World Champions and Race Winners
There have been ten Formula One World Drivers' Champions winning a total of fourteen titles. The first champion was Mike Hawthorn in 1958, who became only the fourth different person to win the title. In the 15 seasons between 1962 and 1976 the title was won by a British driver nine times: Graham Hill (1962, 1968), Jim Clark (1963, 1965), John Surtees (1964), Jackie Stewart (1969, 1971, 1973), and James Hunt (1976). Despite these successes no British champion has ever retained their title. Hunt's victory was the last title until 1992 when Nigel Mansell's winning season. Graham Hill's son Damon won in 1996 before another lengthy period without a British world champion. Lewis Hamilton won by just one point in 2008 with the most recent champion, Jenson Button, winning the year after.
The British Grand Prix has been won 16 times by eleven British drivers: Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, John Watson, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, Johnny Herbert, David Coulthard, and Lewis Hamilton. Eight other drivers have won races other than the British Grand Prix: Mike Hawthorn, Tony Brooks, Innes Ireland, Graham Hill, John Surtees, Peter Gethin, Eddie Irvine and Jenson Button.
Read more about this topic: British Formula One Drivers
Famous quotes containing the words world, champions, race and/or winners:
“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)