F1 drivers in their fifties: why Alonso is nowhere near the oldest

F1
- Last updated: December 21st 2023

Oscar Piastri wasn't even born when Fernando Alonso first raced in F1. But the 42-year-old double-world champion will have to race for a decade to best Luigi Fagioli as the oldest championship GP winner, says Matt Bishop

Alonso oldest drivers header

Alonso is the oldest driver on the current F1 grid but Chiron (inset, top) raced into his fifties, as did Fagioli, who won a GP aged 53

Aston Martin

On July 29 next year, all being well, Fernando Alonso will celebrate his 43rd birthday. Just over four months later, on December 1 2024, in Qatar, also all being well, he will become the first driver to reach the remarkable milestone of 400 championship Formula 1 grand prix starts. The latter landmark will place him well clear of anyone else, although youngsters such as Max Verstappen (185 championship F1 GP starts; 26 years old), Charles Leclerc (123; 26), George Russell (104; 25) and Lando Norris (104; 24) may challenge Alonso’s magnum opus in time. Nonetheless, as of now, they are a very long way behind the veteran Spaniard, who already holds the all-time ‘most F1 GP starts’ record (377). But, despite his F1 longevity, he is not even close to being high on the ‘oldest drivers to start an F1 GP’ leader-board. Indeed, the only age-related top-10 in which he appears is ‘youngest drivers to start an F1 GP’. He is seventh on that list, at 19 years 218 days.

Still, after all these years, he is as fast and as fine an F1 driver as ever he was. The most accepted barometer of an F1 driver’s speed and ability is his performance relative to his team-mate. However, although that may seem to be the fairest test, for it is axiomatically the case that only that team-mate is driving an equal car, a thorny conflicting variable is also at play: to put it bluntly, some team-mates are speedier and abler than others. Alonso’s Aston Martin team-mate Lance Stroll is 17 years his junior, yet in 2023 the older man thrashed the younger man 19-three in qualifying sessions, 18-four in races, and eight-nil in podiums. Moreover, although Stroll is not of course as experienced an F1 driver as is Alonso, he is experienced enough. Indeed he has raced in F1 for seven consecutive seasons, during which he has started 143 championship F1 GPs: more than Mario Andretti (128), Jack Brabham (126), Alan Jones (116), Damon Hill (115), Keke Rosberg (114), Denny Hulme (112) and Jody Scheckter (112), F1 world champions all.

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Might Alonso have struggled to trounce so comprehensively a more capable young team-mate such as Verstappen, Leclerc, Russell or Norris? Perhaps. Probably, in fact. But we will never know. What we do know, and can say without fear of contradiction, is that, despite his increasing age, Alonso remains an absolutely top-drawer F1 driver. Personally, I would love to see him win a grand prix next year, preferably in Barcelona, where the grandstands will be filled with people who adore him. Equally, having worked with Stroll at Aston Martin in 2021 and 2022 —sometimes feeling a bit sad about his apparent disinclination to enjoy what every other driver I have ever worked with has always looked upon as the best job in the world — I would be delighted if he could relocate his mojo, ideally by winning his home grand prix in Montreal.

Anyway, Alonso will turn 43 next year. That is pretty old for a modern-day F1 driver but, when the F1 world championship was inaugurated in 1950, 43 was pretty much par for the course, and quite a few drivers were older than that. Indeed, Giuseppe Farina was 43 when, on a warm and sunny day in early September of that year, at Monza, he raced his Alfa to a win that would earn him points enough to become the very first F1 world champion. As I say, Farina was far from the oldest kid on the 1950 F1 block. The reason for that was twofold: (1) F1 drivers did not need to be anything like as physically fit as they must be today and (2) their grand prix careers had been on hold since the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 and had not resumed until well after the cessation of hostilities in 1945, imposing an almost decade-long interregnum during which they did not race but merely grew older. Farina, for example, had raced well in important international races in the 1930s. So had other early-1950s F1 stars who were no longer in their first flush of youth. Two obvious examples were Luigi Fagioli (who turned 52 in 1950) and Louis Chiron (51 in 1950); and there were others, too.

Louis Chiron in pits at Montlhery in 1931 French GP

Chiron won the 1931 French GP during the first, pre-war, part of his career

Keystone-France via Getty

Luigi Fagioli with Juan Manuel Fangio in 1950

Fagioli with Fangio, with whom he won the 1951 French GP, aged 53

AFP via Getty Images

Chiron and Fagioli are in positions one and four in the ‘oldest drivers to start an F1 GP’ list. Chiron was 55 (nearly 56 actually) when he finished sixth in the 1955 Monaco GP, and Fagioli was 53 when he won the 1951 French Grand Prix. He is, of course, therefore, the oldest driver to win a championship F1 grand prix, the only driver born in the 19th century to have won a championship F1 grand prix, and the only driver to have won a grand prix in the pre-WW2 European Championship and the post-WW2 F1 World Championship. Nonetheless, he is now by some margin less well known than the two other great Fs of early-1950s F1, Fangio and Farina, and that must surely be because, unlike them, he never won an F1 world championship. But, if he was not quite as good as Fangio, because no-one was, he was better than Farina. Before F1 had been born or thought of, he had won the 1930 Coppa Ciano for Maserati, the 1933 Coppa Acerbo and the 1933 Italian Grand Prix for Alfa Romeo, the 1934 Coppa Acerbo and the 1935 Monaco Grand Prix for Mercedes-Benz, and more besides. He started only seven championship F1 GPs: six in 1950 (finishing second in four, third in one, and having his chances ruined in a lap-one multi-car shunt in the other) and one in 1951 (which he won). The next year, 1952, uniquely, the Monaco Grand Prix was a sports car race, and he shunted his Lancia in practice for it. At first his injuries were thought to be minor, but a week later, in hospital in Monte-Carlo, he succumbed to them, aged 54.

Chiron was an excellent driver, too: smooth and fast. An urbane and handsome Monégasque, notably fleet-footed on the dance floor, in the 1920s he supplemented his income by plying for hire as a gigolo in the opulent lobby of the Hotel de Paris, Monte-Carlo, earning enough to buy himself a Bugatti grand prix car. He was prolifically successful in it, and in its serial replacements, which were also paid for by wealthy female admirers, and he won the Italian Grand Prix in 1928, the German Grand Prix in 1929, the Monaco Grand Prix in 1931, and the French Grand Prix in 1931, 1934 (in an Alfa) and 1937 (in a Talbot), and more besides.

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I am sometimes asked, particularly on Twitter/X, to recommend books about motor sport history. OK, here goes: The Bugatti Queen (2004) by Miranda Seymour. It tells the story of Hellé Nice, who modelled naked for Parisian artists and painters, danced in nightclubs in Paris and Nice, and raced cars when it was only slightly more common for women to do so than it is today. Her story is an extraordinary one. You really should read it. Chiron does not come out of it at all well, however, for it includes the story that, at the post-Monte Carlo Rally party in 1949, he suddenly and angrily accused her of collaborating with the Nazis during WW2 and, worse, of being an agent for the Gestapo. The likelihood is that she did not and was not. Nonetheless, Chiron’s accusations ruined her reputation, ended her racing career, pitched her into a deep depression, and eventually made a recluse of her. She died in abject poverty in Nice 35 years later, in 1984, aged 83. Her neighbours told Seymour that they had sometimes seen her stealing milk that they had left for their pet cats outside the front doors of their apartments.

I always think of her as I pass the statue erected in Chiron’s honour on the harbour side of the Swimming Pool section at Monaco, just as I will imagine a lonely and emaciated octogenarian woman lapping stale milk out of saucers intended for domestic cats if I ever see a $3.3 million (£2.6 million) Bugatti Chiron in the metal. Now you will, too.

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