Two days ago, at Monza, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen won the Italian Grand Prix. His victory was a truly dominant one, but, although he won the race from pole position, which he had earned by dint of a scintillatingly rapid qualifying lap, early on in the race he had been briefly headed by Lando Norris, and Norris it was who would drive the race’s fastest lap. Nine days ago, at Zandvoort, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri won the Dutch Grand Prix – but, which is more, in so doing he also achieved something not only much rarer than a grand prix victory but also more rarefied: the coveted, the elusive, the ineffably perfect Formula 1 grand chelem.
Notching up an F1 grand chelem – pole position, fastest lap, race victory, leading from lights to flag – is motor sport’s equivalent of the 6-0 6-0 6-0 tennis whitewash, the 147 maximum snooker break, or the nine-dart finish. You can doubtless come up with examples of your own from other sports. What we are talking about is perfect, unblemished mastery.
Piastri’s feat at Zandvoort on August 31, 2025, etched as it now is into the granite of F1 history, marked a moment of racing punctuation – an exclamation mark, certainly, but also a question mark. For it invited us to pause, take stock, and ask: what does a grand chelem really mean in modern F1? Why are they so rare? And what stories do they whisper to us from our sepia-tinted memories of motor racing’s most glorious past?
Piastri has entered the record books with his Dutch GP whitewash
McLaren
Oh and why do I use the term ‘grand chelem’ when many others use the term ‘grand slam’, you may be wondering? For the same reason that I use the term ‘grand prix’ and ‘parc fermé’. You don’t use the terms ‘grand prize’ and ‘closed park’, do you?
OK, let’s now play with a few salient numbers. Since the F1 world championship was inaugurated in 1950, more than 1100 F1 grands prix have been contested, yet F1 grands chelems number only 69. Very few F1 drivers ever achieve one. Indeed, 15 of F1’s 34 world champions, the titans of our sport, hung up their helmets (or, in Giuseppe Farina’s case, his linen skull-cap) without a single grand chelem to their names: the aforementioned Farina, Phil Hill, Graham Hill, John Surtees, Denny Hulme, Emerson Fittipaldi, James Hunt, Mario Andretti, Jody Scheckter, Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Alain Prost, Jacques Villeneuve, Kimi Räikkönen, and Jenson Button. Perhaps more exotic are the nine drivers who never won an F1 world championship yet nonetheless recorded F1 grands chelems: Stirling Moss, Jo Siffert, Jacky Ickx, Clay Regazzoni, Jacques Laffite, Gilles Villeneuve, Gerhard Berger, Charles Leclerc, and – so far, although he may well become an F1 world champion very soon – Oscar Piastri.
In the 1960s and 1970s it was entirely feasible for a driver to lead every lap of an F1 grand prix without once visiting the pitlane. Tyres were expected to last a full race distance, and refuelling, despite its not being banned until 2010, was rarely seen. A driver who established a lead on lap one could therefore head the field all the way – and many did. Nowadays, however, during what we have learned to call the pitstop ‘window’, even the most dominant driver-car combo will often surrender a race lead, however briefly, to a rival on an alternative race strategy. For example, when the leader’s pitstop comes early in the race, that window – perhaps just a single lap – allows another driver, or drivers, yet to pit, to nose ahead. And there goes the race winner’s grand chelem, out of the window and gone with the wind.
Schumacher would bend races “to his will”
Grand Prix Photo
Add to that the regulatory fastest lap complications. From 2019 to 2024 – and throughout the 1950s, too, for that matter – an F1 world championship point was awarded to the driver who had recorded the race’s fastest lap (as long as that driver had also finished in the top 10, as far as the 2019-2024 reintroduction of the rule was concerned). In recent years that tempting morsel of marginal gain led to a flurry of late-race pitstops, as drivers were instructed by their teams to strive to earn an extra world championship point via the somewhat artificial conjunction of new soft tyres, low fuel, and clean air. The result? A driver who had led all the way, quickest in qualifying and fastest in the race too, was too frequently beaten to the race’s fastest lap by a driver in a lonely seventh place with nothing to lose and nothing else to gain. The rule was repealed for this season, and fastest laps are now once again unrewarded by world championship points in F1.
Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Nigel Mansell, and Sebastian Vettel scored four F1 grands chelems apiece; Juan Manuel Fangio and Jack Brabham bagged two each; but Michael Schumacher was the first modern maestro of the grand chelem, for, at his peak, Schumacher bent races to his will. He duly recorded five of them – two with Benetton (both in 1994) and three with Ferrari (one in 2002 and two in 2004) – and he was able to do so not only because he was a brilliant driver, which he was, but also because he often had a significant car advantage, especially in his Ferrari years. Schumi’s fellow countryman, Vettel, enjoyed similar serendipity at Red Bull in the first part of the following decade. In 2011, for example, he utterly dominated India’s inaugural F1 grand prix, and the result was a nonchalant grand chelem: his first in F1. He repeated the feat in Japan in 2012, and he notched up two more in 2013 – Singapore and Korea – during that season of suffocating Red Bull supremacy.