Autobayng News Team
Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s victory in the Chinese Grand Prix makes him the first Italian driver to win a Formula 1 race in almost exactly 20 years.
Before the Mercedes driver’s victory today the last Italian to win a race was Giancarlo Fisichella in the 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix. Fisichella scored his third and final grand prix victory five months before Antonelli was born.
Italy has produced 103 Formula 1 drivers, more than any country bar Great Britain, with 171 (158 American drivers have contested world championship rounds but many of these were the Indianapolis 500 in 1950-60, which was not run to F1 rules). Antonelli is the 16th Italian to win an F1 race.
Of those, the most successful remains F1’s first two-times world champion, Alberto Ascari, who had won 13 grands prix by the time of his death in 1955. Only five other Italians have won more than one race.
These include Italy’s only other world champion, Giuseppe Farina. He won the inaugural championship in 1950, and took five grand prix wins.
Riccardo Patrese started a then-record 256 grands prix before retiring at the end of 1993, having won six times. Michele Alboreto was another five-times winner. Besides these drivers and Fisichella, Italy’s only other multiple race-winner was Elio de Angelis, who won two grands prix before his death in 1986.
Antonelli is therefore Italy’s 10th one-time grand prix winner. He joins Giancarlo Baghetti (famous for winning on his grand prix debut), Lorenzo Bandini, Vittorio Brambilla, Luigi Fagioli, Luigi Musso, Alessandro Nannini, Ludovico Scarfiotti, Piero Taruffi and Jarno Trulli. But with a car as competitive as the Mercedes which Antonelli has at his disposal, don’t count on him remaining a one-time winner for long.
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Published by
Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 – when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring journalist, Keith began running the site full-time in 2010, achieving a long-held ambition to dedicate his full attention to his passion for motor racing. View all posts by Keith Collantine
