World champion with only one championship lead in his entire F1 career? That's possible!

(Motorsport-Total.com) - You have to be at the front at the right moment; everything else beforehand doesn't count. What applies to race wins, when you've led every lap but suffer an engine failure on the last lap, also applies to an entire World Championship.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter who was leading after races one, five, or twelve in the World Championship. What matters is having the most points at the very end of the season. Few know this better than Sebastian Vettel, who, in his first World Championship title in 2010, was ahead after only one race: the season finale in Abu Dhabi.

Previously, the World Championship lead had changed hands a total of ten times between Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Jenson Button, Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton, but the "laughing sixth" in Abu Dhabi was the German, who took the crown for the first time.

However, Vettel is not one of the ten world champions with the fewest number of championship leads, because in his three subsequent world championship titles, the then Red Bull driver was at the top of the championship significantly more often.

This photo series, however, is about precisely those drivers who were least often at the top in their Formula 1 careers - and yet still became world champions.

Sometimes it's enough to lead the championship for a single race – like Sebastian Vettel, who became world champion in 2010 after only being in the lead after the finale in Abu Dhabi. However, the German was, of course, the world championship leader many more times later on, and therefore doesn't make the cut for the photo gallery of the 10 champions with the fewest championship leads .

Of course, there are some drivers from the earliest times, because in the 50s and 60s there weren't as many races and therefore there were fewer opportunities to be at the front.

But drivers who were active in this millennium can also be found on the list – including Kimi Räikkönen, who also took the lead in the final race of 2007 (although he had held it briefly before). The "Iceman" was also in the lead for a time in 2003, and later in 2008 and 2013.

Two other drivers were significantly more "efficient": Each of them needed just one World Championship lead in their entire career to go down in Formula 1 history as world champions. Find out which ones they are in the photo gallery .