The 2025 Formula One teams driver lineups are buying resolved much earlier than most observers would have thought. With Lewis Hamilton announcing the early exit from his shiny new Mercedes contract as hje looks to Maranello for a brighter future, the subsequent dominoes are falling into place earlier than in a usual season.
Mercedes have delayed announcing protege Kimi Antonelli as their replacement for the seven times world champion for three reasons. Firstly they needed to see how he performed in his rookie year in F2. Secondly Toto Wolff was keeping his options open should Carlos Sainz decided to take a one year stop gap contract with the silver arrows which would allow them to blood the Italian rising star in a team further back on the grid for a year.
Mercedes holding out for Max
Finally the management at Brackley have been holding out to see if Max Verstappen would follow through on his threat to leave the Red Bull team. Yet the re-singing of Sergio Perez for another two seasons – with conditions – appears to suggest Max has been appeased by the team for now.
The earliest Max may now depart for Mercedes is probably 2026 when the new engine and chassis/aerodynamic regulations come into force. The big sell from Mercedes is the way they leapt to the front of the field the last time such an enormous FIA rule change was enforced in 2014.
When the brand new V6 turbo hybrid power units were deployed in anger that year, Mercedes nailed the brief and due to the token system for development introduced by the FIA, the rest of the manufacturers took several years to catch up.
Its almost a done deal that Sainz is going to Williams which closes another door for Mercedes to place Antonelli with a lower order team for a year and so if the German press are to be believed, the next driver to be called Kimi will be in the W16 car which Hamilton has rejected for the 2025 season.
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Red Bull Canada trepidation
So Max is unlikely to sport the colours of the German auto manufacturers marque before 2026, but Helmut Mars now makes a bold claim about how he would fair today if he were driving Lewis Hamilton’s car.
Red Bull went into the weekend of the Canadian GP with trepidation. The kerbs in Monaco had upset their RB20 car and in Montreal the same style of kerbs are deployed around the circuit. Lewis Hamilton in free practice three destroyed the field by almost half a second so the world champions freaked the worst for the coming qualifying hour.
Ferrari were on a high following Charles Leclerc maiden win in his how town of Monaco, yet the team in red were disappointing all weekend; first with both cars failing to make final qualifying and secondly as both Leclerc and Sainz failed to take the chequered flag in the race.
The rain affected Grand Prix on the Isle de Notre Dame left fans with a number of if’s and but’s to answer, given choices made by drivers and teams as the race progressed. Would Lando Norris have claimed his second career win had the team brought him in a lap earlier meaning he wouldn’t have lost time behind the safety car?
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Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve
Would it have been Russell standing on the top step if he’d made less mistakes during the race? Could Hamilton have even won? Or is that stretching the bounds possibility?
In his regular slot on Austria’s OE24, Dr. Helmut Marko was asked whether his driver would have won in. Montreal if he’d been driving a McLaren or even a Mercedes. The 81 year old Red Bull consultant t instantly replied “Yes!”
“Only Max has the race overview and the confidence to step on the gas when necessary,” he added. “Apart from that, our team adopted absolutely the right strategy.”
McLaren have proven this year they can take the fight to Red Bull and in Miami Lando Norris claimed his maiden F1 victory, through he was assisted with the timing of a safety car. In Canada the British driver claimed his fifth podium of the season as he came in behind Verstappen at the chequered flag.
Mercedes now competitive?
While Ferrari fell of a cliff in North America, Mercedes enter the fray for a first race victory of the year as Russell claimed pole position and was in contention for the race win. Max entered the weekend having won just one from the previous three races as the pendulum has swung away from the dominance the world champion demonstrated in his RB19 in 2023.
Marko also reveals weaknesses the Red Bull team have had over the years since ground effect cars were introduced in 2022. However these are only now coming to light due to the fierce competition at the front of the field.
“It won’t be a clear-cut story because our car and our simulator have certain weaknesses,” said Marko. “But we are working hard to rectify this.
“We’ve always realised that we won’t win every race,” he continued. “It’s good for us that the others can’t get any consistency. If everything goes normally for us, Max will be ahead in the race.”
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Perez penalised
In their attempt to prevent a safety car at the Gilles Villeneuve circuit, Sergio Perez was instructed not to park the car and brig it back to the pit lane following his shunt with an unforgiving barrier. Perez was subsequently awarded a three place grid drop penalty for next time out in Spain, when the team could have simply told the Mexican to park the car behind a barrier.
“We’re not going to discuss it anymore,” said Marko, “we’ll get over the three-place demotion. At the time, we didn’t know how serious the damage was,” he explained. “We couldn’t see it with the camera angle we had available and we wanted Checo to continue, because anything was possible in this race. And you never know how much debris will fly off.”
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Precedent set by other stewards
Marko appears somewhat bitter with the stewards ruling given the precedents set by other groups of race officials who failed for example to penalise a driver for driving lap after lap with a wing mirror hanging off before it finally detached itself from the car onto the circuit.
“Others have driven around with more parts hanging off,” he observed. “Lewis Hamilton won once at Silverstone on three wheels,” he detailed, referring to the 2020 British Grand Prix.
Next time out in Spain, we should see the real capabilities of the RB20 which has struggled at certain circuits with its stiff suspension. The track in Barcelona has been used for decades for testing because its configuration is an all round work out for the various mechanical and aerodynamic components on an F1 car.
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James Vowels says ‘NO’ to Toto Wolf
When James Vowels left Mercedes to take up the position as team principal at Williams, many F1 observers believed the iconic British F1 racing team would become a satellite of its much larger German operation. Yet Williams is no longer dependent on cash from other Formula One teams to fund their budget and in return accept a junior driver from another organisations academy. James Bower who is the commercial director for the Grove based team stated last week that Williams now have enough funds from sponsors to spend up to the budget cap limit- something they’ve never done in previous years.
In addition Vowels revealed in Monaco the team were spending “100’s of millions” developing their ageing facilities and equipment in an attempt to build the kind of infrastructure that the top teams possess. Ferrari for years used Sauber as a satellite operation, going them engines on the cheap so long as they selected a driver lineup to suit Ferrari’s future ambitions and Mercedes did the same thing when George Russell was promoted from GP2 into Formula One… READ MORE
