F1: Expectations Are High for an Exciting Season

The 2025 Formula 1 season could be one of the best in a generation. Almost half the field of 20 drivers heading into the season opener in Australia can dream of title glory.

This is based on the results of the 2024 championship — an unexpectedly close season where Red Bull initially dominated, before McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes finished strong.

These four teams and seven of their eight drivers shared all the victories from the 24 races last year. These were the highest totals for race-winning teams and drivers since the 2012 and 2021 seasons.

But as the 2025 campaign gets underway, the new season could even be better than the last.

“This season should be epic and even closer,” Zak Brown, the McLaren team’s chief executive, said at the F1 75 Live event in London last month.

“Every race last year, while the top four teams were always at the front, there always seemed to be someone that was able to disrupt,” Brown said. “So, I expect that to be happening again. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more than four teams that won this time.”

But it’s not just at the front of the field where the 2025 season is expected to be tight. The six teams with slower cars were also evenly split last year. In the end, they all scored points, and Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber made its car faster at the end of the year, where it finished last in the constructors’ standings.

In qualifying for the 2024 season finale in Abu Dhabi in December, the time gap between the fastest of the 20 cars (Lando Norris of McLaren) and the slowest (Jack Doohan of Alpine) was just 0.803 seconds. At the season opener in Bahrain in March, the qualifying gap between fastest and slowest cars was 1.039 seconds.

The lack of rule changes on car designs that teams have to work around this year is one factor that could result in even closer racing. This reduces the likelihood that any team will find a breakthrough part to make their cars considerably faster.

“Every year regulations don’t change, it gets closer and closer — that’s just the way it’s always worked,” Norris said last month. “It already got pretty close at the end of last year, and you already started to see the middle pack, which is most of the grid apart from the top four teams, catching up and getting closer.

“I only expect that to be even more the case in this season.”

But not everyone, however, is getting carried away. Max Verstappen of Red Bull, who beat Norris for the 2024 drivers’ title, said, “It’s good for the sport if it’s exciting,” but emphasized how the teams tend to mask the true performance of their cars ahead of the first race each year.

“It would be nice, but it’s impossible to answer right now,” he said. “You can speculate about it, but it’s just a waste of energy to think about that yet.”

Pierre Gasly of Alpine agreed with Verstappen.

“Deep inside me, I hope the field is extremely tight,” Gasly said. “But I don’t want to be disappointed if we come to Australia and suddenly we have rival teams flying.”

But he predicted, because of the combination of how 2024 ended and the car design stability, that “on paper, it will be one of those seasons” where margins would be very small among the teams.

If this does prove true, there is the potential that Formula 1 will get a yearlong title battle between multiple teams for the first time since 2021.

Although Ferrari battled Red Bull at the start of 2022 and McLaren and other teams pressured Red Bull late last year, 2021 was the last time two teams were evenly matched from start to finish.

That year, it was Red Bull versus Mercedes, led by Lewis Hamilton. But, if four teams or more do engage for the 2025 title, it will be the most competitive championship battle since 2010, when Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren were the contenders. Four drivers from these three teams had the potential to win heading into the final race. Red Bull and its star driver then, Sebastian Vettel, ultimately triumphed.

Norris said, “You’re probably going to have this season with winners that aren’t top-four teams, that aren’t McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes or Red Bull.”

“Which is good for Formula 1,” he added.

But George Russell of Mercedes insisted that “when you look at how dominant McLaren were in the second half of last year, without doubt they’re the favorites going into this year.”

That is because McLaren won five of the final 12 races in 2024, the most of any team, and beat Ferrari and Red Bull for the constructors’ championship.

All the teams must also cope with the additional challenge of planning their 2026 cars to new, and very different, design rules that are coming. At the same time, they must ensure that their 2025 cars still get faster.

They all have a finite amount of resources to achieve this balance within Formula 1’s financial rules, known as the cost cap.

“I think why it’s going to be so interesting is whoever continues to develop will probably win the championship, but you’ll pay the price in 2026,” Russell said.

“So, teams who come out of the blocks and see it’s a close battle, they might continue to develop. But we also saw it in 2021. Mercedes stopped developing and fine-tuned the car and found massive performance in the second half of the year.

“Naturally, always in that final year of regulations,” he continued, “it becomes close, but I still expect McLaren to be right at the forefront.”