Formula One News

In a year of remarkable reliability Heidfeld set a new record for finishing races

The final part of our look at the 2009 F1 season in numbers will shed some more light on which were the best-performing drivers, and looks at how 2009 compared to other F1 seasons.

Plus there’s a recap of all the major records broken in 2009 – from the youngest ever F1 driver to the first-time champions.

Season records

Drivers ranked by results

Jenson Button won the world championship and he also scored more wins than anyone else. But what happens if we rank the entire grid in order of who got the best results? The table below shows the rankings.

Mark Webber moves up a pace to third at Rubens Barrichello’s expense. Fisichella moves up from 15th to 11th thanks to his second place at Spa.

Rosberg suffers the most, falling from seventh to 14th, having failed to land a big score when the opportunity presented itself at races such as Singapore. But curiously the gulf in performance between him and team mate Kazuki Nakajima is even more apparent: we can see Rosberg beat Nakajima’s best finishing position on no fewer than 13 occasions. The same goes for Alonso compared to his two team mates.

Have a look at the 2009 F1 championship standings to make comparisons of your own:

2009 season in context

F1 2009: Retirements (click to enlarge)

For the third year in a row we saw a new record for race completion. Out of every start made by every driver, 82.06% resulted in a classified finished. In a decade F1 has gone from only having half the field finish each race to more than four out of five cars finishing.

Reliability stayed close to its record level of last year, with just 9.12% of race starts ending due to a car failure.

F1 2009: Drivers (click to enlarge)

Last year’s record for every driver starting every race was not matched due to two sackings (Sebastien Bourdais and Nelson Piquet Jnr) and two injuries (Felipe Massa and Timo Glock).

F1 2009: Pole positions (click to enlarge)

Pole positions were shared among eight drivers in 2009. That was partly because the field was generally quite evenly matched, with some teams that were not regular contenders for victory enjoying strong form at particular venues – such as Force India at Spa and McLaren at anything slow and twisty.

It was also partly because of the artificial nature of race-fuel qualifying, allowing drivers to cut their fuel load to qualify well (Toyota at Bahrian, Alonso at Spa). This will be gone next year.

F1 2009: Different winners (click to enlarge)

Strange that Button won as many races as the two champions before him, yet there are so many discussions about him being an ‘unworthy’ champion.

2009 stats and facts highlights

• Jenson Button’s first world championship
• Brawn’s first world championship
• Brawn are the first team to win their maiden Grand Prix since Wolf in 1977
• Mark Webber’s first F1 win
• Red Bull’s first pole position
• Force India’s first pole position
• Force India’s first F1 points and podium
• The Malaysian Grand Prix was the third shortest ever F1 race by time at 55 minutes, 30.6 seconds. It was the first time half points had been awarded since the 1991 Australian Grand Prix.
• Jaime Alguersuari became the youngest driver to start an F1 race
• Nick Heidfeld’s record streak of race completion ends after 41 consecutive classified results and 33 races finished in a row
• Sebastien Buemi became the 69th driver to score a point on their debut
• Ferrari failed to score in the first three races for the first time since 1981
• McLaren failed to score a point in four consecutive races for the first time since 1981
• Button became the first driver to win four consecutive races since Fernando Alonso in 2006
• Britain became the first country to score 200 wins in F1 and Brazil became the third country to reach 100 wins
• For the second year in a row the world championship was won by a British driver in car number 22 with a Mercedes engine, by finishing fifth in the Brazilian Grand Prix, beating a Brazilian driver to the title

Race facts and stats

If a double-post on F1 stats still isn’t enough, here’s all the post-race stats analysis from every race this year:

Australian Grand Prix facts and stats
Malaysian Grand Prix facts and stats
Chinese Grand Prix facts and stats
Bahrain Grand Prix facts and stats
Spanish Grand Prix facts and stats
Monaco Grand Prix facts and stats
Turkish Grand Prix facts and stats
British Grand Prix facts and stats
German Grand Prix stats and facts
Hungarian Grand Prix facts and stats
European Grand Prix facts and stats
Belgian Grand Prix facts and stats
Italian Grand Prix facts and stats
Singapore Grand Prix facts and stats
Japanese Grand Prix facts and stats
Brazilian Grand Prix facts and stats</a
Abu Dhabi Grand Prix facts and stats

All credit goes to the Source of this article.