F1 Grid

Pick the square, then type a driver. The name counts if the driver raced for the team on the left of the row and also fits the top of the column: another team, a nationality or something from their career. You have 9 guesses for the nine squares. A wrong name uses one up and leaves the square open, and each driver can fill only one square per grid.

Starting at least one World Championship race in one of its cars. The team is the constructor the official records list, so a customer car counts for the company that built it: Stirling Moss's Rob Walker Lotus counts as Lotus. Practice sessions, test drives and failed attempts to qualify do not count.

Older teams no: Benetton and Renault came out of the same factory but are two teams here, and Minardi is not Racing Bulls. The current teams yes, because they change names every few years: Aston Martin includes Force India and Racing Point, Racing Bulls includes Toro Rosso and AlphaTauri, and Renault / Alpine is one team. Lotus covers Team Lotus and its customer cars from 1958 to 1994 plus the two later teams called Lotus, and Sauber includes BMW Sauber.

A career record (World Champion, Race winner, Podium finish), a teammate of a star such as Senna or Hamilton, a win at Monaco or in the British, Italian or Belgian Grand Prix (wherever it was held that year), or the decade of a driver's debut. All of them describe the whole career, not the time at the team in the row: Ferrari against World Champion wants a champion who drove for Ferrari at some point, whether or not the title came there. 35 drivers have won the title, and a title counts once its season is over.

Two drivers who started the same race for the same team, from 1980 on. Before that the records name the car rather than the team that entered it, so a privately run Lotus and a works Lotus would look like teammates. A driver who stood in for a single race counts too.

30 teams and 18 countries. The teams are Ferrari, McLaren, Williams, Lotus, Brabham, Tyrrell, Benetton, Renault / Alpine, Jordan, Sauber, Red Bull, Mercedes, Minardi, Arrows, Ligier, Alfa Romeo, Honda, Aston Martin, March, BRM, Cooper, Maserati, Vanwall, Lola, Surtees, Shadow, Wolf, Footwork, Prost and Racing Bulls. The countries are United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, United States, Finland, Australia, Japan, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, Sweden and Mexico. Rows are always teams. At most two columns in a grid are something other than a team, and at most one of the six teams is an older or smaller one: Honda, March, BRM, Cooper, Maserati, Vanwall, Lola, Surtees, Shadow, Wolf, Footwork and Prost.

Yes. A square only makes it into a grid if at least 3 drivers fit it and at least two of them are among the best known, so no square depends on a name only a historian would find. A grid is only used if nine different drivers can fill its nine squares at once.

The 250 best known drivers, out of the 687 who have started a Grand Prix since 1950. They are ranked by titles, wins, podiums and length of career, with a lift for recent drivers, and only drivers who raced for one of the grid's teams are counted. Past the top few hundred the names are ones nobody could be expected to guess. The Indianapolis 500, part of the championship from 1950 to 1960, is left out: its 103 drivers who raced nowhere else are not in the pool, and Race winner means a Grand Prix win. Accents are optional, so raikkonen finds Räikkönen. Nationality follows the records, which give one per driver: Jochen Rindt, born in Germany, raced as an Austrian.