1996

Pos	Driver	Nat	Car	Pts	Wins	Share of the leader
1	Damon Hill	British	Williams	97	8
2	Jacques VilleneuveVIL	Canadian	Williams	78	4
3	Michael SchumacherMSC	German	Ferrari	59	3
4	Jean Alesi	French	Benetton	47	0
5	Mika Häkkinen	Finnish	McLaren	31	0
6	Gerhard Berger	Austrian	Benetton	21	0
7	David CoulthardCOU	British	McLaren	18	0
8	Rubens BarrichelloBAR	Brazilian	Jordan	14	0
9	Olivier Panis	French	Ligier	13	1
10	Eddie Irvine	British	Ferrari	11	0
11	Martin Brundle	British	Jordan	8	0
12	Heinz-Harald Frentzen	German	Sauber	7	0
13	Mika Salo	Finnish	Tyrrell	5	0
14	Johnny Herbert	British	Sauber	4	0
15	Pedro Diniz	Brazilian	Ligier	2	0
16	Jos Verstappen	Dutch	Footwork	1	0
—	Luca BadoerBAD	Italian	Forti	0	0
—	Giancarlo FisichellaFIS	Italian	Minardi	0	0
—	Ukyo Katayama	Japanese	Tyrrell	0	0
—	Pedro Lamy	Portuguese	Minardi	0	0
—	GLGiovanni Lavaggi	Italian	Minardi	0	0
—	Tarso Marques	Brazilian	Minardi	0	0
—	Andrea Montermini	Italian	Forti	0	0
—	Ricardo Rosset	Brazilian	Footwork	0	0

Read from the season’s final standings row, never summed from the race results. 8 of 24 entries in this table carry no championship position and are ruled below the placed field, ordered by points.

Read from the season’s final constructor standings row. A constructor scores through both of its cars, so these totals are not the sum of any one driver’s line above.

Both championship tables on this page are read from the season’s standings rows at round 16, the last round loaded, and neither is derived by adding up the race results. That distinction is the whole point: for most of the sport’s history only a driver’s best few results counted toward the title, a race stopped short paid half points, and a driver could be excluded from a championship he had scored in, so a table built by summing the results column would disagree with the championship as it was actually awarded. Positions are the source’s own; where it recorded none, the row prints a dash and sits below the placed field rather than being given a place it never held or dropped from the page. A points total is printed as it is stored, to two decimals where it needs them, because the sport has awarded half points and split shared drives since the 1950s and those fractions are real. The calendar is every round in the archive for 1996, in round order, with the winner taken from the classification code the source prints rather than from its sort key; three of the 1,161 races loaded were won by a shared car, and for those the calendar names one driver while the race classification credits both. The Cars column counts the rows in each race’s classification, which includes cars that retired, so it is entries with a recorded result rather than a count of cars that took the start. The drivers and constructors counted in the masthead are those that appear in a race result for 1996, not those that entered. The constructors’ championship has been awarded since 1958, so both tables exist for this season. 1996 is complete: all 16 rounds are loaded and both tables are final.