JULY 24, 2002

Michael has one new record to beat!

IT was widely reported after the French GP (including by us) that Michael Schumacher had beaten Carlos Reutemann's long-standing record of points-scoring results. This had stood at 15 consecutive points scores in the 1980-81 period. The previous record was thought to have belonged to Juan-Manuel Fangio who had a sequence of 14 scores in the 1953-55 period.

However historians in the 1980s failed to take one thing into account: in the 1950s points were given for the fastest lap. Longtime F1 journalist Paul Treuthardt has now revealed that Fangio actually scored in 21 consecutive Grands Prix. The anomaly comes because in 1955 Fangio retired from the Monaco GP with a transmission failure but still managed to pick up a point for having set the fastest lap of the race. Thus is was not until the Belgian GP in 1956 that he failed to score again.

The full list is as follows: 1953, France (2nd); Britain (2nd); Germany (2nd); Switzerland (4th); Italy (1st). 1954: Argentina (1st), Belgium (1st), France (1st), Britain (4th), Germany (1st), Switzerland (1st), Italy (1st), Spain (3rd). 1955: Argentina (1st), Monaco (Fastest lap), Belgium (1st), Holland (1st), Britain (2nd), Italy (1st). 1956: Argentina (1st) and Monaco (2nd).