The verdict is finally in: who was the fastest flat cap-wearer in F1?

On Saturday, August 8, 2026, I posted on BlueSky wishing Nigel Mansell a very happy 73rd birthday, describing him as “the fastest flat cap wearer of all time”. My post prompted the sort of agreeable squabbling that social media occasionally produces when it is behaving itself, several people concurring enthusiastically while others quite reasonably put forward the claims of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, and Mike Hawthorn. So, having inadvertently opened the door to what may be the least important but most British motor sport debate of the year thus far, I found myself wondering just how many Formula 1 drivers had habitually worn flat caps, and whether I could, with a straight face and perhaps a slightly tilted hat, write about their cranial-sartorial attributes as well as their racing-sporting qualities. So here goes. After all, it is still F1 holiday time… just.

The answer, as far as I can establish, is seven: in alphabetical order Jim Clark, Mike Hawthorn, Graham Hill, Innes Ireland, Nigel Mansell, Jackie Stewart, and Roger Williamson all habitually wore (or in the case of Mansell and Stewart, still wear) flat caps. All were or are British, which is hardly surprising because the flat cap was once as much a part of British life as rain, tea, complaining about the rain, and arguing about whether the tea or the milk should be poured into the cup first. More poignant is that all but Mansell and Stewart are long dead, which tells us something about the all but total disappearance of the flat cap from modern life, and therefore from modern motor sport. For the record, I can just occasionally be seen sporting a flat cap but never, absolutely never, a baseball cap.

Nowadays all F1 drivers wear baseball caps parading sponsors’ logos – indeed the mandatory wearing of the cursed things is written into their contracts. By contrast, a few decades ago, you could stroll into the paddock of any British circuit and find most of the drivers looking as though they had just left a farmyard, a newspaper office, a country pub, or a cricket pavilion. Today, if you saw a group of F1 drivers wearing flat caps, you would assume that Netflix had commissioned a period drama.

Take Jim Clark, whose classic houndstooth flat cap was a perfect fit – both literally and culturally. It had the modest and practical authority of something that was not trying to make an impression, which was precisely why it made such an impression, for Clark was a sheep farmer in the Scottish Borders when he was not racing F1 cars faster and better than anyone else ever has, and his classic houndstooth flat cap belonged naturally to that landscape: fields, hedges, hills, valleys, bothies, cold mornings, and damp tweed. Clark did not wear it as a fashion statement, but rather because his father, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbours would all have worn such things, so he did too, in the same way that he would have pulled on a pair of gumboots to walk across a muddy farmyard.

Mike Hawthorn’s flat caps were more ambitious in terms of desired effect, although they were frequently of conventional design, albeit often made of corduroy rather than the more usual tweed or wool. The complete Hawthorn ensemble, however, is where the magic happened: the corduroy flat cap, the polka-dot bow tie, and the pipe jammed into his mouth together lent him the air of an English country gent who had somehow taken a wrong turn and ended up at somewhere he clearly did not belong such as Spa, Nürburgring, or Monza.

Hawthorn was the first British F1 world champion, in 1958, and to my mind there is something wonderfully incongruous about the image of a man dressed for an afternoon shooting grouse in the Home Counties instead engaging himself in the business of driving race cars at breakneck speed in far-flung locales. He could never be mistaken for anyone else, at almost any distance and from almost any angle, which among today’s F1 drivers is something you could say about only Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Max Verstappen, and Valtteri Bottas. Increasingly, the rest of them all look like contestants vying for the approval of Simon Cowell on a boy band talent show.

Graham Hill took the flat cap in a different direction. His was often a houndstooth woollen news-boy or baker’s-boy flat cap, characterised by a voluminous crown and a button on top, fashionable rather than traditional, very much a thing of the Swinging Sixties and Seventies, and it suited a man who had a much more conscious relationship with his public image than for example Clark ever did. Hill was a natural performer, a gifted after-dinner speaker, a sparkling raconteur, a wit, and therefore a man who understood the theatre of motor racing as well as its sporting and engineering aspects. He wore a flat cap with metropolitan swagger, as though he had bought it at Biba on London’s King’s Road on the personal recommendation of Barbara Hulanicki.

Innes Ireland, meanwhile, returns us to the classic houndstooth. Ireland’s flat caps bore the air of a man who might be about to go shooting, disappear for a fortnight, and return with a disreputable story about pheasants, single malts, punch-ups, and perhaps the odd milkmaid. Indeed, his occasional wearing of a houndstooth deerstalker, Sherlock Holmes-style, only strengthened that impression. The deerstalker also reminds us that hats were not only about keeping heads warm: they all carried cultural baggage. Pedro Rodríguez and Tom Pryce could also be seen in deerstalkers, Rodríguez almost always, although by my reckoning neither joins my flat cap septet and neither ever stalked deer.

Then there is Nigel Mansell, still with us, still capable of making a flat cap look like competitive equipment rather than casual leisurewear, and therefore the most immediately obvious candidate for the title that I rather rashly awarded him on his most recent birthday. Mansell’s flat cap is inseparable from the public image that he developed during and after his F1 career: as British as roast beef, brave, and stubborn. He was never what you could call orthodox or even normal, either in driving style or character, but the classic houndstooth that covered his head was always reassuringly conventional.

Jackie Stewart eventually turned his flat cap into a personal trademark, for his green-and-yellow or sometimes blue-and-red Stewart tartan variations are now as unmistakably JYS as the man himself. Yet he did not begin there. In his youth in Scotland, when shooting occupied as much of his time as racing, he wore exactly the same style of classic houndstooth flat cap that Jim Clark wore. Later, in the 1970s, he adopted fashionable, baggy, jet-black news-boy or baker’s-boy flat caps in ribbed wool twill, very much in the style of those worn by his great friend Graham Hill. It was only subsequently that the tartan became the visual shorthand we know today, for Sir Jackie Stewart is now a brand venerable in its own right.

Finally there is Roger Williamson, whose F1 career was so tragically brief, for he failed to finish his first grand prix and he failed to survive his second. Williamson wore a soft leather flat cap, dark khaki green in colour, shaped distinctively by visible seams dividing the crown into several panels, and finished off by a small button at the top. It was a practical-looking thing, almost military in its solidity, yet knowing what happened to Williamson at Zandvoort in 1973 inevitably changes the way one sees photographs of him wearing it: indeed his flat cap is one of a tiny number of pieces of visual evidence of what he was like left behind by a cruelly truncated career that ought to have been much, much longer.

I should add, before the F1 flat-cap police arrive at my door, that I am perfectly prepared to admit that I may have forgotten someone. Please tell me if I have. Equally, Juan Manuel Fangio, Froilán González, Giuseppe Farina, Eugenio Castellotti, and Luigi Musso frequently wore ivy caps, often of cotton or linen, and if you are minded to classify an ivy cap as a flat cap the membership rules become considerably more complicated. Jean Behra wore a beret, and Maurice Trintignant and Peter Collins wore beanies or bobble hats. There may be other cases lurking in the photographic archives, and I shall no doubt hear about them, probably from someone who has devoted rather more time to the subject than any sensible person should. Or, to put it another way, I have enjoyed writing a column about it, but it will never make a book.