1982 Formula One World Championship

The 1982 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 36th season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It included two competitions run over the course of the year, the 33rd Formula One World Championship for Drivers and the 25th Formula One World Championship for Constructors. The season featured sixteen rounds between 23 January and 25 September. The Drivers' Championship was won by Keke Rosberg and the Constructors' Championship by Scuderia Ferrari.

The Championship started with a drivers' strike at the season opener in South Africa and saw a partial race boycott as part of the ongoing FISA–FOCA war at the San Marino Grand Prix. Two drivers died during 1982: Gilles Villeneuve during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix and Riccardo Paletti at the start of the Canadian Grand Prix. Championship front-runner Didier Pironi also suffered a career-ending accident while qualifying for the German Grand Prix. These incidents and several other major accidents led to regulation changes to increase driver safety for the 1983 season. Motorsport journalist Nigel Roebuck later wrote that 1982 was "an ugly year, pock-marked by tragedy, by dissension, by greed, and yet, paradoxically, it produced some of the most memorable racing ever seen".^[1]

Eventual champion Rosberg won only one race all season – the Swiss Grand Prix – but consistency gave him the Drivers' Championship, five points clear of Pironi and John Watson. Rosberg was the second driver to win the championship having won only one race in the season, after Mike Hawthorn in 1958. Eleven different drivers from seven different teams won a race during the season, with no driver winning more than twice; there was also a run of nine different winners in nine consecutive races from the Monaco Grand Prix to the Swiss Grand Prix. Ferrari, who replaced Villeneuve with Patrick Tambay and Pironi with 1978 World Champion Mario Andretti, managed to score enough points to secure the Constructors' Championship, finishing five points clear of McLaren with Renault third.