Name: the entire history of formula one, i guess
Uploaded: 2024-09-28T16:11:44.000Z
Duration: 12 min 37 s
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It's 1894 and the first ever motor race has just been held from the French capital of Paris to one of its neighbouring cities, Rouen.

Let's have a championship, said absolutely no one who raced for another 56 years before finally setting up Formula One.

A championship like no other, with fierce competition amongst the world's elite drivers and constructors.

This isn't what it looked like though, because unlike today, the sport first started with small, privately owned teams who produced cars with little regard for aerodynamics or human safety.

Mechanical problems were common and most accidents were fatal. In fact, at any point your car could suddenly break down, sending you to an inevitable death.

Surely no one's going to want to join this.

And despite the prospect of imminent death, the Formula One train was full steam ahead.

A governing body was set up, now called the FIA, and 81 drivers decided to race in 1950, including this man, the first ever world champion, Nino Farina.

An Italian driver driving for an Italian team. But it's not Ferrari.

Although it may seem crazy today, Alfa Romeo dominated the first era of Formula One alongside Ferrari.

They drove pre-war car designs with an engine in front of the driver and ran on a budget so small it would give Christian Horner an aneurysm.

This Formula One thing is getting kind of boring, said the FIA, who introduced new regulations in 1954, which hurt the leading constructors and saw the rise of a new team from way over in Germany, who wear lederhosen and eat sausage.

And who we're not really best friends with right now.

The team was called Mercedes, who had gone on to dominate two championships with Argentine one-man Malfangio at their helm, before their run of success was put to a dramatic halt after the team's involvement in the deadliest motorsport crash in history.

The 1955 Le Mans disaster saw the deaths of 84 people, including Mercedes driver Pierre Levay.

And although no one was to blame for the crash, Mercedes withdrew from motorsport entirely for 34 years.

Moving on, are you tired of your engine being in front of your car?

Do you want a new design that gains you performance and championships?

Well try the new mid-engine design coming to a paddock near you.

It's the late 1950s and after the fall of Mercedes, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, Formula One is wide open for the taking.

What's that? It's the UK, who love one thing more than tea and biscuits, and that's world domination.

But this time in the motor racing world, through the development of mid-engine cars, which went on to wreck the pre-war designs used by Italian teams, leading to five new British world champions.

Elsewhere, F1 has begun expanding overseas with four new races in Canada, the USA, Mexico and South Africa.

These two have just set up their own private teams called McLaren and Williams, and Formula One constructors need more financial support than ever before.

Here comes the money. Here we go, money talk. Here comes the money.

In the 1970s, Formula One started getting pretty expensive, through endless crashes, regulation changes and, uh, life insurance.

But teams have just found a way around it, by allowing brands to advertise their products during a race in exchange for a fee.

And they would start to advertise anything that paid well, condoms, cigarettes, musicians.

And even today, sponsorship still remains a huge part of the sport, to the point where it looks like 6ix9ine just shapeshifted onto the new RB19 chassis.

This racing thing's pretty cool, said hotshots Nicky Lauda and James Hunt, becoming the two faces of the sport in the mid-1970s.

Lauda, the face of professionalism and hard work, and Hunt, the face of cigarettes, champagne and models.

He was a bit of a legend. The two would give fans the closest title fight yet in 1976, with Lauda and Ferrari putting up a dramatic title defence against Hunt and McLaren.

Despite Lauda almost dying in the crash at the Nurburgring, the championship went down to the last race at the Japanese Grand Prix, with Hunt clinching his first and only title in the dying laps of the race.

It's the late 1970s now, and being a constructor sucks for a lot of reasons.

Formula One is racing in over five different continents, which is barely feasible for private teams.

Each track controls the advertising and prize money of their individual Grand Prix, and the sport's governing body, the FISA, dictate all the rules, regulations and commercial rights.

I know what to do, said Bernie Eccleston, forming the Formula One Constructors' Association.

A Brazilian called Nelson Piquet is winning championships in both motor racing and Muay Thai kickboxing, and there are a couple of rookies in town who can only be described with one word.

There are a couple of rookies in town who can only be described with one word.

Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, who started their rise in Formula One during the mid-1980s.

Prost was simply sensational, winning the 1985 and 1986 championships with McLaren, and Senna had a driving style so mesmerizing that it actually made you forget that he was in a relationship with a 15-year-old at the time.

McLaren believed that these two would be a great pairing, which honestly makes me question what they were smoking out of the exhaust pipes, because instead it led to a fierce rivalry with two championships ending in dramatic fashion in Japan.

I mean, seriously, what did they expect to happen?

It's 1992, and Williams have just developed a technology called Active Suspension.

Hey, why don't we use it to dominate the grid for two years?

said Williams using it to dominate the grid for two years, which saw Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost win back-to-back championships with the team.

Heading into the 1994 season, Formula One was set for one of its most exciting years yet.

Ayrton Senna moved to Williams replacing the retiring Prost, newcomer Michael Schumacher was given a competitive car at Benetton, and Ferrari had hopes of a rebound year, with Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi at the wheel.

Oh boy, what an exciting year this will be.

The 1994 San Marino Grand Prix to this day remains the most devastating weekend of Formula One's history, with two fatalities in two days.

A crash at Villeneuve during qualifying saw the death of Roland Ratzenberger, and on lap seven of the race, three-time world champion Ayrton Senna experienced a steering column failure at a speed of 192mph, which saw the Brazilian have a fatal crash at the Tamburello corner.

This would prove to be a serious wake-up call to the FIA, who believed that F1 cars were inherently safe, despite the dramatic speed increase over the previous eight years.

And after the crash, many of the Williams personnel were investigated due to the belief that it was a mechanical failure that caused the crash.

Let's get back to the racing now, because 1994, despite being overshadowed by the deaths of Ratzenberger and Senna, still had one of the closest title fights ever between Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill.

The two drivers were split by nothing the whole season, and arrived at the final race in Australia just one point apart.

And this race would see the third controversial ending to a championship in just five years, when the two made contact in a crash that was potentially caused by Schumacher, knowing full well it would lead to his first world title.

Despite all the controversy around it, no action was taken against Schumacher, and he would never try any antics like this ever again.

Until three years later, when he did the same thing to Jack Villeneuve, got disqualified from the 1997 championship, and was publicly ridiculed by the mainstream media.

2000, a new millennium, and a new era in Formula 1.

The world championship is in the hands of McLaren and Mick Hackenham,

Michael Schumacher is hunting his first title for Ferrari and third as a driver, and Formula 1 cars have a new soundtrack, through the introduction of V10 engines.

At this point, no driver had won more than two titles in a row for over four decades.

But Ferrari and Schumacher were about to change that, winning five championships in a row, including two title battles with Mick Hackenham and Kimi Raikkonen, and three years of complete supremacy.

Like in 2002, where Ferrari finished the season with the same amount of points as every other team in the championship combined.

It's an energy drink company, who have just bought out Jaguar and joined the Formula 1 grid.

Elsewhere, Renault have a superstar in their hands.

Fernando Alonso, a 22-year-old Spaniard, who pulls off moves which defy the laws of physics and is ready to end Ferrari's run of five consecutive titles by becoming the youngest ever double world champion.

I want to be great again, said McLaren, who went into the 2007 season with an all-new driver line-up and a brand new plan that would bring them championship success.

The plan involved signing the defending champion Alonso and an inexperienced rookie to ensure no competition in the team.

So yeah, it turns out McLaren made a very slight error which faltered their master plan.

Because instead of signing an inexperienced rookie, they signed Lewis Hamilton, who raced like a veteran from the start, sparking a number of debates and controversies at McLaren over the season, like Spygate, when the team was fined £100 million for being in possession of confidential Ferrari documents.

Luckily, it was Ferrari who went on to win that season with Kimi Räikkönen, although Hamilton would eventually win out the next year with an overtake at the last corner of the final race.

2009, a year which shaped the landscape of Formula One with a new regulation change by the FIA.

Use the regulations to produce a dominant car.

And that's exactly what Braun did to Perfection, which allowed them to bring title success to Jenson Button before the three teams with bigger budgets could catch up for the next season.

It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's Sebastian Vettel, who Red Bull gave wings in the early 2010s, which allowed the German to win four consecutive world titles, including two extremely close championship battles and two years of record-breaking dominance.

Going into the turbo-hybrid era, Prime Vettel was simply unstoppable.

But the introduction of V6 hybrid power units led to a new era of dominance in Formula One when a constructor returned after 55 years.

Mercedes were back with a vengeance, producing a car with supreme aerodynamics and phenomenal engine power, which blew out all competition for several years.

Although, this meant that a conflict started between their drivers,

Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, in a rivalry coined the Silver War, which saw the two trade championships and dominate the grid for three years before Rosberg's retirement in 2016.

Lewis Hamilton goes on to win four more titles, and the team dominate the competition until the final year of the turbo-hybrid era.

In 2021, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton underwent one of the closest and most gruelling championship battles in history.

They were split by almost nothing the entire season.

Some days Verstappen was ahead, some days Hamilton was ahead, some days they were side by side, and on one occasion, they were on top of each other.

The championship went down to the wire, with several crashes and controversies leading up to the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where Max Verstappen converted pole into race victory to win his first world title in a race that was straightforward, not controversial in the slightest, and didn't cause the complete irreparable destruction of Formula One social media.

On a completely unrelated note, there was a change in F1's race directors going into the next season, which saw new regulations and another record be broken after Max Verstappen won 15 races in a single season to take his second title.

And that pretty much brings us up to today.

Have I covered every single driver and big event in Formula One's history?