The history of Formula One is replete with incredible moments led by charismatic and talented drivers who, in turn, etched their names in golden letters on the championship record.
These drivers wrote their words in golden letters on the championship record.
Fans in the stands and at home in front of the television have been thrilled by one or two driving geniuses in each decade of the sport’s history.
Even though some of them passed away too soon, their accomplishments and legacies are still very much alive in the sport they loved.
In this new article for Motorbli, we will discuss the 15 drivers who have won the most Formula 1 World Championships.
We are doing this as a way to honor those who have won the championship as well as those who have not.
In the lines that are to follow, you will see the names of people whose lives have been intertwined with this sport.
These names may or may not be well-known to the reader, depending on the period in which the drivers were at the height of their careers and the age of those who spend some of their time on this website researching information on motorsport. Michael Schumacher
The Kaiser broke the record for most world championships won in 2003 and 2004.
In the first of these years, he added the sixth title, which allowed him to surpass the Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio, and in the second of these years, he signed the heptacampeonato.
Both of these accomplishments helped the Kaiser make history.
Schumacher is one of the few drivers to have won championships with two different car manufacturers during his career.
He accomplished this feat with Benneton in 1994 and 1995 and then again with Ferrari in the first five years of the 21st century.
After the 2006 season, in which he battled Fernando Alonso to the very end for the title of world champion, he decided to call it quits and retire.
The eighth driver was in contention until the penultimate race, which was held in Suzuka when the engine in his car gave out.
This gave the advantage to the Spaniards, who went on to win in the land of the rising sun and complete the task in Interlagos.
After a three-year absence, he made his comeback in 2010 to compete in Formula One with Mercedes, which made its debut in the sport under that name in 2010 after Brawn GP purchased the German brand from Mercedes.
His final race was in 2012 when the team announced they had signed Lewis Hamilton for the year after that. This marked the end of his career in the sport.
His baggage in this final stage was understated, as it was not even a shadow of what he showed in that hegemony behind the wheel of his red car: he did not win, and he only finished on the podium once.
The second competitor on this list has a chance of besting Schumacher’s record. The British driver can overtake the German in terms of the total number of titles won.
Lewis Hamilton. He already caught up to him in 2020, and he has a chance to pass him this year if the results of the world championship he is competing in against Max Verstappen go in his favor.
Hamilton won the championship driving a McLaren in his second season competing in the Grand Circus (2008). It was not easy for him; in fact, he was not able to celebrate his victory until after he had passed Timo Glock in the final corners of that race in the rain at Interlagos.
This was a difficult accomplishment for him. The victory of Felipe Massa and the fifth-place finish of the Briton gave the Brazilian the honey on the lips by only one point. The Briton finished in fifth place.
The subsequent ones were put on hold because he was unlikely to win another championship while playing for the British team.
After being let down for four years, Hamilton decided to start over and start a new adventure at Mercedes, thus taking the place of our previous protagonist.
An experience that is still ongoing and that has allowed him to rule the hybrid era with an iron fist, holding all of the titles from 2014 until 2020 (except 2016) in his possession and dominating it with an iron fist.
Younger readers are probably not going to be familiar with the Argentinean.
And it’s a well-known fact that Juan Manuel Fangio won all five of his titles during the decade that encompassed the 1950s, which also happened to be the decade in which several of the competition’s earliest iterations took place.
He won the championship in 1951 and again from 1954 to 1957 thanks to his strong performance in an Alfa Romeo 159 Alfetta, a Daimler Benz, a Ferrari, and a Maserati during the first of these years.
He also won the championship in 1957.
In 1958, he called it quits after a career that included 24 victories, 35 podium finishes, 29 pole positions, and 23 fastest laps. At age 84, he said his final goodbyes in the country of his birth, Argentina, in 1995.
Because the Frenchman was so prominent in the great competitions and battles in the 1980s between Ayrton Senna and Niki Lauda, the four championship trophies he won carry a unique significance.
He won them back-to-back in 1985 and 1986 with Mclaren, just as he did again three years later (1989).
Only a half of a point behind the Austrian driver, who had more victories than anyone else that year, he was at the gates of glory a year before starting to win (1984). In 1984. (7).
To win his first championship, he prevailed over Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari and won more races than any competitor combined.
The second victory was achieved in Adelaide, Australia, following a tense finish against the Williams vehicle driven by Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell, which featured several punctures.
The Frenchman took advantage of the fact that Piquet had to pit during the race’s final segment to refuel to prevent the same thing from happening to his tires, which allowed him to win the race.
The third driver is best known for colliding with Senna at Suzuka at the entrance to the Casio chicane.
Following the accident, his teammate and competitor, Senna, required assistance from the stewards to return to the track and enter the pit lane.
With two races still to go, he had a 16-point lead over him, which, when combined with the fact that he was disqualified, gave him the triple championship.
Williams won the fourth and final one in 1993 after accumulating seven victories that season.
Damon Hill served as his teammate during that season, and he replaced Nigel Mansell.
In the annals of Formula One history, the name Sebastian Vettel will forever be linked to the first golden era of the Red Bull team.
After a first year in which the Austrians began to win and compete head-to-head with the champion Brawn GP, the next four years were those of dominance in the championship.
This came after the first year the Austrians began to win in 2009.
During this time, there was a great deal of friction between the German and his teammate, the Australian Mark Webber, as evidenced by the incident in Turkey in 2010, which resulted in the elimination of both of them.
Even though he did not finish the season in first place in the drivers’ standings, he won his first title in the season’s final race in 2010 at Yas Marina, making him the youngest champion ever at 23.
A touch on the first lap of the last race at Interlagos forced Vettel to come from behind and finalize his three-time championship against Fernando Alonso and his Ferrari.
The 2011 and 2013 titles came with less suffering for Vettel than he faced in 2012 when he was forced to come from behind and finalize his three-time championship.
The Australian driver was a pioneer in Formula One, having started his F1 championship in the 1959 edition and increasing it the following year (1960) and 1966.
He is considered to be one of the sport’s founding fathers. The first two were accomplished with a Cooper, while the third was completed in 1969 with a vehicle that bore his name.
Decades later, he managed his own racing organization, Brabham Racing Organisation.
Nevertheless, it competed under a variety of words over the subsequent years. In his home country, he passed away at the age of 88 seven years ago (2014).
Jackie Stewart, a Scotsman, won the Formula One World Championship three times (1969, 1971, and 1973) between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, shining brightly with his unique light.
He drove a Matra to victory in the first race, the first of his six victories that year.
The other two were branded with a different company’s name: Tyrrell.
He retired after winning the tricampeonato with this team, leaving behind 27 victories, 43 podium finishes, 17 pole positions, and 15 fastest laps.
He had 11 successes with this team between those two courses.
For the Austrian to win the three championships to his credit, he had to recover from that terrible accident that occurred at the Nürburgring in 1976 and came dangerously close to taking his life.
In the year before, 1975, he made his name with Ferrari, and in the year after, 1977, he did it again with the Prancing Horse, so 1975 was the beginning of a pattern.
After an absence of a few years from the Grand Circus, he returned with McLaren and went on to win the most recent competition by a razor-thin half-point margin over Prost.
The first Brazilian to compete in this tournament was Nelson Piquet, who won the championship in 1981, 1983, and 1987. He is considered one of the greatest protagonists of the 1980s.
In addition, he can brag about having accomplished this feat while racing for two different teams, namely Brabham and Williams.
To win the third of his championships, he had to triumph over his teammate Nigel Mansell, just like the other protagonists in the story.
It is time to talk about one of the most charismatic drivers who has competed in this championship without departing from the yellow-green country.
As a result of his victories in 1988, 1990, and 1991, Ayrton Senna was a three-time world champion.
Two of them were not without emotion: in the first one at Suzuka, the engine of his Mclaren stalled, and he had to climb from 14th position to win in the rain, and in the second one, he crashed again with Prost at the first corner of the Japanese track.
In both of these races, he had to climb from the 14th position to win in the rain.
The third one occurred after Mansell retired, also at the same circuit, while he was running third behind Senna to make his title chances last.
Mansell’s retirement ended his chances of winning the championship.
However, for posterity remain the exhibitions of the Sao Paulo racer in the rain, particularly in Monaco, where he won six times.
As fate would have it, the Sao Paulo racer left on that fateful Sunday in May at Imola on the Tamburello curve.
The Italian Alberto Ascari’s victories in Formula One in 1952 and 1953 were the catalyst for the beginning of Ferrari’s love affair with the racing series.
He is, to this day, the only driver from his country to win with the Scuderia, and he did it spectacularly, winning six out of eight grand Prix in the first of them and five out of nine in the next one.
In addition, he competed for other transalpine marques like Maserati and Lancia, but he could not replicate his previous victories with them.
Accidentally killing himself in 1955 while he was testing a Cavallino racing sports car at Monza, he passed away due to his injuries.
Jim Clark, another native of the United Kingdom, is recognized on this illustrious list.
Clark won the Formula One World Championship in 1963 and 1965, making him the only driver to win the title twice.
He accomplished them with the help of Lotus, which helped him win seven and six races, respectively. In addition to his success in the Indianapolis 500 in 1965, for which he is known as the Flying Scotsman, he won several other prestigious races.
After those three years, in 1968, he was killed when his car crashed into some trees at the Hockenheim racetrack.
Emerson Fittipaldi is remembered as one of the most successful drivers in Formula One history, having won the championship in 1972 and 1974 with Lotus and Mclaren.
As some others have done, he won using a variety of brands, which adds to the impressiveness of his accomplishment.
Moreover, at the age of 25 years and ten months, he was the youngest champion in the sport’s history until Fernando Alonso defeated him in 2005.
At the wheel of his Mercedes-powered McLaren, he triumphed over Michael Schumacher in 1998 and Eddy Irvine in 1999, just before the beginning of the Schumacher and Ferrari partnership that would come to dominate the sport.
That overtaking move at Spa-Francorchamps, when he caught the slipstream of the Kaiser and Brazilian Ricardo Zonta, who was being lapped, on the Kemmel straight after passing Eau Rouge, will live on in the annals of motorsports history.
Because the Spaniard won two championships while driving for Renault in 2005 and 2006, so he is ineligible to be left off this list.
In the first race, he was victorious over Kimi Raikkonen and his McLaren, which had plagued him throughout the year with its unreliability in several Grand Prix and came to a head in Interlagos when there were still two races to go.
After a relatively quiet season the year before, Michael Schumacher and Ferrari emerged victorious in the second race, which proved to be more challenging.
That Suzuka decided to retire made things simpler for him, but he had also signed four victories in a row, which put him further away from the pack in the middle of the championship.
In 2007, he also got to the finish line with options, and in both 2010 (where he came in first) and 2012 with Ferrari, but Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel had more luck.
Will he have the ability to finish third with Alpine the following year? That question can only be answered by time.
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