Just to make it clear that I didn’t think this one up myself, I should establish right away that it was the comedian Andy Zaltzman who identified, in an article published in the Times in 2008, a strange relationship between the Formula 1 World Championship and US presidential elections. I modestly claim credit for updating it here, but the original idea was definitely his.
Zaltzman pointed out that in the years when a Democrat has been elected president (rather than inaugurated, which happens in the following year), the World Championship has almost always been won by a British driver. There have been outliers, which is to be expected even in a scientific study as frivolous as this one, but the correlation is still remarkable.
The F1 World Championship dates back to 1950, and it has been contested in eighteen election years since then (we’re in the nineteenth now). Mike Hawthorn became the first British driver to win it in 1958, so obviously none of his compatriots achieved the feat in the two election years before that. It was won in 1952 by the Italian Alberto Ascari and in 1956 by the Argentinian Juan Manuel Fangio, and on each of those occasions the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president.
The 1960 champion was Jack Brabham. Brabham was Australian, but Australia shares a monarch with the United Kingdom, to which he had emigrated in the 1950s, so if not exactly British he was at least Brit-ish. Although this might seem tenuous, it was apparently sufficient to establish the relationship, because in 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president. (It seems that being Australian no longer counted twenty years later, when Alan Jones won the championship but Ronald Reagan led the Republicans into office.)
John Surtees won in 1964, but if he hadn’t then either Graham Hill or Jim Clark would have. Going into the final round, it was mathematically out of the question that anyone other than a British driver would claim the title. This dominance was echoed in the US election, in which Lyndon B. Johnson secured an unprecedented sixty-one percent of the vote.
And so it went on. James Hunt won the championship, and Jimmy Carter the election, in 1976. Bill Clinton was elected to the presidency in 1992, when Nigel Mansell became the next British world champion after Hunt, and was voted in for a second term when Damon Hill took the title four years later.
The relationship was at its strongest in 2008. Barack Obama became the first person of mixed race to be voted in as president, and Lewis Hamilton became the first mixed-race champion. Hamilton has since won six more titles, but only one of them in a year when US citizens voted for a new leader. That was 2020, when Joe Biden was elected, further supporting Zaltzman’s hypothesis more than a decade after he proposed it.
There is only one case each of a British driver winning the championship when a Republican was elected (Graham Hill, Richard Nixon, 1968) and of a Democrat being elected when a non-British driver won the championship (Obama, Sebastian Vettel, 2012). Correlation does not imply causation, of course, but it’s striking that on the eight occasions when the coincidence could have happened it actually did happen seven times if you include the UK-adjacent Brabham, or six if you don’t. Either way, that’s an impressive hit rate.
As I write this, Max Verstappen is comfortably leading the 2024 championship, but his closest challenger is Lando Norris. Given his recent record, nobody would be surprised if Verstappen won for the fourth year in a row, but it’s within the bounds of possibility that Norris could defeat him.
I’d rather not speculate on what effect this might have on the election which will take place in November. Instead, I’ll finish my silly little essay in an appropriately trivial manner by noting that although Verstappen is usually described as Dutch and Norris as British, they are, by place of birth and joint citizenship respectively, both Belgian.
Top image: Obama copyright Official White House Photostream, Hamilton copyright Mercedes-Benz.
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