A Brief History
On May 13, 1950, the first Formula One World Championship race was held in England. That race was won by Italian driver Giuseppe Farina driving an Alfa Romeo with an average speed of 146.3 KPH. Formula One, or F1, is perhaps the premier auto racing form, using single person cars with open wheels that use wings fore and aft to provide downforce.
Digging Deeper
Depending on the source, F1 cars can achieve speeds up to 256 MPH, but about 35 MPH less in a race. By comparison, an Indy car racer posted a four-lap average of 234.2 MPH in 2023 at the Brickyard.
NASCAR has purposely kept speeds down for safety reasons, and currently zip about 199 MPH during a race, although some cars can drive up to 271 MPH on a straight.
No other car racing can challenge the Top Fuel dragsters of NHRA that rocket up to 338 MPH on their quarter mile run!
Note: The fastest street legal car broke the 200 MPH barrier in 1987, and the current champ is the 304.77 MPH Bugatti Chiron, 2019 model.
The “land speed record” for a car powered by its own wheels rather than by rockets or a jet engine achieved 458.44 MPH in 2018 at the Bonneville Salt Flats, though another car made a single pass at 503 MPH in 2018.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Hamilton, Maurice. Formula 1: The Official History. Welbeck Publishing, 2022.
Hewson, Anthony. Auto Racing Strategies. Abdo Group, 2023.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Herranderssvensson of the Alfa Romeo 158 of Giuseppe Farina, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
