Last Formula 1 season ended with the total supremacy of Red Bull, which in addition to having won both world titles – the Drivers and Constructors one – well in advance of the end of the championship, also had the satisfaction of winning 15 of the 22 races present in the championship calendar allowing Max Verstappen to surpass the all-time record for number of GPs won in a single year, bringing the new record to 13. The Milton Keynes team was also able to place at least one of its drivers on the podium for 19 consecutive races between the Grand Prix of Saudi Arabia and that of Mexico. The streak of top 3 finishes was then abruptly interrupted at Interlagos. Red Bull therefore had the joint sixth longest consecutive podium run for a single team.
At the top of this particular ranking, despite the winning cycles for Red Bull itself and above all for Mercedes in the last 15 years of Formula 1 history, however, Ferrari still resists. It is a not too well known record, but one of the most difficult to match in the history of motorsport, which perfectly testifies to the level of perfection reached by the Maranello team at the beginning of this century. In fact, between the 1999 Malaysian Grand Prix and the 2002 Suzuka race, Scuderia Ferrari was able to put on a series of 53 consecutive races with at least one driver always on the podium. That means three complete seasons (2000, 2001 and 2002), plus the last two races of the 1999 Formula 1 season.
In those 53 races, Jean Todt‘s Ferrari, with Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine at the wheel, collected a total of 76 podiums out of the 106 available. To give a measure of the dimensions of this feat – achieved moreover in an era in which the reliability of the top cars was indeed much improved compared to the 80s and 90s, but it was still not nearly as perfect as it is now – you have to look at who is in second place in this ranking: Mercedes. The Silver Arrows scored 28 consecutive podium finishes between the 2014 Australian GP and the 2015 British Grand Prix. The sequence was broken at the Budapest track, when 25 more races would have been needed to tie the Ferrari record. This therefore truly remains one of the few records that are very difficult to beat in the history of Formula 1, even now that the seasons are made up of an average of 22-23 races.
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