F1 Driver of the Day: Who has won the award in F1 2022?

First introduced in 2016, the Driver of the Day award is voted for by fans and awarded to the driver with the highest percentage of the vote at the time of closing, which is the penultimate lap of a race.

Romain Grosjean won the first award back at the 2016 Australian Grand Prix before repeating the feat at the next race in Bahrain.

Heading into the 2022 season, a total of 121 awards had been handed out with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen scooping the most so far.

Here are all the winners of the award so far in 2022 and what they did to achieve it:

Charles Leclerc

Ferrari proved they meant business in the opening race of the season and so did Leclerc. He stormed to pole in Sakhir before holding off the Red Bull of Verstappen, who would later go on to DNF in what threatened to be a recurring theme of the team’s season. The Italian team’s day was made even better when Carlos Sainz finished behind Leclerc to give Ferrari the one-two.

Leclerc’s 28.3% share of the vote is the highest achieved by a driver so far this season.

Meanwhile Kevin Magnussen came just shy of scooping the award himself after impressing with a P5 on his return to the sport.

Charles Leclerc – 28.3%

Kevin Magnussen – 22.5%

Max Verstappen – 9%

Lewis Hamilton – 5.1%

Zhou Guanyu – 5%

Charles Leclerc

He may not have won the race but Leclerc picked up the Driver of the Day award for the second time in as many races, largely due to his epic battle with Verstappen.

The pair’s wheel-to-wheel fight demonstrated how much of a game changer the 2022 regulations are as we saw close-up battles for the first time. With eight laps remaining, Verstappen caught up with Leclerc but the Ferrari man was smart in allowing the Dutchman to overtake so that it would be him and not