Karun Chandhok's 10 big F1 questions of 2024

1. How crucial is it that someone closes the gap to Red Bull?

There’s no doubt that neutral Formula 1 fans around the world were getting a bit bored of the dominance shown by Max Verstappen and Red Bull last season. It’s not their fault – they did the best job by far and it really is up to the others to catch up.

A little look at TV viewership, social media and forum engagement numbers shows that F1 peaked around the second half of 2021. That of course was one of the most extraordinary seasons of the past 74 years of the series, and not every year can be like that, but we still want to wake up on Sunday morning and genuinely not know who is going to win the race. That’s what gets people to tune in, and it’s what we lacked in 2023.

If you rewind two decades, Michael Schumacher and Ferrari had a superb battle with Mika Hakkinen in 2000, had some decent competition in 2001, and then crushed the opposition in 2002, which is a similar trend to the past three years with Max and Red Bull.

PLUS: How F1's Verstappen era compares to Schumacher's early 2000s dominance

The difference then of course was that Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley worked closely together to change the technical rules to break a dominant cycle, whereas the current infighting between F1 and the FIA, plus the power that the teams seem to wield over the series, prevents that from happening. Essentially, Liberty and F1 are counting on Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and the rest to raise their game and take the fight to Red Bull.

It’s a big year for Mercedes after its first winless season in over a decade. Lewis Hamilton, the team’s biggest star, has given a ‘vote of no-confidence’ by leaving for its Italian rival even before he drove the W15 but, for this year at least, the team still has the best collective driver line-up in my opinion. The facilities and budget are top-notch, the trackside engineering and race team are as strong as ever, and therefore the pressure is on the design team to deliver the goods.

There were obviously some big changes at the top last year, with James Allison taking back the hands-on leadership role from Mike Elliott. James is a brilliant leader of a team, and his wealth of experience in the sport allied to his personal aero background gives cause for optimism.

Allison has returned to the front line at Mercedes as technical director

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Hearing his comments towards the end of last year, it does sound like the team has a decent understanding of where it went wrong in terms of getting the car working in the optimum ride-height window to balance downforce and porpoising. Truly understanding a problem, rather than thinking you’ve understood the problem, is the first big hurdle to cross but it sounds like Mercedes has done that.

PLUS: The issues Mercedes hopes it has solved with its W15 F1 car

Ferrari failed to build on 2022, when it had a fast car but made errors. Last year, the car started off the season too far away from the Red Bull and with much higher tyre wear than its immediate rivals. The in-season development was impressive, however, and the team did seem to find a way to widen the envelope of performance, resulting in both drivers having a better second half to the season.

Hamilton’s move has added a whole new dimension to this battle behind Red Bull. If Ferrari ends up stronger than Mercedes, as it seemed to be towards the end of 2023, then the Brit has once again made a superb career move

Ferrari has got an issue in that the two drivers seem to have different driving styles, and that can create problems in terms of direction for development and set-up of the car. With the margin between those top teams being so small, Ferrari really needs to find a way to make the car less peaky and kinder to its tyres to give both drivers a chance to be competitive all the time.

Hamilton’s move has added a whole new dimension to this battle behind Red Bull. If Ferrari ends up stronger than Mercedes, as it seemed to be towards the end of 2023, then the Brit has once again made a superb career move. If it’s the other way around and Mercedes unlocks the potential the team has been talking about for two years, Lewis will be a bit worried at the sight of the red car disappearing in his mirrors.

2. Will Perez keep his drive or Ricciardo take his seat?

Perez is under pressure to defend his Red Bull seat from Ricciardo and others

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Red Bull is the only organisation on the grid that doesn’t seem afraid of a mid-season shake-up, and that keeps the pressure on all the drivers to perform. Being team-mate to Verstappen is a real poisoned chalice. Of course, it means you’re probably in a top car, but competing against him at the moment must be brutal.

Sergio Perez started last season well but, as the year unfolded, qualifying became a bit of a problem. He only had one top-four qualifying position in the last 17 races, which put him on the back foot. So although he could come through the pack, he was never really going to be a contender for a win.

After two early victories, the momentum firmly shifted in Miami when, despite starting on pole, he was beaten by Verstappen, who came through from ninth on the grid. Perez ended the year with just two podiums in the last 10 races while his team-mate won nine of them. The fact that Verstappen would have won the constructors’ championship by himself by 166 points meant that Red Bull didn’t really need Perez to be finishing second every time, but if Mercedes, Ferrari or McLaren get their act together, that may become a requirement.

On the flip side, it’s really hard to decide whether Daniel Ricciardo is going to genuinely be a better option than Perez. He had an outstanding performance in Mexico but, apart from that, across his run of races against Yuki Tsunoda he was outqualified 4-3 and didn’t really blow the young Japanese driver away any more than Liam Lawson did.

Are Lawson or Tsunoda ready to go into the big team? I don’t believe so, which means that really it’s up to Checo to show that he deserves to stay in that seat, while Ricciardo needs to completely trounce Tsunoda and stake his claim to be promoted once again.

3. Will McLaren or Aston Martin break into the top three?

Aston Martin and McLaren shone at each end of the 2023 season, but a consistent campaign at the front is what each needs

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Alongside Mercedes, McLaren is the team that I am most intrigued by heading into 2024. Its turn of form in the middle of last year was one of the most extraordinary flips we’ve seen in recent times, made even more impressive with the cost-cap and wind-tunnel restrictions we have these days.

With David Sanchez returning from Ferrari and Rob Marshall joining from Red Bull in the first major defection of a top technical person from ‘Team Newey’ for a while, Andrea Stella and Zak Brown have shown they mean business. The new wind tunnel has been up and running since August, and the team says that it’s a huge improvement in terms of the information it was getting compared to the old Toyota wind tunnel that it had been using in Cologne.

PLUS: Can McLaren's evolutionary-but-innovative MCL38 deliver Norris' first F1 win?

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri seem to work well together, want similar things from the car and, while they may not yet be at the level of Verstappen, Hamilton or Fernando Alonso for consistent brilliance, you do feel that they will be ready to fight for wins if the car is capable of it. Norris admitted to making too many errors in qualifying last year, while Piastri’s inexperience showed in terms of race pace and tyre management. Both of them are self-critical and smart enough to know what to do better in 2024, and I can’t wait to see if they can grab their first grand prix wins.

If I had to put money on it, I would say that McLaren is more likely to break into that top three based on the momentum it built up in the second half of last year

Aston Martin’s season started off as a fantastic ‘feel good story’ for 2023. Watching Alonso rediscover the old magic early in the season was brilliant, but the team seemed to lose its way a bit from June’s Spanish GP onwards. Aston started the season only 0.510% off the Red Bull in qualifying until Spain – a huge gain considering in 2022 it was 2.06% off.

From Spain onwards, that grew to 0.867% and the low point was in Mexico when the Aston seemed like the slowest car on track at times in the race. Lance Stroll had a terrible run in qualifying from Monza to Las Vegas, with seven Q1 eliminations out of eight races, but seemed to recover solidly in the final four events.

PLUS: How McLaren and Aston Martin enjoyed opposing fortunes in F1 2023

At various points of the season, Aston Martin and McLaren looked like they had the second-fastest car, quicker than Ferrari and Mercedes, but breaking into the top three involves consistency. If I had to put money on it, I would say that McLaren is more likely to break into that top three based on the momentum it built up in the second half of last year. But if Aston manages to correct the slide and steer back onto its early season development path, it could well be up there.

4. Which team-mate contests will be the fiercest?

Now it is their final season as team-mates, how will the Russell and Hamilton dynamic change?

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The intra-team battles at Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Alpine will be fun to watch. George Russell had an outstanding 2022 but, by his own admission, 2023 didn’t really build on that. Going up against a driver of Lewis Hamilton’s calibre is always a tall order.

We didn’t see the best of Hamilton in 2022, whereas last season the real Hamilton reappeared and it was a bit of a wake-up call for George. The younger Brit made a couple of key errors from good points positions in Canada and Singapore, and he will be hungry to put last season behind him, especially if the car is more competitive.

PLUS: How Hamilton's Ferrari deal makes Russell's F1 2024 harder

The Ferrari battle seemed to ebb and flow depending on whether the car set-up suited one driver or the other. On any given weekend, one of the drivers seemed unhappy with the balance but, across the season, they ended up pretty close on points. I was criticised by some people last year for saying that I believed Charles Leclerc was the fastest driver over one lap, but the fact that he was in the top four in eight of the last nine (GP) sessions in a car that wasn’t always one of the two best underlines my point.

The pressure on Carlos Sainz this season has just gone up a notch. With a potential seat at each of Mercedes, Red Bull and Aston Martin being open for 2025, he needs to find the mental strength to block out the noise and deliver a strong season.

Many people have linked him to Audi for 2026 because of his illustrious father’s relationship with the German manufacturer, but I don’t think that’s where he would want to go. Audi is at least five years away from being a top team in F1, and Sainz won’t want to waste his prime years building a start-up.

At McLaren, Piastri showed that he’s got plenty of one-lap speed and outqualified Norris 8-7 in the final 15 representative sessions of the season. With a year of racing and tyre management under his belt, he should be a stronger contender, while Norris continues to impress – his race from the back of the grid in Mexico last year was one of the best drives of the season in my opinion.

5. Why is Alpine marooned in the midfield?

Alpine risks being cut adrift of the top teams

Photo by: Alpine

Alpine was probably the big disappointment of last season. Its marketing department may be delighted to have a glittering roster of stars from other sports and Hollywood as investors, but ultimately the only thing that really matters is on-track performance. The rest is just noise, and for the third-biggest automotive manufacturer group to have a team slip from fourth to sixth last year wasn’t good. It was a turbulent year for the team, with Otmar Szafnauer, Alan Permane and Pat Fry being the most high-profile exits.

It had the sixth-fastest car and was in a bit of limbo without anyone to fight against in the constructors’ table, racking up 120 points versus 280 for Aston Martin and 302 for McLaren. The argument about it taking time to turn things around has been blown out of the water by these two teams, and really the rules reset in 2022 should have presented Alpine with an opportunity to leap into the top three, which is where a works Renault-owned team should expect to be.

Renault-Nissan alliance boss Luca de Meo seems to be someone who doesn’t suffer fools, and the pressure will be on the design team in Enstone and the engine department in Viry to get Alpine back in the fight with Aston and McLaren.

It feels like Alpine needs a year of stability and calmness

The team says that it’s been bold with the design of the A524 but there have already been rumours of delays to the chassis homologation from a failed crash test, which has been a setback. Perhaps these ambitious ideas will yield the results despite the delays but it’s never a good sign when a team has to miss doing a shakedown in Europe before shipping the cars to Bahrain.

Both cars getting knocked out in Q1 at Monza highlighted a weakness in the power unit, and I’d be interested to see what the engine department can do given the limitations of the rules.

Esteban Ocon is one of the nicest people you will meet in the paddock. Frustratingly, he started the season with a run of three penalties in Bahrain, which sort of set the tone for his year. He had excellent drives in Monaco and Las Vegas, but seven non-finishes in total for the season, including three caused by unreliability – plus first-lap clashes at the Hungaroring and Austin and an expensive crash in Australia with his team-mate – somewhat ruined his season.

Pierre Gasly settled into the team quickly and had some very good drives. He was in the train pushing Carlos Sainz hard in Melbourne until the crash at the end, and his performances in difficult circumstances in the Netherlands and over the bumps at Austin were superb.

Overall, it feels like Alpine needs a year of stability and calmness, but there’s no doubt that the pressure will be on the team to move up in the constructors’ championship this year.

6. How high can Williams climb?

Vowles has laid out a clear path for Williams and 2024 will be a test of its abilities

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The way the constructors’ table shook out last year clearly broke the pack up into groups. Williams ended up in seventh but it could quite easily have been eighth or maybe even ninth. The gap between Williams and Alpine last year was 92 points, a not insignificant number, but it does feel like the 2023 season was the most positive one for the Dorilton era of Williams.

James Vowles has brought a wave of new energy into Grove, and his engineering-led management has a very good Williams-Patrick Head sort of feel to it. He’s been very open and honest about the journey the team is on and the investment and upgrades that have to happen back at the factory. Roping in Pat Fry is an excellent move as I honestly believe he is one of the most underrated people in the paddock.

Realistically, if Williams can cement seventh place but close the gap to the pack ahead, I think that will be a very good result for 2024. There were weekends like Silverstone, Zandvoort, Montreal and Las Vegas where the car seemed very competitive, but there were others like Monaco, Qatar and Abu Dhabi that seemed like a slog.

Alex Albon was one of the stars of last season and really seems to have found his feet in his post-Red Bull life. If the team can give him the support, confidence and car to perform, they can really build a recovery together over the next few years.

Vowles said last week that the team has him under contract for 2025, but it’s not impossible that Lewis Hamilton’s move could trigger a chain reaction where Albon goes to Mercedes alongside his close friend George Russell. Williams will do well to hang on to Albon, and this year could be a really interesting one at the negotiating table for both sides.

7. What’s going on at Haas?

Gene Haas's patience ran out with Steiner which has seen Komatsu installed as the new team boss

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Changing your team principal or, frankly, any senior figure in a team this close to the start of the season doesn’t seem like a good idea. It destabilises the team and doesn’t give the new person stepping in enough time to make all the changes they may want before the season.

Even on the weekends when Gene Haas was present, to close observers this seemed like Guenther Steiner’s team. He was a big personality and was unquestionably the standout star of the Netflix Drive to Survive show.

Perhaps that was the issue and, after finishing last or second to last for the past couple of seasons, Gene Haas had had enough. The additional publicity that Guenther brought was probably quite powerful in attracting a title sponsor like MoneyGram but, with every position in the constructors’ table worth about $10million, all of a sudden Williams in seventh is $30million better off than Haas in terms of cash from F1.

Steiner has left big shoes to fill in terms of a character and a presence in the paddock. Ayao will be a more introverted team boss

The team entered F1 with a bang, scoring points on its debut in Melbourne in 2016 but, nearly a decade later, it is yet to get a podium finish. Of course, Steiner’s job was not to design the car and he had to work with the budget he was given, but it was his job to look at weaknesses in the organisation, search for talented people in other teams and steer the ship. When you have a modest budget, you can’t expect to be winning, but you get the feeling Gene expects them to be in the midfield whereas Guenther felt he needed more funding to deliver.

PLUS: Why the Steiner-Haas F1 team divorce is best for both parties

Ayao Komatsu is a bright, no-nonsense engineer. He’s been around motor racing for a very long time – in fact, I first met him when he was helping Takuma Sato out in Formula 3 back in 2000-01. Stepping up to team principal is a whole other challenge, and all of a sudden the pressure of the media, the political games with F1 and the FIA, sponsorship and commercial obligations, as well as driver contracts, are all going to end up on his table.

Steiner has left big shoes to fill in terms of a character and a presence in the paddock. Ayao will be a more introverted team boss (frankly, anybody is compared to Guenther!), but he’s got a tenacious work ethic and passion for the sport, which will be tested.

8. How much fun is the silly season going to be this time?

Hamilton's shock Ferrari switch for 2025 should trigger an exciting F1 driver market

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Lewis Hamilton’s shock move to Ferrari has really energised the whole sport. Everywhere I went in the days following the announcement, people wanted to talk about it. Mercedes has been his natural home for so many of F1’s new fans, and there’s a real curiosity about why he left and also who replaces him.

For the first time in F1 history, in 2024 we’re heading to the opening race with exactly the same driver line-up as the one that finished the previous season. Having a flat driver market with boring renewals was pretty dull, so the sport should collectively be thanking Lewis for pulling the trigger.

The fun of silly season creates interesting storylines and subplots and, when we had a season where one driver won 19 races, we really did need some more stories to talk about!

Zak Brown has done an excellent job in locking down Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri at McLaren. With over half the contracts up for renewal at the end of 2024, including at three of the top five teams, there are going to be lots of covert meetings and negotiations over the next few months.

By the summer break, I imagine Mercedes, Red Bull and Aston Martin would want to lock their drivers down. Carlos Sainz is the big one to watch in the market, with Alex Albon and Sergio Perez the other key players. As a race winner and someone who has proved he can cope with the pressure of a top drive, Sainz is surely ahead of Albon in the queue. Liam Lawson did a superb job in his cameo appearances at AlphaTauri and I would be very disappointed if he didn’t get a proper shot at an F1 season in the future.

PLUS: How a devastating title loss steeled Red Bull’s latest charge for F1

Andrea Kimi Antonelli is being touted as the next Max Verstappen or Charles Leclerc, and certainly his karting and junior career has been impressive so far. He has a good benchmark in the highly rated Oliver Bearman at the top F2 squad Prema Racing and I wonder if Mercedes will do with him what Ron Dennis did with Lewis Hamilton in 2007 and stick him in the deep end at the earliest opportunity.

9. What should be done to improve the sprint races?

F1 sprint races undergo another format tweak this year

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

As Martin Brundle rightly says, the worst sprint is still going to be better than the best FP2. Fundamentally, there is no such thing as a ‘great’ practice session to watch, but the sprints can be excellent, like in Qatar last year. Overall, the TV viewership over a sprint weekend is 30% higher than a like-for-like non-sprint weekend in the same time zone, so surely that’s the reason to be doing it.

In principle, I have been a fan of doing six sprint weekends, and it honestly confuses me that we have so much negativity around it. The beauty of the world we live in is that people have choices in terms of what to watch, so if you don’t like the sprint or the shootout, then don’t watch it!

The format is far from perfect, of course, and the obvious thing to tweak is the order in which the sessions are run. Qualifying on a Friday for a Sunday race was a bit confusing, but that’s been an easy fix and I’m glad that they have re-ordered the sessions now.

We had six weekends when the highly intelligent and well-paid engineers were lift twiddling their thumbs as they couldn’t change the cars

In theory, with the sprint qualifying on a Friday evening and sprint on a Saturday morning, it should mean that the teams will be able to modify their cars ahead of qualifying for the main grand prix on Saturday. This is a really good step because we had six weekends when the highly intelligent and well-paid engineers were lift twiddling their thumbs as they couldn’t change the cars.

I would also have sprint tyres that would basically be the softest compound normally nominated for the weekend plus one step softer, which is used just for the sprint race, mandating a one-stop race. This way we will see some proper tyre degradation and intrigue around the pitstops.

10. Outside of the driver market, what will be the biggest story of 2024?

The F1 political battles are also set to rage again in 2024

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Obviously, I have no solid answer to this question, but it’s fun to play ‘fantasy F1 stories’. Last year, we seemed to spend most of the season talking about Las Vegas’s return to the calendar.

I really hope that the biggest story of 2024 is an on-track battle for the world championship. People talk about the ‘Netflix effect’ on F1, but the stats we see at Sky are pretty clear that the single biggest boost in viewership in the past decade came in the second half of 2021 when we had that titanic battle between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. If the racing is good, nothing else matters.

If we don’t get a title battle, watching Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri chase their first wins will be fun, or perhaps Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso winning again. The Mercedes-versus-Ferrari battle this year, keeping in mind Hamilton’s situation, will be fascinating.

The FIA seems to have a lot of issues at the moment, with Steve Nielsen and Tim Goss the latest to leave. President Mohammed Ben Sulayem got into a personal battle with Toto and Susie Wolff in December, which resulted in a clear division in the sport, putting F1 and the teams on one side of the line and the FIA on the other. The Andretti issue, where the FIA approved and F1 later somewhat emphatically rejected the entry, has also been a clear divider. This political battle looks like it’s going to escalate throughout 2024.

The governing body is looking to establish more control over something that the commercial rights holder believes it should be in charge of. With 70% of the FIA’s income coming from F1, it’s a very complicated balance of everyone working together without egos getting in the way. I feel like there are some real fireworks to come in this particular battle in 2024.

What will be the biggest talking points in F1 2024?

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