Why Going 24-0 Is Nearly Impossible

A perfect season sounds like it should just require a great car. It doesn’t — it requires everything to go right, 24 times in a row. That’s a completely different, and much harder, problem. Here’s the math.

Losses compound; wins don’t forgive

To go 24-0 you must win all 24 races. If your chance of winning any single race is p, your chance of sweeping the whole season is p multiplied by itself 24 times (p²⁴). That exponent is merciless:

Per-race win chance	Chance of a 24-0 season
99%	~79%
95%	~29%
90%	~8%
85%	~2%
80%	~0.5%

Look at the 90% row. A car that wins nine of every ten races is generationally dominant — better than almost anything in F1 history — and it still only sweeps a full season about one time in twelve. Drop to 85%, itself an elite rate, and a perfect season happens less than once in fifty attempts.

This is exactly what real history shows

The record books line up with the math. The most dominant seasons ever ran at these very rates and still fell short:

• Red Bull, 2023: 21 wins from 22 — a ~95% team win rate. Historic. Not perfect.
• McLaren, 1988: 15 from 16 — ~94%. One collision at Monza away from immortality.
• Mercedes, 2016: 19 from 21 — ~90%.

Every one of them was in the 90–95% band where, per the table above, a clean sweep only happens 8–29% of the time. They were dominant, the dice simply didn’t fall perfectly across a whole year.

The things that cost that one race

Per-race win probability is never really 100%, because a Formula 1 weekend has too many ways to go wrong:

• Reliability: an engine, gearbox or hydraulic failure ends a race regardless of pace.
• Weather: a wet race compresses the field and rewards gambles.
• Safety cars and red flags: they reshuffle strategy and hand rivals a free roll of the dice.
• A rival’s perfect weekend: occasionally another team simply nails everything.
• Contact: one first-lap incident, and it’s over.

Any one of these, on any one of 24 weekends, ends a perfect run.

How 24-0 the game reflects this

The 24-0 game is tuned to mirror exactly this curve. Even an elite draft — a dominant car, two top drivers, the right principal — only goes 24-0 a mid-teens percentage of the time. A merely-good team does it a few percent of the time. An average team, essentially never. That spread isn’t an accident; it’s calibrated so that a perfect season stays a genuine, rare achievement, just as it is in real life. Build the best team you can, and you’re still fighting the same exponent that has beaten every real F1 team for 75 years.