Believe it or not, narrowing down the drivers you want to start your beer brand with to only 6 is a tough job. After all, there have been 774 of them in the history of F1 – among which 113 winners of a Grand Prix and 34 winners of the world title! In this short article we try to explain exactly how we managed to select ONLY 6 for our very first collection.

Let’s start here

The initial idea wasn’t even to have any drivers in the first place! We actually wanted to have a different beer for each grand prix of the 2023 season. One for Bahrain, one for Saudi, one for Australia… you get the idea. Each of them would’ve had a short track description, list of previous winners and a QR code leading you to a page where you can discuss the race with us and other fans. Obviously, the point was to add to the experience of each race weekend. 

So why did we scrap the idea? Well, we decided to do some research and ask 40-50 hardcore fans of the sport what they actually wanted. The results? Almost everyone said they wanted a beer with either contemporary or legendary drivers, but the ones in support of the latter prevailed. And, well, we listened!

Legendary drivers… But which ones?

So far, so good. But the toughest part was still ahead of us. At that point we had already talked to several breweries and we had come to a sad realization – it was not possible to have more than 6 different labels considering our budget. How on earth can one select only 6 great drivers??? We now had two choices – scrap this idea too, or define it very very tightly, and even then we could never not leave someone out. 

Still, we went for the second option, because it’s what fans seemed to want the most. Us included. But boy, did we have a tough time defining the limits for a legendary driver collection. We’ll spare you the details, but eventually we reached the following conclusion – we needed to select a specific period which is recent enough to us in order for the most amount of fans to relate, but it must include as many of the greatest drivers of all time. Luckily we had the 90s – with drivers such as Senna, Prost, and Schumacher, of which any F1 fan would likely point one as the best of the best. That was all set. But who should be the other three then?

Well, the other championship winners in the 90s were Mansell, Hill, Villeneuve and Hakkinen. Good, we can go for Mansell and Hakkinen and choose between Hill and Villeneuve. Done, right? Right? Yeah, not so fast. 

Even though Michael obviously won 2 titles in the 90s, he’s much much more respected and well-regarded for his 5 titles at Ferrari between 2000-2004. So we couldn’t launch a beer brand featuring legendary drivers with Michael in his Benetton overalls. We could’ve done it for another collection, but not for the launch for heaven’s sake!

Plus, you can obviously notice that our slogan comes from something Kimi said – someone who we personally regard as one of the great drivers in history – dude raced in 30% of all F1 races EVER, is still Ferrari’s last championship winning drivers and is in the top 5 drivers in terms of podiums in the sport.

Which is why our driver selection took one final twist. We defined it as legendary drivers between 1990-2009 only to be able to have Michael in a Ferrari and Kimi… well at all!

What about the ones you left out – why not Alonso, Hamilton, Vettel, etc.?

Well, we can’t obviously put drivers who are still racing as legendary ones – not because they aren’t, it’s just they still have some history to write! And as you’ll see on the back of the box, we have the number of wins, podiums, and championships that each of our six drivers have achieved. So yeah, that explains why we had to leave Fernando and Lewis behind. Sebastian – he didn’t win a championship during the defined period of 1990-2009, which made things easier.

We would have loved to have these, as well as Button, and the other two mentioned drivers – Hill and Villeneuve. However, as you can see – selecting only 6 champions out of 34 is a tough tough job. We promise that we will make other collections which will include everyone you would want to. In fact, our next idea is to make a 3-pack with Hamilton, Vettel, and Alonso. 

You can help us get to that point faster by getting the beer we have now. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to find out when we have anything new in the store!