F1 Drivers Once Shared the Same Car During a Race

Try explaining this to a modern F1 fan: for the first eight years of the World Championship, two drivers could climb into the same car during a single Grand Prix, take turns behind the wheel, and split whatever points the car earned right down the middle.

It sounds like something from a completely different sport. Even so, from 1950 to 1957, it was a normal part of Formula 1.

Built for a brutal era of racing

Early F1 races routinely lasted around three hours, run in open-cockpit cars with no power steering, minimal cooling, and often blistering heat, especially at events like the Argentine Grand Prix. Driver fatigue wasn’t a minor concern, but rather a real physical limit, and teams built shared drives directly into their strategy to cope with it. If a driver was struggling, exhausted, or simply needed relief partway through a race, a teammate could take over the same car and continue the effort.

Whatever position the car finished in, the points were divided equally between however many drivers had taken a turn at the wheel, regardless of how many laps each of them had actually driven. A driver who took over for the final five laps of a podium finish earned exactly the same points as the teammate who’d driven the previous two and a half hours.

The race that turned into chaos

The clearest example of how strange this system could get came at the scorching 1955 Argentine Grand Prix. Track temperatures were brutal enough that several drivers were physically unable to continue and handed their cars over mid-race.

By the finish, Ferrari’s Giuseppe Farina and Maurice Trintignant had each driven parts of two different cars that finished second and third, sharing those positions with two different teammates in the process. Nine different drivers ended up on the scoresheet from a single race, some earning as little as a third of a point for a few laps’ work in someone else’s car.

Mercedes’ Juan Manuel Fangio, driving the entire race himself in brutal heat, took the win and the fastest lap outright rather than sharing anything, a feat that stood out precisely because most of his rivals simply couldn’t manage the same physical toll alone.

Why it disappeared

By the late 1950s, race distances were shortened, physical conditioning for drivers improved, and the sport moved to treat each entry as belonging to a single driver rather than a rotating cast. From 1958 onward, points were no longer awarded at all for shared drives, effectively ending the practice within Formula 1’s championship rounds, even though a handful of shared entries technically continued to appear on results sheets for a couple more years without scoring anything.

It’s a detail that seems almost impossible next to modern F1, where a driver physically leaving the cockpit mid-race would end their afternoon entirely. For nearly a decade, though, tag-teaming a Grand Prix car was simply how some of the sport’s toughest, hottest races got survived.

Would a rule like this ever make sense in a modern sport built around individual performance, or does it only work in an era when simply finishing the race was already an achievement in itself?