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Ten-time grand prix winner and twice championship runner-up Valtteri Bottas exited full-time Formula 1 racing having scored zero points in 2024, which he ended last of the full-time drivers in the standings, ahead of only Williams’s sacked non-scorer Logan Sargeant and Alpine one-off Jack Doohan on countback.
Yet given how often Bottas dragged more speed out of his Sauber than seemed feasible, few would argue he was actually the worst driver last season. Indeed in The Race’s ranking of every driver’s performance, he was a lofty 13th.
When it comes to judging who really was an F1 season’s least impressive driver, it’s actually fairly rare for the championship to offer the right answer in the 21st century - as our assessment of how the points tables' tail-enders really performed shows.
2024
Last in championship: Jack Doohan (Alpine), 24th, 1 race, 0 points, only result 15th
Last full-time driver: Valtteri Bottas (Sauber), 22nd, 0 points, best result 11th
Our pick for actual worst performer of the year: Logan Sargeant (Williams), 23rd, 15 races, 0 points, best result 11th
The combination of never stringing together his hints of potential performance into anything tangible when it counted, the gaps to team-mate Alex Albon even with car spec disparities considered, the number of crashes plus the fact that in his second season he should have been progressing all made it unsurprising that Williams eventually jettisoned Logan Sargeant mid-season. That his replacement Franco Colapinto proved to be an instant upgrade proved it was the right call.
2023
Last in championship: Nyck de Vries (AlphaTauri), 22nd, 10 races, 0 points, best result 12th
Last full-time driver: Logan Sargeant (Williams), 21st, 1 point
Actual worst performer: De Vries
Sargeant gets a bit of rookie season benefit of the doubt for 2023, but we don’t afford as much of that to Nyck de Vries as he’d been on the F1 periphery for so long that he should have been better prepared to make the most of the surprise chance he’d got with AlphaTauri.
He never seemed a natural fit for the Red Bull programme or like he was truly convincing its hierarchy, and his part-season didn’t really offer any hints that things were going to improve.
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2022
Last in championship: Nico Hulkenberg (Aston Martin), 22nd, 2 races, 0 points, best result 12th
Last full-time driver: Nicholas Latifi (Williams), 20th, 2 points
Actual worst performer: Latifi
As Nico Hulkenberg did a solid job on his Aston Martin stand-in drives and 21st in the championship De Vries actually did a great job on his points-scoring Williams one-off, it’s De Vries’ team-mate for that Monza weekend Nicholas Latifi who has to be judged as 2022’s least impressive performer.
After some encouraging progress during 2021, he never properly got to grips with the new generation of cars and went backwards, meaning we rank his season as even worse than Mick Schumacher’s crash-strewn Haas swansong and Daniel Ricciardo’s massively disappointing McLaren finale - either of which could’ve been contenders for this unhappy honour.
2021
Last in championship: Nikita Mazepin (Haas), 21st, 0 points, best result 14th
Actual worst performer: Mazepin
Expectations were low for its all-rookie line-up as Haas wrote off all 2021 car development just to make it through to the new rules era, but Nikita Mazepin was still comprehensively beaten by team-mate Mick Schumacher.
If anything Mazepin’s sole season in F1 now looks even worse in hindsight than it did at the time - given Kevin Magnussen’s arrival for 2022 raised so many questions over Schumacher, who had himself been so much faster than Mazepin in 2021 (and then Hulkenberg’s arrival for 2023 even raised some of those questions over Magnussen too).
2020
Last in championship: Jack Aitken (Williams), 23rd, 1 race, 0 points, only result 17th
Last full-time driver in championship: Nicholas Latifi (Williams), 21st, 0 points, best result 3 x 11th
Actual worst performer: Latifi
Jack Aitken’s Williams one-off standing in for George Russell while Russell was making his stunning Mercedes debut in place of COVID-stricken Lewis Hamilton in the Sakhir GP is best remembered for him going off and causing a safety car that sent Russell’s race off-course. Yet prior to that Aitken was impressively quick for a driver thrown very much in at the deep end.
And that reflected badly on his team-mate Latifi, who was also just too far off Russell’s pace too often during the year even allowing for Russell being in his second season and Latifi being a rookie.
Romain Grosjean’s post-crash Haas replacement Pietro Fittipaldi could’ve been a contender too, only ahead of Aitken in the standings on countback because his two appearances meant he had a 19th as well as a 17th. But considering how he was deployed to help team-mate Kevin Magnussen plus the grid penalty he had on his debut, his performances were solidly sensible if low-key.
2019
Last in championship: George Russell (Williams), 20th, 0 points, best result 11th
Actual worst performer: Robert Kubica (Williams), 19th, 1 point
Given what Robert Kubica’s F1 career should’ve been prior to his life-changing rally crash, and everything it took for him to even get back on the grid at all so many years later, it feels horrible to declare anything about his Williams year to be a ‘worst’.
But sadly that season just proved that the limitations he now faced were just too great to be a top-line F1 driver again, and the margin Russell generally had over him in qualifying in particular was just too much as they battled at the back in Williams’s nadir campaign.
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That said, Kubica’s racecraft was still sharp - and it was a dose of that which meant he beat Russell to an inherited point when one was on offer in the wild German GP and consequently avoided being last in the actual championship. That result was very much against the overall performance trend, though.
2018
Last in championship: Sergey Sirotkin (Williams), 20th, 1 point
Actual worst performer: Brendon Hartley (Toro Rosso), 19th, 4 points
Sergey Sirotkin’s one-off F1 season with Williams was more respectable than is often remembered, though he and team-mate Lance Stroll plus the disappointing Stoffel Vandoorne at McLaren could all have been contenders for the ‘worst driver’ tag in a relatively illustrious battle in 2018. Marcus Ericsson too, had he not closed the pace gap to rookie Sauber team-mate Charles Leclerc later on.
But Brendon Hartley’s full year at Toro Rosso narrowly edged below Vandoorne in our final run-off.
From too early in the season it just seemed too obvious that Hartley’s belated F1 stint wasn’t going to last very long. Scoring only four points in a year team-mate Pierre Gasly managed 29 was damning, as though Hartley wasn’t that far off Gasly’s pace on average, his peaks were nowhere near as high and he didn’t capitalise on Toro Rosso’s stronger weekends at all.
2017
Last in championship: Jenson Button (McLaren), 25th, 1 race, 0 points, only result DNF
Last full-time driver: Marcus Ericsson (Sauber), 20th, 0 points, best result 2 x 11th
Actual worst performer: Jolyon Palmer (Renault), 17th, 16 races, 8 points
Though Jenson Button’s one-off F1 comeback with McLaren for the Monaco GP while Fernando Alonso was contesting the Indianapolis 500 ended with him tipping Sauber driver Pascal Wehrlein headfirst towards the barriers, his pace prior to a grid penalty that was not his fault was decent for someone thrown back into F1 amid new regulations.
Ericsson’s Sauber season was pretty solid considering his poor car, and though Wehrlein’s early-season injury stand-in Antonio Giovinazzi had a notably terrible Chinese GP weekend, his good debut in Australia before that saved him from being the worst performer of the year.
So that goes to Jolyon Palmer, for trailing Nico Hulkenberg so heavily at Renault that the team took the chance to drop him for Carlos Sainz in the final part of the season, its mind not changed by an anomalously impressive sixth place in Singapore.
2016
Last in championship: Rio Haryanto (Manor), 24th, 12 races, 0 points, best result 15th
Last full-time driver: Marcus Ericsson (Sauber), 22nd, 0 points, best result 11th
Actual worst performer: Haryanto
Dismissing Rio Haryanto as just a stereotypical pay driver from a potential new market for F1 in a backmarker team would be too harsh given he arrived on the grid via a strong GP2 season and outqualified Manor team-mate Wehrlein multiple times.
Overall though his form was too erratic and Esteban Ocon was a clear upgrade when Haryanto’s sponsorship ran out and he was dropped mid-season.
Ericsson is a bit underserved by the standings in this season again as though Sauber team-mate Felipe Nasr took the attention-grabbing and constructors’ battle transforming ninth place in the wet in Brazil, Ericsson was generally the struggling team’s stronger performer.
2015
Last in championship: Kevin Magnussen (McLaren), 22nd, 1 race, 0 points, only result DNS
Last full-time driver: Will Stevens (Manor), 21st, 0 points, best result 14th
Actual worst performer: Pastor Maldonado (Lotus), 14th, 27 points
Magnussen’s one-off return to stand in for his injured McLaren replacement Alonso can be quickly discounted as his car broke down before the Australian GP even started.
Will Stevens, Roberto Merhi and Alexander Rossi were all zero-pointers for the troubled Marussia/Manor team, but each performed more respectably with their machinery than Pastor Maldonado did in what turned out to be his final F1 season.
He was blown away by Lotus team-mate Grosjean on qualifying pace in particular, and though some of his race exits weren’t his fault, there were still far too many mistakes for a driver by then into his fifth F1 season. Once Renault reacquired the Lotus team, it didn’t need much of an excuse to jettison him before 2016 began.
2014
Last driver in championship: Andre Lotterer (Caterham), 24th, 1 race, 0 points, only result DNF
Last full-time driver in championship: Esteban Gutierrez (Sauber), 20th, 0 points, best result 12th
Actual worst performer: Max Chilton (Marussia), 21st, 16 races, 0 points, best result 2 x 13th
Maldonado and Esteban Gutierrez had enough respectable moments to avoid ‘worst’ honours, and Andre Lotterer and Stevens’ bizarre one-offs at Caterham were too strange to really count - though actually both did relatively impressive jobs in the circumstance.
So overall the most underwhelming driver of the year ends up being Max Chilton, who was no match for Marussia team-mate Jules Bianchi in the races they had together before Bianchi's tragic Suzuka crash.
2013
Last driver in championship: Max Chilton (Marussia), 23rd, 0 points, best result 14th
Actual worst performer: Esteban Gutierrez (Sauber), 16th, 6 points
Seventh place at Suzuka was the clear highlight of Gutierrez’s rookie season at Sauber, but even that one-off points finish was 20 seconds behind team-mate Hulkenberg.
Beyond that, poor qualifying form in particular meant he stood out as the year’s underachiever as even those dragging Marussias and Caterhams around at the back were more consistently eye-catching.
2012
Last driver in championship: Pedro de la Rosa (HRT), 25th, 0 points, best result 4 x 17th
Actual worst performer: Narain Karthikeyan (HRT), 24th, 0 points, best result 15th
It seems harsh to judge anyone for anything they did as HRT’s situation got even less competitive through its final year in F1, but while Narain Karthikeyan inherited the team’s ‘high’ point of 15th in Monaco, he was generally slower than team-mate Pedro de la Rosa - often by quite a margin.
2011
Last driver in championship: Karun Chandhok (Team Lotus), 28th, 0 points, 1 race, only result 20th
Last full-time driver: Timo Glock (Virgin), 25th, 0 points, best result 15th
Actual worst performer: Narain Karthikeyan (HRT), 26th, 8 races, 0 points, best result 3 x 17th
Was Karun Chandhok’s spin-filled one-off with Team Lotus at the Nurburgring bad enough to make him the worst driver of the season? It feels harsh to consign anyone to that on the basis of a single race so he’s let off.
Instead it goes to the unfortunate Karthikeyan again - overshadowed by Tonio Liuzzi at HRT before being dropped for most of the second half of the season so Red Bull could suss Ricciardo in F1 adversity. Ricciardo was soon outperforming Liuzzi and putting Karthikeyan’s efforts into perspective.
2010
Last driver in championship: Christian Klien (HRT), 27th, 3 races, 0 points, best result 20th
Last full-time driver: Timo Glock (Virgin), 25th, 0 points, best result 14th
Actual worst performer: Sakon Yamamoto (HRT), 7 races, 26th, 0 points, best result 15th
The arrival of the three hapless new teams meant a mix of fresh faces, surprise returnees and proven frontrunners squabbling over nothing in their own much-lapped world adrift of the main part of the field in 2010.
Sometime Red Bull driver Christian Klien gets credit for outperforming team regular Bruno Senna on a couple of his surprise HRT outings, while Sakon Yamamoto ends up at the bottom of our list for not doing so when he replaced Chandhok alongside Senna at mid-season.
Lucas di Grassi was considered too as his deficit to Virgin team-mate Timo Glock was too big considering di Grassi’s strong GP2 career and F1 test experience, but car spec disparities were a factor here and there wasn’t enough of a case to rank him worse than Yamamoto.
2009
Last driver in championship: Luca Badoer (Ferrari), 25th, 2 races, 0 points, best result 14th
Last full-time driver: Kazuk Nakajima (Williams), 20th, 0 points, best result 2 x 9th
Actual worst performer: Badoer
Sometimes on this ‘real worst’ mission we’ve declared that a stand-in who only does a race or two can’t fairly be ranked the year’s worst driver when the sample set is too small.
That caveat is rescinded when that temporary stand-in’s performance is just so bad there is no alternative.
Luca Badoer may have been off the F1 grid for a decade when called up from Ferrari reserve duty following Felipe Massa’s horrible Hungaroring crash, but prior to the testing ban he’d had enough F1 mileage that he shouldn’t have had a decade of rust on him.
Qualifying firmly last on both his appearances (while team-mate Kimi Raikkonen won on one of those weekends) was extremely poor regardless of the mitigating circumstances.
OK, his replacement Giancarlo Fisichella was twice on the back row too and didn’t score on his five attempts in that troubled Ferrari, which put Badoer’s awful races into slightly better perspective. But not enough to change our minds about him being the season’s worst overall performer.
2008
Last in championship: Anthony Davidson (Super Aguri), 22nd, 4 races, 0 points, best result 15th
Last full-time driver: Adrian Sutil (Force India), 20th, 0 points, best result 13th
Actual worst performer: Kazuki Nakajima (Williams), 15th, 9 points
The toughest season of the era to work out who actually performed least well, with seven contenders in the mix.
Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson did their utmost with Super Aguri in its dying few races (Sato starring in the circumstances actually), as did both Fisichella and Adrian Sutil at Force India - which was generally the slowest package once Super Aguri collapsed. Fisichella was marginally the stronger of the two, but not by enough to consign Sutil to the bottom of our list.
There were plenty of low points for Nelson Piquet Jr at Renault and Sebastien Bourdais at Toro Rosso, but enough highs to rescue them - Piquet ending up in the lead at Hockenheim was a total strategy fluke yet he did genuinely well to hold on to second, while Bourdais was unlucky on plenty of occasions.
So in a very, very narrow call, it’s Williams rookie Kazuki Nakajima who ends up bottom of our list due to his lack of peaks and the often large gap to team-mate Nico Rosberg.
2007
Last in championship: Markus Winkelhock (Spyker), 25th, 1 race, 0 points, only result DNF
Last full-time driver: Anthony Davidson (Super Aguri), 23rd, 0 points, best result 3 x 11th
Actual worst performer: Sakon Yamamoto (Spyker), 24th, 7 races, 0 points, best result 12th
You definitely can’t call actual championship tail-ender Markus Winkelhock the worst F1 driver of the 2007 season given he led (albeit via a mad tyre choice quirk) on his sole grand prix start with Spyker at the Nurburgring.
But you can give that crown to his replacement Yamamoto for being miles off team-mate Sutil when he took over that car for the rest of the season.
2006
Last in championship: Franck Montagny (Super Aguri), 27th, 7 races, 0 points, best result 2 x 16th
Last full-time driver: Takuma Sato (Super Aguri), 23rd, 0 points, best result 12th
Actual worst performer: Yuji Ide (Super Aguri), 25th, 4 races, 0 points, best result 13th
Three of the four drivers toiling with Super Aguris in its hastily-assembled F1 debut programme avoided embarrassing themselves in those tough circumstances (Sato, Yamamoto and Franck Montagny).
The other one - Yuji Ide - was on average 2.5s off Sato’s pace on his handful of appearances then had his superlicence revoked for sending Christijan Albers’ Spyker into a roll at Imola.
Ide’s Japanese domestic racing form was far better than his F1 failure suggested, but there’s no denying his F1 cameo was terrible.
2005
Last in championship: Ricardo Zonta (Toyota), 27th, 1 race, 0 points, only result DNS
Last full-time driver: Takuma Sato (BAR), 23rd, 1 point
Actual worst performer: Patrick Friesacher (Minardi), 21st, 11 races, 3 points
The bottom part of the 2005 championship is skewed by the Michelin teams’ United States GP boycott lifting all the Jordans and Minardis into the points. Sato’s final BAR year was a mess, but his pace was better than his dreadful championship position suggested.
The Indianapolis controversy also caused 2005’s official last-placed driver’s situation - Ricardo Zonta jumped into the Toyota after Ralf Schumacher was injured in the crash that triggered the weekend’s tyre failure panic, then was among the cars withdrawn at the end of the formation lap.
Karthikeyan is a contender for the ‘worst’ tag as Tiago Monteiro made more of Jordan’s rare opportunities, and famously ended up with an Indy podium for it, but we’re putting Patrick Friesacher at the bottom of 2005’s pile for being marginally the least impressive of the year’s three Minardi drivers along with Albers and Robert Doornbos.
2004
Last in championship: Gianmaria Bruni (Minardi), 25th, 0 points, best result 3 x 14th
Actual worst performer: Zsolt Baumgartner (Minardi), 20th, 1 point
You could make a case for Giorgio Pantano given how disappointing his Jordan F1 stint was compared to expectations from his junior career.
Or Marc Gene for the underwhelming two Williams stand-in outings that led to the team parking him for Antonio Pizzonia for the rest of Ralf Schumacher’s injury absence instead.
Or even Jacques Villeneuve, given how poor he was in his Renault cameo after Jarno Trulli was sacked.
But ultimately you just can’t look past Zsolt Baumgartner invariably trailing Gianmaria Bruni at Minardi, even though Baumgartner did inherit a point for being last in the high-attrition Indianapolis race.
2003
Last in championship: Zsolt Baumgartner (Jordan), 24th, 2 races, 0 points, best result 11th
Last full-time driver: Jos Verstappen (Minardi), 22nd, 0 points, best result 9th
Actual worst performer: Nicolas Kiesa (Minardi), 23rd, 5 races, 0 points, best result 11th
Another tough one and in a year of pretty decent overall driver line-ups, it comes down to weighing up two stand-ins.
Baumgartner was a long way off the pace when standing in for the injured Ralph Firman at Jordan but so was Nicolas Kiesa at Minardi when he took Justin Wilson’s place after Wilson’s promotion to Jaguar in place of Pizzonia. And Kiesa had more races to settle in plus expectations were higher given he was a Formula 3000 race-winner.
So Kiesa ends up narrowly bottom, with Pizzonia and Firman providing just enough high points to avoid consideration for that themselves.
2002
Last in championship: Anthony Davidson (Minardi), 23rd, 2 races, 0 points, best result DNF
Last full-time driver: Pedro de la Rosa (Jaguar), 21st, 0 points, best result 2 x 8th
Actual worst performer: Alex Yoong (Minardi), 20th, 15 races, 0 points, best result 7th
Though Davidson crashed out of both his Minardi appearances, he’d at least been a lot closer to the pace than the man he was replacing - Alex Yoong.
De la Rosa having the first of several seasons last in the championship was more surprising when he was in a Jaguar than when he was in an HRT, but even though he was outperformed by team-mate Eddie Irvine, he deserved better than zero points.
2001
Last in championship: Alex Yoong (Minardi), 26th, 3 races, 0 points, best result 16th
Last full-time driver: Fernando Alonso (Minardi), 23rd, 0 points, best result 10th
Actual worst performer: Gaston Mazzacane (Prost), 25th, 4 races, 0 points, best result 12th
Yoong was slow and out of his depth when he made his debut with Minardi for the final few races but had the excuse of being an F1 novice and thrown in against Alonso - who was producing unheralded miracles as a rookie himself in a very uncompetitive car.
Second-year driver Gaston Mazzacane gets less leeway for how far he was from Jean Alesi in the four races he managed before Prost ditched him in a driver merry-go-round in which it picked up Luciano Burti as Jaguar replaced Burti with de la Rosa.
2000
Last in championship: Luciano Burti (Jaguar), 23rd, 1 race, 0 points, only result 11th
Last full-time driver: Jean Alesi (Prost), 22nd, 0 points, best result 9th
Actual worst performer: Gaston Mazzacane (Minardi), 21st, 0 points, best result 8th
Discounting Burti as he didn’t have much chance to perform on a Jaguar one-off when Irvine was taken ill mid-weekend in Austria, this one goes to Mazzacane again.
Yes, he fared better against Gene at Minardi than his pre-F1 record suggested he might and he even briefly battled Mika Hakkinen’s McLaren for third in changing weather at Indianapolis. But that wasn’t enough to outweigh all the other anonymous performances.
There were plenty of other zero scorers that year, but disappointing rookie Nick Heidfeld gets let off for having his confidence smashed by a terrible Prost straight after dominating F3000, while his team-mate Alesi somehow qualified that car seventh in Monaco so clearly deserved far better than being last full-timer in the points.
Pedro Diniz bowed out with a non-score at Sauber yet compared reasonably to fresh-from-Ferrari team-mate Mika Salo much of the time. And Johnny Herbert’s big zero at Jaguar was more to do with woeful reliability than him.
