Quote Originally Posted by Vitesse
D'you wanna look at that again? All the numbers were over 100 in 1952 - they just numbered the cars through the programme - event by event - that year. It was the Italians who came up with - and quickly abandoned - the unworkable all-year number system in 1948.

In Monaco, the numbers were allocated alphabetically (in French, obviously) by the nationality of the entrant. The Swiss used the same method, but alphabetically in German.
Whoops! I was taking numbers from Lang and looked at Fangio, who missed the 1952 race and read 1953 as 1952.