Painting the Colours: McLaren's First World Champion Throwback

Emerson Fittipaldi, F1 World Champion

The 2025 season marks the first time McLaren can take the driver’s championship since 2008 with Lewis Hamilton, but let us take a brief look back at the first McLaren world champion, Emerson Fittipaldi. 

On the 12th December 1946, in São Paulo, Brazil, Emerson Fittipaldi was born to the Brazilian motorsport journalist, Wilson Fittipaldi and his wife Józefa Wojciechowska. Alongside his brother, Wilson Fittipaldi Jr, the brothers had a passionate heart for motorsport, but the expenses came at a scare as their father could not afford to finance them into karting, but the brothers did not stop there. During their adolescent years, they became entrepreneurs working to fund their own karting expenses, building an enterprise from a single steering wheel for their mother to creating their very own Fittipaldi karts. Emerson Fittipaldi continued his journey to rightfully secure his name in the hall of fame at the age of 18, taking the Brazilian karting championship title. 

Turning his academics in mechanical engineering at university into being the driver in the seat, moving to England in 1969. He spent 1969 and 1970, becoming a Formula Ford winner, moving to Formula 3 in the same year and winning the championship, which earned him a Lotus contract in Formula 2 in 1970, where he joined Lotus on the Formula 1 grid in the seventh race of the season. 

The Brazilian Formula 1 driver debuted in 1970 at the Inaugural British Grand Prix with Lotus. In his debut season, he took his first victory in 1970 at the US Grand Prix and took his first pole two years later in Monaco, the same season he took his first pole to victory race win at the 1972 Belgian Grand Prix. The year in which he won five out of twelve races to secure his first world championship. He spent three seasons with Lotus until he left the team at the end of the 1973 season. 

Fittipaldi then moved on to join McLaren the following year in 1974, for two years until 1975. Within those two years, he won 5 races with McLaren and secured the championship with McLaren for McLaren’s first drivers’ title in 1974. During the same year, he took his last pole position to which he had won the Canadian Grand Prix with. In 1975, he stood on the top of the podium for the final time at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix and at the end of the season, he parted ways with McLaren after securing runner-up to Niki Lauda’s Ferrari.

He went on to embark on the journey with his brother to create the Fittipaldi Automotive Formula 1 team in 1974, the team in which he joined in 1976, after departing from McLaren, for four years until 1980 (being called Copersucar until 1979 and Fittipaldi from 1980 onwards). Emerson Fittipaldi took 2 podiums throughout his 4 years with the team. The Brazilian sugar money that sponsored the team so far had run out in 1980, which caused the team to seek funding. This year marked a decade since Fittipaldi had joined the sport and won two driver titles, but it was also the year that he announced his retirement from Formula 1. As the only Brazilian-based Formula 1 team crippled down, Fittipaldi returned to home soil to return to his family’s agricultural work and business. 

Fittipaldi’s racing story did not stop there as he went on to return to the world of racing in 1984 when he joined Indy Car and won the 1989 World Championship and took two wins at the Indianapolis 500, his first in 1989 and then again in 1993. Even though he left the prestigious level of Formula 1, his competitive racing gene grew stronger with success. 

Emerson Fittipaldi will always be in the top books in McLaren’s history, with him being listed as McLaren’s first driver’s champion! Ahead of the final two races in the 2025 season, where either one of the papaya-dressed driver can win the championship, this would be their first driver's title since Lewis Hamilton took his first title in 2008 with the team.

Written by Shaakirah Vangeria