Ferrari on 26 March: Mansell’s debut win and Vettel’s Melbourne success
26 March has produced Ferrari victories in three different eras. Nigel Mansell won on his race debut for the team at the 1989 Brazilian Grand Prix, Michael Schumacher triumphed in Brazil in 2000, and Sebastian Vettel opened the 2017 season with victory in Australia.
Although the races shared a calendar date, each represented a different stage in Ferrari’s sporting and technical development.
March 26 in Ferrari Formula 1 history
Explore Ferrari Grand Prix results, qualifying and Sprint sessions, driver birthdays, remembrance dates and selected milestones connected with this day.
Ferrari Grands Prix held on March 26
Ferrari driver birthdays on March 26
Didier Pironi
Didier Pironi was born in 1952. Ferrari record: 25 Ferrari F1 starts · 2 wins · 6 podiums.
Race, qualifying, Sprint and Ferrari driver biographical dates are generated from the locally processed F1DB dataset. Session anniversaries are shown only when an explicit session date is available in the source. Selected non-race Ferrari milestones are curated separately from Ferrari sources. Historical shared-car result rows are preserved without inventing additional Grand Prix starts.
1989: Nigel Mansell wins his first race for Ferrari
Nigel Mansell began his Ferrari career with victory at Jacarepaguá in Rio de Janeiro. The result immediately gave the British driver a place in the team’s history and provided a successful competitive debut for the Ferrari 640.
The car’s semi-automatic gearbox made the achievement significant beyond the winning driver. Ferrari’s use of steering-wheel paddles represented an important technical step in Formula 1, with the Brazilian victory demonstrating its potential.
2000: Michael Schumacher wins at Interlagos
Eleven years later, Michael Schumacher won the Brazilian Grand Prix on 26 March, this time at Interlagos in São Paulo. Rubens Barrichello retired from his home race.
The victory came early in the season that would bring Michael Schumacher his first Drivers’ Championship with Ferrari. It forms part of the campaign’s opening sequence of wins.
2017: Sebastian Vettel starts the season with victory
Sebastian Vettel won the Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park, giving Ferrari a winning start to the 2017 championship. Kimi Räikkönen finished fourth in the other Ferrari.
The Melbourne result ended the team’s wait for a victory stretching back to the 2015 Singapore Grand Prix and established Ferrari as an immediate contender that season.
Explore the German driver’s time at Maranello in our Sebastian Vettel F1 records, or browse another date in the Ferrari anniversary calendar.
