Sainz is walking in the footsteps of F1 legends

If we were to ask what Jacky Ickx, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell have in common, the answer may not be obvious to everyone. Sure, they’re all Formula 1 legends – though Ickx wrote the most glorious chapters of his career at Le Mans – but they’re also the only three drivers who have raced Ferrari, McLaren and Williams cars at some point in their careers, with Carlos Sainz now set to join them in 2025.

With 34 drivers’ titles and 33 constructors’ crowns gathered between them, these squads enjoy an historic aura. Red Bull and Mercedes cannot necessarily say as much. They may be catching up with McLaren and Williams in terms of world championship victories, but they’ve been around since 2005 and 2010 only respectively – though the German brand did race briefly, yet successfully, in the 1950s. In comparison, McLaren has been around since the 1960s, Williams since the 1970s, while Ferrari prides itself on having been present since the first F1 season.

Ickx’s case is somewhat different to his peers’. The iconic Ferrari driver, who was runner-up with the Scuderia in 1970, didn’t actually race for the current Williams team – he entered eight grands prix with Williams cars in 1976 for Frank Williams Racing Cars (which was to become Walter Wolf Racing) and he failed to qualify in half of these. His time at McLaren came down to a single race as the team entered a third car at the Nurburgring in 1973 – with Ickx achieving a podium finish behind the untouchable Tyrrells.

Prost’s and Mansell’s cases are much more comparable to Sainz’s in that all three of them raced for these actual teams and ended up there as part of real career decisions. Both Prost and Mansell spent nearly a decade at those outfits, with their career trajectories deeply intertwined.

They were title rivals in 1986, with McLaren’s Prost narrowly beating Williams’ Mansell, before they both ended up at Ferrari in 1990 – Mansell had joined a year prior, with Williams having lost its Honda engines (and its competitiveness) to McLaren, where the intense Ayrton Senna rivalry had taken its toll on Prost in 1988 and 1989.

Prost outperformed Mansell at Ferrari, and the Briton went back to Williams in 1991, this time with a Renault engine. Mansell went on to win the world title in 1992, before Prost – after a sabbatical – had the same success with the Didcot-based outfit the following year. Now over 40 years old and committed to the North American CART…