Championship anti-climaxes: Other times the main event didn’t settle the title

Max Verstappen could achieve an unusual feat this weekend by winning a Formula 1 world championship title outside of a grand prix.

The Red Bull driver has a strong chance of becoming a three-times world champion in the sprint race on Saturday.

Until 2021, Formula 1 only awarded points during the main event of a weekend, the grand prix itself. The introduction of points-paying sprint races changed that.

It therefore required unusual circumstances for an F1 title to be awarded outside of a grand prix. It has happened, however, and other series have also seen titles decided in curious ways.

Absent rival

There was a lot of politics and bickering going on at Williams in 1987, with the team’s drivers Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet each wanting to prove a point against each other. The pair largely had the title fight to themselves that year in their dominant Williams-Hondas.

Piquet held the advantage over Mansell in the points table after the season-opener, and over the course of the first eight races they swapped around in the standings four times. But then Piquet started to build an advantage. He had a run of nine consecutive podium finishes and went into the penultimate round, the Japanese Grand Prix, with a championship lead of 12 points over Mansell.

It was an all-Williams fight for the title going into the first qualifying session on Friday. Trying to wrest the fastest time from Piquet, Mansell crashed heavily, injuring his back and was ruled out of participating in the rest of the weekend. Piquet therefore won the title as his only remaining rival was flown by helicopter to hospital.

Absent champion

A cardboard cut-out of Alex Dunne was crowned British Formula 4 champion at Brands Hatch last year. The real Dunne was at Monza for the penultimate round of the Italian F4 championship.

Dunne faced the dilemma of a date clash while competing for the title in both series. He had a big lead in British F4, but sat third in the Italian standings. Missing the Brands Hatch finale could cost him the title, but he would have no chance of becoming Italian F4 champion unless he headed to Monza.

His gamble paid off, as he became British champion at the same time as moving up to second place in the Italian standings that weekend.

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In qualifying

Modern-day racing does not only award points for more positions than previously, with F1 drivers only scoring by finishing in the top six for many years, but also for other achievements such as pole position, fastest lap or most positions gained.

Last month, Fernando Alonso’s protege Gabriel Bortoleto became FIA Formula 3 champion in qualifying at Monza after his two title rivals Paul Aron and Pepe Marti failed to take pole. They sat 38 and 39 points respectively behind Bortoleto going into the weekend, with 39 points available to score. As pole position was worth two points, it meant Bortoleto had to remain 38 points ahead at the end of the session to clinch the title.

Bortleto’s title was sealed when the qualifying session was red-flagged with 10 minutes to go, securing pole position for Oliver Goethe. Aron was third at the time, Bortoleto fifth and Marti only 16th. Bortoleto was informed of his success as he returned to the pits, with both the weekends’ races still ahead of him.

• Bortoleto clinches F3 title as rivals fail to win bonus points for pole

Drugs test

There have been several cases of championships being decided by post-race stewarding decisions. But perhaps none as notorious as the 2002 Formula 3000 championship – the Formula 2 of its day.

To this day, Tomas Enge maintains his innocence that he did not knowingly expose himself to any marijuana ahead of the race at the Hungaroring in August that year. But the random drugs test he failed that weekend ultimately led to him losing the title – after he had won it on-track.

Enge took victory from pole at the Hungaroring which put him on top of the points table for the first time and with only two races of the season left to go. He finished fourth in the next round at Spa-Francorchamps, dropping him one point behind Sebastien Bourdais.

The news of Enge’s failed drugs test broke ahead of the Monza season finale and he endured a stressful weekend and race to finish second and take the title. However it remained unclear what the consequences of his failed drugs test might be.

Eventually the punishment came: the stewards disqualified him from the Hungaroring race. Enge had spent just under three weeks as champion, and the changed result meant the title now went to Bourdais.

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More post-race wrangles

F1 has previously seen doubt hang over championships for days, even weeks, after the final race.

In 2007 McLaren’s appeal of the results of the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix meant Kimi Raikkonen had to wait 26 days after the final race to be confirmed as champion.

McLaren launched an appeal after post-race investigations into fuel temperatures in the cars of several teams had led to no penalties. The stakes were high, and a penalty would have benefited McLaren, as their driver Lewis Hamilton had lost the title by a single point and finished the race behind several of the investigated cars.

Some 14 years and seven championships later, Hamilton found himself on the losing end of another post-race row, and a much more explosive one. Now driving for Mercedes, his team protested the result of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix after race director Michael Masi arrange a final lap restart in contravention of the rules, and Hamilton lost the lead, win and championship to Max Verstappen in deeply controversial circumstances.

Both Mercedes’ protests were rejected by stewards, but they retained the right of appeal, and over the next few days the team mulled its options. Eventually it chose not to force the issue, deciding that the FIA’s only available course of action was to cancel the result of the race entirely, which would not restore Hamilton’s lost title. Verstappen was confirmed as champion and, months later, Masi lost his job.

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However Hamilton hasn’t always had the raw end of the deal when it comes to post-race decisions settling championships. He took his final title win before reaching F1 in just those circumstances.

In the penultimate race of the 2006 GP2 (now Formula 2) season at Monza, Nelson Piquet Jnr reduced Hamilton’s lead to six points by holding him off in a battle for second place. There were seven points available to score in the next day’s decider, so Piquet had to win from seventh on the grid and take fastest lap (which delivered that seventh point) to have any hope of beating Hamilton to the title.

But then stewards noticed that Giorgio Pantano, who had claimed the bonus point for fastest lap, had done so while failing to slow for yellow flags. His lap time was deleted and Hamilton was found to have set the next-quickest time. Hours after the race, Hamilton picked up an extra point and, with it, the title.

• The time a fastest lap bonus point won Hamilton a championship

Cancelled finale

Jamie Chadwick became a three-times champion of the short-lived W Series last year when it collapsed with three races left to run.

That meant three drivers were denied the opportunity to see if they could overhaul Chadwick in the standings – Beitske Visser, Alice Powell and Abbi Pulling. With a points lead equivalent to two race wins it seemed unlikely that Chadwick would end up in a losing position.

Pierre Gasly had more reason to feel hard done by when a cancellation cost him the chance to win the 2017 Japanese Super Formula title. He had been signed by Toro Rosso mid-season to make his Formula 1 debut in place of the struggling Daniil Kvyat, but the team decided to send Gasly back to Japan for the Super Formula finale at Suzuka, where he had a chance of winning the title.

Then Typhoon Lan hit Japan on the weekend of Gasly’s Super Formula return. Heavy rain delayed practice, caused the cancellation of one qualifying session and then the abandonment of the event entirely as conditions worsened.

Gasly had been just half a point behind Hiroaki Ishiura at the top of the standings, with four other drivers in contention to be champion. But none of them got a chance to see if they could beat Ishiura once the series organiser decided to cancel the weekend’s two races and not reschedule them.

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