With Sebastian Vettel winning his second world championship, the youngest man to achieve this feat (as well as many others), I thought it would be good to compare the world champions' careers, specifically looking at their ages when they achieved key milestones.
(It's a bit big I know - click on the image to enlarge it a bit, or save it and zoom in)
The axis is marked out in driver's age, from 19 to 49. The yellow bar shows the period that the driver was active in F1, with the green and red markers giving the first and last wins, and the black markers showing when world championships were won.
Hopefully this helps to show just how unusual it is to have won one world championship before the age of 26, let alone two, as Alonso and now Vettel have both done. Three-times world champion Jack Brabham had never entered a Grand Prix before his 29th birthday, and continued winning into his forties.
Similarly this sort of graphic brings out how skewed some drivers' careers were: early success followed by a long fallow period for Jacques Villeneuve, or Emerson Fittipaldi; a long wait for the first victory like Hakkinen and Button; and those who stopped too soon, whether through retirement (like Scheckter) or fatal accident (Hawthorn, Rindt).
(It's a bit big I know - click on the image to enlarge it a bit, or save it and zoom in)
![Champions-Timeline2.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi367.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Foo117%2FGordonMurray_photos%2FChampions-Timeline2.jpg&hash=cb40143fa26966b8ff590e84e14fbd5a)
The axis is marked out in driver's age, from 19 to 49. The yellow bar shows the period that the driver was active in F1, with the green and red markers giving the first and last wins, and the black markers showing when world championships were won.
Hopefully this helps to show just how unusual it is to have won one world championship before the age of 26, let alone two, as Alonso and now Vettel have both done. Three-times world champion Jack Brabham had never entered a Grand Prix before his 29th birthday, and continued winning into his forties.
Similarly this sort of graphic brings out how skewed some drivers' careers were: early success followed by a long fallow period for Jacques Villeneuve, or Emerson Fittipaldi; a long wait for the first victory like Hakkinen and Button; and those who stopped too soon, whether through retirement (like Scheckter) or fatal accident (Hawthorn, Rindt).