There have been bigger days in Formula 1. But few had quite this family dynamic: on 1 May 1972, at the Circuit de Jarama outside Madrid, Emerson and Wilson Fittipaldi lined up together on an F1 grid for the first time, making them the first brothers to start the same World Championship race.
The Fittipaldis were Brazil’s great F1 export of the early 1970s, and they arrived in the sport together in spirit if not quite in step.
Emerson Fittipaldi
- Races (starts):144
- Wins:14
- Podiums:35
- Pole positions:6
- Fastest laps:6
- Driver of the Day:0
- World titles:2
- Points (total):281
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
Emerson, the younger of the two, had already established himself as something genuinely special. By the time the 1972 season opened, he was a Grand Prix winner, a rising star at Lotus, and the man Jacky Ickx and Jackie Stewart would spend the year chasing.
Wilson had taken the longer road in. He was competitive in his own right, but always in orbit around a brother who was difficult to outshine.
At Jarama, they were on the same grid, in different cars, with different realistic ambitions for the afternoon.
Wilson Fittipaldi Júnior
- Races (starts):35
- Wins:0
- Podiums:0
- Pole positions:0
- Fastest laps:0
- Driver of the Day:0
- World titles:0
- Points (total):3
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
Emerson was in the Lotus 72, one of the most effective racing cars of its era.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zantafio56/, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson was in a less competitive machine, doing what many drivers of that generation did: finding seat time where he could and building a career in a sport that rewarded persistence.
The race itself
The Spanish Grand Prix on 1 May 1972 belonged to Emerson.
He won it, adding another result to what would become a championship year.
Wilson finished, which was its own kind of success in the attrition-heavy Formula 1 of the early seventies.
No two brothers had previously started the same F1 World Championship race. The Fittipaldis did it almost as a matter of course, two Brazilians from São Paulo navigating the same sport from slightly different vantage points.
Copersucar-Fittipaldi
Wilson would go on to found the Copersucar-Fittipaldi team in the mid-1970s, eventually bringing Emerson back from McLaren to race under their own family name.
That project, romantic and underfunded in roughly equal measure, became one of the more bittersweet chapters in Brazilian F1 history.
But that came later.
On 1 May 1972, at Jarama, it was simply two brothers on the grid. Emerson on his way to a world title. Wilson doing what he could with what he had. A small piece of F1 history, filed under Family.
