Alfa Romeo and the First Championships

With a prewar design and a small budget, Alfa Romeo's works team won ten of the first championship Grands Prix and both of the first drivers' titles.

Alfa Romeo arrived at the start of the World Championship with a long Grand Prix pedigree. Its P2 and P3 cars had been winners before the war, and for much of the 1930s its racing was run by Enzo Ferrari's Scuderia Ferrari. Once the factory's Alfa Corse took control again, it built the 158 for 1938, the small supercharged car known as the Alfetta, which dominated Grand Prix racing in 1947 and 1948. The works team, run by the company from Milan, sat out 1949 and returned for the new championship.

The very first World Championship race, the 1950 British Grand Prix, went to Nino Farina, with Luigi Fagioli and Reg Parnell completing an Alfa Romeo sweep of the podium. That season Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio won every championship round the team entered, three each, and Farina became the first world champion.

For 1951 the car was developed into the 159, and Ferrari became a real threat. Fangio won the Swiss and Spanish Grands Prix and shared victory in France with Fagioli, Farina won in Belgium, and Fangio took the title at the final round in Spain. The team did all this on a modest budget, using engine blocks built before the war.

It was the end of the first chapter. Facing a new car's cost, Alfa Romeo's state owned parent withdrew the team before 1952. In its two championship seasons the works Alfettas started 13 races and won ten. The company came back as a constructor from 1979 to 1985 without a win, and the name returned to the grid from 2019 to 2023 on cars built by Sauber.

Drivers