Grand chelem: Is the 'perfect weekend' important in modern F1?

Numerically more successful than all of the above, Lewis Hamilton has won 105 F1 grands prix and six F1 grand chelems. He could have had more than six, had not his fast and ambitious Mercedes team-mates Nico Rosberg and Valtteri Bottas run him close enough, often enough, to snatch from him pole positions and/or fastest laps, and frequently lead Hamilton-dominated grands prix during pit stop windows. Indeed, Rosberg has two F1 grands chelems of his own, scored at Sochi and Baku in 2016. Perhaps Lewis’s most clinical F1 grand chelem came at Silverstone in 2017 – a hugely popular result with not only the spectators but also the driver himself, given his particular devotion to winning at home.

Like Alberto Ascari, who bagged his five F1 grands chelems in his two years of F1/F2 domination in 1952 and 1953, Max Verstappen has also collected five grands chelems (so far), all of them earned within the 2019-2024 ‘point for fastest lap’ rule set that made them trickier to achieve. Max scored his first F1 grand chelem on his team’s home circuit, the Red Bull Ring, in 2021. His second, at Imola the following year, was totalitarian in the best sense of the word; indeed, that weekend he also won the sprint race, starting it from P1 for good measure. In 2023, he bagged F1 grands chelems in Spain and Qatar, and he kicked off 2024 in Bahrain with an F1 grand chelem masterclass. He is perhaps the modern driver best equipped to threaten the all-time F1 grand chelem record, about which I will tell you more shortly.

Nelson Piquet scored three F1 grands chelems, all of them for Brabham; and Mika Häkkinen scored two, both in his first F1 world championship year, 1998, caressing his beautiful McLaren MP4-13 into the grand chelem record books at both Interlagos and Monaco. Fernando Alonso – a man who has built his long F1 career on relentless pace, strategic cunning, and sheer bloody-mindedness – has only one F1 grand chelem to his name, and the reason for that is that, unlike his contemporaries Schumacher, Vettel, Hamilton, and Verstappen, he has never enjoyed the luxury of having a seriously hefty car advantage over his rivals. Nonetheless, in Singapore in 2010, Alonso delivered a night-time parade of perfection. That it occurred during a turbulent and ultimately frustrating season with Ferrari adds a layer of romantic rebellion to the tale. Fernando, who has very rarely found himself in any season’s fastest car as I say, sighted his one shot at grand chelem perfection that weekend, and he made it count. The other F1 world champions who have but one F1 grand chelem to their names are Mike Hawthorn, Niki Lauda, and Damon Hill.

Charles Leclerc produced his one F1 grand chelem (so far) at Albert Park three years ago, in a Ferrari that, for the briefest of spells, looked like the fastest car on the grid. His drive that day was composed, controlling, and – unusually for the Scuderia in its modern-day era, particularly in a race that included a safety car deployment, as the 2022 Australian Grand Prix did – happily devoid of strategic farce.

And, now, we welcome Oscar Piastri to the exclusive F1 grand chelem club. It is too early to say what kind of F1 career awaits him, or even whether he will become an F1 world champion, although we will find out soon enough. Nonetheless, even if he beats his McLaren team-mate Lando Norris to F1 world championship glory this season, which he may well, he will still have about him the whisper of potential rather than the roar of legacy. He is, after all, still only 24. But Zandvoort was not a whisper. It was a shout. And it said, loud and clear: “Here I am.”

It was, indeed, reminiscent of the kind of F1 grand prix victory delivered 25 times by the driver who holds the F1 grand chelem record, and has done so for the past 60 years, for, although he raced on in F1 and in many other series until his death in an F2 race at Hockenheim in 1968, he scored his last F1 grand chelem in 1965. We are talking about a Scottish farmer who drove a prodigious eight F1 grands chelems in just 72 F1 grands prix. Those astonishing numbers belong to Jim Clark, and for six decades they have remained untouched, and perhaps they will always be untouchable.

Such was Clark’s supremacy over his opponents that he did not often race per se – although, when he found himself not at the head of the field, for whatever reason, he raced better than any of his rivals did. No, he usually pulverised qualifying, bagging 33 F1 pole positions as if by divine right, then on the following day he would canter away from his pursuers, effortlessly carving 28 fastest laps in so doing. Granted, his Lotuses were always feather-light, but they were also fragile and never entirely safe. Yet when everything clicked – when Colin Chapman’s engineering held together and the gremlins stayed away – Clark was unassailable.

His F1 grands chelems spanned 1962 to 1965, and he scored them at Aintree, Zandvoort, Reims, Mexico City, Brands Hatch, East London, Clermont-Ferrand, and Nürburgring. He was the master of clean air – not that we called it that back then – serving up serene yet superfast laps one after the other while others scrambled along in his wake. His ability to extract speed without stress was uncanny. He led from the front not by force but by fluency.

So what does an F1 grand chelem mean in 2025? Is it an obsolete metric in an F1 era of computer-generated pit stop strategies, frequent virtual and actual safety cars, and constant radio communication? Or is it still the F1 gold standard, the one true signifier of F1 ascendancy? For me it is the latter – for, even in the meticulously organised ultra-hi-tech chaos of modern F1, wherein even the fastest must always pit, there is still something profoundly satisfying in seeing a driver take a race by the scruff of its neck and own every facet of it. An F1 grand chelem still is, as it always has been, the purest display of a driver in total harmony with his car, his team, and himself.

Oscar Piastri has now joined an august lineage, therefore. By that arcane but beguiling measure he now stands shoulder to shoulder with the F1 grand chelem virtuosi: with Hamilton, Verstappen, Ascari, Schumacher, Stewart, Senna, Mansell, Vettel et al, and, yes, even with Clark. He may not yet be their equal, but he has shown that he can, at his best, be their peer. And, for one day, at Zandvoort the Sunday before last, that is exactly what he was.