GPFans employees
Monday 27 December 2021 10:00
World Champion Max Verstappen will no doubt turn to the stats and facts of the 2021 F1 season if anyone ever tells him that his title is not deserved given the multitude of benchmarks he set during the campaign.
There are plenty of other fascinating numbers to immerse yourself in, so let GPFans guide you through a numerical overview of one of F1’s biggest seasons.
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10 Verstappen wins
Verstappen won ten times during the season, two more than Lewis Hamilton. With Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas each winning a race, Red Bull ended the year with more wins than Mercedes.
10 sticks for the champion
Verstappen also scored twice the number of poles that Hamilton had accumulated, scoring 10 poles out of five.
Bottas had a good year on Saturdays, taking four poles to ensure the gap between Red Bull and Mercedes was only one.
652 laps run
Amazingly, Verstappen led with 652 laps over the entire campaign, 50.3 percent of all racing laps.
Hamilton was in the lead with 297 laps.
18 podium places to break the record
The pre-season record for the most podium places in a season was 17. Not anymore, with Verstappen finishing first or second 18 times.
Hamilton had 17 podiums in one year for the fifth time in his career.
Six fastest laps
Both championship protagonists set six fastest laps over the course of the year, with Bottas earning two more than Perez to ensure Mercedes ended the season with more than Red Bull.
12 fastest pit stops
As the undisputed king of pit stops, Red Bull made the fourth pit stop in a row for the fastest stop of the season with a time of 1.88 seconds.
The team collected 12 fastest stops of the race in 22 races, despite a technical guideline that changed systems mid-season.
132 overtaking maneuvers
Aston Martin’s Sebastian Vettel needed so many passes to get the first overtaking prize in front of Alpines Fernando Alonso.
1,294 laps driven
Carlos Sainz completed every race, whereby he did not complete every single race lap in the season by laps.
The Ferrari driver completed 99.77 percent of all laps in the 22 races, with Hamilton finishing second on the list with 1,269 laps.
Three beginners
In 2021, F1 welcomed three youngsters to the grid: the Haas duo Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin as well as Yuki Tsunoda from AlphaTauri.
With Guanyu Zhou at Alfa Romeo, only one rookie will grace the field next year.
A first winner
Esteban Ocon became Grand Prix winner for the first time after coming out victorious in Hungary.
Perez took his first Red Bull win in Azerbaijan while Daniel Ricciardo ended his and McLaren’s drought at Monza.
Four world champions
Four world champions at the beginning of the year [Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen] all lined up on the grid.
The number will stay the same for next season as Verstappen adds his name as Raikkonen retires.
Two [and a half] new tracks
In Qatar and Saudi Arabia, F1 had two more new venues for grands prix.
But including Zandvoort, which has been heavily re-profiled since Formula 1 last visited in 1985, that means the sport has visited three new circuits to make up the 2021 calendar.
51g punch
The force with which Verstappen hit the crash barriers on the Copse corner after contact with Hamilton on the first lap of the British Grand Prix.
The accident would ignite the title fight, with the Dutchman hospitalized and angry at Hamilton’s cheers after the home win.
