Winning a Formula 1 World Championship is one of the hardest things a person can do in sport. You need a fast car, a reliable engine, a great team around you, and apart from all these, you yourself need to be an exceptional driver.
But there are some drivers in the sports who didn’t just win the F1 title, but won with different teams, and more than once.
The drivers who have won the Formula 1 title more than once and with different teams showcased the versatility they have, which is very rare.
Let’s have a look at some of these drivers and know about them in detail.
Top 5 Drivers Who Won F1 Titles With Different Teams
Here are five drivers who won Formula One World Championships with more than one team.
| Driver | Total Titles | Teams |
| Juan Manuel Fangio | 5 | Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari |
| Michael Schumacher | 7 | Benetton, Ferrari |
| Alain Prost | 4 | McLaren, Williams |
| Lewis Hamilton | 7 | McLaren, Mercedes |
| Sebastian Vettel | 4 | Red Bull, Ferrari |
1. Juan Manuel Fangio
Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentine driver, won five World Drivers’ Championships between 1951 and 1957, and he did it with four completely different teams.
He is the only driver ever to achieve that feat, and no one has come close to repeating it.
Juan Fangio won his first title in 1951 with Alfa Romeo. The following year, Alfa Romeo withdrew from the sport due to a rule change, and Fangio found himself without a car.
He eventually returned with Maserati and, in 1954, made a remarkable mid-season switch to Mercedes-Benz, winning enough races with both teams that year to claim his second championship.
In 1955, driving the famous silver Mercedes W196, Juan dominated again and won his third title. When Mercedes withdrew from the sport at the end of 1955 following a tragic crash at Le Mans, Fangio moved to Ferrari, where his team-mate Peter Collins famously handed over his own car in the final race to help Fangio win enough points for the title. That fourth championship came in 1956.
Then, aged 46, Fangio returned to Maserati one last time in 1957 and won a fifth and final championship. He retired in 1958, but his record of five championships has stood the same for 46 years. He won 24 of the 52 races he entered, which remains the highest winning percentage in Formula 1 history.
2. Michael Schumacher
Before Lewis Hamilton came along, Michael Schumacher was the undisputed king of Formula 1. The German driver won a total of seven World Championships, two with Benetton and five with Ferrari, making him the first driver to win championships with two different teams in the modern era.
Schumacher arrived in Formula 1 in 1991, driving for Jordan and then Benetton. By 1994, he was the best driver on the grid. He won his first championship that year with Benetton. He defended that title in 1995, winning nine races and becoming the youngest two-time world champion in Formula 1 history at the time.
Then came the decision that changed everything. At the end of 1995, Schumacher signed for Ferrari. It took four years of hard work, rebuilding, and near-misses before Schumacher finally delivered.
In 2000, he won Ferrari’s first Drivers’ title in 21 years. What followed was one of the most dominant periods in F1 history: he won the championship again in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004, giving him five consecutive titles with the Scuderia and seven in total.
His 2002 season was so dominant that he finished on the podium in every single race. He also holds the record for the most fastest laps ever recorded in F1 history.
Schumacher retired in 2006. He made a comeback with Mercedes between 2010 and 2012, but did not win a race during that period.
3. Alain Prost
Alain Prost is known as ‘the professor’ of Formula 1. He earned that nickname not because of flashy overtaking moves or wheel-to-wheel battles, but because he raced with a level of calculation and intelligence that made it almost impossible to beat him over a full season.
He won four F1 World Championships, three with McLaren and one with Williams.
Prost joined McLaren in 1984 and came close to his first championship that year, losing it to teammate Niki Lauda by just half a point. He corrected his mistake the next year, winning the 1985 title to become the first French World Champion in Formula 1.
He defended it successfully in 1986 in a dramatic season finale in Adelaide, where he won both the race and the championship.
A third title came in 1989 in some controversial circumstances, when a collision with his McLaren team-mate Ayrton Senna at the Japanese Grand Prix ended both their races but handed Alain Prost the championship by the rules of the day.
Prost left McLaren for Ferrari in 1990, but the Italian team’s car was not good enough, and after a winless 1991 season, Ferrari sacked him before the season had even finished.
Then, after a year away from racing, he returned in 1993 with Williams-Renault, which was the most dominant car on the grid and there he took his fourth and final championship with seven race wins.
Faced with the prospect of Senna joining Williams as his team-mate for 1994, Alain Prost chose to retire rather than continue that rivalry.
4. Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton is one of the two drivers in Formula 1 history to have won seven World Championships, and he did it across two different teams: McLaren and Mercedes.
Lewis Hamilton arrived in Formula 1 with McLaren in 2007 as a complete unknown to most fans, and immediately showed that he was something different. In his very first season, he nearly won the championship as a rookie, losing just by a single point in the final race.
A year later, in 2008, he put that right. In the most dramatic finale, Hamilton became the then-youngest World Champion in history. He won that title with McLaren.
Then came a decision that most people in the paddock thought was risky: at the end of 2012, Hamilton left McLaren to join Mercedes.
Mercedes was the team that had not been a championship contender for years. But Lewis Hamilton backed his judgment, signed the contract, and moved. It turned out to be one of the most important decisions of his career.
In 2014, Mercedes introduced a new engine formula that the team had been preparing for years, and they were immediately dominant.
Lewis Hamilton won 11 races and took his second championship. He won again in 2015, then again in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Six titles with Mercedes alone.
He also holds the records for race wins (106) and pole positions (104) in Formula 1 history.
Lewis Hamilton moved to Ferrari in 2025 and, though his first season was difficult, he won his 106th career race at the Barcelona Grand Prix in June 2026, becoming the first driver in history to win a Grand Prix for three different constructor families.
5. Sebastian Vettel
Sebastian Vettel won four consecutive Formula 1 World Championships between 2010 and 2013.
Sebastian Vettel arrived at Red Bull in 2009, having already made history the previous year by becoming the youngest race winner in Formula 1 history.
At Red Bull, alongside the brilliant designer Adrian Newey, he became unstoppable. In 2010, in one of the most dramatic finales in F1 history, Vettel went into the final race in Abu Dhabi fourth in the championship standings and came out as World Champion.
He was 23 years old, the youngest World Champion in Formula 1 history, a record that still stands today.
What followed was total domination. He won the championship again in 2011 by a huge margin, taking 11 victories in 19 races. He won again in 2012 in another final-race decider, and again in 2013, that time with nine consecutive race victories. By the end of 2013, aged just 26, he had four world titles and looked set to build a legacy.
Then, Vettel decided to leave his championship-winning team and go to Ferrari. He joined the Scuderia in 2015 with the brief to bring Ferrari back to the top. In 2017 and 2018, he came desperately close. Both years, he went into the second half of the season leading the championship, only to lose it to Lewis Hamilton in the closing races.
After a difficult 2019 and 2020 with Ferrari, during which the team’s car fell away from the front of the grid, Vettel moved to Aston Martin for 2021 and 2022 before retiring at the end of that season. He finished his career with 53 race wins, 57 pole positions, and four World Championships.
