The Greatest Races: 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

The story of the 2010 Formula One title decider is as much about how Fernando Alonso and Ferrari lost the drivers’ championship as how Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull won it. Ten years on, the scale of Ferrari’s crucial mistake on lap 15 in Abu Dhabi only continues to grow, as we move to 13 years since the Scuderia’s last drivers’ title win, and the prospect of them reclaiming their spot at the top of the sport looks ever more remote. But in dissecting the anatomy of the bottlejob, there’s a story that goes way beyond that one evening in the UAE.

The Greatest Races: 1995 Grand Prix of Cleveland

With two runways, around 64,000 aircraft movements a year and no regular passenger flights, Burke Lakefront Airport is a standard American regional airport, the seventh busiest in the state of Ohio. It has no distinguishing features to set it apart from hundreds of other airports across the USA, a country that’s based around air travel as a means of hopping from city to city. However, between 1982 and 2007, something did mark it out as being a bit more special than other airports – the annual Grand Prix of Cleveland.

The Greatest Races: 2015 Hungarian Grand Prix

At the end of 2019, when F1 pundits and fans all had their say on naming the best races of the 2010s, the 2015 Hungarian Grand Prix was missing. It’s true that it lacked the satisfying climax of its predecessor the previous year, when Daniel Ricciardo surged through the field in a wet-dry race to take his second career win. And it cannot compare to the ridiculous chaos of races like the rain-soaked 2018 and 2019 races at Hockenheim, the gripping season finale at Interlagos in 2012, or the legendary marathon that was the 2011 Canadian Grand Prix. However, it was a race that at the time was widely hailed as a classic, and the best race of the season. It was also witness to one of the finest performances of Sebastian Vettel’s career.

The Greatest Races: 2005 San Marino Grand Prix

It’s rare in the history of Formula One that you get a moment that so clearly marks the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Transitions usually go beyond one moment, taking place gradually over a period of months or even years as drivers decline and others rise to replace them. Dramatic changes have only previously taken place when the sport’s leading drivers retired or died, such as the death of Jim Clark in 1968 or Jackie Stewart’s retirement in 1973.

The 2005 San Marino Grand Prix was such a stark moment in the modern history of the sport that it was recognised as a landmark even at the time it happened. Its significance goes beyond the fact that it was a thrilling race – this was a race that effectively marks the definitive end of the Michael Schumacher era, a decade in which the sport’s most successful driver became the focal point of everything that happened. While he raced on for another seven years, this was the moment where the sport finally became defined by so much more than its greatest name.

The Greatest Races: 1982 Austrian Grand Prix

For the next week, the eyes of the motorsport world will be on the rolling hills of Styria as for the first time in its history, two rounds of a Formula One World Championship season will be held at the same venue. But the circuit in Spielberg – which has gone by the names of the Österreichring, the A1-Ring and latterly the Red-Bull-Ring during its long history – has been the scene of many other landmark moments in F1 history since it held its first championship race back in 1970.