The dust has settled on Abu Dhabi, and the 2024 Formula 1 season has officially come to a close. Lando Norris took one final win for McLaren, capping off a year of surprises, turning tides, and lessons learned. Today, we’re going to peruse the biggest takeaways of the outgoing championship, as well as what we can expect from 2025.
Red Bull Racing Is Mortal After All
In 2023, Red Bull Racing seemed unstoppable. Its machinery was so strong and its drivers so competent that no one could truly mount a challenge. But in 2024, the façade of invincibility crumbled, and it turns out that Red Bull is mortal after all.
There are plenty of reasons for the team’s descent down the slippery slope of performance. You could point to the human element—to the ongoing battles between Christian Horner and Jos Verstappen, to the allegations against Horner that emerged early in the year, to the countless departures from big names like Adrian Newey.
You can point to the driver element. Verstappen remained an extremely competent driver, but teammate Sergio Perez floundered in comparison all season long. The pressure mounted on Verstappen to carry the team to a title, and as the competition got stronger, Verstappen made rare errors. On top of that, the constant threats to Perez’s future couldn’t have made things any easier for anyone involved.
You could also point to the technical element. Somewhere along the way, Red Bull got its car wrong. One wrong turn down the developmental pathway, and suddenly the team was playing catch-up as the likes of McLaren and Mercedes introduced upgrade packages that seriously leveled the playing field.
The tides of F1 can turn quickly, and this year, Red Bull decidedly lost its edge. It’s a great reminder that no one team can dominate for too long.
Rookies Are Back In Vogue
Heading into 2024, F1 set an unprecedented record: For the first time in the sport’s history, there would be no rookies. Every driver that completed the season finale in 2023 had been contracted to race in the season opener of 2024.
For a few years, it had seemed like F1 was allergic to rookies. Young talents like Theo Pourchaire and Callum Ilott had graduated from the Formula 2 ladder only to find that there was nowhere for them to land in Formula 1. Rather, teams just kept re-signing tried-and-true talents like Fernando Alonso, Nico Hulkenberg, and Valtteri Bottas; after all, these guys had years of experience, and experience is crucial in F1.
The only problem was that that experience started to feel uninspired. Teams seemed to realize that in 2024, and as a result, a huge influx of talent began to pour in: Oliver Bearman, Franco Colapinto, Liam Lawson, and Jack Doohan all had their shot at glory, with Kimi Antonelli and Gabriel Bortoleto joining the field in 2025. Suddenly, there doesn’t seem to be enough young talent to go around.
The tides have turned pretty suddenly—but it’s about damn time. The hesitation around signing a rookie these last few years has made little sense; young drivers are more prepared than ever, with test driving, sim work, physical training, and classroom education dedicated to teaching them everything they could ever want to know about driving. Plus, growing F1 seasons have resulted in growing junior programs, giving those drivers more time in the car during the stress of a competitive weekend. Stick these guys behind the wheel of an F1 car, and it turns out that they’re pretty well equipped for the rigors of the sport.
Something’s Fishy at the FIA
Okay, it’s true: The FIA and Formula 1 have almost always been at odds. Between drivers’ strikes, sex scandals, and the ever-present threat that a handful of teams might just break away to form their own racing series, this is one relationship that has been seemingly founded on strain.
With that said, 2024 feels… different.
The current dissatisfaction can be traced back to 2021, when race director Michael Masi’s direct intervention in the final laps of the Abu Dhabi season finale determined that season’s World Champion. Soon after, Mohammed Ben Sulayem was elected FIA President.
His tenure these last few years has been characterized by punchy interviews, spats with drivers, high-profile departures, allegations of misconduct, and scandal, all of which has left F1 drivers begging to be treated like adults and trying fruitlessly to gain respect. That dissatisfaction has leached into goings-on between the FIA and team bosses, and it has resulted in a general sense of unease in the paddock.
We’ve ended the season without any kind of resolution on this front. Max Verstappen will be undertaking community service next week for the mortal sin of cursing during a press conference, while the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association will still be looking for a more clearly defined code of operations heading into 2025. One thing is certain, though: We can expect these wounds to continue to fester.
Growing Seasons Are Brutal
As the F1 field completed its final media pen interviews of 2024, one common refrain popped out: Drivers are tired.
With 24 races on the schedule, F1’s 2024 season was the longest in history. The growing list of venues has necessitated the regular appearance of back-to-back Grand Prix weekends, as well as the godforsaken triple header. In fact, we ended the season on a particularly brutal note, jetting off from Las Vegas to Qatar to Abu Dhabi in the span of three weeks. That’s a lot.
World Champion Max Verstappen signed off his 2024 season by telling media he was ready for some time off, saying that “it’s been too long.”
Sauber’s Zhou Guanyu, who has not only spent the season racing but also fighting to find a seat for 2025, has actually found comfort in the thought of being unemployed.
“Mentally, [the season] has been just so draining, it’s actually good taking a year off,” he said after Qatar. He called it a “relief.”
Fernando Alonso, Kevin Magnussen, and George Russell all admitted to being “tired,” and in Qatar, Esteban Ocon revealed that he had traveled with his Alpine team from Vegas to Doha; he claimed that he tried to give the crew all his best advice on how to manage the time change, “but I didn’t have the strength to wake them up when it was time to wake up. Everyone was so tired.”
Even Charles Leclerc, who stated that he felt physically fine after Abu Dhabi thanks to the top-tier travel conditions and recovery systems in place, admitted, “I still feel like 24 [races] is probably the maximum.”
As F1 looks to reorganize its schedule to be more eco-friendly in the coming years, we’re likely to see fewer far-flung races taking place back-to-back, but that’s still of little consolation to drivers and crews who are pulling long days to make sure their team is operating at full capacity.
The American Market Is Important, But…
Why aren’t we broadening our horizons?
The United States has always been a golden goose for Formula 1: The market holds a huge amount of potential and financial incentive, but the series has never seemed interested in actively understanding the American audience.
This traces back as far as F1’s inaugural 1950 season, when it included the Indianapolis 500 on the calendar in a slapdash effort to create a “world” championship, all without recognizing how truly distinct the Indy 500 was to all European racing tradition. You can see echoes of that mindset in F1’s decision in the 1980s to schedule a race in Dallas in the middle of summer, and you can see it in the series’ dedication to charging huge fees for tickets in Miami and Las Vegas today.
But is the U.S. that important?
As an American myself, my instinct is to always say “yes.” Yes, America deserves more credit and greater respect from F1 and the FIA; otherwise, the series is going to quickly burn through the goodwill it engendered by surprise thanks to the pandemic’s influence on Netflix’s Drive to Survive.
This year, though, I’ve been asking myself why I feel that way. Why should the U.S. receive some kind of special treatment?
This became extremely clear after Logan Sargeant was dropped by Williams partway through the 2024 season, to be replaced by Franco Colapinto. The argument from a lot of fans was that losing Sargeant was the equivalent to a slap in the face to American fans, that we wouldn’t have someone to root for.
Then Colapinto turned up in the Americas, and Argentinian fans—hungry for any kind of representation in F1—turned up in full force. Everywhere you looked, you’d find hand-painted Colapinto flags and hardcore Colapinto fans who were willing to drop everything to travel to Austin, Mexico, and Brazil.
Logan Sargeant wasn’t pulling that kind of support. He also failed to earn a point in 2024, something the Colapinto accomplished in his second race.
But it also made something extremely clear: The U.S. is spoiled. Despite the fact that we have three races in a single season, American fans have somehow convinced themselves that Formula 1 is entirely disinterested in everything the U.S. has to offer, and that’s pointedly not true. We’ve managed to put our blinders on so firmly that we’ve ignored the fact that there are huge swaths of passionate fans in Africa and Central and South America who have been routinely discounted and who are desperate for even a smidge of official recognition from F1.
Having critiques about the way F1 engages with America and its distinct motorsport tradition is one thing, but let’s not forget that the universe does not center around the United States.
The 2025 Title Battle Will Be One for the Ages
What started off looking to be another exercise in domination by Verstappen and Red Bull Racing turned into a compelling season of F1. We saw seven different winners from three different teams, as well as some shocking podium appearances from the likes of Alpine.
Lap time deltas in qualifying were tight, and on the track, we saw some seriously competitive midfield battles.
McLaren emerged as a strong contender for the title a year before it thought it’d be able to do so, and Norris got a crash-course in what it takes to master the art of damage mitigation throughout a season. On top of that, we saw spats emerge between Verstappen and Mercedes’ George Russell, and we’re going to have a handful of familiar faces racing at new teams next year, and brand-new faces learning the ropes for the first time.
If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that 2025 is going to be pretty damn exciting.
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