84% of titles won
The mandatory premise of this article is that it might not be appreciated by Toto Wolff and generally by fans who are too superstitious or not big fans of statistics. With his third consecutive win this year, achieved at the Miami GP and bringing him to three wins in 2026 out of four rounds contested, Andrea Kimi Antonelli has sent a very strong signal to the entire championship and to his teammate George Russell: despite being 19 years old, the talented Italian driver is currently considered the favorite to win the world title.
The numbers say it all: in F1 history 25 times a driver has won at least three of the first four GPs and in 21 of these cases went on to become champion at the end of the year. This is a very high conversion rate, of 84%. The last to make three out of four at the start of the World Championship was Max Verstappen, in 2024, and at the end of the season the Dutch Red Bull driver was able to celebrate his fourth career title after resisting Lando Norris’s comeback attempt. In short, even with a very long season still ahead, the #12 from Bologna really has every reason to dream big.
Hamilton, Senna, Prost and Fittipaldi: the illustrious disappointments
Be careful though, because the exceptions to this statistic are all remarkable: the last driver who lost a World Championship after winning three of the first four Grands Prix was Lewis Hamilton, in 2021, to the advantage of Max Verstappen himself who was crowned champion in the now infamous Abu Dhabi grand finale. But the other similar cases all date back to seasons etched in F1 collective memory: before Hamilton’s defeat, you had to go back to the late 1980s to find two drivers beaten after a triumphant start to the season, and what drivers. In 1989 Ayrton Senna won three GPs in the first four (precisely the second, third and fourth, like Antonelli), but the World Championship was won by Alain Prost who actually got his first win of the season only at the fifth GP. Senna’s many retirements and the unforgettable Suzuka clash directed the championship towards the Professor. 12 months earlier the opposite happened: Prost had won three of the first four races but at the end of the World Championship it was Senna who celebrated, also thanks to the drop-score rule that allowed him to beat his rival teammate despite having scored fewer points overall.
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The progenitor of defeats after a brilliant early season phase is however Emerson Fittipaldi, who lost the 1973 World Championship to Jackie Stewart despite three wins in the first four GPs. Those three wins in fact remained Fittipaldi’s only victories for the whole year while the Scottish champion – winner of the third round in South Africa – then won another four times during that year.
Once, with championships of 16 or 17 GPs, winning at least three of the first four races was more relevant in the points count, but it should also be remembered that until 25-30 years ago the reliability of the cars was much more precarious than today and even the fastest car could suffer several consecutive ‘zeros’, a circumstance much less frequent in contemporary F1. Kimi, in any case, is allowed to make all the superstitions he knows.
