Melbourne calling…
We’re nearly there. F1’s 2025 season is almost upon us.
The three-day preseason test in Bahrain is done and dusted, and now all eyes turn to Melbourne, where the opening race of the season takes place on Saturday, March 15 at 11pm ET.
new 2025 engines turned up to the max
The testing threw up its usual ambiguous mix of optimism, skepticism, mystery, and hope, but ultimately, it matters little. All will become much clearer in Australia, where there will be no sandbagging, and teams will have their new 2025 engines turned up to the max (no pun intended).
While the 2024 season had a sense of the same old – there were no new drivers on the grid, and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen won his fourth straight world drivers’ championship – this new season has seen changes aplenty.
Hamilton goes Italian
The first domino to fall, which was announced just before the start of the 2024 season, was Lewis Hamilton’s bombshell move from Mercedes to Ferrari. But it was just the start.
The freeing up of a seat in one of the top four teams was always going to cause a tsunami within the sport as it also meant that Hamilton pushed Carlos Sainz out of his seat at Ferrari.
And so it proved with the subsequent merry-go-round resulting in only two teams – McLaren and Aston Martin – retaining their driver pairing from 2024. The rest saw either one or two driver changes, with no fewer than over a quarter of the field lining up for their first full season in the sport.
Of those six, three of them – Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes), Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber), and Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls) – have yet to even experience the high-octane intensity of an F1 race.
All change … but not the cars
Only ten of the 20 drivers who started the 2024 season will be sitting in the same seat of the same car on the Melbourne starting grid – a huge change that will massively alter the dynamic in the garages, on the track, and in the media room.
Ironically, the one thing that won’t change this season, at least not massively, is the cars.
2026 is the season that will see huge, fundamental changes
Yes, the teams have updated their liveries and, as always, there are a few new technical tweaks imposed by the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), but 2026 is the season that will see huge, fundamental changes to the design and power units of the cars.
To the untrained eye, the 2025 cars will – and, in fact, are – very similar to their 2024 cousins.
All of which plays nicely into the hands of McLaren who, despite not winning the 2024 drivers’ championship – Max Verstappen won his fourth consecutive title – finished the season as the strongest team and, in the process, won the constructors championship.
And nothing that happened in the three days of Bahrain testing did anything to alter the view that McLaren is the team to beat in 2025. Lando Norris starts the season as a short +175 favorite to win the driver’s title, while his team is an even shorter favorite (evens) to win the constructors.
No change for Team Papaya
As discussed earlier, part of McLaren’s perceived advantage for 2025 is around the continuity as a result of them making no significant changes, not just in their driver team but also in their garage and high-level management team.
The papaya team – as they are known – have adopted the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra, and why not?
But, elsewhere in the pitlane, key components of a successful F1 season are having to be forged, in some cases from scratch. I refer, of course, to partnerships and relationships.
For some, this will be a big issue. For others, less so, but one driver for whom this is going to be a massive challenge is Hamilton.
Not only does he now drive for a team that is not based in the UK and which speaks a language in which he is not (yet) fluent, he crucially has to develop a relationship with a new race engineer.
Bono to stay at Mercedes
Since he joined Mercedes in 2013, Hamilton’s race engineer has been Pete “Bono” Bonnington, and as a partnership, they have enjoyed almost unrivaled success: six drivers’ championships and seven constructors’.
a bond and a mutual respect that is rare in F1
While Hamilton is renowned for speaking his mind, especially in the white heat of an F1 battle, he and Bonnington developed a bond and a mutual respect that is rare in F1, where the high-level pressure lends itself to touchiness, tension, and fallouts.
But any cross words between the pair – and in the past few seasons, Hamilton had a poorly performing Mercedes to complain about – were quickly forgotten once a race was over. The aforementioned self-respect always shone through.
Hamilton once likened Bonnington to a “brother” and said that they had “supported each other on and off the track in good and bad times.”
No more “hammer time”
Bonnington even developed his own now-famous catchphrase: “Lewis, it’s hammer time.” It was his subtle way of telling Hamilton to go faster without telling him to go faster.
But there will be no more hammer time. Bonnington opted not to make the move to Ferrari with Hamilton, whose new race engineer is Riccardo Adami, previously the Ferrari race engineer of Sebastian Vettel and Sainz.
The British driver has officially confirmed there will be no more “hammer time” and that he and Adami will come up with a new phrase for the Italian to use when he needs more pace from his driver.
For Bonnington, there has been a promotion further up the internal Mercedes ladder, but he will also be the race engineer this season for Hamilton’s replacement, 18-year-old Italian Kimi Antonelli.
Yet, while there will be no “Bono” on Team Hamilton this season, a familiar face is returning to the team after a two-year absence.
The return of a familiar face
It came as something of a surprise when, in March 2023, Hamilton’s performance coach and close friend, New Zealander Angela Cullen, announced her intention to quit Mercedes and go off to explore other ventures.
Like Bonnington, Cullen was someone that Hamilton had developed a bond with and a close working relationship – they worked together from 2016 to 2023 – and many perceived their split as a contributing factor to the Brit’s miserable final two seasons at Mercedes.
reuniting for the new season
But during Hamilton’s first week at Maranello (Ferrari’s HQ) in January, Cullen was spotted, and it was later revealed that she and the British driver were reuniting for the new season.
She will attend race weekends with physiotherapy among her duties, as she works as part of the Project 44 performance team led by another key Hamilton ally who is returning: long-time friend and race director Marc Hynes.
In short, while Hamilton had no choice but to leave Bonnington behind at Mercedes, part of that void has been filled by the return of some familiar faces who will work as part of the wider Hamilton team rather than as direct employees of Ferrari – a shrewd move that will surely help ease the transition for the seven-time world champion.
New partnerships are key
But while Hamilton’s move may be the most high-profile example of the need to build new partnerships and relationships, plenty more are developing.
For the six “rookies,” the need to build a relationship with their race engineer is vital if they are to hit the ground running in their first full F1 season. Antonelli has, as mentioned above, hit the jackpot by having Pete Bonnington in his corner, but few can rely on such an experienced right-hand man.
Liam Lawson, the new teammate of Max Verstappen at Red Bull, has, for example, a newly appointed race engineer guiding him through the new season.
Richard Wood has been a performance engineer for Red Bull’s Sergio Perez for the last four seasons, but after a brief stint covering the job in the Perez garage in 2024, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner decided he was the man to hand-hold Lawson in his first season.
Ruthless Red Bull
The pressure is very much on both Lawson and Wood – both as individuals and as a partnership – to deliver in Red Bull’s second car. Perez failed to do so and was unceremoniously dumped from the team.
Other teams – most, in fact – are more forgiving than Red Bull, but there is pressure to deliver wherever you look across the grid; if not to compete for the championship, then to be the best of the rest outside of the so-called “big four.”
undertaken at the expense of many experienced Aston Martin employees
Leading that race over the past three seasons has been Aston Martin. At one point, they even looked like gate-crashing it, but that quest has been undertaken at the expense of many experienced Aston Martin employees, some of whom have been shown the door after many years of service.
Team owner Lawrence Stroll has been ruthless in his approach and has head-hunted many engineers and high-level officials from other teams, including the brains behind many a super-fast Red Bull championship-winning car, Adrian Newey.
Newey and Cardile wooed by Stroll
While Newey is widely regarded as F1’s number one car designer, also hopping aboard the Aston Martin express is former chief Ferrari technical officer Enrico Cardile. Both have taken up senior positions in the Aston Martin hierarchy, but many more junior posts have also been filled with new faces, including both race engineer positions.
These all came about as part of a major reorganization of Aston Martin’s technical structure, which was overseen by the recently appointed CEO and new team principal, Andy Cowell.
Therefore, the partnerships and relationships formed amid the new Aston Martin structure will be key to the team’s success this season. Given the sheer scale of change within the team, no one should be too surprised if they have a slow start to the new season.
If that is the case, Stroll will be hoping that any short-term pain will be more than compensated for by long-term gain.
Vowles rings the changes
Also hoping that a winter of change, both behind the scenes and on the track, will benefit them in the long-term is Williams.
Team principal James Vowles fought hard in the second half of 2024 to get Carlos Sainz on board and was eventually successful.
Sainz joining the talented Alex Albon
It means the Oxfordshire-based team now has an enviable driving pairing, with Sainz joining the talented Alex Albon, who is set to start his fourth season at the wheel of the Williams car.
In terms of partnerships, Vowles will be hoping that Albon and Sainz can work well in tandem and take the team forward sufficiently to see them challenge Aston Martin and company for that lucrative fifth spot in the constructors’ championship.
New-found harmony at Alpine?
Also in that same hunt is the France-based Alpine team, which will be hoping that the splitting up of their 2024 driver partnership will have a positive impact on the team’s success. Over the last couple of seasons, the French pairing of Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly has proved an explosive one, with the former best friends clashing both on and off the track.
New team principal Oliver Oakes – who took the role in July of last year – identified that in order to progress, and for the sake of team harmony, one of the two would have to be sacrificed.
Ocon was chosen as the sacrificial lamb – he will drive for Haas this season – and Gasly has now been partnered with Australian rookie Jack Doohan, who Oakes hopes will prove not only fast, but who will also have a good impact on the team’s morale.
So, in this case, the hope for Alpine is that the building of new partnerships and relationships will be a positive, even if they take time to develop.
So, all eyes now turn to Melbourne. And while the race winner and winning constructors will, as ever, capture the headlines, much of what happens off the track will ultimately dictate what happens over the coming nine months and 23 races.