You don’t have to be in the lead for many races – it’s enough if you’re in the lead when it counts: These are the ten Formula 1 world champions with the fewest number of World Championship leads
You have to be in front at the right moment; everything else before that doesn’t count. What applies to race wins, where you’ve led every lap but suffer engine failure on the last lap, also applies to an entire world championship.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who was in the lead after race one, five or twelve in the world championship. What matters is having the most points at the very end of the season. Hardly anyone knows this better than Sebastian Vettel, who was only in the lead after a single race when he won his first world title in 2010: the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
Prior to that, the championship lead had changed hands a total of ten times between Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Jenson Button, Mark Webber, and Lewis Hamilton, but in Abu Dhabi, it was the German who came out on top for the first time.
However, Vettel is not one of the ten world champions with the fewest number of championship leads, as the then Red Bull driver was at the top of the championship standings much more often in his three subsequent world championship titles.
Of course, there are some drivers from the early days of the sport on the list, because there weren’t as many races in the 1950s and 1960s, so there were fewer opportunities to finish at the front.
But drivers who were active in this millennium are also on the list, including Kimi Räikkönen, who also took the World Championship lead in the last race in 2007 (although he had already held it briefly before). However, the “Iceman” was also in front at times in 2003 and later in 2008 and 2013.
