F1 Has Gone Crazy Again—and It’s Completely Unmissable
The whole sport was bracing for another season of Max Verstappen dominance. Instead, the field is deeper than it has been in years with seven different race winners this season.
Singapore
Charles Leclerc is one of only two men on the planet who gets to race a Ferrari Formula One car for a living—200 miles per hour, 24 weekends a year—and even he was convinced that this season would be boring.
All he had to do was look down the paddock. Red Bull’s car had been utterly dominant in 2023. Three-time world champion Max Verstappen had won 19 of the 22 races, and rolled that form straight into 2024. No matter how much money everyone else plowed into upgrading their technology, they were still playing catch-up.
“We all thought after the first two, three races that Red Bull would walk away with the title, the way they did last year,” Leclerc said.
Instead, this season has taken more sudden twists than a driver with a blindfold. Red Bull has hit the skids, McLaren has emerged as a contender, Mercedes experienced a brief revival, Ferrari is fast again, and Grands Prix have turned back into wide open, can’t-miss free-for-alls. The year that was supposed to deliver a string of dull processions has produced seven different race winners—the most in a single campaign since 2012. The latest was McLaren’s Lando Norris, who tore away from Verstappen to claim victory on Sunday in Singapore.
“We are really in a pack,” Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur said here, with six of the 24 races remaining. “I don’t remember when it was so tight in F1.”
All that on-track action has come with a healthy side of off-track lunacy. Two different teams have had to draft in rookies as emergency replacements. Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz had an appendectomy and came back to win a Grand Prix less than three weeks later. A practice session in Singapore was interrupted by an enormous lizard crawling across the track. And drivers have lately been up against a bizarre crackdown on their foul language.
Yet for the first few months, it looked as though all that excitement would be confined to a fight for second place. Verstappen won five of the first seven races and all was proceeding according to plan. But a sudden decline since the summer break combined with sweeping changes behind the scenes of Red Bull have made everything a little ragged for the sport’s all-conquering outfit.
Legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley are both due to leave for other teams by next season. And the 2024 car hasn’t performed as reliably as its predecessors on some of the calendar’s more challenging street circuits.
Verstappen, a hothead who appeared to have mellowed in recent years, hasn’t been shy about letting his team know. He was so disappointed after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix that he declared in Singapore that he “knew the car was f—ed.” (That burst of obscenity earned Verstappen a reprimand from motorsport’s world governing body.)
But Red Bull’s loss has been the rest of Formula One’s gain.
Leclerc won on Ferrari’s home turf in Monza. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton ended a 2.5-year dry spell with victory at Silverstone—and then picked up another win in Belgium for good measure. Somehow Verstappen hasn’t won a race since late June.
In fact, the past nine Grands Prix have been won by six different drivers, blowing open the race for both available championships. Norris, a 24-year-old Briton, has given himself a chance to reel in Verstappen for the drivers’ title. And together with 23-year-old teammate Oscar Piastri, he has put McLaren ahead of Red Bull in the constructors’ standings.
“The competition has improved quite a bit,” Verstappen said. “We need to find a bit more performance and make our lives a bit easier.”
The natural state of F1 is to bounce from dynasty to dynasty. Every few years, the organizers make wholesale changes to the rulebook, radically altering the cars’ specifications. Whichever team does the best job of cracking the code tends to steal a march on the field and everyone else spends the next few years chasing them. It’s how Red Bull took back-to-back constructors’ titles in 2022 and 2023. And it was how Mercedes dominated much of the 2010s.
None of that prevented the sport’s Netflix-and-social-media-fueled revival in recent years. The Drive to Survive series sparked interest in teams and drivers up and down the paddock, regardless of results. The club of 20 F1 drivers all harnessed their inner influencers.
But in order for F1 to stay relevant, organizers knew that there was one thing no reality show or viral TikTok could ever replace: tense qualifying, and flat-out, wheel-to-wheel racing.
“It’s so competitive right now at the front,” Mercedes driver George Russell said.
Nothing makes that clearer than the number of tight finishes. Back when Verstappen was stomping the field in 2023, his average margin of victory across 19 victories was 13.4 seconds. This season, heading into Singapore, drivers had cut that by more than 40% to 7.6 seconds.
And recently, it had been getting even closer. Over the first 10 races of the year, drivers (mostly Verstappen) were winning by an average of 8.6 seconds. But between Verstappen’s last victory, eight Grands Prix ago, and the field touching down here, the margin was just 6.1. That’s why Sunday will go down as one of the most surprising results of the year. The margin of victory was 20.9 seconds—and Verstappen was on the wrong end of it.
No one in F1 had seen it coming at the start of the season. Which is also why no one in F1 wants to guess how this one ends.
“It makes no sense,” Vasseur said, “to imagine how the picture could be in two or three months.”