What do Formula 1 statistics say about the world championship chances of McLaren driver Oscar Piastri, who has won three of the first five Grands Prix in the 2025 season?
With his third win of the season, McLaren driver Oscar Piastri has taken the lead in the Formula 1 World Championship for the first time. But what do his results so far in the 2025 season actually say about his chances of winning the title?
Formula 1 statistics provide a clear answer here: whenever a driver has won at least three of the first five Grands Prix of a racing season, he has gone on to become world champion in 85 percent of all cases. History therefore favors Piastri as the 2025 world title winner.
If he manages to win the overall title, he would join the ranks of the three German Formula 1 world champions: Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel, and Nico Rosberg all won titles after winning three or more of the first five races at the start of the season.
Schumacher achieved this in six of his seven title-winning years: in 1994 and 1995 with Benetton with four and three wins respectively, and in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004 for Ferrari, although he only won all five opening races in the year he won his seventh world championship. Apart from Schumacher, only Nigel Mansell has achieved this in 75 years of Formula 1 history – in his title-winning year of 1992 for Williams.
The fact that a driver has been as successful at the start of the season as Piastri will be in 2025 has only happened once in 40 seasons, i.e. in just over half of all Formula 1 years – the first time in 1952, when Alberto Ascari won three of five races for Ferrari and became world champion, and most recently in 2024, when Max Verstappen also won the world title after four victories in five Grands Prix.
Six drivers fail to win the world championship
But there are, of course, counterexamples – six in total since 1952: drivers who started a Formula 1 season in dominant fashion but did not end up becoming world champions. And this short list includes some very prominent names.
Jim Clark was the first Formula 1 driver in 1964 to miss out on the title after such a good start to the season: Clark finished only third in the overall standings at the end of the year – no one who had won at least three of the first five races had ever finished lower.
This means that all other early multiple winners have fared better: they each finished second in the world championship and missed out on the title by a narrow margin – for a variety of reasons.
Unusual circumstances in the world championship decider
Niki Lauda, for example, would probably have easily won his second world championship title in 1976 had he not been seriously injured in an accident at the German Grand Prix on the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
The 1989 and 2021 seasons, however, ended controversially – and in both cases, the driver who had dominated the early stages of the championship did not finish at the top of the standings. Otherwise, Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton would each have one more world championship title to their name.
