The unremarkable race that made F1 history without anyone noticing

Fifteen years ago this week – on Friday in fact – the 2011 European Grand Prix was staged on Valencia’s harbourside. Now, I am perfectly aware that that is an arcane anniversary, for it was not a great race, it was run on a dull and finicky 25-turn street circuit, and 15 years – a crystal anniversary I am reliably informed – is not a particularly noteworthy one. Indeed, to put it another way, I would hazard a guess that rather more people are currently preparing to commemorate the 783rd anniversary of the Battle of Köse Dağ – yes, like the 2011 European Grand Prix, it too took place on June 26 – than there are marking the passage of a decade and a half since a Formula 1 race was run around the docks of Spain’s third-largest city.

But an anniversary it remains, and I have always been fond of anniversaries, however eccentric. They are invitations to rummage through one’s mind’s attic, to revisit old stories, and to rediscover events that may not have seemed especially significant at the time but, now viewed through the long lens of history, reveal themselves to have been interesting, remarkable, and perhaps even unique.

The 2011 European Grand Prix is a perfect example. Mention it to most F1 devotees and they will probably remember that Sebastian Vettel won it for Red Bull. That statement is true enough, but it is also rather like saying that the sun rose that Sunday morning, for Vettel winning F1 grands prix in 2011 was no more than par for the course. By the end of the season he had won 11 of them, he had secured his second F1 drivers’ world championship, and, still only 24, he had established himself as the undisputed standard bearer of F1’s new generation. Valencia 2011 was an immaculate Vettel performance, for he drove the fastest lap while converting pole position into victory, and by the end of the afternoon he had scored almost twice as many F1 world championship points as had his closest challenger, McLaren’s Jenson Button.

But we were used to Seb doing things like that in those days. Besides, although Vettel’s victory was impressive, it is not the reason why the race deserves to be remembered. What elevates the 2011 European Grand Prix from a routine entry in Vettel’s F1 magnum opus to something genuinely distinctive is a far rarer statistical nugget, and one that becomes more remarkable the longer one reflects on it: every car that started the race also finished it, all 24 of them. There was not one retirement, not one mechanical failure, not one accident sufficiently serious as to eliminate a competitor, and not one driver left standing beside his stricken machine while marshals busied themselves nearby.

Vettel leads the pack, as he would do all day

From 1950 onwards the F1 world championship was built on not only courage, skill, innovation, and speed, but also fragility. For decades the challenge was not only to drive fast but also to survive the attempt to do so. Engines exploded with theatrical enthusiasm; gearboxes seized all too regularly; clutches broke, hydraulics leaked, fuel lines ruptured, and suspensions collapsed, all of it failing beneath flimsy bodywork that often seemed held together by little more than optimism. F1 history is littered with stories of drivers who raced brilliantly only to watch their finest drives founder in clouds of smoke or showers of debris. For much of F1’s existence simply reaching the chequered flag represented an ambitious objective.

Against that backdrop, the 2011 European Grand Prix’s perfect finishing record was not simply abnormal. No, it was almost unprecedented – for, prior to June 26, 2011, only three world championship-status F1 grands prix had ever concluded without a single retirement, and in every case thereby hung an interesting and unusual tale.

The first had taken place exactly half a century earlier. At Zandvoort, in the summer of 1961, Wolfgang von Trips guided his Ferrari to victory in the Dutch Grand Prix, leading home a field in which all 15 starters reached the finish. F1 in the early 1960s was still a seriously perilous pursuit, conducted by courageous men competing in beautiful, agile, but insubstantial machines. Yet for one sunny late-May afternoon among the sand dunes on the Dutch coast of the North Sea – or Noordzee if you prefer – everything worked. Engines continued running, gearboxes remained intact, and every competitor completed the distance. Von Trips bolstered his F1 drivers’ world championship challenge with a polished victory, jubilantly unaware that fate was already preparing a darker chapter for him at Monza later that season.

The second retirement-free world championship-status F1 grand prix occupies a very different place in motor sport folklore. The 2005 United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis is remembered not as a sporting triumph but as an unsporting fiasco. Michelin’s tyre problems led to 14 drivers withdrawing their cars after the formation lap, leaving only six to contest the race itself. The spectators in the grandstands reacted with understandable fury, and TV viewers watched in angry disbelief, as F1 endured one of its most embarrassing afternoons.

I was in the Indy press room that day, and then and there I decided that, so disgraceful had been F1’s and the FIA’s collective failure even to try to solve the problem, that I would not even run a race report in the magazine that I was then editing. Yet, now, 21 years later, the statistics remain stubbornly literal: six cars started and six cars finished. For what it is worth, Michael Schumacher won for Ferrari, and the more forbearing souls among F1’s often liverish media corps therefore quietly noted a second grand prix in which every starter had reached the flag.

The third member of F1’s exclusive no-retirements club is the 2005 Italian Grand Prix, which took place at Monza 11 weeks after the Indy debacle and was a much happier occasion, for Juan Pablo Montoya won it magnificently for McLaren, combining speed, precision, and aggression to deliver a performance that showcased all the qualities that had made him one of F1’s most compelling talents. Twenty cars started, and 20 cars finished. F1 reliability was improving rapidly by then – but, even so, the result felt novel enough to attract attention.

Then came Valencia 2011. Unlike Zandvoort 1961, it featured a modern, hi-tech grid; unlike Indianapolis 2005, it was contested by every entrant; unlike Monza 2005, it could boast a genuinely big field, for there were 24 starters and, yes, 24 finishers. Yet, because F1 cars were becoming boringly reliable by 2011, my recollection is that very few F1 insiders noticed the significance as events were unfolding on the day. There was no flurry of excited text messages, and no trackside commentator was breathlessly informing spectators that history was about to be made. The race simply happened; lap followed lap in the Valencian sunshine; and, when the chequered flag fell, it turned out that every participant was still circulating.