The first race of the 2024 Formula 1 season was also the 17th time every car which took the start saw the finish.
However, in a first, the same thing also happened in the previous race.
As cars have become more reliable, F1 is seeing more races where all cars finish. There were three such races in 2021, one when new technical regulations were introduced in 2022, and three again last year.
Had Lance Stroll not parked his damaged Aston Martin in Monaco last year, that would have been the second of three consecutive races where every driver was classified.
Max Verstappen made a perfect start to his season by leading every lap from pole position and setting fastest lap on the way to victory. This was his fifth ‘grand slam’, leaving only Jim Clark (eight) and Lewis Hamilton (six) with more. He is level with Alberto Ascari and Michael Schumacher on five.
Schumacher was also the last driver to score a grand slam in a season opener, at Melbourne 20 years ago. Valtteri Bottas came close to doing this four years ago in the Austrian Grand Prix, but lost the fastest lap to Lando Norris by a tenth of a second on the final tour.
This was Verstappen’s eighth consecutive grand prix win, which is the fourth-longest streak in F1 history. He took that record last year when he reached 10. Sebastian Vettel and Ascari made it to nine, but Verstappen could break it again at the Japanese Grand Prix next month.
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He scored the 114th win for Red Bull, which means they have now taken as many grand prix victories as Williams, a much older team which has started more than twice as many rounds. Williams is F1’s third longest-running team, having arrived in 1975 and started 816 races since. This is Red Bull’s 20th season and last weekend’s round was the 370th they’ve started.
Verstappen’s pole position was his 33rd, meaning he is tied for fifth place on the all-time list with Clark and Alain Prost. He scored his 31st fastest lap by a whopping margin of 1.482 seconds from Charles Leclerc. The last driver to achieve a larger margin was Lewis Hamilton at the Belgian Grand Prix last year, beating the next-best time by 1.617s, though unlike Verstappen he needed a late pit stop for a fresh set of tyres to do it.
However Charles Leclerc kept his run of front row starts going. This was his sixth in a row compared to…
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