I'm going to do a pernickety Dave McKinney here. Mention in this thread of pre-WW1 pioneering Peugeots and pre-WW2 pioneering Auto Unions surely ignores the 'F1' definition in the title question? In other words, surely, innovation from 1947 forward.
DCN
I don't understand this.
If someone claims an innovation for the 1960s or 70s and it can be shown that it actually happened 30-40 years earlier, how is that off-topic?
More generally, I don't think we should over-emphasise the adoption of Formula 1 in 1947. Grand Prix racing started in 1906 and even that can be seen as an evolution of what had gone before. Motor sport has continued to evolve for over a century; there have been a few watershed events in that time but I can't see that the adoption of a new phrase in 1947 was one of them. Everybody on this forum has their own areas of knowledge and interest and it may be that not many are interested in events of over 60 years ago, but we should all accept that continuity and not introduce artificial breaks in history.
In any case, digression often leads to interesting places.
I always did enjoy a fruitless argument with David McKinney.