Raikkonen claimed his 10th pole position for McLaren, which surprisingly ties the number that Alain Prost claimed during his six seasons with the team from 1984-89.

Midland teammates Christijan Albers and Tiago Monteiro © XPB/LAT

The Finn wore special boots this weekend to celebrate his 100th Grand Prix, even though it's only the 99th he's actually started. The trend lately is to celebrate number of F1 appearances, rather than actual race starts - something that the Honda PR people are probably regretting now, as they celebrated their 300th race at Hockenheim. If they had waited until this weekend (their 300th actual start), it would have been perfect timing.

In the "best of the rest" category, Midland will feel unlucky to have just missed out on their first points finish, with Monteiro and Albers finishing ninth and tenth. Toro Rosso had a forgettable afternoon, with Scott Speed going off after a premature gamble on dry tires, before limping home 11th, while being involved in Raikkonen's accident took the fun out of Liuzzi's 25th birthday, which was on Sunday.

Takuma Sato brought home the SA06 chassis to its first race finish for the Super Aguri team, but his teammate Sakon Yamamoto is having a worse time than Yuji Ide did in his abortive F1 campaign. In two races, Yamamoto has completed a grand total of one lap.

Finally, the Williams team had yet another nightmarish race, as they retired both cars for the second race in succession, just as they did at Malaysia and Australia. Worse still, they lost a car within the opening two laps for the sixth time in the past seven races. Their eight-race run without a point ties the longest pointless spell that Frank Williams has experienced as a team owner since 1976, his last year before forming Williams Grand Prix Engineering.