Bit late to the party with this one, but Formula 1’s pre-season test for the 2025 season will soon be upon us, so let’s begin our 2024 recap with a look back at this same time last year.

Lap times from pre-season testing are notoriously dubious. Fuel loads, engine modes, run programs, and even how hard the drivers are pushing are all tough to accurately distil. Despite this complete lack of clarity going into the 2024 season opener at Bahrain, I noticed many fans who it seems had received a crystal ball for Christmas and were making confident predictions of the running order. “More Red Bull domination, I guess I won’t even bother watching” seemed to be a common sentiment. They had stopped paying attention before the season had even begun.

I hadn’t. And so it didn’t escape my attention that Red Bull were somewhat underwhelming when they first hit the track for a competitive weekend. Max Verstappen logged a 6th, another 6th, and a 3rd in the free practice sessions. Most wrote this off as sandbagging, hiding their true performance until necessary, but what I saw was a team struggling to get its latest challenger into a workable window. They did eventually suss it out that weekend, but what looked easy early on would seem like a distant memory just a few months later.

The phrase ‘best car’ gets thrown around liberally while discussing the current pecking order in Formula 1, but the term doesn’t do justice to what is a vastly complicated metric. Best how? As in the fastest? Fastest over a single lap? Or fastest over a race distance? On what fuel load? In what ambient temperatures? On which track? On which tyres? And how quickly does it use up those tyres?

With those parameters considered, it is fair to say the RB20 was the best car for the first five races of the season. It took pole and won in Verstappen’s hands in all but Australia, where a brake issue curtailed his running after just three laps. But the arrival of an upgraded McLaren at Miami was a turning point. While a safety car certainly did help to vault Lando Norris into the lead, he fended off Verstappen at the restart and went onto win on merit, the Red Bull unable to make its hard compound tyres work. The fastest lap went to the other McLaren of Oscar Piastri, so it’s hard to argue that the MCL38 wasn’t the all-round car to beat at that point.

This would become further evident at the following race in Emilia Romagna. Verstappen scampered away while his medium tyres still had life in them, only for superior tyre wear to bring Norris back into the fight, before a switch to hard tyres which the Red Bull rarely enjoyed. Having a car that can nail a pole lap with the soft tyres on Saturday is all well and good, but if it chews through its mediums too quickly and doesn’t get on with the hard tyres at all, Sunday becomes infinitely more challenging. By the sixth round of the season, the Red Bull was no longer the overall best car across the entirely of a race weekend.

And so it would continue as a legitimate title fight emerged from what many had prematurely written off as a snooze-fest. Verstappen’s points lead would be at least partially reduced in the face of vastly improved opposition from three other teams, something we haven’t seen for some time. Going into any race weekend, there was genuine anticipation about whether Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull, or Mercedes would be the favourites. And very often one team would be top of the class in practice, only to fall short in qualifying or for another team to make greater progress. So much for snooze-fest.

While I fully understand the inclination of a racing driver to always go for it, there days where damage limitation becomes the aim of the game, and it is on those days when championships are won. While Verstappen earned himself a couple of justified penalties along the way, it was undeniably his wringing every possible ounce of speed out of the RB20 that won him the WDC, even on days where a 7th place would be the theoretical ceiling behind three other teams. In the same way that fictional novels need the protagonist to face genuine peril for the tale to be engaging, racing needs legitimate competition to make its eventual winner fully deserving. I would say 2024 delivered on that.

I’ve heard a lot of revisionism on this topic since the conclusion of the season. Claims that the championship was never really on for Norris and that Verstappen’s coronation was inevitable are easy to make now, but they totally ignore the reality that generally, in Formula 1, the best car takes both championships. Besides, if Norris was in the RB20 and it was Verstappen driving the MCL38, would those same people be saying that Norris was always destined to win and Max never had a chance? No, they would not.

Red Bull only set the fastest race lap on three occasions in 2024. After Bahrain in March and Japan in April, Verstappen would have to wait until the rain-soaked São Paolo Grand Prix in November before again putting in the quickest lap time on Sunday. Let that sink in when considering relative race pace of the different machinery.

Elsewhere on the grid, some interesting battles emerged between the midfield teams. Haas under-promised and over-delivered, while Williams probably didn’t realise their full potential. That can be forgiven for a team still rebuilding after years of underinvestment, having famously only just moved on from using an Excel spreadsheet to track component stock and manufacturing. The battle between Alpine, Haas, and RB for 6th in the WCC went to the wire, with the pursuit of many additional millions in prize money going to the French outfit after a tough season that had started atrociously.

On inter-team battles, and sticking with Alpine, their driver pairing finally did what it had always promised to do and totally imploded, leading to Esteban Ocon vacating his seat for the final race at Abu Dhabi in advance of a move to Haas for 2025. Carlos Sainz gave Charles Leclerc his closest run yet, while George Russell comprehensively beat Lewis Hamilton in the qualifying head-to-head. While he did also end the season with more points, Russell continues to show an occasional inability to capitalise on Sunday, with Hamilton proving he absolutely still has what it takes when the points are given out. And that is rather important after all.

What kicked off to a chorus of yawns actually turned out to be a competitive, memorable, and often dramatic twenty-four race slog, with the WDC being wrapped up with only two races to go, and the WCC remaining unsettled until the final lap of the season’s finale in Abu Dhabi.

The manner in which the year developed should serve as a lesson: nothing in motorsport is ever guaranteed, and the result is not certain until the chequered flag falls and tech inspection is complete. By all means look at whatever data there is, compare it to historical precedent, and then make a prediction, but be prepared to throw that squarely out the window. And make sure you keep the receipt for the crystal ball.

Image Credit: Mercedes-AMG Petronas/LAT Images