The 10 best F1 cars of all time

10. McLaren MP4/2

The McLaren MP4/2 is probably John Barnard’s masterpiece, even though he designed some pretty incredible Ferrari machinery later in his career. The MP4/2 won on its debut in 1984, added another 11 wins that season, six the following year and two more in 1986. On the way it secured two constructors’ titles, a third and final drivers’ crown for Niki Lauda and a further two  championships for Alain Prost. Following on from the MP4/1’s innovative all-carbon chassis, the MP4/2 added a TAG-badged Porsche engine to the mix. The result was so nigh on impossible to content with, at times the rest of the field would struggle to remain even on the same lap.

Amazingly the MP4/2 was actually pretty rubbish in qualifying trim, mostly because McLaren – financing their own engines – refused to run specific qualifying motors, when the rest of the competition did. Teams like Brabham were heading into qualifying with short-life BMW engines with the boost turned up to well over 1,500PS (1,100kW). But come race day, the McLaren was the car to beat. It wouldn’t be until Williams turned up with Honda power in 1986 that McLaren’s big Malboro-liveried beast would fall, and even then, thanks to the tenacity of Prost the MP4/2 still took the drivers’ title one more time.

9. Lotus 72

Seventy-five races and 20 wins does not sound that impressive in the present company. But the Lotus 72 has an ace up its sleeve. It won three Constructors’ Championships and two Drivers’ Championships in six seasons of racing and its 20 victories are spread out over five seasons, not just one. The Lotus 72 is a special racing car.

A complete innovation when it was launched, with inboard brakes, side-mounted radiators, and an overhead air intake the 72 was possibly Colin Chapman’s masterpiece. The wedge shape was a departure from the cigar-style Formula 1 cars that preceded it. It made its debut in the middle of the 1970 season and, after retiring from his first race with it, Jochen Rindt proceeded to reel off four wins in a row. Sadly a crash at Monza robbed the world of Rindt, but he and the 72 had already been dominant enough that he won the title posthumously.

In the penultimate race of the season, Emerson Fittipaldi took the car's fifth victory in a perfect memorial to Rindt. By comparison, 1971 was a fallow year. The car was developed through the 72C to become the 72D, complete with iconic John Player Special livery. In 1972 Fittipaldi took five wins and the title, in ‘73 he took three, Ronnie Petersen another four and Lotus won the constructors' title. Petersen would take three more wins for the 72, now in 72E form in 1974, before the car struggled in ’75, while the 77 was developed for Lotus’s next F1 revolution. No other car has had such longevity of success as the Lotus 72. It holds the record for the longest time between first and last victories for an F1 chassis.

8. Alfa Romeo 158/9 Alfetta

The Alfa Romeo 158 was originally built in 1937, some 13 years before the birth of F1, for voiturette racing. In the years before World War Two, Alfa Romeo ran the car in several grands prix with a small, supercharged 1.5-litre straight-eight engine designed by Goiacchino Colombo – he of Ferrari V12 fame. And yet, even before it arrived as an F1 car in 1950, the 'Alfetta' proved to be a dominant performer. Indeed it won 37 of the 41 races it entered before the start of the war.

As motorsport began to return in 1947, the Alfetta was also put back into action, albeit with an upgraded, and far more powerful version of its straight-eight engine. Now producing more than 350PS (261kW). When the time finally arrived for it to make its F1 debut in 1950, the car had been honed to become the class of the world. The front row of the grid was made up of Guiseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Fagioli and Reg Parnell, all driving Alfa Romeo 158s. Come the chequered flag, Farina, Fagioli and Parnell filled the podium.

It was a dominance that continued for the rest of the season, as Alfa Romeo won all six of the races it entered. In fact the only reason the Alfetta doesn’t hold the record for most dominant F1 car of all time is that it didn’t enter every eligible race that season. It skipped the Indy 500 and therefore ‘only’ won 85 per cent of the races in the 1950 season.

The fact it maintained its superiority in 1951 says it all. With the aid of a further fettled 420PS (313kW) engine fitted with more substantial superchargers, Juan Manuel Fangio claimed three victories and the first of his fives F1 drivers' championships.

7. Red Bull RB9

Remember when Red Bull were last making a mockery of the word 'competition'? It feels like a long time ago now, can it really be more than a decade? That four-year period from 2010-2013 was utterly ransacked by Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull, but the power-partnership didn't peak until the second half 2013. Fernando Alonso could, and arguably should, have dragged a slower Ferrari to the crown in 2012 and would have won the championship in 2010 were it not for an inability to pass Vitaly Petrov at the last race of the season.

When we say peak, we mean the Red Bull RB9 shut out the competition like we'd never seen before. After a tame start to the year that saw Sebastian Vettel run neck and neck with Alonso as the pair shared wins, something clicked in the second half of the season, and the German went on a rampage. An astonishing run of nine wins in a row absolutely floored Ferrari and the rest in a relentless burst success that we felt sure at the time we'd never see again... (Anything to say Max?)

The more amazing thing about the RB9 is that it probably could have been even better. Powered by a Renault engine that even then was really just OK compared to Ferrari and Mercedes, Adrian Newey later admitted that development work on the RB9 had been delayed by the intense title fight in 2012. Red Bull had focused efforts on the RB8 for longer than originally planned and the RB9 arrived in an under-developed state. That it went on to break F1 records makes you wonder just how fast it would have been with a full development programme. It’s a scary thought.

6. Mercedes W07 Hybrid

Mercedes’s achievements during F1's second hybrid era are, quite frankly, extraordinary. They eclipse even the performance of Ferrari in that early-2000s blitz. While it might not have achieved the kind of single-season dominance as McLaren did with the MP4/4 in 1988, it's longevity of success that has really set the Silver Arrows apart in F1 history. That said, one car in particular stood so far ahead of the competition that its worthy of a place on this list.

The car in question is the W07, the one that Nico Rosberg took to championship glory in 2016. But when you consider that the beaten man, Lewis Hamilton, took ten victories during that season, while Rosberg waltzed home with nine, you get an idea of just how good this car was. At the time, it was the most wins a car had ever taken in a single F1 season (19), the most points scored (765), the most podiums (33) and the most poles (20).

At the heart of that sustained Mercedes success was an incredible understanding of the 1.6-litre V6 regulations, and the PU106C engine that powered the W07 was the class of the field. Such a power advantage allowed Mercedes to experiment with its design, and while the W07 was by far the quickest in a straight line, it was also the best in the corners. How Toto Wolff will be striving for a return to that kind of form before too long.

5. Ferrari 500

Once Alfa's funding ran out, and it was forced to drop its 160 development and walk away from F1, there was a huge vacancy at the top of the sport. Step up Ferrari. A lack of dedicted Formula 1 cars being built meant that the 1952 season was run to Formula 2 regulations, and Ferrari was the only manufacturer to build a dedicated car to that specification.

It was the Ferrari 500, and it quickly became recognised as the class of the field. Another car that won every race it entered, it won first time out at the Swiss Grand Prix in the hands of Piero Taruffi, before Alberto Ascari returned from his forays at the Indy 500 to go on a seven-race winning streak (a record that stood until Sebastian Vettel surpassed it in 2013).

Ascari won both the 1952 and '53 championships with the Ferrari 500, a car that almost went unbeaten for two straight seasons, only to be bested at the final round of the '53 season by Fangio in his Maserati.

4. Williams FW14B

When the Williams FW14 arrived on the scene in 1991 it was a technological marvel, so far advanced of most of its competition you'd be forgiven for finding it funny. Teething issues meant that it was never really in with a chance of winning the title that year, but Adrian Newey’s first iconic F1 design would still win seven races that season on its way to second in the championship. In fact, people forget that in that first season Nigel Mansell won only two races fewer than eventual champion Ayrton Senna, and his lack of real title contention was mostly down to the early season struggles that saw the FW14 retire six times in four races.

Many of the reliability issues stemmed from a troublesome semi-automatic gearobx, and work was done to rectify that for 1992. New traction control systems and tweaked active suspension made this ‘B’ spec car an even more monstrous machine, even if to the naked eye the only real difference is a couple of protrusions by the front suspension pushrods, which contain some of the active suspension components.

At the wheel of this new FW14B there was no stopping Mansell, who had been waiting for another opportunity to fight for the championship for so long that he’d already retired from F1 once. Mansell won the first five races in a row, a feat still only matched once by Michael Schumacher in 2004, and went on to win a record (at the time) nine races in the season. It also qualified on pole for all but one race in 1992 and added another 11 fastest laps.

3. Ferrari F2002

Here we are once again trying to discern greatness from greatness. The Ferrari era from 2000-2004 was another of those that can only really be defined as such. And yet there is one car in particular that stands out from the rest. It could be the F2004, which won 15 races during its 18-race tenure, including 12 of the first 13 rounds of that 2004 season in a demoralising canter to the championship. Instead, we've plumped for the F2002, because it absolutely wiped the floor with the competition.

So dominant was Ferrari at this stage that it didn’t even introduce the F2002 until the third race of the season. It didn't need to, the F2001 from the season before still won in Australia by a huge margin. But when the new car did finally arrive on the grid, the rest of the field must have felt like giving up on the spot.

From the Brazilian Grand Prix onwards, Schumacher finished no lower than second, and on all but one occasion it was his team-mate Barrichello who won instead. Powered by a screaming 3.0-litre V10 the F2002 wasn’t the most powerful car on the grid – that honour fell to the BMW-powered Williams cars – but it was by far and away the best handling. It featured an innovative clutchless gearbox that was so small the rear could be packaged in almost any way designer Rory Byrne wished. So dominant was the F2002 that the Constructors Championship was won with nearly triple the number of points of runners up Williams.

2. McLaren-Honda MP4/4

The McLaren MP4/4 is statistically (for now at least) the best F1 car of all time. In the 1988 F1 season, in the hands of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, the MP4/4 won 15 of the 16 races, only missing out on the complete set at the Italian Grand Prix thanks to Senna's famous collision with Jean-Louis Schlesser. Just one month after Enzo Ferrari died, even McLaren had to feel OK with losing that one win to Ferrari.

Powered by a superior Honda engine sniped from rivals Williams for the '88 season, the MP4/4 car was masterminded by Designer Steve Nichols and Technical Director Gordon Murray. What they came up with was leagues ahead of the rest, truly one of the most dominant F1 cars we have ever seen.

Despite that unfortunate mishap at Monza, the MP4/4 was imperious throughout the season in a way never seen before or since. It holds a 93.8 per cent victory rate, and overall scored ten one-two finishes. Prost won seven races, Senna won eight, and the Brazilian secured his first of three F1 world championships.

1. Red Bull RB19

The season isn't quite over yet, but there's simply no way we can overlook Red Bull's extraordinary contender for 2023, even with six races left to run as we write. It's quite possible that we will look back in 20, 30, 40 years time and still see the RB19 as the most dominant car F1 has ever seen. This is already the most dominant display from a single car and a single driver in history.

Max Verstappen in the RB19 has proven to be, bar for one inexplicable blip in Singapore, utterly untouchable. The car has already set two new records, firstly for Red Bull, as it achieved 14 race victories in a row (plus three Sprint successes), while Verstappen himself set a new record of ten consecutive wins. It's also well on its way to setting a new points record.

It's not just the wins, it's their manner. The RB19 has absolutely anihilated the field. There has been a consistent gap in the region of 20-30 seconds between Verstappen and his nearest non-Red Bull challenger throughout. Let's check back at the end of the year to see just what this car can achieve.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images