A dream pair
Italy, with its drivers, is the master of world motorsport. The twin triumphs of Kimi Antonelli and Marco Bezzecchi yesterday in F1 and MotoGP wrote a page of history that our country had not experienced since 2003, but our ‘black knights’ went even further: an Italian driver is in fact the leader of the world championship standings in both F1 and MotoGP simultaneously and this is truly one of those circumstances that our country has experienced on very few occasions, which have their roots deep in the past. The last time such a situation occurred was in 1952, a year of grace for Italian motorsport.
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In that season Alberto Ascari became Formula 1 world champion for the first time in his career, at the end of a championship led always and only by our country, given that the first leader in that magical year was Piero Taruffi, winner of the first race of the season; at the same time Umberto Masetti was writing history by winning the 500 class World Championship again, going on to win his second world title in the premier class. That year Masetti took the lead in the championship on July 6, in Belgium, lost it momentarily but regained it at Monza in the Nations GP on September 14 and then kept it even at the end of the last race of the year, on October 5 at Montjuïc. A feat, that of the double Italian world title, which had also been repeated two years earlier, in 1950, with the world titles won by Farina and again by Masetti.
The missed precedents
Since then, from that 1952, until the evening of March 29, 2026, it had never happened again that two Italians led the two F1 and 500/MotoGP championships. The ‘fault’, it must be said, lies more with the four wheels. In fact, Italy has rarely found itself with its own representative at the top of the World Championship. Michele Alboreto with Ferrari in 1985 was first in the standings for several rounds, but that very year it was the Italian riders in the 500 class who missed the appointment.
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A curious case had occurred even earlier, in 1966: Lorenzo Bandini found himself leading the championship after the first two GPs thanks to a second and third place, but lost the world leadership on July 3 at the end of the French GP. On that very same day, at the end of the Belgian GP of the 500 class, Giacomo Agostini jumped to the top of the World Championship in the premier class of two wheels by winning the Spa race. In that case, there was only a passing of the torch between our men.
In this ‘compilation’, a ‘bonus track’ is deserved by the particular case of the 2005 season: Valentino Rossi was the reigning world champion and Giancarlo Fisichella won the first F1 GP of that year, in Australia. Before the two-wheel season restarted, however, Fisichella had already lost the first position in the championship to teammate Fernando Alonso, so in that season formally there were never two Italians simultaneously in command of the two standings. Now, instead, we have the award-winning firm of Bez&Kimi.
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