Google is founded and Titanic cleans up at the Oscars – What was happening in the world when McLaren last won the constructors’ title

With six races remaining in the 2024 season, McLaren currently lead the constructors’ standings by 41 points from Red Bull, having overtaken the Milton Keynes outfit at the top following Round 17 in Azerbaijan.
This marked the first time that the Woking squad had held P1 in the teams’ table since March 2014 – but, should they hold that position until the season’s end and win the championship, it will herald the end of a 26-year wait to do so.
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Yes, McLaren’s last constructors’ title came on November 1 1998 at the Japanese Grand Prix, with Mika Hakkinen claiming his eighth win of the campaign – and the team’s ninth – to seal his debut drivers’ championship as well as the teams’ crown.
But what else was happening in the world when the papaya outfit claimed their eighth constructors’ championship? Let’s take a trip down memory lane to find out…
At the start of the 1998 campaign, Jacques Villeneuve was the reigning world champion, having beaten Michael Schumacher to the 1997 title following an infamous collision at the season finale in Jerez which resulted in Schumacher being disqualified from the championship.
Villeneuve’s Williams team, meanwhile, had claimed their second consecutive constructors’ title ahead of Ferrari and Benetton – with McLaren down in fourth.
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However, there was change happening at the Woking outfit; Adrian Newey had joined from Williams as their new Technical Director and, while he had arrived too late to influence the team’s 1997 car, he focused on the MP4/13 for 1998 – which would go on to become a dominant force and bring the squad both championships.
For Williams, 1998 proved to be a winless campaign, with McLaren and Ferrari taking every victory bar one after Damon Hill scored his final F1 win for Jordan at the Belgian Grand Prix.
One quarter of today’s grid had not yet been born in 1998. McLaren’s current pairing of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were yet to arrive into the world, as were their fellow 2024 drivers Zhou Guanyu, Yuki Tsunoda and Franco Colapinto.
But what of those who were around back then? Coincidentally, there were three world champions on the grid at the beginning of 1998 – Schumacher, Hill and Villeneuve – which marks the same number of title winners that are active in 2024 – step forward Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
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So what were the champions of today doing back in 1998? Well, Alonso, Hamilton and Verstappen were 17, 13 and one years old respectively, so Verstappen’s racing career would not start for another few years.
Alonso had been climbing the ranks in karting world championships and would go on to make his single-seater debut in Formula Nissan in 1999.
Hamilton, meanwhile, had also been impressing in karting, so much so that he joined the McLaren Young Driver Development Programme in 1998 – three years after famously telling Ron Dennis at an awards ceremony that he would one day drive one of his cars. The rest is history.
Drives like the one seen in the video below were helping the Briton to catch the eye, with the youngster going from the back of the field to win a Formula Junior Intercontinental karting race at Buckmore Park in Kent, England.
In football, Arsenal had won the Premier League title in the 1997/98 season – the first full campaign for manager Arsene Wenger, who had also become the first manager from outside of the United Kingdom to win a league title in the country. They had also taken victory in the FA Cup.
The London team would, however, go on to lose in the Premier League to Manchester United by one point in the 1998/99 campaign.
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On the world stage, the FIFA World Cup had taken place from June to July, with host country France beating Brazil 3-0 in the final to prove victorious.
Elsewhere in the summer of 1998, Pete Sampras had won the men’s singles at Wimbledon, marking the fifth of his seven wins in the championship, while Jana Novotna succeeded in the women’s singles.
Over in the United States, the 1998 Super Bowl had seen the Denver Broncos triumph over the Green Bay Packers to take their first victory. The team has since gone on to be part-owned by none other than Lewis Hamilton, who joined the franchise in 2022.
At the 1998 Oscars, Titanic had scooped a total of 11 awards including Best Picture and Best Original Song for Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. This marks the highest number of prizes won by a single film at the ceremony, a record the movie shares with Ben-Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
Television-wise, the fifth season of Friends had recently hit screens, with the season-opener attracting 31.12 million viewers in the US. The sitcom would go on to run for a further five series until its finale in 2004. Other shows attracting high viewing figures in 1998 included ER and Frasier.
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The song at number 1 in the UK charts when McLaren took the title was Believe by Cher, which spent a total of seven weeks at the top and became the UK’s best-selling single of the year.
And Monica held the top spot of the US Billboard charts with The First Night, several months after duetting with Brandy on another one of the year’s biggest songs, The Boy Is Mine.
Two months before McLaren scooped the 1998 constructors’ championship, one of the team’s modern-day sponsors was born. Google was founded, with the company’s search engine launched for the first time.
Elsewhere in technology, the first downloadable mobile ringtone service had been created in Finland. The world had not yet experienced emojis, though, with those not being released until the following year.
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And gamers were getting their hands on the new Gameboy Color for the first time, while F1 fans would soon be playing Formula 1 98 on the PlayStation.
Nowadays F1 24 is the latest official game to bring the sport to life on a console – but will McLaren’s dreams of winning the constructors’ this season go beyond virtual reality? Only time will tell…