The competitive picture has changed almost beyond recognition, but the F1 2024 season has still ended up being another tale of two Red Bull drivers.
As Max Verstappen looks to make more history and Sergio Perez has only just managed to avoid becoming history – for now.Let’s assess the main winners and losers so far as F1 heads into its summer break…
Winners and losers from F1 2024 so far
Winners
Max Verstappen
Sport? It’s not about the body, but the mind. At the elite level anyway.
With the overall talent level at the upper end of the capabilities of the human body, with the differences between each competitor so fine, it is the one who can hold their poise – the one whose technique remains firm and accessible even under enormous pressure and scrutiny – who wins.
It has been clear for some time that this is the area in which Max Verstappen, F1’s mentality monster, excels.
Make no mistake, he feels it too – recall how he described being hit with severe leg cramps on the last lap Abu Dhabi 2021 as the “stress levels” peaked – yet he can somehow hide it better than any driver to have come before.
So many of his greatest triumphs in F1, beginning with Barcelona back in 2016, have been defined by an apparent immunity to pressure.
F1 2024 head-to-head battles
👉F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates
👉F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates
It is a very different sort of pressure he has been operating under in F1 2024 as he continues to bring success to a Red Bull team threatening, in the words of his father Jos, to “explode.”
Verstappen has become Red Bull’s redeeming feature, almost single-handedly keeping the whole thing afloat – more so than ever now they have ceded their status as the team with the fastest car.
It always seemed like the 2021 season would stand untouched as Verstappen’s greatest work for the way he imposed himself against Lewis Hamilton with a ferocity nobody had done before.
Yet if he converts his current 78-point lead into another World Championship over the coming months – becoming only the second man in history after Sebastian Vettel to go from zero to four titles in a single great step – this, as a result of the unique challenges he’s had to combat in 2024, may prove the best of the lot.
A masterclass in blocking out the noise.
McLaren
Just how much will McLaren live to regret their lack of development progress over the winter come the end of the season?
At the launch of their 2024 car in February, team principal Andrea Stella admitted McLaren had not yet addressed all the areas they had targeted with the MCL38.
It seems they have now – and then some – but could that missed opportunity, effectively giving Red Bull and Verstappen a free run to win four of the first five races, ultimately prove decisive?
Since then, 2024 has been very much been a continuation of mid-2023, McLaren building on the progress of the end of the last season to the point that they now stand with what appears to be the quickest car of all and are arguably the favourites for the Constructors’ title.
There have been mistakes, of course, with a number of victories slipping through their fingers, but this is a self-styled ‘young’ team slowly learning how to win again after years of being cut adrift from the fight at the front.
How to turn those near missed into wins? Time will be their friend.
The more time they spend competing for regular victories again, the more practiced they’ll become at it.
Go easy on them for now.
Mercedes
For the first few months it seemed 2024 would be a case of different year, same old story for Mercedes.
For all the changes to the car over the winter, those familiar frailties remained in the opening phase of 2024 as Lewis Hamilton’s mood fluctuated from session to session across a race weekend.
The Mercedes W15, you say? Like a box of chocolates, Lewis. You never know what you’re gonna get.
That seemed to change when the new front wing came along, bringing that stable platform they had been targeting over the winter and unlocking the potential of the car.
Sure, George Russell had Verstappen and Lando Norris to thank for winning in Austria and the conditions and circuit layout played a role in Hamilton’s written-in-the-stars victory at Silverstone.
And it still isn’t a good look that the great Mercedes-Benz are slower than their own customers and the fact that the team saw fit to remove an upgrade at Spa was a sign that things are still far from perfect.
But Mercedes are looking more like Mercedes than they have for a long time. That’s a worrying proposition for everyone.
Nico Hulkenberg
How lucky Audi are to have signed Nico Hulkenberg, the best Red Bull team-mate Verstappen never had, for 2025.
In the second year of his F1 comeback, he has continued to produce a number of eye-catching qualifying performances for Haas.
The difference this time is that he now has a car he can race with too, his consecutive sixth-place finishes in Austria and Britain putting Haas – a more sophisticated, engineering-focused team in this post-Steiner era – on course for their best season in years.
Even with the exciting Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon on the way for next season, they’ll miss Hulkenberg when he’s gone.
Hope beyond hope that Audi do not mistreat him and shuffle him off into retirement the moment a bigger name becomes available.
Losers
Red Bull
Can it merely be a coincidence that Red Bull haven’t been the same since Adrian Newey confirmed that he will be leaving the team in early 2025?
After four wins in five races to start the season, since Newey announced his departure in the week of the Miami Grand Prix Red Bull have won just three of the last nine.
Newey’s influence at Red Bull extended beyond designing the car, hence why even now he is still attending races with the team, talking to Verstappen and Perez and even advising on strategy decisions.
It could be argued, even, that the relationship Newey has enjoyed with Verstappen was the very driving force behind Red Bull’s recent success.
Often it has been tempting to picture the scene deep inside the Red Bull factory of Max and Adrian locked in debates in between simulator sessions, making magic live – like being allowed into Abbey Road to see The Beatles record, or watching Federer and his coach do their thing at a deserted practice court.
There were off-track distractions, of course, yet fundamentally all was as well as it ever was in Red Bull’s world right up until that dynamic was altered forever with a single announcement on May 1.
Be in no doubt that this team have lost something that they won’t easily get back.
Sergio Perez
We now know that Perez will be back in a Red Bull after the summer break, but how many lives does he have left?
He almost fooled us into thinking that this year would be different, playing his part in one-two finishes for Red Bull in Bahrain, Jeddah and Japan – where he proved that he can hack it at proper drivers’ circuits after all – before falling into his traditional mid-season slump as F1 returned to Europe.
Red Bull could afford for that to happen in the past, but not now with their rivals closing in and the decision to hand Perez a new two-year contract when they did remains a mystery.
Did they really believe the security of a new deal would magically get him back on track?
If they did, it flew in the face of everything Red Bull have always thought about him, Helmut Marko airing his theory more than once in the past that Perez performs at his best when there’s something to fight for.
More likely, it seems, is that after Perez’s wobbles at Imola and Monaco, Red Bull’s rumoured insertion of strict performance clauses was done to give them the freedom to drop him if the situation worsened.
He can consider himself fortunate to make it to Zandvoort next month.
And how much longer will he last if there is no discernible improvement from there?
Aston Martin
It has now become clear that Aston Martin were promoted to a false position at the start of 2023 as a result of the struggles of Mercedes and Ferrari.
Fernando Alonso’s joyous run of podiums was never built to last, with the team – having only moved to their new factory in the midst of that streak of results – still at an early stage of their development.
Yet something is badly needed to accelerate it now, with Lawrence Stroll not famed for his patience and Alonso showing signs of the frustration that became a theme of his McLaren-Honda years.
Now 43, he’s simply getting too old to be motivated by minor points finishes. So what could possibly happen to get this project back on track?
Go out and get Newey and everything changes.
Alpine
Flavio Briatore might not be to everyone’s taste, but it is undeniable that the man has a brain. Thinks differently to most.
It has landed him in trouble over the years yet, almost counterintuitively, a little bit of far-out Flavio may be just what his old team needed to bring some old-fashioned common sense and logic back to the place.
The appointment of Oliver Oakes, a highly regarded figure in the junior categories, to replace the bureaucratic Bruno Famin could prove an act of genius – a victory for people with motor racing in their bones over the Renault company men.
And the move to disentangle Alpine from the Viry engine base has been widely interpreted as the first step towards a sale of the team by Renault, a move that would only benefit Enstone at this stage.
With just 11 points so far, this has been a poor season for Alpine, the year all the organisation’s missteps of recent years have brutally caught up with them.
Yet their impressive rate of improvement from rock bottom at the start of 2024 confirms that a helluva racing team remains in their somewhere, still fighting to break through all that Renault rubble.
Sauber
Still without a point at the halfway stage of the season.
Whisper it, but have Audi backed the wrong horse for 2026?
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