Up Next
Lewis Hamilton has gone from shattering Formula 1 records with Mercedes in their heyday together to confessing to being simply "slow" in its 2024 car. And Esteban Ocon's five years with Alpine peaked with a shock race win but ended one race early amid a total relationship collapse.
They're far from the first drivers whose long or great relationships with a particular team came to a limp at best, ignominious at worst, ending.
Here's our pick of another 11 cases:
SEBASTIAN VETTEL - RED BULL
Off the back of four consecutive championships, Vettel failed to win a single race in his final Red Bull season in 2014.
There were good technical reasons for that – engine supplier Renault had totally underestimated the hybrid challenge and was giving away at least 0.5 seconds per lap to the Mercedes power unit.
But it was far worse than that; a newcomer to the team had arrived and overshadowed him, Daniel Ricciardo taking three wins and narrowly outperforming him in qualifying too.
As this unfolded the team became less Seb-centric and, probably sensing which way the wind was blowing, he got out of there to land the plum Ferrari drive. - Mark Hughes
DAVID COULTHARD - McLAREN
It’s easy to overlook David Coulthard given it was his McLaren team-mate Mika Hakkinen who did all the drivers’ title winning in the late 1990s.
But McLaren’s longest-serving F1 driver played a big role in it winning its no-longer-latest constructors’ championship back in 1998 and Coulthard even became McLaren’s leading title charger in early 2001 ahead of Hakkinen before Michael Schumacher and Ferrari turned the screw.
From 2002 Coulthard played the role of the experienced team-mate to a young Kimi Raikkonen, an intra-team battle that increasingly swung out of his favour.
Coulthard held his own well in 2002 but it was Raikkonen who firmly led McLaren to a drivers’ title near-miss in 2003 and when McLaren got its 2004 car wrong, it was Coulthard who struggled more, going podium-less for a whole season for the first time in his F1 career.
While the mid-season debut of McLaren’s B-spec car allowed Raikkonen to win at Spa, Coulthard ended the season without a point in the last three races and with just short of half the points Raikkonen scored across the year.
Finishing a lapped 11th in the Brazil season finale while Raikkonen was one second adrift of the race winner was evidence that the end of this great F1 partnership was well overdue. - Josh Suttill
HEINZ-HARALD FRENTZEN - JORDAN
How do you go from leading one of F1’s greatest underdog title bids to being sacked mid-season less than 18 months later?
That’s the forgotten question behind Heinz-Harald Frentzen’s Jordan tenure that started with an unlikely title bid in 1999.
Third in 1999 proved to be Jordan’s peak in F1, with a decline down the pecking order setting in thereafter for its final years.
But just as Jordan’s competitiveness declined (not helped by some woeful reliability in 2000 and 2001), so too did Frentzen’s relationship with the team.
The first problem came in mid-2000 when Frenzten agreed on a new two-year deal with Eddie Jordan on the basis that race engineer Sam Michael would stay at the team.
By January 2001 Michael had left for BMW Williams and Frentzen told F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast in 2023 that his relationship with Eddie Jordan was never the same thereafter.
Frentzen’s 2001 season on-track actually started really strongly as he was fighting for third at the Australian opener before contact with Rubens Barrichello dropped him to the back of the field. He still recovered to sixth to score a point.
But thereafter “all of a sudden it was like someone had pulled the plug”, according to Frentzen, who struggled to match team-mate Jarno Trulli and suffered a seven-race point-less streak including two big shunts in quick succession in Monaco and Canada.
Then on the eve of his home German GP came the shock news that Jordan had sacked Frentzen with immediate effect, something Frentzen only found out when he received a fax announcing the decision.
Jordan wanting to keep its Honda engine deal meant it was always going to replace Frentzen with Takuma Sato for 2002, but this mid-season parting was a particularly brutal way to end a partnership that started so brightly. - JS
NELSON PIQUET - BRABHAM
Piquet and Brabham were a mighty force together in the first half of the 1980s, winning one of the last titles of the Cosworth DFV era in 1981 then the first turbocharged drivers' title with BMW power in 1983.
But Brabham’s subsequent decline temporarily took Piquet down, too, before he jumped ship for Williams.
Despite McLaren’s rise, the Piquet/Brabham-BMW combination was still generally the benchmark for raw pace in 1984, just horribly unreliable - nine pole positions yet Piquet didn’t finish a race until June.
A switch to Pirelli for 1985 made matters much worse, the peaky tyres often unable to handle the BMW engine’s full power and rarely a match for rivals’ Michelins.
The French Grand Prix at a boiling Paul Ricard was a glorious exception, and Piquet dominated. But that was one of only two podiums all year. Piquet’s departure from the team behind his F1 rise became inevitable and Brabham’s era as an F1 giant was over, too. - Matt Beer
FELIPE MASSA - FERRARI
Felipe Massa’s Ferrari decline was long, slow and sad.
It’s easy to assume his life-threatening qualifying accident at the Hungaroring in 2009 was to blame, but the reality has more to do with Ferrari than Massa’s brain injury.
Raikkonen was a team-mate Massa could work with, but when Massa returned to F1 in 2010, after recovering from those head injuries, Raikkonen had made way for Fernando Alonso.
After just their second race together, in Australia - where Massa held off Alonso to finish third - Alonso’s management ordered Ferrari to ensure there was no repeat.
That’s why Massa had to cede victory to Alonso a few races later in Germany - what would have been an emotional and crucial result to Felipe after all he had been through, almost dying for the Ferrari cause.
But Ferrari had spurned him, and his confidence never recovered. He always resented Alonso as a team-mate - to Massa, Alonso was a voracious political animal in a way Raikkonen had never been.
Yes, he struggled to adapt to the idiosyncratic Pirelli tyres - that certainly didn’t help - but the environment at Ferrari also became somewhere Massa could no longer be the best version of himself. - Ben Anderson
GRAHAM HILL - LOTUS
Though the first of Graham Hill’s two F1 world championships came with BRM, if you close your eyes it's a Lotus you can see him driving as it was during his four seasons in that machinery the witty Hill became a true celebrity even outside of racing.
But a crash at the United States GP during his title defence in 1969 broke both his legs and his career never really recovered.
Legendary Lotus boss Colin Chapman placed Hill at Rob Walker’s private team for 1970 with Lotus support, but Hill wasn’t fit and left for Brabham at the end of the year. His final Monaco GP win with Lotus in 1969 turned out to be his last F1 podium, too. - Jack Benyon
FERNANDO ALONSO - RENAULT
Given Alonso eventually reappeared at ‘Team Enstone’ for his 2021 F1 comeback, you could argue that 2009 wasn’t really the end of his time at Renault.
But as it was known as Alpine by the time he made it back there and the 2008/09 tenure was effectively chapter two of the relationship that made Alonso an F1 winner and double champion, then it counts as a sour end to a great partnership.
Renault was a welcoming environment for Alonso in 2008 after his fractious single season at McLaren (first time around), and though the team was no longer the title challenger it had been when he left, it was good enough to win twice in 2008. Yes the Singapore win was the result of a scandal, but Alonso and Renault won totally on merit next time out in Japan, too.
The return to Renault was only really ever an exercise in treading water for Alonso until Ferrari had room for him. Though there were moments of brilliance even in the much less competitive 2009 Renault, there were also some uncharacteristically scruffy or ‘phoned in’ performances from a driver who clearly felt there was little to push for and whose mind was on his next move.
And given all their history together across three stints, you could argue the ill-tempered final races of Alonso’s 2021/22 Alpine deal were an even worse final chapter to it all than his limp 2009. - MB
RALF SCHUMACHER - WILLIAMS
Ralf Schumacher and Williams is rarely remembered as a 'great' partnership, but it was incredibly significant for both parties and deserved to end on a better note than it did in 2004.
Schumacher took BMW's first podium of its 21st century comeback in its first race in 2000, and claimed its first win in 2001.
He and Juan Pablo Montoya (who narrowly escapes inclusion in this entry thanks to winning on his final Williams start in an otherwise lacklustre 2004) were there for all of BMW's winning years with Williams. By the time they left at the end of 2004, the partnership between team and engine supplier was on its last legs.
Sadly, Williams followed up an impressive 2003 with a miserable 2004 remembered most for the failed 'Walrus' nose on its FW26. To make matters worse, Ralf missed six races after suffering a concussion in a crash at Indianapolis.
Once he returned he didn't quite get a late-season win like Montoya did with the conventional-nose car Williams finished the year with. But there was at least an impressive second place to his brother Michael's Ferrari in the penultimate race of the year in Japan. It was his only podium finish all season. - Glenn Freeman
NIKI LAUDA - McLAREN
Beating team-mate Alain Prost to the 1984 title by half a point completed a fairytale comeback for Niki Lauda, who spearheaded McLaren’s revival in the early 1980s.
But there’s an often-forgotten 1985 epilogue in which Lauda won just one race and suffered a miserable season of poor reliability.
He notched up 11 retirements in the 14 races he competed in, missing two rounds due to a wrist injury sustained in a frightening crash in practice at Spa.
That led to Lauda ending up a rather misleading 10th in the drivers’ championship while Prost stormed to his first world title.
While clearly adrift of his peak and someway off Prost, particularly over one lap, there were still plenty of flashes of brilliance from Lauda.
The end results were just fairly miserable barring his Zandvoort victory, with Lauda’s last race with McLaren and in F1 in Adelaide summing his season up.
He’d qualified down in 16th, over two seconds slower than Prost, but he’d charged into the lead with 25 laps to go after a pass on Ayrton Senna, only for a brake problem to send him into the wall and bring a premature end to a wretched season. - JS
SEBASTIAN VETTEL - FERRARI 2020
Vettel’s underlying problem at Ferrari was that the boss who had believed in him and recruited him (Luca di Montezemolo) was gone by the time Vettel arrived there. Replaced by an autocratic automotive boss (Sergio Marchionne) and an aggressive but not deep-thinking lieutenant (Maurizio Arrivabene). Not Vettel people at all.
So he never got to be empowered there the way his mentor and hero Michael Schumacher had been by Ross Brawn and Jean Todt.
Nonetheless he arrived there to find a pretty good car and he was quicker than mid-2010s vintage Kimi Raikkonen.
When the Ferraris became seriously competitive in 2017 and ’18 Vettel even put credible title challenges together. But there was a belief within that he wasn’t as quick as Hamilton at Mercedes and there was a desire to benchmark him, so Raikkonen was replaced in 2019 by the mercurial Charles Leclerc.
Who simply came in and took the team off Vettel, signed off by Charles’ victorious insurrection at Monza and him being forgiven by new team boss Mattia Binotto - who had already decided he wasn’t going to negotiate a new deal with Vettel beyond his contract ending 2020.
Isolated in the team, by Vettel’s final season at Ferrari he was a pale shadow of the guy who’d arrived there five years earlier. - MH
PIERLUIGI MARTINI - MINARDI
You might be wondering why a partnership that only scored 16 points over nearly eight seasons counts as in any way ‘great’, but you don’t get many more iconic backmarker combinations in F1 than Pierluigi Martini in a Minardi.
That’s not just because of that longevity - three stints together over 1985-95, punctuated by a return to Formula 3000 and a single year at Scuderia Italia.
It’s the moments of glory across the end of 1989 and start of 1990, when Martini actually led for a lap in Portugal and qualified fifth, fourth, third then second across the last three races of 1989 and the 1990 opener. That spell was one of the greatest F1 underdog driver/team surges ever, and there were many more less famous moments of Martini getting a Minardi higher up the order than you’d expect.
But a relationship that seemed like it might go on forever fizzled out in underwhelming fashion when Minardi’s financial situation led to Martini being swapped out for Pedro Lamy halfway through a highlight-free 1995 season.
And there wouldn’t be a fourth Martini/Minardi stint, or any more F1 starts for the only man to ever lead a grand prix in a Minardi. - MB
