1995 F1 Season

In 1995 Benetton and Williams ran the same engine, a Renault V10, so for once comparing two front-running teams does not depend on guessing what each manufacturer was supplying. And the result is odd: Williams took twelve of the seventeen poles (seven for Damon Hill, five for David Coulthard) and won five races. Benetton took four poles and won eleven.

The championship finished 102 to 69 for Michael Schumacher, nine wins to four, and the constructors' title 147 to 118. What separated the two cars on Saturday and what separated them on Sunday point in opposite directions, and that is the story of the year.

Part of the explanation sits in the column nobody reads. Of seventeen races, Hill failed to finish seven, and five of those seven were spins or collisions. Schumacher was out five times, three of them through contact. Two of those collisions were with each other, at Silverstone and at Monza, and both races were won from behind by Johnny Herbert in the second Benetton. Herbert ended the year with two victories that arrived on the days his two rivals took each other out.

It was Schumacher's second consecutive title and his last with Benetton: that winter he left for Ferrari, who had not won a drivers' championship since 1979. Below, the simulation block runs this grid a hundred times. Our ratings leave the Williams and the Benetton tied at the top, with the Williams a fraction ahead, and the championship still ends the same way all hundred times: the gap the model sees is between the drivers, not between the cars.