Formula 1: Here are the family trees of each team

formula One

… with the obvious exceptions of Ferrari and McLaren. Time for a history lesson, friends

Regardless of whether Mercedes or Red Bull are ahead in the F1 championship showdown in Abu Dhabi this weekend, Sir Jackie Stewart, himself three-time world champion, can be proud of his role in the history and success of both teams. Bear with me on this one.

Stewart won his three championships in 1969, 1971 and 1973 for the Tyrrell team, which after several changes of ownership eventually became the Mercedes team of today. And when Stewart started his own Stewart Grand Prix team in 1996, he could only dream that the team would win four world championships and fight for a fifth twenty-five years later, albeit owned by Red Bull.

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All of this got us thinking about the teams’ pedigrees in today’s F1 grid. Ferrari has always been Ferrari and despite a few changes of ownership, McLaren has always been McLaren, but everyone else has interesting backstories linking them to the history of the sport.

Mercedes-AMG

The Tyrrell team dates back to 1958 when Surrey-based timber merchant Ken Tyrrell began racing his own cars in Formula 3. Her golden era was 1968-1973 when she won those three F1 championships with Stewart, but what most fans of a certain age remember her most is the six-wheeled P-34 that Jody Scheckter used to win the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix. Their final victory came in Detroit in 1983, but after a subsequent fallow the team was sold to British American Tobacco prior to the 1999 season.

British American Racing, or BAR as it was known, ran Jacques Villeneuve and Jenson Button with little success until the team was sold to Honda in late 2005. Button won in Hungary the following year, but in the wake of the 2008 World Cup financial crisis, Honda pulled out towards the end of the season. It should have been, but against all odds, Ross Brawn kept the team alive as the Brawn GP, ​​struck a deal with Mercedes engines and won the championship with Button in his first and only season in 2009. Mercedes was obviously impressed because the following year they pulled Michael Schumacher out of retirement and bought the Brawn team, which won seven championships with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.

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In late 1988, Jackie Stewart bought the fortune of a small Formula 3000 team (now Formula 2) called Gary Evans Motorsport to build a vehicle for his son Paul’s racing career. Paul Stewart Racing started mostly in Formula 3 and Formula 3000 with modest success, but can earn as an impetus for the careers of David Coulthard and three-time Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti.

At the end of the 1996 season, the team was renamed Stewart Grand Prix with support from Ford and rose to Formula 1 in 1997. There was little success, but Johnny Herbert won the rain-soaked Grand Prix of Europe in 1999 at the Nürburgring. Before the 2000 season, the team was sold to Ford, which then owned Jaguar, and therefore painted the cars green and renamed Jaguar Racing. They competed, again with little success, for five seasons before selling out to Red Bull, and the rest, as they say, is history. Thanks to Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull won four consecutive world championships (2010-2013), and there is of course the possibility of a fifth in 2021.

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This one is good. Giancarlo Minardi founded the Minardi Formula 2 team in Faenza, Italy in 1980, but their history goes back even further. Minardi had been involved in racing since the late 1960s and in 1976 Enzo Ferrari loaned him a 312-T chassis, which was current at the time, for two non-championship F1 races to assess young talents.

Giancarlo Martini was the driver, but the experiment was unsuccessful and Ferrari has not had a customer team in F1 since then. After Minardi did a little better in F2, he really got into F1 in 1985, but for the next 20 years only brought 38 championship points and no podiums. There were highs, however, particularly when Pierluigi Martini qualified in the front row for the US GP in 1990. Australian businessman Paul Stoddart bought the team in 2001, renamed it European Minardi and made his F1 debut that year for Fernando Alonso.

In 2005 the team was sold again, this time to Red Bull, which from 2006 onwards called Scuderia Torro Rosso (“Team Red Bull” in Italian), young Sebastian Vettel. In 2020 Red Bull changed the name of the team based on its clothing brand to Alpha Tauri and with Pierre Gasly at the wheel they won their second Grand Prix, again in Monza. To this day, the team is based in Giancarlo Martini’s hometown of Faenza.

alpine

The Toleman family made their fortune in the transportation business, and in 1977 then-chairman Ted Toleman began trying his hand at motorsport junior formulas. His team celebrated great successes in Formula 2 and dominated the European Championship in 1980 before entering Formula 1 the following year.

For 1984 they signed Ayrton Senna fresh from Formula 3 and could have won in Monaco had the race not been abandoned due to torrential rain. Before the 1986 season, the tight team was bought by Benetton and renamed Benetton Formula. Benetton won 27 Grands Prix between 1986 and 2001, with Michael Schumacher taking the drivers’ title in ’94 and ’95.

In 2002, Renault bought the team for allegedly $ 120 million and won the 2005 and 2006 world championships with Fernando Alonso. In 2011 a deal with Lotus resulted in the team receiving the Lotus Renault brand and then only ‘Lotus’ for 2012-15 before returning to Renault for 2016-2020. The Renault sub-brand Alpine took over the naming rights for 2021 and won the Esteban Ocon in Hungary with the cars painted in French racing blue.

Aston Martin

Former Top Gear presenter Eddie Jordan was a moderately successful driver in Formula 3 before turning to team management. After the F3 and F3000 successes, the Jordan team made the big leap into F1 by sponsoring 7-Up for the 1991 season. The car was both beautiful and fast, but probably best known for having Michael Schumacher making his stunning F1 debut at Spa that year. The team achieved a total of four Grand Prix wins, including a 1-2 for Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher in Spa 1998.

Heinz Harald Frentzen – yes, the guy who was a guest in the Top Gear Series 29 last year – clinched two victories in 1999, taking third place in this year’s drivers’ championship. The team was sold in 2005 and became Midland F1 in 2006, Spyker in 2007 and Force India from 2008. In 2018, Lance’s father Lawrence Stroll bought the team and initially renamed it Racing Point before opting for Aston Martin in 2021.The win was taken at Sakhir in 2020, courtesy of Sergio Perez.

Alfa Romeo

Alfa Romeo will forever have the honor of winning the first Grand Prix held at Silverstone in 1950 with Giuseppe Farina at the wheel. They retired from the sport in 1952 before returning for a period that saw no wins from 1979 to 1985. But the lineage of the current team is all about Peter Sauber’s racing business, which was founded in Switzerland in 1970.

At the end of the 1980s, Sauber became a Mercedes works team in the sports car world championship and won Le Mans in ’89. Mercedes used this program to encourage talented young drivers, including Michael Schumacher, ahead of his F1 debut. Sauber entered Formula 1 in 1993, became a BMW works team in 2006 and won the Canadian Grand Prix with Robert Kubica in 2008.

In 2019, the team announced that it would compete as Alfa Romeo Racing, although the ownership and management structure in Switzerland remains unchanged. This weekend marks Kimi Raikkonen’s last F1 race before retiring and it is fitting that he is ending his driving career for the same team he started with after making his debut for Sauber in 2001 at the age of 21.

Haas

Let’s not make the mistake of confusing Gene Haas, who owns the Haas F1 team, with Carl Haas, whose Beatrice Haas team drove former champion Alan Jones in a Lola chassis in the ’85 and ’86 F1 seasons . Both men may be American F1 team principals named Haas, but that’s where the relationship ends.

The current Haas team was formed from scratch for the 2016 season but acquired the factory and assets of the disbanded Marussia F1 team, whose legacy was based on winning the Formula Renault UK championship in 2000 and 2003 with Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis goes back to Hamilton and Manor Motorsport respectively.

But Haas’ real story lies in NASCAR, where they have competed since 2002. In 2009 the team teamed up with driver Tony Stewart to become Stewart-Haas Racing, and they have since won 65 NASCAR races and 2 drivers’ championships, with Kevin Harvick finishing fifth overall in 2021.

Williams

As with Ferrari and McLaren, the Williams team’s legacy is pretty pure. They have never competed under any other name and Williams Grand Prix Engineering was officially founded in 1977. But there is a little more backstory. Frank Williams first got into Formula 1 as a driver in 1969 with Piers Courage. After showing great promises, Courage was killed in 1970 and the team then had a lackluster time in the early 1970s before being sold to Walter Wolf Racing in 1976.

The team won on their debut as a designer in 1977 with Jody Scheckter at the wheel, but by that time Frank Williams had left to build a new team of their own, Williams Grand Prix Engineering. Williams became one of the most successful constructors of all time with 114 race wins and seven drivers’ titles. In late 2020 the business was sold and although Sir Frank stepped down from the management of the team, the legendary Williams name was retained. Sir Frank Williams passed away last month.

So there we have it. It’s impossible to say whether Lewis ” Tyrrell ‘or Max’ ‘Stewart’ will win the championship in 2021, but we’ve already seen Esteban Ocon take a popular win for ‘Benetton / Toleman’ in Hungary and last year’s Grand Prix won by Italy, Pierre Gasly has performed well in his ‘Minardi’ all season.

Let’s finish with a quiz question. Who is the only driver who has competed in grands prix for all four of these teams? Yes, it’s none other than Max’s old man Jos Verstappen, who started in Formula 1 between 1994 and 2003.