Formula 1: the teams with the highest number of GPs without a win

3/25/2022

Ferrari is a winner again after two and a half years but some teams have had to wait much longer. The longest black periods in Formula 1

New year, new cars and new winners. By winning the Bahrain GP, Charles Leclerc has given the Ferrari team the win it didn’t manage to clinch not even once in the last two seasons. The last time Ferrari won was at the 2019 Singapore GP and at the time, the Maranello single-seaters brought home a double victory: Sebastian Vettel won and Leclerc came 2nd.

Since then for the next 45 Grand Prix races, Ferrari fans did not savor the taste of victory even if they were very close on several occasions: in the 2019 Mexico GP, for example, Vettel came 2nd and was only 1.766 seconds behind whereas in the 2021 World Championship, Leclerc led the way for 60 laps and Carlos Sainz for 12, but never at the checkered flag.

So Ferrari once again resumes its run of wins with Brembo brakes, a sequence that began back in 1975 when Piero Ferrari presented Alberto Bombassei to his father Enzo who commissioned a supply of brake discs for the Formula 1 single-seaters. Since then, the cars with the Prancing Horse badge have won 187 GPs, always with Brembo brake systems.

A break in this negative run is an ideal opportunity to look at the ranking of the longest periods without a win in Formula 1. To establish the rankings, we have only considered the GPs raced by each team and not included the individual races in which the team did not, for various reasons, take part in the GP or the whole years when these teams did not line up for the start. This is the Top 10 in ascending order.

10th place Jordan: 56 GPs without a win

After winning the 1999 Italian GP with Heinz-Harald Frentzen, the team founded by Eddie Jordan remained without a win until Giancarlo Fisichella won the 2003 Brazilian GP. It was an exciting win because the driver from Rome only led for one lap before the race was suspended after a series of accidents. In those four years, Jordan had changed both drivers as well as the engine supplier going from Honda to Ford but remaining loyal to Brembo brakes.

9th place Lotus: 57 GPs without a win

Lotus also used Brembo calipers for a long time, in the Ayrton Senna years, but this lack of wins refers to the previous period. After the double victory at the 1978 Dutch GP, won by Mario Andretti ahead of his team mate Ronnie Peterson, Colin Chapman's team went through a bad patch until the 1982 Austrian GP, won by Elio De Angelis just 5 hundredths of a second ahead of Keke Rosberg. A final joy for its founder who died unexpectedly four months later.

8th place Ferrari: 58 GPs without a win

The best loved racing team in the world and well as the one with the most wins experienced a bad period at the start of the nineties. After the double win at the 1990 Spanish GP with Alain Prost on the highest step of the podium and Nigel Mansell on the middle one, the Italian team went for 3 seasons in a row without a win. The negative run ended at the 1994 German GP dominated by Gerhard Berger: the Austrian set off in pole position and remained in the lead from the start to the checkered flag.

7th place Renault: 64 GPs without a win

The French team won 15 GPs from 1979 to 1983 and almost won the Constructors’ Championship. No-one could ever have imagined that after winning the 1983 Austrian GP with Prost, its next win would have been 20 years later. This was because after going through a bad patch in 1984 and 1985, it left Formula One and only returned in 2002: the ranking does not therefore include the 16 seasons it was absent. Renault started winning again at the 2003 Hungarian GP with Fernando Alonso.

6th place Tyrrell: 70 GPs without a win

Unlike the trans-Alpine constructor, Ken Tyrrell’s team raced the World Championship tracks without a break from 1970 to 1998 but in the last fifteen years has not won even once. And yet in the 1970s, it obtained 21 wins, the last at the 1978 Monaco GP with Patrick Depailler even if he started off in third position. After four years of despair, Tyrrell started to win again, once again on a street circuit thanks to Michele Alboreto who finished way ahead in the 1982 Las Vegas GP.

5th place March: 75 GPs without a win

March was even more unlucky in Formula 1 as shown by its 3 total wins in the 197 GPs it has raced. What is more, these wins were achieved in its first 7 seasons. The first came in the second GP ever raced, the 1970 Spanish GP won by Jackie Stewart, who was more than one lap ahead of his opponents. Then nothing more until the 1975 Austrian GP won by Vittorio Brambilla who was leading the race when it was called off because of heavy rain on the 29th of 54 laps.

4th place Williams: 130 GPs without a win

Williams has been waiting nearly 10 years for a Formula 1 win. Even the last win by Pastor Maldonado in the 2012 Spanish GP who took advantage of pole position came after a seven and a half year break. The previous win was achieved by Juan-Pablo Montoya in the 2004 Brazilian GP at the end of a bizarre race in which 5 different drivers fought for the lead. All this means that the late Frank William’s team has won only one GP from 2005 to the present day.

3rd place McLaren: 170 GPs without a win

Last year, on the other hand, marked the end of a negative run by McLaren which hadn’t won a race since the 2012 Brazilian GP: it was a memorable day since it was Michael Schumacher’s last race (all his 91 wins have been with Brembo brakes) and Jenson Button’s last win. Since then, the team from Woking struggled until it saw the light again in Monza in 2021 with Daniel Ricciardo winning ahead of Lando Norris in a double victory which had last taken place at the 2010 Canadian GP.

2nd place Lotus: 177 GPs without a win

With the farewell of Ayrton Senna who won for the last time at the 1987 USA GP before moving to McLaren, Lotus began a difficult period slipping further and further down in the constructors’ ranking. At the end of 1994 the Racing Department was closed and racing abandoned but in 2010 the team returned to Formula 1. Two years later, it unexpectedly won the Abu Dhabi GP with Kimi Raikkonen thanks to a excellent surge of acceleration and Lewis Hamilton’s withdrawal.

1st place Ligier: 223 GPs without a win

Guy Ligier’s team raced in Formula 1 from 1976 to 1996 winning several times before the supremacy of turbo engines: once in 1977, 3 times in 1979, twice in 1980 and twice in 1981. However, after winning the 1981 Canadian GP with Jacque Laffite, even if it won another 17 podium positions, victory seemed jinxed. Lady Luck rewarded the French team at the 1996 Monaco GP which only three drivers managed to complete: Olivier Panis finished ahead of all the others in a Ligier equipped with Brembo brakes.