F1 Driver Numbers Explained: How They Are Chosen and Kept

When the McLarens were rolled out for the 2026 season, the car belonging to Lando Norris no longer carried the 4 he had raced under since his debut in 2019. It carried a 1. Norris had won the 2025 world championship, and only the champion may use that number. Lewis Hamilton, who had the same right after six of his titles, never took it up. He went on racing with the 44 from his boyhood karts in Hertfordshire.

The system that permits both choices dates from 2014. Under the FIA's Sporting Regulations every driver picks a career number between 2 and 99 when he arrives in Formula 1 and keeps it until he leaves. No two drivers may hold the same one. Number 1 sits outside the list, reserved for the reigning world champion, who may run it or keep his own. A number stays out of reach for two full seasons after its driver's last race, one number has been retired for good, and since 2026 a driver may ask to change.

How an F1 driver number is allocated to a newcomer

A driver entering the championship today chooses from what is left. He may have any number from 2 to 99 that is not already attached to somebody on the grid, is not still reserved for a driver who has recently departed, and is not 17. In practice that leaves more than sixty, though the low single digits and the repeating pairs go quickly.

The choice is registered with the FIA and appears on the entry list. From then on the regulations treat it as his for the length of his career. It follows him from team to team, which is the whole point: Carlos Sainz has been 55 at five different constructors.

How clashes were settled when the system began

The first allocation, over the winter of 2013-14, was the only time the whole grid chose at once. Each driver submitted three preferences. Where two wanted the same number, priority went to the one who had finished higher in the 2013 championship. Kimi Räikkönen got 7. Nico Hülkenberg got 27, Valtteri Bottas 77. Jules Bianchi, a rookie the year before and near the bottom of the standings, took 17.

Some of those first choices still define the drivers who made them.

Driver	Number chosen for 2014	Team that season
Lewis Hamilton	44	Mercedes
Jenson Button	22	McLaren
Fernando Alonso	14	Ferrari
Nico Rosberg	6	Mercedes
Daniel Ricciardo	3	Red Bull
Sebastian Vettel	5, though he raced the champion's 1	Red Bull
Pastor Maldonado	13	Lotus
Max Chilton	4	Marussia

The two seasons a number stays reserved

When a driver leaves, his number does not return to the pool at once. The regulation holds it until he has gone two entire consecutive seasons without taking part in a race. The reasoning is practical. Drivers come back, and a returning driver who found his number on someone else's car would have a fair grievance.

The effect can be traced through the entry lists. Max Chilton last raced in 2014, so his 4 lay dormant through 2015 and 2016 and was free by the time Norris wanted it. Sebastian Vettel last raced in 2022, and 5 reappeared on a rookie's Sauber in 2025. Räikkönen's 7 and Rosberg's 6 have both been reissued the same way. The reservation also explains a curiosity from Monaco in 2017, when Jenson Button made a single appearance as a substitute for Alonso and did so with 22 on the car: he had raced in 2016, so the number was still his.

1. 1ChoiceA new driver selects any number from 2 to 99 that is not in use, not reserved and not the retired 17.
2. 2CareerThe number travels with him between teams for as long as he keeps racing in the championship.
3. 3TitleIf he becomes world champion he may switch to number 1 for the following season. His own number is held for him.
4. 4DepartureAfter his last race the number stays reserved for two complete seasons in case he returns.
5. 5ReleaseWith two seasons gone, the number goes back into the pool and any newcomer may claim it.

The sequence set out in the FIA Sporting Regulations since 2014, with the change request added for 2026.

Temporary numbers for stand-ins

One group falls outside all of this. A substitute called in for a race or two, with no career number of his own, does not borrow the absent driver's. Each team holds spare numbers for the purpose, and the stand-in is entered under one of those. Oliver Bearman drove a Ferrari at Jeddah in 2024 as number 38 and later chose 87 when he became a full-time driver. How those emergency appearances come about is covered in our guide to the reserve driver's job and the rules on standing in.

Number 1: the champions who used it and the one who refused

Before 2014 there was no decision to make. The champion's car carried the 1 because the entry list was built that way. Career numbers turned an automatic allocation into a choice, and the choice has split the champions cleanly.

Sebastian Vettel took it first. He had won the 2013 title, selected 5 as his career number, and then raced the 2014 season as number 1, saying in effect that a driver should carry the plate for as long as he is entitled to. Max Verstappen thought the same. After his first title in 2021 he put aside the 33 he had used since his debut and ran the 1 for four straight seasons, from 2022 to 2025, remarking that few drivers ever get the chance.

Hamilton went the other way and never wavered. He was champion going into 2015 and 2016, and again for every season from 2018 to 2021. Six title defences, all of them as number 44. His explanation was consistent: the 44 was his number from the start, it was what his family had painted on the kart, and he saw no reason to trade it for one that every champion before him had also carried.

Nico Rosberg supplied the oddest season. He won the 2016 championship and retired five days later, so in 2017 nobody was eligible. The number sat unused for a reason entirely different from Hamilton's.

Season	Reigning champion	Number he raced
2014	Sebastian Vettel	1
2015 and 2016	Lewis Hamilton	44
2017	Nico Rosberg, retired	Not on the grid
2018 to 2021	Lewis Hamilton	44
2022 to 2025	Max Verstappen	1
2026	Lando Norris	1

• Number 1 raced46.2%
• Number 1 not used53.8%

Thirteen seasons under career numbers. The seven without it are Hamilton's six title defences and 2017, when the champion had retired.

Show the numbers

Seasons with a number 1 on the grid, 2014 to 2026

Item	Value
Number 1 raced	6seasons
Number 1 not used	7seasons

There is a commercial reading of all this, and it should not be overstated. A champion's merchandise sells whichever number is on it. But Hamilton's refusal did establish something that the old system could never have shown: that a driver's own number can become worth more to him than the one the sport considers its highest honour. Norris, who had raced as 4 for seven seasons, went the other way. The full roll of title winners from this country, and the numbers they won under, is in our list of Britain's Formula 1 world champions.

The 2026 rule that lets a driver change number in mid-career

For twelve seasons the choice a driver made as a rookie was final. Daniil Kvyat could not swap his 26, nobody could trade up to a number that came free, and a teenager's pick stayed with him into his thirties.

That changed for 2026. The regulations now allow a driver to request a different career number, subject to the FIA's approval. Where the number sought is still inside its two-season reservation for a driver who has left, the reporting around the change indicated that the former holder's agreement was part of the process.

Max Verstappen used it first. Having lost the title to Norris he could no longer run the 1, and instead of going back to 33 he asked for 3. He had said for years that 3 was the number he always wanted. It was unavailable when he arrived in 2015 because Daniel Ricciardo, his future team-mate, already held it. Ricciardo's last Grand Prix was in Singapore in 2024, which meant the 3 was technically still reserved through 2026. Ricciardo was reported to have given his blessing, and the switch went through.

Two things are worth saying about the change. It is narrow: a driver must ask and be granted, and nothing suggests the FIA would approve a new number every season. And it loosens the logic of the 2014 reform only slightly. The idea then was that a number should identify one person for a whole career. A single considered change still serves that purpose better than the pre-2014 arrangement did, when a driver's number altered every year according to where his team had finished.

Whether many will follow is doubtful. A number that has been on a driver's caps and helmets for a decade is an asset he owns. Giving it up makes sense for someone who never liked his first choice, or who, like Verstappen, was only ever using it as a substitute for the one he wanted.

Why number 17 is retired in F1

One number cannot be chosen by anyone.

Jules Bianchi drove for Marussia in 2013 and 2014 and took 17 as his career number when the system began. At Monaco in 2014 he was classified ninth, in the points, the first that team had ever scored. On 5 October that year, in heavy rain and failing light at Suzuka, his car left the track at the Dunlop curve and struck a recovery vehicle that was removing another car. He suffered severe head injuries and never regained consciousness. He died in Nice on 17 July 2015, aged 25.

Within days the FIA announced that 17 would be withdrawn from the list of numbers available to Formula 1 drivers. It has not appeared on a car since.

No other number has been treated this way, and the restraint is deliberate. Formula 1 lost many drivers in its first three decades, and a policy of retiring each of their numbers would have been both impossible under the old allocation systems and arbitrary to apply in hindsight. Bianchi was the first driver to die from injuries sustained at a Grand Prix weekend since Ayrton Senna in 1994, and the only one to do so while holding a number that was personally his. That is why 17 stands alone.

The accident changed more than the entry list. It led to the virtual safety car, to revised start times so that races would not run into dusk, and to a long re-examination of how recovery vehicles are deployed, all of which are part of the story told in our guide to what happens when it rains at a Grand Prix.

Is number 13 allowed in F1

It is, and it always was. The widespread belief that 13 is banned comes from its long absence, which was a matter of habit.

Race organisers in the early decades of the championship simply tended not to issue it. When fixed numbering arrived in the 1970s the sequence was written to step over it, and the later system based on championship order kept the same gap: the sixth-ranked team received 11 and 12, the seventh 14 and 15. No article of the regulations said why. Superstition was assumed and nobody argued.

The exceptions are few enough to name. Moisés Solana raced a BRM as number 13 in his home Grand Prix in Mexico in 1963. Thirteen years later Divina Galica, the British Olympic skier turned racing driver, was entered as 13 for the 1976 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in a Surtees and did not qualify. After that, nothing for nearly four decades.

Then came 2014 and a free choice from 2 to 99. Pastor Maldonado, moving from Williams to Lotus, asked for 13 and was given it. He used it for two seasons. Those seasons produced a fair number of accidents and no podiums, which did nothing for the number's reputation, though the Lotus of 2014 was a poor car whoever drove it and whatever was painted on its nose.

Nobody has taken it up since. That is a choice made by individual drivers and not a rule, and the distinction matters to anyone settling an argument: a newcomer who wanted 13 tomorrow could have it.

The stories behind British drivers' numbers

Lewis Hamilton, 44. The number goes back to the kart tracks of the Home Counties in the early 1990s. Hamilton started racing at Rye House in Hertfordshire at the age of eight, and the kart needed a number. As Hamilton has told the story, his father Anthony took it from the registration plate of the family car. It stayed on his karts through the cadet classes. Formula 1's old system then gave him whatever his team's championship position dictated, including, memorably, 22 in the year of his first title. In 2014 he went straight back to 44. His record under it is set out in our guide to the titles, wins and poles Hamilton has accumulated.

Jenson Button, 22. Button's choice was a souvenir. In 2009 the Brawn team, assembled from the remains of Honda's operation at Brackley only weeks before the season, was placed at the foot of the entry list and given 22 and 23. Button won six of the first seven races in the 22 car and took the championship. Five years later, offered any number he liked, he chose that one. The season behind it is told in full in our account of Button's career and the Brawn title.

There is a coincidence here that is easy to miss. Hamilton's 2008 McLaren also carried 22, because McLaren had been excluded from the previous year's constructors' standings and was listed last. Two British world champions in consecutive years, at different teams, with the same number assigned by the same accident of the rulebook.

Lando Norris, 4. Norris chose 4 for his debut with McLaren in 2019 and raced it for seven seasons, until the title allowed him to put it aside. He is the clearest case of the 2014 system working as intended: a single number, on one team's cars, for a driver's whole career up to the championship.

George Russell, 63. Russell has carried 63 since his debut with Williams in 2019, and kept it through the move to Mercedes for 2022, the same number on both cars.

British driver	Career number	Where it came from
Lewis Hamilton	44	His first kart, from his father's car registration
Jenson Button	22	The Brawn he drove to the 2009 title
Lando Norris	4, then 1 as champion	Chosen for his 2019 debut at McLaren
George Russell	63	Chosen for his 2019 debut at Williams
Oliver Bearman	87	Chosen on joining Haas full-time for 2025
Jolyon Palmer	30	Chosen on joining Renault for 2016

London-born Alex Albon, who races under the Thai flag and has used 23 since his 2019 debut, belongs on the edge of this list.

What the rest of the grid chose, and the patterns behind it

Ask drivers how they choose their numbers and the answers fall into a handful of types. Very few are random.

The largest group went back to childhood, as Hamilton did. Fernando Alonso's 14 commemorates a karting world title he won at the age of fourteen, on the fourteenth of July, in kart number 14. Ricciardo's 3 was, among other things, a nod to Dale Earnhardt, the American stock car driver he admired.

A second group inherited, or kept a number that had already brought them success. Nico Rosberg took 6 because his father Keke had won the 1982 world championship with it. Sebastian Vettel's 5 was the number on the Red Bull in which he won his first title, in 2010.

Then there are the compromises, which say most about how the allocation works. Verstappen wanted 3, found it taken, and doubled it to 33. Charles Leclerc's 16 is usually explained as a route back to seven, the number Räikkönen already held: the digits add up to it, and he was born on the 16th. Sainz would have liked 5; Vettel had it, so he took two of them. A late arrival chooses from a picked-over list, and half the grid's numbers are second or third preferences that their owners have since grown into.

Driver	Number	His stated reason
Fernando Alonso	14	A karting title won aged 14, on 14 July, in kart 14
Sebastian Vettel	5	The number on his 2010 title car
Nico Rosberg	6	His father's number as champion in 1982
Max Verstappen	33	He wanted 3, which was taken
Charles Leclerc	16	Seven was taken; one plus six makes seven
Valtteri Bottas	77	It fits the double T in his surname

The last type is typographic. Bottas chose 77 because it could stand in for the two letters in the middle of his name, and built a logo on it. Sainz's 55 has been worked into his branding in a similar way. Nobody planned this in 2013, but a number that can be drawn into a signature has turned out to be worth more than a lucky one.

Where the number must appear on the car and how large

For years the regulation was brief. The number had to be clearly visible from the front of the car and on the driver's crash helmet. Teams complied to the letter, which is to say they printed it small and put it where no sponsor wanted the space. By 2016 a spectator in the grandstand at Copse had little chance of telling one silver car from the other by its number.

The complaint reached the sport's rule-makers, and a clarification took effect from the Spanish Grand Prix in May 2017. Numbers on the external bodywork now had to meet a minimum height, and the driver's name, or the three-letter abbreviation of it, had to appear as well, with its own minimum size. The exact figures sit in the Sporting Regulations and have been restated as the cars have changed shape, so this guide gives the principle rather than the millimetres.

1. 1Before 2014The number had to be visible from the front of the car and on the helmet, and changed with the team's championship position.
2. 22014Career numbers arrive. The same requirement applies, and teams often print the number small.
3. 3May 2017From the Spanish Grand Prix the number must meet a minimum height, and the driver's name or abbreviation must also appear on the bodywork.
4. 42018 onwardsWith the engine-cover fins removed, the markings move to the engine cover and the sides of the chassis.

The sequence of changes described in this section. The minimum sizes themselves are set out in the current Sporting Regulations.

The teams' solutions that weekend were instructive. That season's cars had tall fins on their engine covers, and several teams filled them with one very large numeral. Others put the abbreviation along the fin and the number on the nose. When the fins were removed by the following year's rules the markings moved to the engine cover and the sides of the chassis, where they remain.

The other ways of telling two team-mates apart

The number is one identifier among several, and the least useful at 200mph. The camera housing on top of the airbox is colour-coded: black on one car in each team, fluorescent yellow on the other. Helmet designs are the oldest method, and for a period from 2015 the regulations required each driver to keep substantially the same design all season so that the helmet stayed recognisable; that restriction was later relaxed. The number matters most in the places where the car is stationary or slow, on the grid and in the pit lane, and in photographs.

The three-letter codes on the timing screens

HAM. NOR. RUS. The abbreviations on the timing tower are not a nickname system and not, strictly, part of the numbering rules. They are identifiers used by the official timing and by the broadcast graphics, and they follow a simple convention: the first three letters of the surname.

Most of the grid falls out of that without difficulty. Even close cases resolve themselves. Fernando Alonso is ALO and Alex Albon is ALB. Carlos Sainz was SAI in the seasons when Logan Sargeant was SAR. Pierre Gasly and Romain Grosjean, GAS and GRO, shared a grid for years.

The convention breaks when two drivers share a surname, or its first three letters. The Schumacher brothers produced the best-known fix. Both would have been SCH, so Michael became MSC and Ralf RSC, taking the initial of the first name and two consonants from the surname. When Mick Schumacher reached Formula 1 in 2021 he inherited his father's MSC.

Max Verstappen ran into a different version of the problem. When he first drove in a practice session in 2014, Jean-Éric Vergne was still on the grid, and both surnames begin with the same three letters. Vergne left at the end of that season, and VER has belonged to Verstappen since.

Surnames with prefixes are handled case by case. Nyck de Vries was DEV, Paul di Resta DIR, Pedro de la Rosa DLR. No published article of the Sporting Regulations lays down how the codes are built; they are assigned when a driver first appears on an entry list, and once given they stay. A reader looking for the rest of the shorthand that appears on screen during a race will find it in our glossary of Formula 1 terms.

How it worked before 2014: numbers by championship order

From 1996 to 2013 a driver's number told you how his team had done the previous year, and nothing about him.

The reigning champion's team received 1 and 2, the champion taking the 1. Every other team was then numbered in the order of the previous season's constructors' championship: 3 and 4 for the best of the rest, 5 and 6 for the next, and so on down the list, omitting 13. New teams went to the bottom. Within a team the lower number went to whichever driver the team nominated, usually the senior one.

A champion who changed teams took the 1 with him, and the old system produced some strange sights as a result. Michael Schumacher carried it from Benetton to Ferrari for 1996. Damon Hill, told by Williams before the title was even won that he would not be kept on, raced the 1997 season as number 1 in an Arrows that qualified near the back of the grid at the opening round. Button took it from Brawn to McLaren for 2010, which left Hamilton, champion two years earlier, as number 2 in what had been his own team.

The result was a number that changed almost every season. Button raced as 10, 8, 15, 17 and 9 in his first five seasons alone, long before he ever got to choose. For an explanation of the standings that drove those allocations, see our guide to how the constructors' championship is scored.

Damon Hill and the number 0

The system had a gap in it, exposed twice in two years. Nigel Mansell won the 1992 title for Williams and left for IndyCar racing in America. Williams, as the champion's team, was still entitled to the first two places on the list, but there was no champion to carry the 1. The FIA's solution was to issue 0 and 2. Alain Prost, the incoming star, took the 2. Damon Hill, in his first full season, was handed the 0.

Prost won the 1993 title and retired. So it happened again: Ayrton Senna joined Williams for 1994 as number 2, and Hill raced a second season as 0. He won nine Grands Prix across those two years with a zero on the nose of the car. It had been seen once before, on Jody Scheckter's McLaren at two races in 1973, and has not been issued since. Career numbers start at 2.

Hill's own title, in 1996, came in a car numbered 5, the number his predecessor had made famous. His route from test driver to champion is covered in our piece on Damon Hill's years at Williams and Arrows.

The fixed team numbers of 1974 to 1995: Ferrari's 27 and Mansell's Red 5

Before any of that came the arrangement older British fans remember best, because it ran for twenty-two seasons and attached numbers to teams so firmly that they became part of the cars.

Until 1973 numbers were given out race by race, by each event's organisers, with no continuity at all. A driver might be 4 at Silverstone in July and 16 at the Nürburgring a fortnight later. Some organisers numbered the field in the order entries arrived, some grouped cars by team, and some events issued even numbers only. Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart won their championships under a different number almost every time they raced, and nobody watching thought it odd, because the cars of that era were told apart by their colours and by helmet designs. For 1974 the governing body fixed them for the season using the previous year's constructors' standings. Lotus took 1 and 2, Tyrrell 3 and 4, McLaren 5 and 6, and so on. Then it left them alone. A team kept its pair indefinitely, with one exception: when a driver won the championship, his team took 1 and 2 for the following year and handed its old numbers to the team that had just lost them.

Team	Numbers	Seasons held
Tyrrell	3 and 4	1974 to 1995
Ferrari	27 and 28	1981 to 1989, then 1991 to 1995
Ferrari	11 and 12	Most seasons from 1974 to 1979
McLaren	7 and 8	1978 to 1984, then 1993 to 1995
Williams	5 and 6	Most seasons from 1984 to 1995

That swap mechanism explains every famous pairing of the era. Tyrrell never won another title after 1973, so nothing ever dislodged its 3 and 4, and the Surrey team raced under them until the system ended. The story of what those numbers were painted on is in our history of Ken Tyrrell's team.

Ferrari's 27 and 28 arrived by the same accident. Jody Scheckter won the 1979 championship for Ferrari, so the team ran 1 and 2 in 1980. Alan Jones then won the 1980 title for Williams, whose cars had been 27 and 28. The numbers changed hands. Ferrari did not win another drivers' title for the rest of the fixed-number era, and so 27 stayed, first on Gilles Villeneuve's car and later on those of Michele Alboreto and Jean Alesi. A number that began as a back-of-the-grid allocation for a young Williams team became, in Italy, close to sacred. The single interruption was 1990, when Prost arrived from McLaren as champion and brought the 1 with him. McLaren took the 27 for that one season, and Senna won the title with it.

Why Red 5 became part of Mansell's name

Williams held 5 and 6 through its strongest years. When Nigel Mansell joined in 1985 he was given the 5, and the team painted his numeral red to distinguish it at a distance from the white 6 on Keke Rosberg's otherwise identical car. Murray Walker began calling the car "Red Five" in commentary. It stuck.

Mansell drove Red 5 through two spells at Williams, to the 1992 title, and then took the name with him to America, where his IndyCar carried a red 5 as well. It is probably the only case in British motorsport of a car number functioning as a nickname, and our profile of Mansell's career from Lotus to the championship explains the seasons that earned it.

One footnote from the first year of the fixed system deserves its place. At the 1974 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, Lella Lombardi was entered in a privately run Brabham as number 208, matching the wavelength of her sponsor, Radio Luxembourg. She did not qualify. It is the highest number ever entered in a world championship Grand Prix.

How MotoGP and NASCAR do it, and what F1 borrowed

Formula 1 came late to the idea that a number could belong to a competitor.

Grand prix motorcycling had it for decades. A rider chooses a number early in his career and it moves with him through the classes and between manufacturers. The champion may run 1 and many have declined. The precedent was British: Barry Sheene won the 500cc title in 1976 and 1977 and kept his 7 on the fairing both times, because by then the 7 was Sheene. Valentino Rossi made the same decision across all of his premier-class titles, and his 46 was eventually retired from the top class after he stopped racing. Marc Márquez has never given up 93. Others, among them Francesco Bagnaia, have taken the 1 when entitled to it. The arguments on each side are identical to the ones Formula 1 now has, and our guide to MotoGP's weekend format and regulations sets out the rest of that rulebook.

NASCAR works on the opposite principle. Numbers there are licensed by the series to the team owner. A driver who changes teams leaves the number behind, and the famous ones are remembered as much for the garage that ran them as for the man at the wheel: the Petty family's 43, the Wood Brothers' 21, the 3 that Richard Childress Racing fielded for Dale Earnhardt. In that sense American stock car racing still runs something close to the arrangement Formula 1 abandoned in 1996. Ricciardo, an Earnhardt admirer, chose his 3 partly in tribute, which is how a NASCAR team number ended up at the centre of the first use of Formula 1's 2026 number-change rule.

What Formula 1 took in 2014 was the motorcycling model, and the reason given at the time was plain. The World Motor Sport Council wanted drivers to be easier to identify and easier to market. The same meeting, in December 2013, approved double points for the final race of the season. One of those ideas lasted a single year and is remembered with embarrassment. The other has outlived most of the drivers who made the first choices, and has produced the 44, the 33, the 4 and the 63 as things supporters wear.

The old systems told you about last year's results, or about which team a man happened to drive for. The current one tells you who is in the car, which is what a number on a racing car was for in the first place.

More on the sport's rules and history is on our motorsport pages, and the full set of guides for readers in this country is collected on the England hub.