Modern Formula 1 Fans Would Have Hated The Sport’s First Season 75 Years Ago

The first race to be run under the FIA’s new Formula 1 World Championship happened on May 13, all the way back in 1950. While the idea of a top-flight formula for global racing cars itself had already existed for years, this was the first time a formal championship had been assembled for the world’s best drivers and constructors. The series consisted of six races in Europe—Silverstone, Monaco, Bremgarten, Spa-Francorchamps, Reims, and Monza—plus the Indianapolis 500. Every championship race (bar Indy, which drew no European entrants) run in 1950 was won by the Alfa Romeo team, with either Nino Farina or Juan Manuel Fangio taking the checkered flag. Maserati, Talbot-Lago, Ferrari, and ERA didn’t stand a chance.

Any time a single team manages to win more than half of the races, F1 fans will write it off as the car being a rocket ship and call the season boring. This isn’t unique to F1 either, as the current dominant runs in IndyCar, FIA WEC, and IMSA have fans of those series saying the racing is washed. Nobody hates racing more than race fans, right? 

On Tuesday, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the series, F1 posted a new colorized highlights reel of the inaugural 1950 British Grand Prix to its YouTube channel. F1 won’t allow me to embed the video here, so you’ll have to click the link to see it, but it’s definitely worth watching. 

Farina and Fangio won three rounds each, but by dint of Fangio suffering more retirements than Farina had, the Drivers standings saw Farina ahead by three points (thanks to a fourth-placed finish at Spa) at season’s end. The points fight came down to the final round at Monza, as Fangio had pole and fastest lap before his gearbox grenaded. 

While the season has gotten much longer in recent years, the cars are certainly faster, the tracks are safer, and everything about the sport today costs orders of multitude more dollars, it’s nice to see that not much has changed from 1950 to 2025. It’s still possible for a team and driver to execute to a higher level than everyone else, and it’s still possible for F1 fans to decry a dominant constructor. Probable, even.