The 2025 Formula 1 season is upon us.
The season officially gets underway Thursday night in the United States with the opening practice for Saturday night’s Australian Grand Prix (11:55 p.m. ET, ESPN). F1 begins the season with five consecutive races in Australia and Asia before heading to Miami in May for the first of three races in the United States.
Here’s what you need to know ahead of the season as Max Verstappen looks to defend his title for the fourth straight season.
Max Verstappen goes for five in a row
Max Verstappen still has a ways to go to tie Michael Schumacher (and Lewis Hamilton) at seven F1 titles, but he can tie Schumacher’s streak with another driver’s title in 2025.
Schumacher is the only driver — so far — to win five straight championships. He won titles from 2000 through 2004 with Ferrari as the team dominated F1 at the turn of the century.
Verstappen won his fourth consecutive title in 2024 even though Red Bull wasn’t head and shoulders above the field. He became the fourth driver in the 2000s to win at least four straight titles, but his points total of 437 was his second-lowest of that stretch.
Verstappen was clearly the best driver of 2024, but there were some serious cracks in the Red Bull foundation. After he won seven of the first 10 races and gapped the field, Verstappen went 10 races without a victory before closing the season with two wins in the final four races.
He’s already started to tamp down expectations, at least at the beginning of the season. Verstappen has been publicly pessimistic about the team’s chances of winning the Australian Grand Prix. Melbourne was the site of Verstappen’s only DNF of 2024 after he was forced to retire because of a brake issue in the opening laps.
Is McLaren the team to beat?
As Red Bull (relatively) struggled, McLaren took advantage. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri formed the fastest driver duo in F1, even if the team couldn’t exactly figure out the way it wanted to handle team orders throughout the season when it had two fast cars in the same Grand Prix.
Norris got four wins and Piastri scored two as the 2024 season featured seven drivers with at least two victories.
McLaren continues to look like the top team through preseason testing, as there were no signs of the team losing its grip atop the standings at Bahrain. But there’s reason to believe the constructor’s race could be closer in 2025. Ferrari rivaled the team in pace at the end of the season and should start the season strongly. Mercedes showed flashes at the end of the year too. And you can’t count out Red Bull, even if it takes rookie Liam Lawson a bit to get settled as Verstappen’s new teammate.
Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari
The announcement of Hamilton’s shock move to Ferrari over a year has now been realized. It’s a bit odd to see the winningest driver in F1 in Ferrari red after so much dominance in silver and black for Mercedes.
But Hamilton looked extremely comfortable in preseason testing with the Scuderia and is looking to bounce back after a rough last three seasons with Mercedes. After Verstappen controversially won the 2021 title in Abu Dhabi, Hamilton failed to win in 2022 and 2023 before winning twice a season ago.
It’s not unfair to expect a victory or three in 2025, either. Hamilton should be in a much more consistently fast car than he’s had in recent seasons. Is he a title favorite? The odds say so, but those may be a bit inflated. A F1-record eighth title in 2025 would be an incredible story. And easily justify the switch.
Five rookies in the field
Goodbye Valtteri Bottas, Franco Colapinto, Zhou Guanyu, Kevin Magnussen and Sergio Perez. Hello Lawson, Kimi Antonelli, Ollie Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto, Jack Doohan and Isack Hadjar.
Rookies make up more than a quarter of the field this season, and yes, we’re still counting Lawson as a rookie. He competed in six races a season ago after taking over for Daniel Ricciardo at the Red Bull junior team.
Both Lawson and Antonelli have by far the best chances to win a race in 2025. Lawson takes over for Sergio Perez after Perez struggled mightily in 2024. His performance left Red Bull no choice but to replace him after the season even though he brought significant sponsor money and was a teammate liked by Verstappen.
Antonelli, 18, is Hamilton’s replacement at Mercedes. The Australian Grand Prix will be his first F1 start after scoring two wins and three podium finishes in F2 a season ago.
Bortoleto teams with Nico Hulkenberg at Sauber as the team moved on from Bottas and Zhou at the end of the season. Bottas is back with Mercedes as a reserve driver. Bearman subbed impressively for a sidelined Carlos Sainz in Saudi Arabia a season ago and is now with Esteban Ocon at Haas.
Doohan teams with Pierre Gasly at Alpine and reportedly only has the first six races of the season guaranteed in his contract. The team has signed Colapinto as a reserve driver for the season. Colapinto showed speed at Williams late in 2024, but he also showed a propensity for crashing.
Hadjar, meanwhile, is paired with Yuki Tsunoda at RB after Lawson was promoted to replace Perez.
Who is more focused on 2026?
The biggest surprise of preseason testing was the speed that Williams showed with Sainz. The team has been a backmarker in recent seasons but made a case to be in the thick of the midfield race after signing Sainz following his departure from Ferrari.
If we assume that the top four teams will once again be McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes in some order, the fight for fifth should be among Alpine, Aston Martin and Williams with RB and maybe even Haas on the fringes.
If one of those teams gets off to a slow start, however, we could also easily envision a scenario where it punts on the 2025 season in order to worry more about 2026. Like 2022, the 2026 season features a host of new rules regarding car and engine design. Teams are entering 2025 worried about their performance of the car in the short term while knowing that all their long-term developmental plans have nothing to do with the cars they’re fielding this season.
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