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With the long and increasingly febrile buildup almost at an end, Formula One is finally ready to go racing into the sport’s new era. Whether it will prove a success is one of many questions that will be answered at the season-opener in Melbourne this weekend, as will the most pressing concern: which team and driver enter this brave new world on top of the pile?
In the paddock at Albert Park this week, teams and drivers increasingly had an air of the stony-faced stare-down of a cold war summit amid caginess about their prospects. No one wanted to give anything away nor make predictions.
None of which has done anything to temper the palpable sense of excitement and anticipation in Melbourne, where the city is abuzz in the Victoria sunshine as fans flock to Albert Park. The genteel signs encouraging players to replace their divots on the park’s golf course, across which one of the many huge, vibrant fan areas sits, are dwarfed by huge banners of drivers, stages with bands and DJs around which fans congregate to eat and drink. A chicken schnitzel joint, the wonderfully named Schnitty Schnitty Bang Bang, has been doing a roaring trade.
The trams are packed, ferrying the revellers adorned in team merchandise, and Melbourne is the perfect stage to open the show, boasting an enthusiastic, party atmosphere in the heart of the city. Now the sport needs to make good on that promise after the biggest rule change in its history.
The bookies make Mercedes and George Russell favourites and the British driver has exuded a quiet confidence ever since his car came out of the box and was doing everything predicted of it. Mercedes struggled under the previous rules, with rides that stubbornly persisted in simply not behaving. This time they have a pleasingly quick, well-balanced drive, with potentially more pace to be revealed. It may well be the car Russell has been waiting for.
Certainly, in the paddock, there was a steely determination to the 28-year-old. “I know what I need to do. I feel stronger mentally than ever,” he said. “I believe I can do it. I’ve said that all along and I respect all of the drivers, but I’m not scared of any of the drivers. Even the greatest driver who’s on the grid at the moment, I’m not scared to go and be teammates with him or race wheel-to-wheel with him, because that was a position I found myself in in 2022, when there was another certain guy who was the greatest at that moment. So I back myself fully.”
He is referring to Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton respectively, both men who will not be shy in coming forward to crash Russell’s party. With Ferrari looking strong too, Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will expect to be in the mix, their fast-starting car a formidable weapon.
The four-time champion Verstappen in the Red Bull will have something to say too, not least in that there is little love lost between him and Russell. Red Bull have been playing down their opening form yet the Dutchman has been repeatedly quick and the team’s first foray into building their own engine must be considered a remarkable success.
In turn, the constructors’ champions, McLaren, remain feisty in looking at a long season that will be defined by a ferocious development war in which they would anticipate arming up with alacrity. The world champion, Lando Norris, is sanguine that he can mount a stout title defence. The range of talent this season at the sharp end represents a mouthwatering prospect and Norris summed up quite how close that competition could be.
“I know there’s still areas that I’m not at the level I need to be and it’s still a good level but when you’re fighting these guys, you need to be close to perfection,” he said.
However, the focus in these early stages will also be as much on machine as man, with just what the major regulation changes mean for racing lending such heady anticipation to the running in Melbourne. New engines with an almost 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical energy will be an early differentiator and, as Aston Martin discovered to their cost with their underpowered and unreliable Honda unit, a huge stumbling block. The cars are smaller, lighter and more agile, but have less downforce, making them a more interesting prospect to drive. They are sliding more through corners on the narrower tyres and look simply more racy than their predecessors.
Discontent is still stirring as drivers adapt to the techniques of energy management required by the constraints of these new engines. It demands a style of driving that remains controversial, disliked almost universally. Should it affect the spectacle, most notably in drivers having to visibly back off on straights as their limited electrical energy dwindles, there seems no doubt that the sport will act swiftly to rectify it.
There is uncertainty, then, not least in that while technologically the formula is doubtless a marvel for engineers to pore over, its implementation in the form of energy management (taking place unseen within the cockpit) will be baffling and uninteresting to a broad audience. Verstappen has dismissed the new rules as being “anti-racing”, reflecting perhaps broad fears that led F1’s chief executive, Stefano Domenicali, to call for calm in assessing how the racing actually pans out in these opening meetings.
Melbourne on Sunday is the first acid test of whether F1 enters the new era with the hoped-for celebratory spectacular in the Aussie sunshine or whether this new dawn fades.
