F1 Championships: Runners-Up of the 2010s Quiz

Answer: Fernando Alonso

The 2010 season marked the first of four straight championship wins for Sebastian Vettel and the Red Bull team. However, before the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi, Vettel had been in third place in the standings, a full 15 points behind leader Fernando Alonso, and hadn't led the championship at any point during the season. Alonso's main challenger for the title was Vettel's team mate Mark Webber, but both drivers made somewhat ill-advised early pit stops, which left them stuck in traffic on a circuit where it is notoriously difficult to overtake and ultimately consigned them both to finishing positions in the lower half of the top ten. Meanwhile Sebastian Vettel led the race from pole position to claim the title and set a new record for the youngest F1 world champion in the history of the sport at the age of 24 years and 99 days.

Answer: Jenson Button

Sebastian Vettel absolutely dominated the 2011 season, taking 11 wins and only finishing off the podium on two occasions (he finished fourth at his home race in Germany and retired after suffering a puncture on the first lap of the penultimate race in Abu Dhabi). The McLaren drivers, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, who won three races each, were the only other drivers to manage more than one win in the whole season. Button secured the runner-up spot in the championship ahead of Vettel's Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber, Ferrari's Fernando Alonso and Hamilton, but was 122 points behind Vettel at the end of the season.

The particular highlight of Button's season was his amazing win in the wet at the Canadian Grand Prix, where he survived two separate collisions and came back from last place to snatch victory away from Vettel by passing him on the final lap of the race.

Answer: Fernando Alonso

The 2012 season was one of the most open and competitive of the decade as multiple drivers and teams won races and the championship fight went on until the final race in Brazil, where eight points for a sixth place finish were sufficient for Sebastian Vettel to retain his title for a third consecutive year. Notably the first seven races of the season were won by seven different drivers for five different teams - Jenson Button (McLaren), Fernando Alonso (Ferrari), Nico Rosberg (Mercedes), Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull), Pastor Maldonado (Williams), Mark Webber (Red Bull) and Lewis Hamilton (McLaren). An eighth driver and sixth team - Kimi Raikkonen and Lotus - also won a race later in the season.

Fernando Alonso led the championship for most of the early and mid-part of the season before being overtaken by Vettel when the latter won four races in a row between the Singapore and Indian Grands Prix - the only time during the season that the same driver managed to win consecutive races.

Answer: Fernando Alonso

The main factor behind the large points gap in 2013 between the world champion Sebastian Vettel and the runner-up, Fernando Alonso, was Vettel's record-breaking streak of nine consecutive race victories from the Belgian Grand Prix in August to the final race in Brazil in November. His feat broke the previous record of seven consecutive wins that had been held jointly by Alberto Ascari and Michael Schumacher. In total, Vettel took 13 wins, Fernando Alonso and Nico Rosberg won two apiece, and Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton both took one each.

This season marked the third time in four years that Alonso had finished the season as the world championship runner-up. The only drivers to have suffered this particular disappointment on more occasions prior to 2013 were Stirling Moss in the 1950s and Alain Prost in the 1980s and 1990s (who both finished in that position on four occasions).

Answer: Nico Rosberg

The 2014 season marked a major change in F1's rules when the old 2.4 litre V8 engines were replaced by 1.6 litre V6 turbo-charged power units with additional electric power provided by energy recovery systems. Mercedes' engine was the class of the field and their cars went on to win 16 of the 19 races - 11 of which were also one-two finishes for the team. Aside from five retirements (four mechanical failures and one crash), a Mercedes car only finished off the podium on two occasions during the whole season.

The eventual champion, Lewis Hamilton, took 11 wins compared to five for his team mate and runner-up, Nico Rosberg. The season marked the start of a bitter rivalry between the former childhood friends that lasted until Rosberg's retirement from the sport at the end of the 2016 season.

Answer: Nico Rosberg

Mercedes were equally dominant in 2015, again winning 16 of the 19 races. However, on this occasion it was a (slightly) closer fight between their two drivers with Nico Rosberg winning six races compared to Lewis Hamilton's ten, including three straight wins at the end of the season after the championship battle had already been decided. One of those six wins came at the Monaco Grand Prix, which he had first won in 2013 and his father, Keke Rosberg, had also won in 1983.

Hamilton's win marked the first time in the history of the sport that a British driver had successfully defended his world title.

Answer: Lewis Hamilton

The 2016 season was the third in a row to be dominated by the Mercedes team. The defending world champion Lewis Hamilton won 10 of the season's 21 races (the most by any driver) but lost the championship to his team-mate, Nico Rosberg, by a margin of just five points. Hamilton's title challenge was derailed when his Mercedes suffered engine failure at the Malaysian Grand Prix and Rosberg his ninth race of the season in Japan to build up a 33 point lead. Hamilton did everything he could by winning the final four races of the season, but Rosberg finished all of them in second place to squeak over the line and win his first - and only - F1 world driver's championship. Just days later he announced his immediate retirement from the sport.

Answer: Sebastian Vettel

Four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel moved from Red Bull to Ferrari for the 2015 F1 season but it took three seasons before he managed to break Mercedes' stranglehold on the top two positions in the drivers' championship by finishing as the runner-up in 2017. He won the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in March and held the championship lead from that point right through until September, when his points tally was overtaken by Lewis Hamilton at (somewhat ironically) Ferrari's home race in Italy.

From that point on, Vettel's championship challenge disintegrated following a first-lap crash with both his team-mate and Max Verstappen in Singapore, an engine failure that relegated him to the back of the grid in Malaysia, and an early retirement from the race in Japan. Hamilton clinched his fourth world title (to equal Vettel's tally) with two races of the season remaining.

Answer: Sebastian Vettel

The 2018 season followed a similar pattern to the previous year, with Sebastian Vettel getting off to a flying start by winning the first race in Australia and maintaining a genuine championship challenge throughout the first half of the season following further victories in Bahrain, Canada, Great Britain and Belgium. Lewis Hamilton then stepped up again to win six of the last eight races and claim the championship by a final margin of 88 points. Similarly to 2017, Vettel's season was again marred by a number of unforced driving errors, which perhaps most memorably included him crashing out of the lead when it started to rain during his home grand prix in Germany.

Vettel's Ferrari team-mate, Kimi Raikkonen, won the US Grand Prix - the only victory he recorded during his five-year long second stint with the Scuderia.

Answer: Valtteri Bottas

Mercedes once again dominated both F1 world championships in 2019, when they won the constructors' title, Lewis Hamilton won his sixth drivers' title and Valtteri Bottas claimed the runner-up spot. The latter two achievements were both confirmed with two races of the season remaining when Bottas claimed victory at the Circuit of Americas, with Lewis Hamilton following him home in second place.

The US Grand Prix marked Bottas' fourth win of the season (following victories in Australia, Azerbaijan and Japan) - a welcome improvement in form following his win-less season in a championship-winning car the previous year.