The First Retirement of Every F1 Season

Who recorded the first retirement in every Formula 1 season? We’ve done the research to find which teams and drivers have recorded the first retirement of the year on the most occasions!

^{Header image: © Andrew Balfour}

Leslie Johnson holds the unwanted honour of being the first ever retirement in a Formula 1 race as he retired on the third lap at the 1950 British Grand Prix. Since then, another 60 drivers have gone on to take the first retirement of the season.

There have been 23 occasions where the first retirement of a season has happened on the first lap of the first Grand Prix of the year. Until 2022, the longest before the first retirement of a season was at the 1957 Argentine Grand Prix, where Peter Collins raced for 26 laps before clutch problems saw him record the first DNF of the year.

Pierre Gasly broke the 65-year-old record for the furthest into the season before a retirement at the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix, becoming the first retirement on the 45th lap of the race. That record was broken once more in 2024, as – for the first time in F1 history – no drivers retired from the season-opening race. The first DNF in 2024 came on the second lap of the second race of the year. It was once again Gasly who recorded the first DNF of the year in 2024.

The full list of first DNFs of every Formula 1 season can be found at the end of the article.

The most first retirements of the year

Only nine drivers have recorded the first retirement of a season on more than one occasion in their careers. The drivers who have done it most frequently are Jean-Pierre Jarier, Johnny Herbert, Christijan Albers and Pastor Maldonado. Albers is the only driver to have been the first retirement of the year in three successive seasons. He was first out with mechanical issues for Minardi in 2005 and with Midland in 2006, then he recorded a retirement for Spyker, crashing out on the eleventh lap in 2007.

Herbert had a particularly unlucky time in the late 1990s, as for four of the five seasons between 1996 and 2000, he can be classified as the first driver to retire in one way or another. He was the first DNF of the year in both 1996 and 1997, both times through collisions; he failed to start in 1999; and was out with clutch problems on the second lap in 2000, becoming the first retirement of the new millennium. Like Herbert, Jarier – who was the first driver to record three first retirements in a season – also recorded the first DNS of the season in 1975.

Both Peter Collins and Alex Soler-Roig recorded the first retirement of the year in successive seasons, Collins doing so in 1957 and 1958 and Soler-Roig doing so in 1971 and 1972.

In terms of teams, McLaren became the first team to record a sixth first retirement of a season in 2019, with Carlos Sainz out with power unit issues. It was the second time in four years that the team was first to record a retirement, with Fernando Alonso also out first in 2016. McLaren extended the record of most first retirements of the season to seven in 2023, with Oscar Piastri becoming the first DNF of the year.

World Champions who were the first retirement of the year

There have been only eight occasions in Formula 1 history that a World Champion has recorded the first retirement of the season. Juan Manuel Fangio (1956), Nelson Piquet (1985) and Fernando Alonso (2016) are the only World Champions to have done so having already been crowned World Champion, while Fangio is the only driver to have recorded the first retirement of a season who has gone on to win that year’s title. 

Causes of the first retirement of the year

In Formula 1 history, mechanical failures have caused more first retirements of the season than driver errors. 46 retirements have been as a result of mechanical issues, while 28 have been due to driver error or collisions.

Nikita Mazepin’s crash on the first lap of the 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix was the first time that the first retirement of the year had not been caused by mechanical gremlins since 2016. In the ten years prior to 2017, Pastor Maldonado’s transmission issues in 2011 were the only time that a driver error or collision was not to blame for the first DNF of the year.

Occasions where two drivers were out at the same time

Of course, in collisions there have been occasions where multiple drivers have had their races ended at the same point. For those occasions, we’ve taken the driver classified at the bottom of the order to be the first DNF of the season.

Times where this has happened were in 1955, 1959, 1981, 1989, 1997, 2002, 2008 and most recently in 2016, when Fernando Alonso crashed into the back of Esteban Gutierrez. Further details of these occasions are listed in the table below.

Did Not Starts at the first race of the season

There have also been a number of occasions where drivers have not even started the first race of a season. In the table below, there are details of drivers who recorded a DNS (Did Not Start) at the opening race of the season.

Both Chris Amon and Brian Redman were forced into DNSs in similar circumstances at the first race of the season in 1963 and 1970. In 1963, Maurice Trintignant raced Amon’s car and in 1970, Graham Hill raced Redman’s car.

There have been two occasions where three drivers recorded a DNS at the first race of the season, Those were in 1960, when three Maserati drivers all failed to start, and in 2015 when Valtteri Bottas, Kevin Magnussen and Daniil Kvyat all failed to line up on the final grid.

Bottas is one of two drivers to not start the first race of a season due to injury. The other driver to do so is Innes Ireland, who broke his leg during practice for the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix and then was injured in practice again at the 1964 Monaco Grand Prix.

Disqualifications at the first race of the season

There have been a number of occasions where drivers have been disqualified at the first race of the season. While in recent years these disqualifications – for example Lewis Hamilton in 2009, the Sauber drivers in 2011 and Daniel Ricciardo in 2014 – have happened after the race has been completed, there have been a couple of occasions where drivers have been disqualified before any drivers have retired from the race.

Those instances were at the 1975 Argentine Grand Prix, when John Watson was disqualified on the sixth lap, and at the 1987 Brazilian Grand Prix, where Adrian Campos was disqualified after three laps.

THE FIRST DNF OF EVERY SEASON

The table below shows a full list of every first DNF of the season plus the reason for the DNF and the lap on which the driver retired. The list excludes any Did Not Starts, Did Not Qualifys and Disqualifications.

^{*Pierre Gasly retired on Lap 2 of the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix – the second race of the season. There were no retirements in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.}

^{Header image: Atres Max on Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0}

^{This article was originally published in March 2020 and has since been updated.}