Now, there are some who would suggest that this weekend’s Las Vegas
Grand Prix is not the 1,100th World Championship race. They would
claim it is only the 1,089th such race, with the missing 11 thanks
to those anomalous Indianapolis 500s between 1950-1960. Indy was
only put on the calendar to put the ‘World’ in World Championship,
and rarely caught the attention of F1 drivers – although Alberto
Ascari did attempt it in 1952. But they stand as points-paying
Grands Prix, and so F1 will celebrate its 1,100th World
Championship race with its first Saturday race since the 1985 South
African Grand Prix – race #419 – a span of 680 Sunday races. The
previous milestone races, as shown in the table below, do have some
iconic moments. The 1990 Australian GP was race #500 – with the
fallout of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost’s collision at Turn 1 in
Japan. It is where Senna gave his infamous “if you no longer go for
a gap” interview to Sir Jackie Stewart – the winner of race #200 in
Monaco. Race #700 was Jordan Grand Prix’s last win in the curtailed
Brazilian GP of 2003, while race #800 was the controversial 2008
Singapore GP – the less said about F1’s first night race, the
better… Lewis Hamilton was the winner in #900, in that battle
with Nico Rosberg in Bahrain, while he became the sole two-time
milestone winner in China 2019 – the 1,000th race. F1’s milestone
Grands Prix
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