Will 2025 really be as exciting as F1 hopes?

What a difference a year makes.

Leaving the Bahrain paddock after 2024 Formula 1 winter testing, there was a specific gloom amongst the championship’s storytellers asking, “how are we going to do this again?"

After all, Red Bull had won 31 of the previous 33 races and Max Verstappen’s march to a fourth straight title already seemed certain. There are only so many ways to make the same tale interesting…

Such is the way in F1 – where periods of domination are the norm and the diverse nature of narratives in the ‘Piranha Club’ make the championship ever appealing to many. But 2024 matters when considering the new question: is F1 2025 going to live up to expectations of a year-long thriller?

Precisely how last season ended is what matters the most. Despite Verstappen's wins in the second half of the campaign clinching him the championship, they were spread around triumphs by Lando Norris that created a surprise title battle and saw McLaren overhaul Red Bull for the constructors' crown. Even Ferrari claimed three wins in the latter rounds to move ahead of the Austrian outfit, while Mercedes popped up with the odd victory.

And, with the lack of car design rule changes for this year ahead of the major ones coming in 2026, there is simply no reason to expect that fluctuating form to not continue as the new season gets going.

Mercedes wishes to know if the W16 is going to work when temperatures go up. But the cold, rainy Bahrain test meant it doesn’t have a full grasp on whether it has been successful.

Despite Verstappen winning seven of the opening 10 grands prix in 2024, the season was eventually a thriller with four teams claiming at least four victories

Photo by: Dom Romney / Motorsport Images

Ferrari, given everything it didn’t show in winter testing, will be hoping it is at least as close to McLaren as it ended last year, following that finely poised race-long chase between Norris and ex-Scuderia driver Carlos Sainz in Abu Dhabi.

And Red Bull is seemingly having similar set-up headaches even with an RB21 the team insists can be successful over a wider range of tracks compared to what came to be known as its recalcitrant predecessor.

But, with the points reset ahead of the Australia opener, all eight drivers from F1’s top four teams can at least dream of 2025 title glory right now.

There’s a couple of lessons from 2024 that suggest a McLaren domination of the upcoming campaign would be the reverse of what F1 really hopes 2025 will be

Red Bull would, surely, even expect nothing less of Liam Lawson as Sergio Perez’s replacement alongside Verstappen at this stage, now that the New Zealander gets to race a frontrunning car for the first time in his fledgling career.

The testing results, however, make McLaren the firm favourite heading to Melbourne. Norris’s near 0.5s average lap time margin over Mercedes and Ferrari on that headline day two race simulation was emphatic – even around the usual testing caveats.

Oscar Piastri having an only slightly reduced margin in the hotter and tougher final day similar runs suggests McLaren’s advantage has endured through the first of many 2025 challenges.

McLaren is the team to beat heading into 2025 with Norris the favourite for the drivers' crown

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Of course, various issues (and in Red Bull’s case, extra aerodynamic development assessment), mean for Ferrari and Red Bull the picture is more clouded than around how the McLaren race runs came in six and nine laps shorter than Mercedes clocked on those two race simulations. This discrepancy could show a fuel-load impact coming through on the averages or just that McLaren is so confident it doesn’t want to show its full hand.

But the orange team has been so bad in Bahrain in recent years that this was an almighty showing. The team feels it has succeeded in working its package to be better in exactly the tighter corner types prevalent at the track owned by its Group controller.

Now, there’s a couple of lessons from 2024 that suggest a McLaren domination of the upcoming campaign would be the reverse of what F1 really hopes 2025 will be.

How, in his wins at Zandvoort and in Singapore, Norris crushed the field to such an extent that they were snoozefests. His start struggle at the former and bizarre errors in the latter kept jerking snoring heads skywards, but progress from both team and driver since suggest there will be fewer such examples this year.

Even Sainz’s 2024 Australian Grand Prix win was an awful race once the surprise of Verstappen’s brake-fire retirement had worn off.

And, although McLaren let additional wins in 2024 at Montreal, Silverstone and Monza go begging, it now has the confidence that brews from finally ending a 26-year constructors’ championship wait to rely upon in similar perfection-requiring circumstances.

Will McLaren dominate the 2025 season having learned from its mistakes last year?

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

But even if this year is to be a McLaren sweep, there’s hope it will be more interesting than, say, 2023. Because, unlike when F1 was relying on Perez to make things anything close to interesting against Verstappen, in Piastri sitting alongside Norris in an MCL39 McLaren has a line-up that is very closely matched.

Both must now be considered title contenders even as Piastri is embarking on just his third F1 campaign.

His progress has been seriously impressive since his debut two years ago. He knows qualifying was a weakness last year and there were still plenty of occasions where Norris had a tyre management edge.

"When [Norris] was in the fifth or sixth team, he was saying that only one team will win all the races This is a normal, confident speech. It is good for him, but I think it is going to be difficult” Fernando Alonso

But the feeling from inside the Australian’s camp is that his efforts on both fronts in the off-season has paid off. Now he just needs to discover by what amount…

Piastri has already shown in his brilliant Baku win and no-compromise approach to Verstappen’s Abu Dhabi Turn 1 lunge that he has the skills to cope with at least some of the pressures that come with a title fight. And in a year-long attempt Norris doesn’t have such experience either.

McLaren was at pains to deflect speculation regarding its 2025 potential before testing starting.

Norris claimed “this season you're probably going to have some winners that aren't top four teams – that aren't McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes or Red Bull” and squad CEO Zak Brown repeated that exact line later at the F175 season launch event.

Even if McLaren does dominate this season, the title battle should still be interesting given how closely matched its drivers are

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But the deft PR application is clear. Fernando Alonso, at Aston Martin, highlighted how the game works when these comments were put to him in Bahrain last week. And Alonso knows better than any driver how to make the media and F1 interest work.

"When [Norris] was in the fifth or sixth team, he was saying that only one team will win all the races,” said Alonso of the chances of non-frontrunning teams winning in 2025.

“This is a normal, confident speech. It is good for him, but I think it is going to be difficult. Reliability is so good these days; there are not many retirements, there are not many incidents. Strategies are quite defined. Everything is so perfect now that it is difficult to change or to make a race unpredictable. It has to be crazy weather or something.”

McLaren’s early advantage could, of course, prove to be a mirage. But there’s additional lessons from recent years that show F1 can get its spread success desire even if McLaren’s edge holds true. In 2020, the championship had five winners – matching the total of the more competitive previous campaign, where Lewis Hamilton waltzed to his record-matching seventh title. Then in 2021, F1 got six different winners, including McLaren’s false-dawn breakthrough at Monza with Daniel Ricciardo, the highest total for driver victories between the recent peaks of 2012 and 2024 (eight and seven).

But the Occam's razor principle overhangs all.

The lack of rule changes combined with how 2024 ended and the wins being passed around the existing frontrunners suggests a multi-team scrap for the titles will play out in 2025. Especially as it seems no midfield squad has been able to bridge a performance gap only a rules reset can provide in one winter.

But even if it’s just two teams that scoop up most of the silverware on offer, 2021 proved that it can still work as an all-time classic. The tales then, will really write themselves.

Even if the wins are less spread out than in 2024, the 2025 F1 season can still be a classic

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images