F1 loves statistics. Seriously, we’ll give baseball and cricket fans a run for their money when it comes to a reverence for numbers.

From championship points to grid positions, seven decades of accumulated stats lay out the ongoing story of F1 in easily digestible facts and figures, team milestones, personal achievements and so on.

Our additions to the tally in 2022 feature some ups and some downs. It never shows the full picture, but if you like your data unfiltered, here’s the story of our season in numbers.

22 races, 20 countries

2022 equals the record for the most races in a season (set in 2021), with 22, spread across 20 countries, Italy (Imola-Monza) and the USA (Miami-COTA) being the lucky ducks to get two bites at the cherry. The last time those two countries doubled up in tandem was 1984, when we had the Imola and Monza either side of a mid-season jaunt to Detroit and Dallas.

Races in the points: 17

McLaren scored 24 times from 44 starts in 2022, with a best finish of third. Lando scored 17 times, Daniel seven (never when Lando didn’t). The flip-side of that stat is the five races where the team didn’t register. Nothing leaves a team – especially one expecting to score – quite so disgruntled as coming away from a track with nothing to show for it.

Unfortunately, shut-outs are par for the course in a sport as competitive as ours, and not always our fault – it could be said that bad luck played a role in Miami, Canada and Brazil. And the races where we were simply not competitive enough - such as the painful season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix - serve as valuable data. We may not want to re-live the events in Sakhir, but it played a key role in the improvements we made throughout the season, and in securing P5 and P6 just two races later. We live and we learn.

Pitstops: 805

Cars came through the pit-lane 805 times (including red flag stoppages and Safety Car detours) during 2022, for an average of 37 pit-stops per grand prix. McLaren made 84 stops across the season, an average of 3.8 stops per race. Surprisingly, and despite often running different strategies, both drivers had exactly the same number of stops, with 42.

The number of stops is much higher than in recent years, reflecting a willingness among teams to prioritise a fastest-way-to-the-flag race over securing track position. This, in turn, stems from the ability of the cars to overtake more readily in 2022 – up 30 per cent on 2021.

Fastest pit-stop: 1.98s

Daniel had the fastest pit-stop of the season in Mexico City. His 1.98s stop on Lap 44 at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez was the only stop under two seconds all season, as F1 got to grips with larger, heavier wheels and heavier, lower cars.

We finished second in the fastest pit-stop table, having taken the fastest stop at six races (Bahrain, Saudi, Emilia-Romagna, Austria, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi). We had the first and second fastest stops in Saudi, Mexico and Abu Dhabi.

Sets of tyres used: 440

Speaking of pit-stops, that's an awful lot of tyres. The team went through 440 sets, from Wets to Inters, Soft to Hard and all of the Mediums in-between, from free practice to qualifying and Sprints to grands prix, we ran on many different tyres in our pursuit of fastest laps and the chequered flag.

Fastest Laps: 2

Lando bagged us two fastest laps in the 2022 campaign: one in Round 5 in Monaco and the second in the season finale in Abu Dhabi, bagging us a valuable two extra points, and serving up an additional qualifying-style lap for the eyes to feast on.

Top Speed: 356km/h

The pre-season prediction was that the new, heavier cars would be a little down on pace in 2022. The expectation was that cars might be quicker on the straights and through high-speed corners, but slower in low speed (and, since cars spend longer in the low-speed corners, it tends to count for more).

Our fastest speed of the season through the Speed Trap came in the thin air at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, where Lando hit 356km/h, a marginal 0.4km/h down on our quickest time there in 2021.

Drivers: 4

Lando and Daniel were on the grid for each of the season’s 22 races – but the Sporting Regs for 2022 insisted that each driver had to sacrifice at least one practice session for a rookie – defined as a driver with two or fewer grand prix starts. We raided IndyCar for our rookie talent: Alex Palou subbed for Daniel in FP1 at the Circuit of the Americas, while Pato O’Ward drove Lando’s car in FP1 at Yas Marina.

Podiums: 1

Lando’s podium at Imola was our 494th, and the 399th race at which we’ve recorded a podium. Perhaps more statistically-relevant was that it represented the only time during the 2022 season that the top three places were not taken up by drivers from the top three teams in the Constructors’ Championship.

Laps completed: 2,448

Lando raced 1,253 laps in 2022, and Daniel 1,195. The MCL36 proved to be a reliable challenger, with just five DNF's all season, meaning that we completed an impressively large proportion of the 2,670 possible laps set out at the start of the season. 91.69%, to be precise, which was the third highest of the grid.

Longest back-to-back: 12,100km

2022 was the season for back-to-backs. We had eight pairs plus the triple-header of Belgium-Holland-Italy, meaning the only standalone races during the year were a peculiar early-season block that had Australia, Emilia-Romagna and Miami operating in splendid isolation.

As the crow flies (were it a very determined crow), the shortest distance between two races was the 236km between Francorchamps and Zandvoort. The longest was the 12,100km between Sao Paulo and Abu Dhabi. Are the long-haul back-to-backs tougher than the European back-to-backs? Not if you’re good at sleeping on a Boeing 777.

Championship position: 5th

After an excellent battle with Alpine in the second half of the season, we came up just short, finishing the year in fifth. It’s the seventh time we’ve finished in that position, after 1969, 1970, 1983, 2004, 2013 and 2014.

A valiant, but ultimately frustrating effort, but with lots learned, plenty of data gathered and a team of incredibly dedicated and hardworking heads determined to enjoy a better season next year. We may not have reached the end of the year yet, but we're already busy beavering away on the MCL37. Here’s hoping for better in 2023!

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