September 3, 1950: Nino Farina Becomes Formula One's First World Champion

Today in 1950 · Sunday, September 3, 1950

The Alfa Romeo 158 Alfetta, the car Nino Farina drove to the first Formula One World Championship

The Alfa Romeo 158 Alfetta, the car Nino Farina drove to the first Formula One World Championship · Drawing by Jiri Zemlicka, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza, Giuseppe 'Nino' Farina won the Italian Grand Prix — and with it, the first Formula One World Drivers' Championship ever awarded. Motor racing had crowned champions before, but 1950 was the inaugural season of the unified world championship, and Farina, driving for Alfa Romeo, closed it as the man in front.

The title came down to the final round. Farina finished the season with 30 points to Juan Manuel Fangio's 27 — beating the Argentine teammate who would go on to dominate the decade with five world titles of his own. At Monza, in front of the home crowd, the 43-year-old Italian sealed it with a win.

Every world championship since — from Fangio to Senna to Hamilton — traces its lineage to the trophy decided this Sunday afternoon in 1950. Someone had to be first. It was Farina.

Also on this day

  • David Ben-Gurion proposed the creation of Israel bonds to finance the young state's development.
  • In Korea, the Great Naktong Offensive raged along the Pusan Perimeter, with UN forces holding at Masan, Taegu and the Naktong Bulge.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — a folk song adapted by Lead Belly, who died broke in December 1949 — one year before it became the biggest hit of 1950. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: “Sunset Boulevard” kept filling houses, with silent-era legends — Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Cecil B. DeMille — playing versions of themselves.
⚾ In sports: The Labor Day standings showed the Phillies a comfortable seven games up on Brooklyn, and the Yankees clinging to a two-game AL edge with Detroit and Boston charging.

Sources: Formula1.com: official F1 history · France24: 70 years of Formula One · Wikipedia: September 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

Read nearby dates in 1950

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Postcard Heart – The 1950s Doo-Wop Love Letter That Never Needed a Stamp v.21

Image
Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 1 ▶ The player starts right at this track (00:00). Let it keep playing for the full album. He only meant to buy a postcard. Blue sky, a little red canoe — the kind you send to someone far away with a line like "wish you were here." He was still writing it in his neatest hand when she walked past the postcard stand, and suddenly there was no faraway town worth wishing about. That is the whole heart of this song, and of the album that takes its name from it. The doo-wah harmonies bounce like a stamped envelope skipping across a mail sorter, while the lead vocal keeps one hand on the counter, half in love already. By the second verse they are taking the long way past the square, and a small heart drawn next to a name has quietly re-addressed his whole life. If you have ever mailed your feelings to the wrong distance, this opener sets them straight: the only address that matters is standing right in front of you. I...
Read more

August 23, 1950: The Flood After the Great Assam Earthquake

Image
Today in 1950 · Wednesday, August 23, 1950 Crew on the deck of a Brahmaputra River steamer, Assam region, 1895 — the river basin devastated by the 1950 earthquake · William Henry Jackson, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In late August 1950, the aftermath of one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded was still unfolding in northeast India. The magnitude 8.6 Assam-Tibet earthquake of August 15 — among the ten most powerful instrumentally recorded quakes in history — had sent enormous landslides into Himalayan river valleys, damming rivers including the Subansiri. About a week after the quake, the natural dam on the Subansiri burst. An eyewitness account preserved by the Assam Times records that the river 'remained blocked for five days' before a midnight flood surged through with twelve to fourteen feet of water, obliterating everything in its path. In the villages of Torajan and Ghasigaon, the account says, there were no survivors — not even...
Read more

Crying in the Chapel: The Orioles' 1953 Hit and Songwriter

Image
The Story Behind the Song · The Orioles, 1953 The Orioles in an early press photo by James J. Kriegsmann, taken before 1954 · Shaw Artists Corporation, published without copyright notice, public domain Who wrote Crying in the Chapel? Artie Glenn wrote "Crying in the Chapel," first recorded by his son Darrell Glenn on Valley Records. The Orioles recorded their version on June 30, 1953, and Jubilee released it that July. Their recording became a No. 1 R&B hit and crossed over to the pop charts. The Orioles’ Crying in the Chapel: the 1953 charts What happened next is the part worth remembering. By the Billboard issue dated September 5, 1953, the Orioles' record stood at No. 1 on both of the magazine's rhythm-and-blues charts at once — National Best Sellers and Most Played in Juke Boxes. A week later it was No. 11 on the pop Best Selling Singles chart. And it was not alone there: on a single page of that September 12 issue, four different versions of the sam...
Read more