The 2024 season is proving to be one of the most unpredictable and competitive world championships the sport has ever seen.
But as well as its impressive variety of race-winning teams and drivers, this year is remarkable for another reason – it will likely be Formula 1’s most reliable season in history.
F1 has changed substantially over the decades. For the majority of seasons, at least a third of drivers who have started a grand prix have retired from it. There have even been more than ten championships where those who retired from races actually outnumbered those who took the chequered flag over the year.
However, a driver does not actually need to still be running at the end of the race to be counted as a finisher. As long as a driver has covered more than 90% of the race distance – or 90% of the number of laps covered by the winner in the event of a shortened race – they are classified as an official finisher by the FIA. So even though Lando Norris pulled into the pits and out of the Austrian Grand Prix after clashing with Max Verstappen while battling for the lead, the McLaren driver still counts as a classified finisher in the record books as he completed 64 of the 71 laps – 90.1% of the race.
Ever since the FIA, back in 2003, first started to gradually introduce measures to reduce costs in the sport and encourage teams to build longer-lasting and more reliable cars, the rate of reliability in F1 has risen dramatically. And now, in 2024, we are seeing the lowest rate of retirements there has ever been.
Grands prix only, excludes sprint races – *Season in progress
Through the first 16 rounds of 2024, drivers have started a grand prix a total of 319 times, with 292 classified finishes from those attempts. That is a finishing rate of 91.54% – making this likely to be the season with the fewest retirements ever.
It’s not just that cars are seemingly as reliable as ever – this year’s technical-related retirement rate of 3.45% is almost as low as 2021’s 3.43% – but drivers are as well-behaved as ever on track. There is a historically low rate of drivers crashing into each other or spinning out too. That has contributed to the run of seven consecutive races without a Safety Car intervention, while there has only been a single lap of Virtual Safety Car in the last 440 laps of racing.
But is this record reliability harming or enhancing the racing in Formula 1 this season?
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For
The high rate of reliability makes racing better simply because it provides more of it. With fewer drivers dropping out of races, there is more on-track action for fans to enjoy through the race, more for trackside fans to watch and more side-by-side racing as a result.
It’s also making the world championship a more merit-based competition. With rarer retirements, the best drivers get more opportunities to score points, making the final championship table a farer representation of who deserves to be in each position.
It’s also better that the random element of mechanical failures is not robbing drivers of hard-earned results. Imagine how frustrated so many fans would have been if Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari had suddenly broken down on him in the later laps of Monaco or Monza? Better reliability means less heartbreak out of drivers’ control.
Against
Currently, the level of reliability in Formula 1 is arguably too high. For a sport that is supposed to be the peak of motorsport and engineering, the fact that cars breaking down is such an extreme rarity suggests that modern F1 cars are not being pushed close to their limits.
When cars are this reliable, the top teams benefit and the lower teams miss out. How many more points would Haas, Williams or even Sauber have scored this year if just a couple of cars ahead of them dropped out of a handful of races? Instead, the top teams can almost monopolise the top ten to themselves.
And without the element of reliability problems striking at any time, fans do miss out on that wildcard factor of the world feed suddenly cutting to the leader with smoke billowing from the back of their car, turning the entire dynamic of the race – and possibly even the championship – on its head.
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I say
Whether or not you feel that Formula 1 in its current guise is an insult to the spirit of the world championship’s origins, the reality is that the sport was always going to have to evolve to be more sustainable in order to survive.
As a result of the FIA’s push to curb sky-high costs, the static power unit regulations and the sheer skill and professionalism of modern F1 teams and their drivers, we’re seeing fewer retirements than ever. And that is no bad thing.
Given a choice between a third or even half of the grid dropping out every race and the current season, where over 90% of cars are running at the end, this record reliability is preferable. Having drivers suddenly losing points, podiums or even victories through fuel line failures or, worse, brake problems may have made racing unpredictable and added excitement at times, but it’s still unsatisfying.
After all, this isn’t endurance racing. We should grateful that teams can all reliably make their cars last just 300km of a grand prix distance every race weekend.
It’s better for fans, as we arguably enjoy a more ‘pure’ championship where the hard work of drivers do not regularly come to nothing. It’s better for mechanics who don’t have to spend as much time fixing their cars during the longest season in history. It’s also better for the teams’ finance departments, as they’re having to spend less on repairs and re-fabricating parts while under the budget cap.
But it goes beyond just break downs and failures. Drivers are hitting each other less often too and that’s a genuine testament to the abilities of the current grid. Seven consecutive races without a Safety Car or major accident even with some wet races among them shows how high the level of racecraft is among the 20 drivers on the grid. Something further demonstrated by the volume of race winners there are in the field.
This current rate of reliability will not last. Although teams will have learned lessons from the major power unit revolution of 2014, we can expect the retirement rate to increase in 2026. But until then, 2024 is Formula 1 at the most competitive it has been for a long while – and the reliability rate has a part to play in that.
You say
Is a record-high reliability rate making Formula 1 better? Have your say in this weekend’s poll.
Do you agree that the current record-high reliability rate in F1 is making the sport better?
- No opinion (6%)
- Strongly disagree (38%)
- Slightly disagree (25%)
- Neither agree nor disagree (13%)
- Slightly agree (13%)
- Strongly agree (6%)
Total Voters: 16
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