1980 Formula One Season

The 1980 Formula One season was the 31st season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 1980 World Championship of Drivers and the 1980 International Cup for F1 Constructors which were contested concurrently from January 13 to October 5 over a fourteen race series. The season also included one non-championship race, the 1980 Spanish Grand Prix.

After the season got off to a bad start (the first 3 races were nearly boycotted; the first 2 due to safety concerns with both the Buenos Aires and Interlagos circuits and the third because of a dispute between FISA and FOCA), the Drivers’ Championship was won by Australian Alan Jones in a Williams and Williams took the Constructors award, the first of many Formula One titles for the English team. The season was marred however by a number of accidents; veteran Clay Regazzoni was paralyzed from the waist down after a huge accident at Long Beach and never raced in Formula One again, Frenchman Patrick Depailler lost his life on August 1 while testing for Alfa Romeo at Hockenheim and Jean-Pierre Jabouille broke both legs after a head-on crash at Montreal and was out for the remainder of the season, to name a few.