This weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix is being celebrated as a huge milestone by McLaren who are just the second team in Formula 1 history to start 1,000 Grands Prix. Or are they? There have been some questions about that online because, according to many of the internet’s major F1 statistics sites, the numbers don’t quite add up.
The team currently competing as McLaren Racing began life in F1 at the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix when Bruce McLaren decided to bring the motorsport team he founded a few years earlier into the World Championship. Since then, the outfit has entered 1,003 Grands Prix and, according to most statisticians, has started 998 of them.
So why are McLaren celebrating 1,000 F1 races in Monaco this weekend, rather than wait just a few days for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix? That’s an interesting question which we put to the team ourselves.
A spokesperson for the team confirmed to Express Sport there is a discrepancy between the way many statistics websites have counted the number of races McLaren have started, and the team’s own internal records. And it all goes back to the 2005 United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis – one of the most controversial races in F1 history.
The story is infamous: tyre suppliers Michelin warned that their compounds would not be able to even get close to completing the race, but the FIA refused to entertain proposed modifications to the track because they felt it would unfairly disadvantage the team running Bridgestone tyres.
So, amid safety concerns, the seven teams which were supplied by Michelin all completed the formation lap at the start of the race but, instead of taking their qualifying positions on the grid, they instead peeled into the pit lane and retired their cars.
That left just three teams and six cars to actually start the Grand Prix in one of the most farcical scenes the sport has ever witnessed. McLaren were one of those seven teams who were supplied by Michelin and so their two cars completed just one lap of the Brickyard before drivers Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya took them back to the pit lane and got out, their working days done.
Many statistics websites don’t count that as a McLaren start but the team itself, a spokesperson confirmed to us, feels that it counts as race number 586 out of 999 so far, because their cars completed the formation lap and because they then retired the cars of their own free will, rather than being forced not to start through an incident or failure outside of their control.
Not everyone will agree that should be the case but, in the end, it doesn’t matter. McLaren love the fact that their 1,000th F1 Grand Prix, as far as they see it, takes place at the same venues as their very first. Of course, that wouldn’t have been the case had April’s Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix not been cancelled due to war in the Middle East.