Mercedes became the first Formula 1 team to score a 1-2 in the first four races of a season with its result in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Here we look at the records the German squad has broken and some that it can still break.
Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton helped Mercedes break a new record in Baku, as it became the first team in history to finish 1-2 in the first four races of a Formula 1 season.
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That four-race run beat a record set in 1992 when Williams took three 1-2s at the beginning of the campaign.
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Mercedes is now just one 1-2 short of the all-time record of five consecutive 1-2 finishes, which has been done four times before. The first was Ferrari’s run from the 1952 Belgian GP to the 1952 Dutch GP.
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Ferrari also managed a run of five 1-2 finishes from Hungary to Japan 2002 – which included Michael Schumacher’s famous effort to secure a dead heat at Indy that year.
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Mercedes itself also delivered five consecutive 1-2s in the modern era – from Malaysia to Monaco 2014 and then from USA 2015 to Australia 2016.
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To capture the most 1-2s in a season, Mercedes will need to take 13 in total this year – with it having delivered 12 during its 2015 campaign.
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The Baku win was Mercedes’ sixth consecutive victory – but it still has some way to go to match the 11 straight wins that McLaren pulled off between the Brazilian and Belgium Grands Prix in 1988.
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McLaren’s record is all the more impressive because it was from the first 11 races of the 1988 season in which it achieved it. Its record ended when Ayrton Senna famously tripped over backmarker Jean-Louis Schlesser at Monza.
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McLaren never got a chance to try for the most 1-2 finishes at the start of the 1988 season, as Senna’s gear selector broke on the grid in the Brazil season opener and he was later disqualified for switching to a spare car.
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Mercedes has nearly matched McLaren’s 11 straight victories tally: taking 10 consecutive wins from Japan 2015 to Russia 2016, and Monaco to Singapore in 2016.
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Mercedes has had the perfect start to the season, but it will still likely struggle to match its 2016 record of the most wins in a season – when it won 19 races out of 21. Only Max Verstappen’s win in Spain and Daniel Ricciardo’s triumph in Malaysia stopped it getting a clean sweep.
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