Formula 1 is a ruthless business, but the paddock has always harboured a mischievous side. From legendary World Champions to the newest faces on the grid, drivers and engineers have spent decades keeping each other on edge away from the stopwatch.
Few partnerships matched the sheer scale of Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger's antics at McLaren between 1990 and 1992. Berger once enlisted a hotel concierge—handing over $100—to help collect approximately 50 frogs from a golf course during a trip to Australia. With assistance from Ron Dennis' wife Lisa, the Austrian scattered the amphibians through Senna's hotel room. When a furious Senna confronted him the following morning, Berger asked if he had found the snake yet (yes, that snake did not exist). Berger also replaced Senna's passport photo with an inappropriate image and threw his supposedly indestructible briefcase out of a helicopter, while Senna retaliated by filling Berger's shoes with shaving foam.
Decades later, Ferrari team-mates Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz kept things slightly simpler. For Sainz' 28th birthday in September 2022, Leclerc spent roughly 15 minutes squeezed inside a cupboard in his team-mate's driver room before bursting out with confetti, though some accidentally landed in the birthday boy's coffee.
Press conferences and team radios have also served as stages for chaos. At the 2012 German Grand Prix, Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel noticed Nico Rosberg's microphone was turned up much louder than the rest. Schumacher encouraged Vettel to push Rosberg's microphone closer to his mouth, resulting in an increasingly distorted answer that left the surrounding drivers struggling not to laugh. Back at the 1999 Canadian Grand Prix, Eddie Irvine interrupted Mika Hakkinen's post-race interviews by throwing a towel at the McLaren driver, sparking a water-soaked exchange.
Engineers aren't immune, either. At the 2011 Japanese Grand Prix, Sauber driver Sergio Perez started 17th and climbed to eighth. On the final lap, Perez radioed his team to announce a sudden engine failure and loss of power. His engineer Marco Schupbach urged him to keep pushing, only for Perez to reveal it was a joke after crossing the line. Schupbach got his revenge by falsely claiming team-mate Kamui Kobayashi had finished fourth (when he was actually 13th), and later teamed up with the Sauber crew ahead of the 2012 Belgian Grand Prix to fit a fake rain button to Perez's steering wheel under the guise of testing new wet-weather technology.
The prank wars continue into the current era. Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli and his race engineer Peter 'Bono' Bonnington have engaged in an ongoing feud involving a cream cake to the face during 2025 pre-season testing in Bahrain, a water pistol chase in the paddock witnessed by Lewis Hamilton, and hot sauce secretly added to Antonelli's water bottle. In May, Antonelli had Bono's security pass deactivated at Mercedes HQ in Brackley, though the tables turned in September at the Italian Grand Prix when Mercedes mechanics ambushed Antonelli with whipped cream for his 20th birthday. Meanwhile, Antonelli admitted he hasn't dared to prank Team Principal Toto Wolff yet.
At the traditional end-of-season drivers' dinner ahead of the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, tensions between Max Verstappen and George Russell from the previous race weekend in Qatar inspired a prank. The rest of the grid deliberately left a seat free beside Verstappen for Russell. When Russell arrived, Verstappen cheerfully told him they saved him a seat, but Russell simply picked up the chair, carried it to the opposite end of the table, and sat alongside his then-Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton, much to the amusement of Liam Lawson and the other drivers.
Niki Lauda even managed to turn his own history into a joke. In 2013, ahead of the release of the film Rush depicting his rivalry with James Hunt, Lauda returned to the Nurburgring with an American television crew. While discussing his severe 1976 accident, he bent down, retrieved a biscuit he had discreetly placed in the grass, and jokingly announced he had discovered his missing ear.
The newest generation is keeping the tradition alive at Racing Bulls, where Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad have been plotting against each other. Lawson teamed up with Sky Sports F1 presenters Simon Lazenby and Naomi Schiff in October to trick his rookie team-mate into a staged TV interview, while Lindblad retaliated using a hidden earpiece to direct Lawson through awkward paddock challenges—including stealing Charles Leclerc's microphone mid-interview. McLaren's Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri also joined in during a media day karting challenge at Silverstone in July, where Norris operated the pedals of a two-person kart and drove away with Piastri still aboard, causing his team-mate to lose his hat.
