Taking a closer look at how Lewis Hamilton reached the 100-win landmark
Hamilton won 21 grands prix with his first team McLaren and 79 so far since switching to Mercedes.
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Your support makes all the difference.Lewis Hamilton broke new ground with a 100th Formula One Grand Prix win on Sunday in Russia.
Here, the PA news agency looks at how the competition’s most successful driver has reached the landmark.
Season by season
Hamilton won 21 grands prix with his first team McLaren and 79 so far since switching to Mercedes in 2013, and the season-by-season breakdown puts that split in an even clearer light.
His best McLaren season brought him five wins – and the first of his seven world titles – in 2008, with two in 2009, three in both 2010 and 2011 and four in 2007, his debut season, and 2012.
A quiet first season with Mercedes yielded only one win, in Hungary but since then he has been dominant.
He won 11 races in 2014, 10 in both 2015 and 2016, nine in 2017 and 11 again in each of the three completed seasons since, winning the title in six of those seven years with that sequence only interrupted when team-mate Nico Rosberg pipped him to the 2016 prize by five points.
Hamilton averaged 10.4 wins per season across that stretch and has five so far this year, with six races to come and the hope of adding a seventh in place of the cancelled Australian GP.
Favourite circuits
Hamilton’s home event at Silverstone has been a happy hunting ground with eight British Grand Prix victories, matching Hungary as his most successful race.
That also sees him top the chart of most wins by any driver at a single grand prix, alongside Michael Schumacher who won eight times in France between 1994 and 2006.
Hamilton has won seven times at Canada’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and six times each in Shanghai and Barcelona. He also has six United States Grand Prix wins, with five coming at the purpose-built Circuit of the Americas after a first win in 2007 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
In all Hamilton has won 28 different grands prix, with five or more wins in 11 of those, and at 29 different circuits.
Flying lap
Hamilton’s one-lap speed has been a key part of his overall dominance – he holds the all-time F1 record with 101 starts from pole position and has occupied that spot to begin 59 of his 100 wins.
He has 14 wins having not started on the front row of the grid and just four from outside the first two rows – starting fifth in Singapore in 2017, sixth at Silverstone in 2014 and at 2020’s Turkish Grand Prix and, remarkably, 14th in the 2018 German GP after a hydraulics fault prevented him competing in the second qualifying session.
That mastery of a single lap has also shown up with Hamilton recording the fastest lap in 31 of his race wins, eight of which have come since 2019 and yielded an additional championship point on each occasion. He has 57 fastest laps in total in his 281 career races.