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 in Bahrain Feb. 26-28. That won’t stop us from looking ahead, because there’s plenty to unpack, long before a single wheel will be turned in anger.
A legend of the sport finds himself in new colours. There’s a wide-open title fight. One of the sport’s most dominant teams is on the brink of implosion. And there is a youth revolution afoot.
Nate Saunders breaks down the storylines that will define F1 in 2025.
Hamilton at Ferrari
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.
There’s so many questions here: how will the two mix? Expect every qualifying session and race performance between them to be micro-analysed as the season unfolds. Can Ferrari finally win a title? And if so, will it be Hamilton’s eighth or Leclerc’s first? It promises to be an utterly captivating storyline, however it plays out.
A wide-open title fight
After a routine opening chunk of races, 2024 turned into one of the most unpredictable and open seasons in recent memory. Everyone bar Sergio Pérez from the top four teams won multiple times across the year, with Red Bull’s midseason implosion allowing McLaren and Ferrari to fight for the constructors’ championship until the end of the year.
Logic dictates that, with a big rule change coming in 2026, developments and upgrades to existing cars will be minimal. Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari all won a race in the final months of last season, with each showing different strengths and weaknesses as the schedule continued, which produced a fascinating and unpredictable show week to week.
Max Verstappen remains the man to beat; the Dutchman proved last year that he is the best driver in Formula 1 right now, with his immense talent coming to the fore in Red Bull’s worst moments. McLaren and Ferrari are both targeting a strong start to the new season, as both took time to get out of the blocks in 2024, and by the time they did, Verstappen had built a comfortable buffer.
Several drivers seem ready to take the fight to Verstappen. McLaren’s Lando Norris has vowed to learn from the mistakes that dogged his otherwise-stellar season, while teammate Oscar Piastri might be a dark horse if he makes another step forward. George Russell has marked himself out as a man willing to call Verstappen out in the media and will surely relish the opportunity to battle wheel-to-wheel on track. Ferrari has two drivers who will fight for the title if the car is in the right place.
It’s always impossible to predict a championship fight before preseason testing, but every metric we have to measure from last season suggests the four top teams will at least start the season closer than they ever have been. If that is the case, we could be treated to something special this year.
Red Bull: a team imploding?
Red Bull felt like a circus at points last year, a never-ending headline generator on and off the track. The year started with the Christian Horner misconduct investigation, which ultimately cleared the team principal, but that appeared to create significant splinters behind the scenes. Horner’s rift with Verstappen’s father, Jos, intensified as the year went on, leading to speculation that advisor Helmut Marko might leave; Marko opted not to, cooling reports Verstappen was about to jump ship to Mercedes at the first opportunity. Mercedes do not appear convinced that the door is shut completely, though.
It was easy in 2024 to paint Red Bull as a team falling apart at the seams: legendary designer Adrian Newey’s departure to Aston Martin was big news, while sporting director Jonathan Wheatley switched over to lead Sauber.
Throughout the year, Red Bull seemed unsure of what to do about its messy driver situation as Pérez and Daniel Ricciardo both underperformed. Every decision appeared messy and protracted; the year ended with the team finally moving on from Pérez, replacing him at the lead team with the inexperienced Liam Lawson. That in itself will be a fascinating storyline. If Lawson follows the trend of teammates collapsing under the pressure of Verstappen in the other car, Red Bull is running out of legitimate candidates to put in that seat, with Yuki Tsunoda seemingly set to never make the step up. The coming season might be a return to calmer times at Red Bull, but it will be a captivating situation if those old wounds have not properly healed. Formula 1 rounded out the year with the quite surprising news that it now has an agreement in principal for General Motors to join the grid in 2026 as Cadillac. The team, now stripped of its obvious links to Michael Andretti, has built a team facility near Silverstone in the U.K., although it remains unclear how the team’s operation will be split between that base and multiple others in America. Assuming that gets confirmed, the presence of an 11th team on the surface is great. Not only is the arrival of GM the same year as Audi (who are in the process of taking over Sauber) a massive coup for F1, it has also created the opportunity for two more drivers on the grid and a huge amount of jobs in motor racing as the sport’s prestige continues to grow. Cadillac is expected to enter with at least one American driver. The new team will inject some life into the driver market — Ricciardo has already ruled out a return with the team, but minds can quickly change, and his name will undoubtedly remain linked. There’s a more obvious option out there, though. Cadillac might see Pérez as the ideal face of their 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 is experiencing a truly remarkable time in terms of racing talent. It has wise old legends like Hamilton and Fernando Alonso; the golden generation of talent of Verstappen, Leclerc, Norris and Russell; and now a whole new batch of exciting young drivers joining the grid. This season has three “official” rookies and two “unofficial” rookies who have a race start or two to their name but 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 teams giving young talent the chance to excel, expect to be hearing a lot more about the names above — for better or for worse. Should F1’s on-track spectacle be close and gripping this season, it will only intensify feelings that the upcoming rule change — which will act as a reset button to the competitive order — is coming at a terrible time. Rule changes in previous decades were seen as a good way to shake things up after a period of dominance, but the fear is that the 2026 regulations will have the opposite effect, taking the closest competitive order at the front for years and breaking it apart just as it is creating box-office viewing. Perhaps it is too early to be negative, though. Even if F1 is as close as many expect (or hope), the sport remains confident that the new rule change will not go down that path. The budget cap, implemented by Liberty Media in 2021, has worked as the great equaliser in terms of closing up the competitive order. That may well be the key factor in stopping the new set of rules from creating huge imbalances in performance again. Expect this topic to float around all 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 an incredible job in how it has marketed F1, and the movie seems like the next logical step in the sport’s amazing worldwide boom. Expect the movie to dominate headlines, especially in the weeks leading up to its release and during its run in theatres.Preparing for Cadillac
The youth revolution
The 2026 rule change: good or bad?
The F1 movie
