Where Verstappen’s fastest-ever F1 lap fits in with the all-time greats

For a minute or so on Saturday afternoon at Monza, Lando Norris was not only provisional polesitter for the Italian Grand Prix, but also a record-breaker: his 1m18.869s lap meant an average speed of 264.423km/h, faster than Lewis Hamilton’s 264.362km/h, set during qualifying for the 2020 race here.

Then Max Verstappen went faster still, with a 1m18.792s lap: 264.681km/h. Another new record.

Actually two new records, since this is the shortest-ever time the record of fastest-ever average speed has been held.

The significance was perhaps lost in the moment, given the focus on Red Bull scoring pole against the run of form and car characteristics. Tearing ourselves away from the here-and-now, let’s digest Verstappen’s achievement in context.

This is a record whose previous holders are mostly, if not exclusively, champions, since this is a measure not purely of straight-line performance – any moderately competent racing driver can strap themselves into a fast F1 car, mash the throttle on a long enough straight and ring the bell for top speed. Holding a high average over the course of a lap is assuredly the mark of a great driver in a quick car.

To go back to the earliest records requires statisticians to disregard the anomalous presence of the Indy 500 as a points-paying race through the 1950s: different cars, oval circuit. Strike the likes of Bill Vukovich and Jim Rathmann from the record and we have a pattern of quick evolution through the first world championship season and beyond.

Obviously the first fastest-ever world championship lap was clocked at the first points-paying grand prix, at Silverstone (pedants’ note: we’re disregarding the failed attempt to run a world championship in the mid-1920s). Giuseppe Farina, ultimately the champion that season, set the first benchmark of 151.300km/h at a track whose layout differed substantially from today.

Farina raised it at the Swiss and Belgian GPs which followed, before his team-mate, the great Juan Manuel Fangio, broke the record in France and Italy. In that first world championship Italian GP at Monza, Fangio brought the record to 191.231km/h.

It would stand for another year before Fangio broke it again, once more in practice for the Italian Grand Prix. 200.353km/h in the evolved version of the Alfa Romeo 158 he had raced the previous season; by this point the Alfa 159’s 1.5-litre straight-8 produced over 400bhp, courtesy of two-stage supercharging and a methanol-rich fuel mix, of which it burned a gallon every mile and a half.

Little wonder Alfa Romeo’s documents rat the time referred to the 159s as fianchi larghi (‘wide hips’) on account of the extra girth induced by their larger fuel tanks.

The cars which followed in subsequent seasons were less outrageous, especially the F2 machinery which populated the grids in 1952-53 as race promoters closed off their events to the few remaining F1 cars in circulation. Fangio’s record remained unbroken until the 2.5-litre formula had matured – and it was ‘Il Maestro’ who broke his own record again, at Monza in 1955.

Running the ‘streamliner’ version of the innovative Mercedes W196, and running on the combined oval and road course incorporating the newly rebuilt banking, Fangio raised the bar to 216.216km/h.

A year later Fangio did it again, for the last time, heading a Ferrari 1-2-3 in qualifying at an average speed of 221.402km/h. Curiously, this achievement passed several eminent commentators by: Denis Jenkinson glossed over it in his report for Motor Sport, while Autosport founding editor Gregor Grant was too busy enthusing over Stirling Moss’s victory and the chivalry of Peter Collins in his race report to get to it at all.

Thereafter the record was only broken irregularly until the early 1970s. Tony Brooks clocked 240km/h at Avus – essentially two corners linked by a stretch of autobahn – in his Ferrari in 1959, the year he was a runner-up to Jack Brabham in the world championship.

Jim Clark, Lotus 49-Ford

Photo by: Motorsport Images

F1 became a 1.5-litre engine formula in 1961 so it’s perhaps not surprising that the speed record stood until after the ‘return to power’ in 1966: fittingly it was the peerless Jim Clark who broke it in 1967 at Spa-Francorchamps, recording 243.92km/h in qualifying on the daunting old 14.120km layout.

The luckless Chris Amon, one of the finest drivers never to win the world championship, broke the record at Spa in 1970 (244.700km/h) and Monza in 1971 (251.213km/h). In between, Jacky Ickx went around Monza in a Ferrari at 246.018km/h in qualifying for the 1970 Italian GP. And this, compared with today, was a Monza with no chicanes.

Amon’s record lap in 1970 was something of an outlier in this list since he delivered it in the race, rather than qualifying, and in a car which was hardly cutting edge: March’s unloved 701. And he didn’t even win – he was engaged in an ultimately fruitless pursuit of Pedro Rodriguez’s BRM, which Amon went to his grave believing had an illegal engine.

At Monza in 1971, Amon’s record lap caused the tifosi to chafe since his Matra, courtesy of a tow from Tim Schenken’s Brabham, had beaten Ickx’s Ferrari to pole. Indeed, the timekeepers initially refused to acknowledge Amon’s lap at all, and it was widely reported that nobody else holding a stopwatch had registered the same time for Ickx as the officials recorded.

In a troubled year for Ferrari, “it was generally accepted that they had been ‘cooking the books’ to encourage the Italian public on race day” reckoned Autosport. Still, Amon made a poor start and then, reaching for a tear-off, dislodged his entire visor and trailed home half a minute down; it was incidents such as this which moved Mario Andretti to observe that if Amon had become an undertaker, people would have stopped dying.

Amon’s record remained untouched until 1985, when Keke Rosberg, in a Williams-Honda, raised the bar to 258.983km/h in qualifying at Silverstone – ‘bar’ being an operative word here since his left-front tyre was losing pressure thanks to a puncture, and was flat within minutes of him pulling into the pits. It had been a typically Keke piece of bravura lappery, a now-or-never charge in final qualifying as spots of rain acted as the vanguard for the heavy shower that was to come. And it would have been even faster, he reckoned, but for a puncture-induced wobble at the Woodcote chicane.

Here we were arguably at the peak of the 1000bhp turbo era, before the FIA clamped down on boost pressures and fuel tank capacity to cap speeds. “Next time we come here [in this era Silverstone alternated with Brands Hatch as British GP venue] the cars will perhaps be slower,” wrote Nigel Roebuck in Autosport. “Almost certainly the track will be changed.”

Keke Rosberg, Williams Honda FW10

Photo by: Sutton Images via Getty Images

It was indeed so on all fronts, and Rosberg’s record remained intact until 2002. Appropriately enough it was another bare-knuckle fighter at the wheel that day, and in a Williams too: Juan Pablo Montoya. In a season of Ferrari dominance, the burgeoning – at that point anyway, before the rancour set in – Williams-BMW partnership put a shot across the Scuderia’s bows in qualifying at least. A new all-time average speed record of 259.827km/h was all Montoya would take away from that weekend, for his car failed him in the race.

As the mighty V10 era reached its peak in 2004, Montoya did it again at Monza, exceeding the 260km/h mark for the first time. This did not impress Autosport’s then-editor John McIlroy enough to warrant front-page treatment – the likelihood of Renault boss Flavio Briatore dumping Jarno Trulli before the end of the season (why break the habit of a lifetime, Flav?) was deemed more important – perhaps because it was set in the first phase of qualifying which didn’t count to towards the final grid. Montoya himself was effusive, though.

“Even if it doesn’t get recorded as the fastest pole position lap, I know what I’ve done,” Montoya wrote in his regular Autosport column. “That is important to me because this is probably the last year that such a record could be broken. With all the rule changes that are happening for next season, it could be another 50 years before my record is broken again.”

Such an apocalyptic view was very much in tune with the times, as FIA president Max Mosley attacked budgets and car performance; downsized V8 engines were in the offing, moving Montoya to remark that weekend, “Would you rather drive a BMW 1-Series or an M5?”

In fact it would be but 14 years before the record was broken, again at Monza, and this time by a Ferrari driver for the first time since Ickx in 1970. 2007 champion Kimi Raikkonen, lapping Monza for the last time as a Ferrari driver, claimed the last of his 18 pole positions at an average of 262.587km/h.

Raikkonen’s tenure in the Guinness Book of World Records lasted two years before Lewis Hamilton usurped him in 2020, appropriately enough at the temple of speed. Here, though, Monza’s famous whispering trees were the only trackside witnesses outside the denizens of the F1 paddock to Hamilton’s 264.362km/h record: the pandemic meant this event was held behind closed doors.

How pleasing, then that a full house of fans was present to watch the record fall twice in one day in 2025.