Fast starters: Ferrari’s debut F1 winners

But how will it go? That’s the burning question. At 40, is Hamilton too far past his peak to conjure the old magic? Or has he still got it in him to galvanise a team, get the better of a talented team-mate – who perhaps right now is the fastest over one lap – and bid for a record eighth title?

As ever, his destiny will rely heavily on the machinery under him, but there’s no obvious reason why Ferrari should miss the mark, given how well it finished last season. So, the pressure and scrutiny is on Hamilton to deliver. As he’ll know, there will be no period of grace – he’ll just have to crack on.

A fast start would be handy to quell the doubters and relieve some of that pressure, the dream being a Ferrari debut win. In total, seven drivers have pitched up and won first time out for the Scuderia. Let’s recap on a special tradition Hamilton would love to maintain.

Juan Manuel Fangio/Luigi Musso, 1956 Argentine Grand Prix

The first example is one of those occasional shared victories that occurred in the 1950s, as both Juan Manuel Fangio and Luigi Musso claimed first-time-out wins in the same Lancia Ferrari D50. But there were several thick slices of luck behind the result.

Fangio took an easy pole position by 2.2 seconds over the thin all-Ferrari and Maserati 13-car field. But after the start he played second fiddle to fellow Argentine Carlos Menditéguy, in for a one-off drive for Maserati. To the crowd’s pleasure, Menditéguy led with aplomb to nearly half-distance until a broken half-shaft spoilt his day. Stirling Moss’s Maserati inherited the lead.

Fangio, meanwhile, was sidelined with fuel pump troubles, but as Ferrari’s new team leader he didn’t bat an eye in taking over Musso’s car after 30 laps – as was allowed back then. He recalled what followed in his autobiography: “Passing several cars I started a close duel with Stirling Moss.

"Later, I learned from the timekeepers that I had caught up at the rate of two seconds per lap. An oil leak forced Moss to slow up, so I took the lead and then went into a spin myself leaving the track some 20 laps before the finish.

“Luckily, I came to a stop near some marshals who helped me back on track. [Nello] Ugolini, Maserati’s technical director, protested. He claimed, in good faith, that some spectators had been among my volunteer helpers, which was not true. As it was, the protest was overruled and I won the race.”

Fangio won twice more in 1956 and on two other occasions took over a team-mate’s car – that of Peter Collins at Monaco and Monza – to claim his fourth world championship, in his only season driving for Ferrari. It was the least convincing of his five titles.

Giancarlo Baghetti, 1961 French Grand Prix

An extraordinary case, and a feat never likely to be repeated. Reims in 1961 wasn’t only Giancarlo Baghetti’s first Grand Prix for Ferrari, it was his maiden world championship F1 race full stop. The young Italian showed incredible composure and assured racecraft to take the sole surviving 156 ‘Sharknose’ to victory over Dan Gurney’s Porsche.

And it couldn’t even be written off as a fluke. Before Reims, Baghetti had also beaten Gurney in a non-championship race at Syracuse, then headed a weak field at the Naples Grand Prix. He is the only driver to have won his first three F1 races – and what makes his tale even more remarkable is the fact that he never won another.

“At the time it seemed like a dream,” Baghetti told Nigel Roebuck years later. “But of course you wake up! My next race was Aintree – and I crashed…”

Mario Andretti, 1971 South African Grand Prix

He’s best-known in F1 terms for his 1978 World Championship with Lotus, but Mario Andretti’s stop-start Grand Prix career featured other notable landmarks. A full ten years before he became Champion, Andretti stuck his Lotus 49 on pole on his F1 debut at the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, but thereafter was too preoccupied by his USAC IndyCar life to make a full F1 commitment.

After further cameos with Lotus and amidst even a podium in Spain with March in 1970, the proud Italian-American was delighted to join Ferrari in sports car racing, winning at Sebring and The Glen. Then in 1971, finally he lined up in a red car for a Grand Prix – and won at the first time of asking.

Andretti qualified fourth at Kyalami, dropped a few positions but then came on strong in the closing stages on his Ferrari’s Firestone tyres. When leader Denny Hulme’s McLaren suspension failed, Mario picked up the pieces with just four laps to go. He then followed that up with a non-Championship win at the Questor Grand Prix in California. If only he could have given his full attention to Ferrari and F1, perhaps that World Title might have come much earlier.

Nigel Mansell, 1989 Brazilian Grand Prix

Arriving in Maranello at a low ebb after a difficult Judd-powered season at Williams, Nigel Mansell wasn’t exactly optimistic for his Ferrari debut in Rio. In fact, on the grid he happened to meet a British Airways captain and booked an early flight home. That’s how bad reliability had proven in testing with John Barnard’s stunning but frail Ferrari 640 and its revolutionary semi-automatic gearbox and torsion bar front suspension.

Mansell’s subsequent ‘fairy-tale’ debut victory remains a shock for the ages. He was waiting for inevitable failure when the ‘flappy-paddle’ steering wheel began working loose. A pitstop for a new one, slammed on by Joan Villadelprat with such force it drew the chief mechanic’s blood, only added to certainties it couldn’t last. But somehow it did, as Mansell scorched past Alain Prost’s troubled McLaren for one of his greatest wins.

Kimi Räikkönen, 2007 Australian Grand Prix

After so many great moments in McLarens, Kimi Räikkönen’s fifth and final season in silver-grey became something of a non-event. There were plenty of podiums and even three pole positions, but not a single win in 2006. Perhaps mentally he’d already checked out as a big-money move to Ferrari loomed for 2007.

Räikkönen sure had big shoes to fill. He replaced Michael Schumacher, who had stepped down somewhat against his own wishes, and commanded a retainer said to be worth $30 million per year. So there was pressure to deliver – not that you could ever tell with the ‘Iceman’.

The Finn’s Ferrari adventures couldn’t have started more emphatically. At Albert Park he scorched to pole position, claimed fastest lap and led all but six laps of the Australian Grand Prix – on the day Lewis Hamilton made his sensational F1 debut for McLaren, finishing third behind team-mate Fernando Alonso.

The rest of Räikkönen’s time at Ferrari was… well, strange. Against the odds, he beat the McLaren pair to the World Championship that year, then faded to the point that Ferrari eventually paid him not to race. After a spell in rallying, he returned with Lotus-Renault, proved he still had it in him and rejoined Ferrari for another five largely unremarkable seasons.

A final three years in Sauber-Alfa Romeos was a drawn-out and mostly quiet final chapter, before he walked away without a backward glance at the end of 2021. What happened to the dominant force of Australia 2007?

Fernando Alonso, 2010 Bahrain Grand Prix

He’d looked like a potential Ferrari driver from the start, but only after two spells at Renault, two World Titles and that turbulent single season at McLaren in 2007 did Fernando Alonso pitch up in Maranello – as Räikkönen’s replacement.

Bahrain 2010 marked another key change in F1’s forever shifting regulations, as the first season since 1993 not to feature in-race refuelling. Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull had the edge in qualifying, while Felipe Massa – returning from the serious head injury sustained in Hungary 2009 via a spring that had fallen from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn – outqualified his new Ferrari team-mate.

Alonso’s win certainly came to him. Vettel looked on course for victory until, 16 laps from home, a spark plug failure robbed him of power and he dropped to fourth. Alonso had passed Massa at the first corner and so picked up a win to kick off his spell in red on a positive note. He should have been World Champion at season’s end, too, only for Vitaly Petrov’s Renault to frustrate him for 40 laps in Abu Dhabi.

Following another title near-miss in 2012, Alonso’s Ferrari marriage spiralled to a wretched divorce at the end of 2014. Like so many before him, his Ferrari story had a less than happy ending. So now, how will Hamilton’s play out? Good start or otherwise, it’s going to be box-office gold as we watch and find out.

Hamilton image courtesy of Getty Images.

All other images courtesy of Motorsport Images.