76 years of Formula One: The day a sport was born

Credit: Formula One

76 years ago today, a sport was born. Nobody knew that on the morning of 13 May 1950, the motorsport world was about to change forever with the introduction of the Formula One World Championship. 

It was a Saturday, deliberately so. The British strictly observed Sunday rest, so the race was moved a day forward. 76 years on, the sport that was born that grey Northamptonshire morning has become the most-watched motorsport championship on earth. 

But on that particular Saturday, it was just a former RAF bomber base with repurposed perimeter roads, straw bales lining the track and the vague but electric feeling that something was being built from scratch. 

In the days before the race, the pre-race excitement had been building as vans arrived from Italy, France and Belgium, mingling with the domestic teams. 

Some arrived with shiny, freshly painted professional-looking transporters; others turned up with their race cars hooked to the back of a well-used trailer. The paddock was a wide-open dirt patch where teams were expected to conduct their pre-race preparation. F1’s first paddock.

Credit: Formula One

An estimated 120,000 spectators came to see it, among them King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. It remains the only time a reigning British monarch has attended an F1 race. 

Fans packed grandstands and stood ten-deep behind ropes; the ones who couldn’t see had climbed on top of parked vans. Nobody wanted to miss it. Nobody quite knew what it was yet. 

13 May, Silverstone, 1950

The cars that lined up on the grid that morning told their own story. The Alfa Romeo 158 — nicknamed the Alfetta — was already twelve years old, mothballed during the war and pressed back into service. 

It had no right to be the fastest thing on the planet, and yet. The Alfa Romeo cars had even arrived at Silverstone having been driven illegally on public roads from Banbury, around 20 miles away. 

This was the birth of F1: part pageantry, part improvisation, held together by sheer audacity. 

Ferrari wasn’t there. Their entries had been cancelled, allegedly over a dispute about starting money. Enzo Ferrari would bring his cars to the championship eight days later at Monaco. 

His absence from the very first round — the first of many complicated chapters between Ferrari and the sport — somehow feels right in retrospect. F1 has always had a talent for drama, even before it knew what it was doing. 

Before the race, Raymond Mays publicly unveiled the BRM V16 — Britain’s first serious attempt to challenge Italian dominance in Grand Prix racing. 

Before the F1 action, there was an International 500cc support race — among the entrants was a 20-year-old Stirling Moss, who won it. He would spend the better part of the next decade being the best driver never to win the World Championship. But on that morning, he was just a kid in the undercard, taking his first win at the circuit where everything would begin. 

Credit: Formula One

On the front row sat two men who would define the sport’s first decade. Giuseppe Farina took pole with a lap of 1:50.8, leading an all-Alfa lockout of the front four grid spots.

At 43, he was ruthless and precise, a driver whose elegance disguised how hard he was pushing. 

Beside him, sat Juan Manuel Fangio — already regarded as the man most likely to win everything. They were, in many ways, the template for every great rivalry that followed: the established master and the emerging genius, sharing the same grid, chasing the same crown. 

When the flag dropped, Farina bolted immediately. He led from the front, with Luigi Fagioli and Fangio trading positions in his wake. The Alfas were in a race of their own. The rest of the field was an afterthought. 

Then came the moment that F1 would spend 76 years repeating in different forms: greatness undone in an instant. 

Fangio retired mid race with engine trouble caused by a broken oil pipe — possibly from clipping a straw bale. The man who would go on to win five world titles, four of them consecutively, was taken out of the inaugural race by a piece of trackside scenery. 

Farina drove on. He led 63 of the 70 laps and set the fastest lap. The first Grand Chelem in the sport’s history, though nobody had a name for it yet. He crossed the line 2.6 seconds ahead of Fagioli, with Red Parnell third, despite hitting a hare mid-race, which left a notable dent in his car’s cowling. 

A British driver on the podium of the very first F1 race on a circuit built from wartime tarmac. Makeshift and magnificent. 

Credit: Formula One

Afterwards, the field retired to the beer tent to swap stories about their inaugural Grand Prix experience. No podium ceremony or anthems. Just drivers in a tent at a former airfield, at the end of the first day of something that would outlast all of them.

By the standards of the era, it was a fairly typical race. Experienced drivers fighting for strong manufacturers, a pack of lesser cars circulating behind them. What made it historic had nothing to do with the racing. 

It was the decision to give those races stakes, to build a championship and to say: these results will matter, they will accumulate and at the end of the season, one name will mean something above all others. 

76 years later, that logic is unchanged. The cars are unrecognisable. The money, the coverage and the scale: none of it was imaginable on that Saturday morning in Northamptonshire.

But the foundation — one season, one title, drivers and teams hunting each other across a calendar of races — is exactly what it was when Farina crossed the line first. 

The sport was born imperfect. But it has never stopped being extraordinary. 

Edited by Meghana Sree