It is the 75th year of the FIA Formula One World Championship, and the sport faces a reckoning in its milestone year. Not long ago, F1 was booming, attracting new fans across the globe. The intense title battle in 2021 between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, which went down to the wire until the last lap of the last race, ignited a massive interest in the premier motorsports championship on the planet.
But two years have passed since the race in Abu Dhabi, and that season-long fight between the old guard and the upstart is now a distant memory.
The Verstappen-Red Bull Racing combo has since steamrolled the opposition. If 2022 was a damp squib, with the Dutchman winning 15 out of 22 races, in 2023, he raised his game to another level, winning 19 out of 22 while his team won 21.
The current season is important for the sport’s health, and a lot is riding on Red Bull’s rivals stepping up to the plate and offering F1 fans something to look forward to.
However, right from pre-season testing, it was evident that Red Bull held a decent advantage over the pursuing pack. Unsurprisingly, Verstappen kick-started his title defence in style, posting easy wins in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in the first two weekends of the year ahead of his teammate Sergio Perez.
The pecking order
After the first two rounds, it is clear that Red Bull has a nearly half-second advantage per lap over its rivals, at least in Verstappen’s hands. Despite the gap being slightly narrower in qualifying, Red Bull has no match for its speed on race day.
The Adrian Newey-designed cars have been ahead of the curve since the current ground-effect cars came into being in 2022. Red Bull has continued to build on its early mover advantage. The first two races also had different car demands, and the fact that Red Bull aced both quite easily shows that it has a car that will be competitive on most tracks on the calendar.
Behind Red Bull, Ferrari has started the season well and has emerged as the closest challenger to the reigning champion. In Bahrain, Carlos Sainz, who is in his last season at Ferrari, was aggressive in wheel-to-wheel combat to take a well-deserved third place. In Jeddah, the other Ferrari of Charles Leclerc completed the podium positions.
Sainz was forced to miss the race after participating in Thursday’s practice sessions because of appendicitis. However, one of the best performances in Saudi Arabia was his replacement, Oliver Bearman, who made his F1 debut for Ferrari. The 18-year-old Briton got into the car on Friday morning for Free Practice-3 and qualified 11th before finishing seventh in the race, capping off an impressive performance on such short notice.
Firing on track, imploding off it
Trouble in paradise?: The Horner (R) fiasco has fuelled speculations that Verstappen (L) could leave Red Bull and join Mercedes following Hamilton’s decision to join Ferrari in 2025. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Even as the team is dominating things on track, Red Bull Racing finds itself in a hot mess following allegations of inappropriate behaviour by its team boss, Christian Horner, with a female employee. The news emerged before the team’s car launch in February, and a subsequent independent enquiry by the parent Red Bull company cleared Horner of wrongdoing before the first race.
However, during the Bahrain GP weekend, a trove of WhatsApp chats and other evidence was leaked to journalists and key F1 personnel. While the authenticity of it is yet to be ascertained, it has brought out in the open simmering tensions inside the team.
Jos Verstappen, Max’s father, threw oil into the fire when he said Horner’s continuation is untenable, fuelling speculations that Verstappen could leave the championship-winning team, especially now that there is a vacant seat at Mercedes following Hamilton’s decision to join Ferrari in 2025.
Factory teams in trouble
Meanwhile, the two other factory-run teams, Mercedes and Alpine, have had a tough start to the season. Mercedes at least looked like it had turned around a corner during testing, setting some headline-grabbing times. Still, the results from the first two races showed it is, at best, the third or even the fourth-fastest team on the grid. The team has struggled since the new regulations came into force in 2022, and the former champion has still not figured out the ideal operating windows for its cars.
At the other end of the spectrum, Alpine (part of the Renault Group) has had a torrid start to the campaign and is the slowest car on the grid.
Despite the full might of the Renault company behind it, it is an embarrassment for the team based in Enstone. The team has lost many key technical people, and the situation is akin to rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Moto GP
Meanwhile, action on two wheels has also commenced, with the first round of the MotoGP held at the Lusail International Circuit in Qatar. Like Verstappen in F1, reigning MotoGP champion Francesco Bagnaia came out on top, winning the first race of the year aboard his factory Ducati bike.
In qualifying, Pramac Racing’s Jorge Martin, in the customer Ducati, put his bike on pole position and won Saturday’s Sprint Race ahead of Brad Binder and Aleix Espargaró. Bagnaia, who qualified only fifth, finished fourth in the Sprint event.
In Sunday’s main race, the Italian got a great launch to jump from fifth to second and then took the lead from Martin, his title rival last year, cruising to his 19th MotoGP win. Binder finished second ahead of Martin, followed by seven-time champion Marc Marquez, who finished fourth in his debut race for Gresini Racing.
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