Sepang 2026 · Stories
Seven Wins, Including the Very First
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
No team won at Sepang more than Ferrari. Seven victories — starting with the very first race the circuit ever held.
October 1999. The Malaysian Grand Prix didn't exist yet, and then, suddenly, it did — a brand-new Hermann Tilke circuit in the jungle outside Kuala Lumpur, all sweeping curves and impossible humidity. Eddie Irvine won it for Ferrari. The first name in the Sepang record book is written in red.
Then came the Schumacher years, and they were exactly as crushing as you'd expect. Michael won here in 2000, 2001, and 2004 — the high-water mark of the most dominant stretch any team has ever had in this sport. Sepang in those years wasn't really a race; it was a coronation with extra steps. The red cars would qualify up front, disappear into the heat haze, and come back an hour and a half later with the trophy.
Kimi Räikkönen's 2008 win was the bridge between eras — the Iceman at his coolest, holding off the chaos that Sepang always threatened. And then 2012: Fernando Alonso, in a Ferrari that had no business winning anything, drove one of the great wet-weather races of his life through a monsoon-soaked afternoon. If you want to understand why people talk about Alonso the way they do, watch that race. The car was fourth-best. The driver was first.
The last one belongs to Sebastian Vettel, 2015 — his second race in red, his first win for Ferrari, and the moment the whole paddock realized the German might just do it again in a different uniform. Seven wins. Nobody else is close.
Here's what I love about the Ferrari-Sepang story: it spans the entire life of the Malaysian Grand Prix, first race to last. Irvine's win opened the book in 1999. The Schumacher era filled the middle chapters. Alonso's rain dance and Vettel's red debut wrote the late passages. When Formula 1 left Sepang after 2017, Ferrari left as the circuit's most successful team by a distance — and nothing about this weekend can change that, because history doesn't get rewritten by return visits.
Seven wins. The first, the most, and every era in between. Nobody conquered Sepang like Ferrari.