Nate Saunders makes its first prediction about the winner of the F1 2025 championship (1:49)
We’re a week into 2025, but there’s still seven weeks until anticipation for the new year’s Formula 1 season will truly begin to build, with the annual preseason test taking place Feb. 26-28 in Bahrain. That won’t stop us from looking ahead, though, because there’s plenty to unpack long before a single wheel will be turned in anger.
A legend of game is discovered in new colors. There is a combat for the widely open title. One of the maximum dominant in game is on the verge of implosion. And a young people revolution is underway.
Nate Saunders Main points The intrigues that will describe F1 in 2025.
Few driver moves could be as big as Lewis Hamilton joining Ferrari. The sport’s most accomplished driver joining its most famous, successful team, and the excitement surrounding that move will be reflected in how much attention the Italian outfit will receive in the opening months of the season.
From the outside, it appears to be a match made in heaven. Compelling narratives run throughout every element of this partnership. The most obvious is championships.
Ferrari has not won the drivers’ title since Hamilton’s rookie year, 2007, or the constructors’ title since 2008. Hamilton still feels he was robbed of an eighth championship in 2021, an achievement that would have moved him clear of Ferrari legend Michael Schumacher for the most in history. He now has the chance to not only win that eighth title in Ferrari red, but he can also emulate Schumacher’s 2000 achievement in ending a long and painful drought.
Then there’s the man in the other car. Charles Leclerc has been the face of Ferrari since he joined in 2019 and has shouldered the immense pressure that comes with driving for Enzo’s iconic squad. In 2024, he finally ended his Monaco Grand Prix curse and he finished the season as the strongest driver on the grid, winning memorably at Monza and then again in Austin to help Ferrari take the constructors’ title fight with McLaren down to the wire. Leclerc looked like a title contender in 2022 before his and the team’s season fell apart, and the arrival of Hamilton gives him a perfect opportunity to measure himself alongside a man who may well retire as the undisputed greatest of all time.
Here are so many questions: how will both be mixed? Wait that each and each of the qualification consultations and each and each of the functions of the race among them are microanalyzed as the season develops. Can Ferrari despite each one win a title? And if so, will it be the eighth for Hamilton or the first for Leclerc? This promises to be a very exciting story, regardless of how it develops.
After some regime racing, 2024 has become one of the most unpredictable and open seasons in recent memory. All but Sergio Pérez of the four most productive teams have won multiple times a year, with Red Bull’s mid-season implosion allowing McLaren and Ferrari to battle for the manufacturers’ championship until the end of the year.
Logic dictates that, with a giant replacement of the rule to come in 2026, advancements and upgrades to existing cars will be minimal. Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari have all won a race in the final months of last season, showing other strengths and weaknesses as the calendar continued, producing a desirable and unpredictable display of the week on weekdays.
Max Verstappen is still the man to beat; The Dutchman proved last year that he is the driving force of Formula 1 lately, with his immense ability appearing at Red Bull’s worst moments. McLaren and Ferrari are aiming for a good start to the season, as both took time to get out. of the block in 2024, and during the time they did, Verstappen had built a comfortable cushion.
Several pilots seem to be able to fight against Verstappen. Lando Norris, from McLaren, has promised to be informed of the mistakes that have tarnished their stellar season, while his teammate Osautomobile Piastri can be a dark horse if he takes any other step forward. George Russell has established himself as a man capable of denouncing Verstappen in the media and, in fact, will enjoy the opportunity to fight wheel with wheel on the track. Ferrari has two pilots who will fight for the name if the car is in the right place.
It is very unlikely that we hope for a fight for the championship before the preseason tests, but each metric that we will have to measure since last season suggests that the four most productive teams will begin at least the season closer than ever. If this is the case, possibly this year we have the right to something special.
Red Bull felt like a circus of problems last year, an endless name generator on and off the track. The year began with the investigation into Christian Horner’s misconduct, which ultimately cleared the team manager, but appeared to create significant breakouts from the scenes. Rift with Verstappen’s father Jos has intensified as the year has progressed, leading to the hypothesis that adviser Helmut Marko would possibly leave; Marko decided against it, cooling reports that Verstappen was about to jump to Mercedes at the first opportunity. Mercedes doesn’t seem convinced that the door is absolutely closed.
In 2024, it is easy to describe Red Bull as a ruined team: the march of the mythical designer Adrian Newey A Aston Martin is great news, while sports director Jonathan Wheatley goes under the command of Sauber.
The director of the Red Bull team, Christian Horner, explains why Red Bull opted for Liam Lawson that Yuki Tsunoda to register in Max Verstappen in 2025.
Throughout the year, Red Bull did not seem safe to know what to face in the confusing scenario of their pilots, since Pérez and Daniel Ricciardo had a lower performance. Each resolution seemed confusing and long; The year ended with the team that despite everything left Pérez, replacing him in the Major team with the green Liam Lawson. It will be a desirable story in itself. If Lawson follows the trend according to which his companions yield under the pressure of Verstappen in the other car, Red Bull lacks valid candidates to occupy this seat, since Yuki Tsunoda would be in a position to never take the step.
Next season may simply be a return to calmer times at Red Bull, but it will be an intoxicating situation if those old wounds haven’t healed well.
Formula 1 closed the year with the rather unexpected news that it now has an agreement in principle for General Motors to join the grid in 2026 under the Cadillac name. The team, now stripped of its apparent links to Michael Andretti, has built a facility near Silverstone in the UK; it is not yet clear how the team’s operations will be divided between that base and several others in the United States.
Assuming this is confirmed, the presence of an 11th team on the surface is excellent. The arrival of GM the same year as Audi (which is taking over Sauber) wasn’t a huge blow to F1, but it also created the opportunity for two more drivers on the grid and a host of jobs to boost the race as prestige of the game. continues to grow.
Katie George, Nate Saunders and Laurence Edmondson Geek on Formula 1 and personalities ‘Sellgarts’, ESPN’s weekly F1 podcast. Listen to “Según”
Cadillac deserves to sign at least one American driver. The new team will breathe some life into the driver market: Ricciardo has already ruled out returning to the team, but tempers may change temporarily and his call-up will undoubtedly remain linked. However, there is a more obvious option. Cadillac can consider Perez the ideal face of its new operation, given his enormous marketing prowess in Mexico and North America.
Beyond drivers, understanding just how Cadillac’s team will work — and, crucially, if it can hope to be even remotely competitive (something many in the paddock doubt) — will be a key talking point this year as we get closer to their debut.
Formula 1 goes through a remarkable time in terms of rating of races. There are old sensible legends like Hamilton and Fernando Alonso; the golden generation of qualifiability of Verstappen, Leclerc, Norris and Russell; And now a new total organization of young exciting pilots is part of the network. This season has 3 rookies “official” and two unofficial rookies “who have one or two races begin to their credit, but not nothing more.
Mercedes has opted to replace Hamilton with Italian wonderteen Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who crashed out in his practice appearance for Mercedes at Monza. The team expects that the highs could be very high and the lows could be very low, but Toto Wolff has said he would rather slow down a fast driver than anything else. Antonelli promises to be wildly exciting.
Then there’s Formula 2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto at Sauber. The Brazilian is a graduate of Alonso’s karting academy and the two-time champion thinks Bortoleto is not only the pick of the class of 2024, but also a future F1 superstar. High praise, indeed.
Haas driver Oliver Bearman impressed in his super-sub appearance for Ferrari in Saudi Arabia last year and had a solid debut for Haas later in the year, while F1 saw a glimpse of Alpine’s Jack Doohan when he replaced Esteban Ocon at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last year. After the season, Red Bull confirmed Formula 2 runner-up Isack Hadjar has taken Lawson’s seat at RB, adding another new name into the mix.
With more and more groups that provide young talents for the possibility of exceling, expect to hear much more about the names mentioned above, for better or worse.
If the show on the F1 track is intense and exciting this season, it will only accentuate the emotions that the next replacement of rules, which will act as a restart of the competitive order, arrives at a terrible time. The adjustments of the rules in recent decades have been considered an intelligent way to change things after a domain era, but the concern is that the 2026 regulations will have the opposite effect, taking the closest competitive order in the front during years and separate it as you create a visualization in the workplace.
But it is possibly too early to be negative. Although F1 is as close as many hope (or expect), the sport remains confident that the new rules update will not go that way. The budget cap, implemented through Liberty Media in 2021, has acted as a wonderful equalizer in terms of eventual decline in the competitive order. This may also be the key to preventing the new set of regulations from again creating massive imbalances in functionality. Expect this topic to circulate throughout the year.
Formula 1 is set for a groundbreaking year, with the “F1” movie starring Brad Pitt due for release in late June. The movie has been granted unprecedented access to F1 race tracks and facilities, filming on location and sometimes on the formation lap of actual races. With Hamilton as an executive producer, the film aims to create the most realistic racing movie of all time. Pitt, who plays comeback race star Sonny Hayes at the little-fancied Apex GP team, has even been doing a lot of the racing scenes himself.
Liberty Media has done incredible paintings in the way it markets F1, and the film turns out to be the next logical step in the incredible global rise of the sport. Expect the film to make headlines, especially in the weeks leading up to its release and release in theaters.