Seven themes to watch for the rest of F1 2024

Every Formula 1 season is packed with narratives – but 2024 has exploded in some rather unexpected ways.

It began with Lewis Hamilton deciding to swap Mercedes for Ferrari in 2025, then carried on via the Christian Horner behaviour scandal and Red Bull management war, into the campaign getting the most different race winners in over a decade. That was after Max Verstappen had utterly dominated the opening seven races.

How Verstappen tries to wrap up his fourth F1 crown is one tale that will end in the coming months, but so too will we see how key decisions at Red Bull might cost the team the more lucrative constructors’ prize – even if all seems to have cooled on the earlier sagas.

There’s still possible turns in this utterly frenetic driver market to come, plus the consequences of different management turmoil at two other long-standing squads. Then there’s the possibility that with 2024 being so good people will expect next year to be even better and how they might view the worth of a pecking order-resetting rules change looming just after that.

Here then, are the seven storylines to follow for the rest of F1 2024.

1. Close competition (hopefully) continuing

The Verstappen/Red Bull early domination of the 2024 F1 season has ended

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

After Max Verstappen won the Japanese Grand Prix in April, 20 seconds ahead of the best non-Red Bull, few could have predicted the current exciting state of Formula 1. Sure, Ferrari and Carlos Sainz had grabbed that feel-good Melbourne victory following the Spaniard’s appendicitis, yet Verstappen surely would have won from pole in Australia without his disastrous brake problem. Seven different winners from the first 14 races – the most since the eight of 2012 – just didn’t seem possible.

Except it was. And F1 is now enjoying exactly the sort of close contests, with regular different winners, that it wanted from the 2022 rule changes.

Plenty has gone into this. Red Bull appears to have hit something of a development ceiling with the RB20, with the rest plunging into the success space it carved out on the first outwash design path two years ago. There was much riding on the major Red Bull update for last month’s Hungarian GP. And while this showed that there is indeed more to come from this design path, the improvements are smaller, and so the rest can catch up.

Specific circumstances have also played into this enjoyable mix. One is how Sergio Perez’s continued underperformance means others are picking up the pieces when Verstappen is absent from the lead fight. The other is that rare, but still notable, Verstappen errors, team strategy mistakes and that Canada FP2 reliability crack have also allowed chances to fall to rivals.

Red Bull is in a battle, “under pressure” and “doing more mistakes” – as Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur insisted was possible back at Suzuka. If that continues, an exciting season run-in is on.

2. Will Verstappen wrap up the drivers’ title early?

Verstappen remains favourite for the drivers' title but can Norris take the fight to him by cutting out errors?

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

He took his first F1 world title on the last lap in 2021 but, for each of the past two years, Max Verstappen has wrapped up the drivers’ championship with 280 and 406 racing laps remaining – or four and five full rounds still to run.

He’s now 78 points ahead of McLaren’s Lando Norris. That’s still a hefty margin, but it’s down from the maximum gap Verstappen has enjoyed to this point – 84, leaving Silverstone last month.

This isn’t 2022, where Verstappen had to fight back from a major early season deficit to retain his crown, aided by a Ferrari implosion. It’s certainly not 2023, where he waltzed to his third title. But, if he matches Alain Prost and Sebastian Vettel as four-time F1 champions, Verstappen will do so having seen off a surging threat from another squad.

Mercedes and Ferrari have had spells at the front – the former of late and the latter at the beginning of the campaign. But since May, McLaren has returned to being Red Bull’s closest challenger, as it was for a large swathe of the 2023 mid-season.

PLUS: How 2024 missteps will be the making of McLaren

The biggest problem for a team still growing and learning how to win is that its driver line-up continues to make critical errors. Granted a chance to eat into Verstappen’s lead, Norris failed to do so at Spa, and left Belgium two points further behind. If such mistakes aren’t eradicated, that alone can preserve Verstappen’s considerable advantage.

3. Will keeping Perez cost Red Bull the constructors’ title?

Perez's form could cost Red Bull the constructors' title

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

There was much intrigue in Red Bull’s decisions over its driver line-ups heading into the summer break, but the outcome was ultimately underwhelming. Sergio Perez will continue at the main team, with Daniel Ricciardo staying at RB, having appeared set to be either promoted to the Mexican’s seat or released altogether.

PLUS: The 2024 F1 half-term driver grades

Red Bull had grown increasingly exasperated with Perez’s poor performances since he’d ably backed up Verstappen in Bahrain, Jeddah and Japan. The frustrations of the ‘public support’ camp at Red Bull – including team boss Christian Horner – were only aired in private. The ‘apply pressure’ approach favoured by Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko was spouted to reporters with every Perez misstep.

Red Bull tried one major move to boost Perez – it announced back in early June that he’d been granted a two-year contract. In reality, the performance clause that became so important ahead of the summer break, and the F1 reality that any contract can be escaped if one side wants it enough, meant this was little more than a very public show of support.

But that didn’t matter. His consistent errors and underperformances – he missed Q3 in six of seven rounds from Miami – meant from that race to Spa the team averaged 21 points per round to McLaren’s 30. Should that trend continue after the summer break, then the Woking team will be level or ahead around the Singapore or United States GPs. McLaren also has a series of updates planned.

That Perez didn’t improve with his contract update matters, since it suggests that his retention until the end of 2024 will not lead to any notable results uptick. With Verstappen’s tougher battle these days, a ‘one-car’ team will lose the lucrative constructors’ championship.

4. How the final driver market pieces now fall

Can Lawson find a way on to next year's F1 grid as the driver market develops?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Carlos Sainz signing for Williams last week on the eve of the summer break also confirmed one thing: that Logan Sargeant is not going to be replaced mid-season, as had been speculated in Miami and Hungary (regarding Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Esteban Ocon respectively). With Sergio Perez and Daniel Ricciardo also staying put, the line-ups to the end of the season should now be set.

Sainz’s deal also uncorked the bottle for most of the remaining seats in the driver market. At the time of writing, it now seems straightforward for Alpine to promote reserve driver Jack Doohan to race alongside Pierre Gasly next year. The thinking is to justify its considerable investment in its Academy set-up, rather than take on another team’s junior, such as Antonelli.

Valtteri Bottas goes from Williams’s back-up option to surely staying on board at Sauber. The arrival of new team boss Mattia Binotto will “reset” negotiations there, says the Finn.

But it seems unlikely that Zhou Guanyu can stay on the grid for 2025. With Ollie Bearman signing for Haas and Mercedes intent on promoting Antonelli to replace Lewis Hamilton – expect more interviews with the young Italian to emerge now that the team’s mind is increasingly settled, given it’s unlikely to gain Verstappen’s services for 2025 – three existing drivers are going to drop out. Expect them to be Kevin Magnussen, Sargeant and Zhou.

Binotto’s arrival at Sauber/Audi doesn’t guarantee Bottas remaining there because, with Perez and Ricciardo staying put, Red Bull still doesn’t have a slot for Liam Lawson. He could be an outsider elsewhere since he’s free to join another team for 2025. But Red Bull’s leaving it late to make more driver choices may restrict Lawson when other squads will want to have their line-ups settled earlier.

5. Ferrari’s quest to recover ahead of Hamilton’s arrival

Ferrari's upgrades have flopped which has allowed McLaren and Mercedes to push past in the pecking order

Photo by: Ferrari

One key element of why 2024 has turned out to be as good as it has done concerns the car upgrades – they need to be hits straight away in this cost-cap era, and have backfired at certain teams. Mercedes was insisting this was the case regarding Red Bull’s floor and front wing upgrades at Imola in May. Mercedes, in turn, took its new floor off its W15s at Spa last month due to doubts about its performance and a shock early deficit in straightline speed.

But it’s at another high-profile team where flop upgrades have had the biggest impact. Ferrari’s floor upgrade for the Spanish GP led to its SF-24s bouncing through high-speed corners, robbing their drivers of confidence and, by extension, ultimate lap time. Ferrari assessed the issue with old and new-spec tests at Silverstone, where the team ultimately went back to its Imola-upgrade arrangement. It has since fast-tracked adjustments to the new floor, but this doesn’t change what Sainz highlighted at Silverstone.

“We have lost two or three months of performance gain in the wind tunnel or performance we could have added in these three months,” the Spaniard explained.

How Ferrari kicks on with getting its package back to the stage where it can bother or even usurp Red Bull, as McLaren has managed, will be a key storyline over the rest of 2024. Before too long, Lewis Hamilton is going to be arriving at Maranello, and so much is expected of his late-career twist to try to win that eighth title. He’s already fielding (very premature) questions about whether this was the right move, given Ferrari hasn’t won since Monaco in May, and Mercedes has taken three of the past four victories.

6. The impact of major management shifts at Sauber and Alpine

Both Sauber and Alpine have undergone major management changes in the past few weeks - the impact of which will start to be felt over the second half of the season

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

It’s not just a decision on Sauber’s other driver for 2025 that will have gone onto Mattia Binotto’s ‘to do’ list when he began work at the Swiss-based team last week. There seem to have been plenty of behind-the-scenes politics to work through given the departures of CEO Andreas Seidl and board chairman Oliver Hoffmann, while Red Bull sporting director Jonathan Wheatley arrives as team principal next summer after finishing his gardening leave.

For now, Binotto must steady the ship and turn Sauber’s trajectory around – starting by finally taking points in 2024. A potential year or two (at least) of pain, even with the coming Audi rebrand, was apparently enough to extinguish Carlos Sainz’s considerable interest in joining this project, so Binotto needs to make his new squad more competitive in the short term, as well as build up to Audi’s F1 debut without things turning into a farce.

The axing of two team principals, a year apart at the same venue, means ‘farce’ could also apply to Alpine, which started 2024 by propping up the field in Bahrain qualifying. Hitech team boss Oliver Oakes has now replaced Bruno Famin in charge.

Whoever does take over will, like Binotto, have a driver market call to make soon. But at Alpine the team is also now trying to adjust to operating as a customer engine squad – if it can satisfy French employment laws regarding treatment of staff at its Viry-Chatillon division. The overarching work of Alpine executive advisor Flavio Briatore means the potential for further change (good or bad) at the team is clear.

7. 2026 rule change regret

Focus on the F1 rules overhaul for 2026 will sharpen later this year

Photo by: FIA

If McLaren can make a real fist of depriving Red Bull of a seventh constructors’ championship in its short history, or if Mercedes keeps up its winning run, or Ferrari gets back to such success, expect plenty of chat to follow about the merits of F1 changing its car design rules again for 2026.

Very different engines as well as an overhaul of the chassis regulations means there’s the potential for one team to wipe away the rest. If that team has two good drivers, and a Mercedes 2014-16 Hamilton/Rosberg-style scenario can arise, then F1 is on safer footing. If that team is a Max Verstappen-led Red Bull with still no intra-team competition (or, ultimately, the same applies to any squad), the question will be why F1 ditched its current rules cycle just when things were getting interesting. If the current constantly changing competitive order continues, calls to abandon the 2026 changes entirely may follow.

PLUS: The turmoil of F1's 2026 rules shift

But, while it does look like that point is arriving fast, and it seems like a waste of time to have tried to attract more engine builders (Audi) to lose another (Renault), regulation changes are a part of F1’s DNA. Such change must happen for the championship to progress – either on safety grounds, because modern squads are just much better than they were in older periods, or, yes, even for the racing spectacle to evolve.

The change is coming regardless of outside objections – at least according to sources on the FIA’s determination to see things through. Plus, the chat about fully sustainable fuels will truly soon kick off – something that has the potential to highlight how motorsport can be a considerable force for good in the unfolding environmental crisis.

What will dominate the headlines over the rest of the 2024 F1 season?

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images