This Week – 14/04/2024
Hello welcome to another edition of this week a round-up of the latest news and talking points. Last weekend Max Verstappen won in Japan but is Red Bull vulnerable while Ferrari is now thinking they are chipping away, what can they do if they are going to beat Red Bull? We have also had news on the 2025 calendar and a key non-move in the driver market…
General News
Heikki Kovalainen says he has the possibility of making a full recovery after undergoing open-heart surgery. The Finn who raced in F1 between 2007 and 2013 announced last month he would undergo an operation after being diagnosed with an ascending aortic aneurysm, a medical condition that affects the arteries.
In a post on social media, he confirmed that his operation “went well” and is now recovering at home. he said in a social media video “I was diagnosed with an ascending aortic aneurysm at the end of last year. It’s a piece of the ascending aorta that has dilated quite a lot. This is obviously the reason why I haven’t been able to join in rallies or any other activities over the winter.”
“I was operated on last week at Tampere University Hospital, in the heart unit there. A wonderful team of doctors, nurses and assistants took care of me. It was open-heart surgery, so I have marks forever on my chest. But the surgery went well.”
“We managed to do exactly what we set out to do. We cut out the diseased part of the ascending aorta and put an artificial graft in place. Everything went well. It was obviously a big operation. A couple of days after the operation I was feeling a bit rough, but things have improved a lot since then.”
His short-term goal appears to be recovery, the NHS says that the surgery can take up to two to three months to recover.
F1 has confirmed the 2025 calendar with Melbourne returning to the opening race with the same twenty-four races as this season for the seventy-fifth running of the championship
Bahrain has hosted the opening race for the last four years, but the timing of Ramadan next year means the Shakir race, along with the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, have been pushed back to April. Melbourne and Suzuka all move forward by a week and Shanghai moves to March, allowing Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to slot in April. That could prove controversial as the races clashes with Holy Week and Easter for Christians after moving races to Saturday last month, as Ramadan started on 10th March.
From there on, there are only minor tweaks to the 2024 calendar, with the Spanish Grand Prix – taking place in Barcelona for the final time before it switches to Madrid in 2026 – moved in front of the Canadian Grand Prix.
Barcelona-Austria-Britain and Hungary-Spa have been split into two double headers with Budapest returning to the final race before the four-week summer break.
The races after the summer break, starting with the Dutch Grand Prix from 29-31 August, run in the same order as in 2024, with the only change being a weekend off introduced between the Mexico City and Sao Paulo events to prevent the season ending with two triple-headers.
Mercedes
CEO and team principal Toto Wolff says last weekend’s race at Suzuka painted a bleak but realistic picture for 2024. Wolff said, “No-one is going to catch Max this year.”
Adding “His driving and the car are just spectacular. You can see it by the way he manages the tyres. This season is [about] best of the rest. That is the fight that is on.” This isn’t really news as it looks as if the Dutchman could have continued the run of wins since September if he hadn’t retired with the brake issue in Melbourne it is likely Verstappen would have won the race.
Most of Verstappen’s rivals expected this season to be like this, if perhaps not quite to such an extent. After all, the Dutchman and Red Bull have dominated F1 since about the halfway point of the 2022 season.
Later in the week, Wolff said the team could never accept throwing the towel in on the current generation of cars to get a head start on. Once again this season the team has not met its own expectations despite a radical overhaul for 2024 it hasn’t allowed them to challenge Red Bull.
Mercedes has admitted that its 2024 challenger is exhibiting characteristics that ‘make no sense’, with increased levels of downforce not translating into extra performance on track. It suspects that its issues may be more mechanical-related rather than anything to do with pure aerodynamics.
The big question could be is it worth Mercedes throwing everything at the 2026 regulation change like they did in 2012-13 which led to Mercedes dominating the 2010s from 2014 onwards. But the new financial regulations ban teams from working on aero until January 2025.
Asked by Motorsport.com if there could come a time later this year where Mercedes has to make a call on abandoning the current rules cycle, Wolff was emphatic about his team’s stance. He said, “We cannot completely abandon the current regulations and continue to perform at the level we are at the moment. That’s not the ambition of the brand, nor our own and our partners’. So, no. I think you’ve got to continue to push, continue to form your understanding.”
Wolff reckons that Mercedes is locked in the chasing pack behind Red Bull with Ferrari and McLaren, which ultimately was not what its F1 ambition was.
Ferrari
Carlos Sainz is keen to “speed up” his contract negotiations as he looks to secure a seat for next season. In the three races he has started this season he has finished on the podium, creating serval options including Mercedes, Aston Martin, Red Bull and Sauber for 2025.
A move to Mercedes would be a straight swap with Hamilton, joining Aston Martin would likely mean replacing Fernando Alonso and switching to Red Bull would be in place of Sergio Perez, unless Max Verstappen surprisingly leaves.
He told Sky Sports “I’m talking to a few [teams] because that’s what my management team and myself should do when I don’t have a job for next year yet. So, we’re talking to pretty much all of them.”
“It’s just a matter of obviously going more into detail and seeing the more realistic options and what are the best options for me and for my future, which I don’t have any news for you or nothing to say here.”
Sainz made his F1 debut in 2015 but has never been rated this highly as he is the only non-Red Bull race winner in the last eighteen months, after winning the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix and the Australian Grand Prix earlier this season. He is also outperforming Charles Leclerc at Ferrari this season and, along with Alonso, is the best driver without a contract for next year.
The Spaniard ended the week saying that Red Bull’s current advantage may not be locked in for the whole season, amid intrigue about the potential of a major Ferrari upgrade set for Imola. The team has been the closest challenger all season with Sainz beating Verstappen in Melbourne.
Red Bull’s performance in Japan last weekend, where Verstappen led home a dominant one-two ahead of teammate Sergio Perez, has left few in any doubt that the Milton Keynes-based squad is clear favourite for the titles again this year. But Sainz has suggested that the upgrades, if Ferrari doesn’t lose too much ground, could be challenging Red Bull from mid-season.
He explained, “I think they [Red Bull] are definitely going to have an advantage in the first third of the season until we bring one or two upgrades that makes us fight them more consistently. But by that time, maybe it’s a bit too late with the advantage that they might have on the championship. In the meantime, we need more Australia’s, but I don’t see Red Bull, as a team, making these mistakes very often, no.”
“[It’s] a shame, because also I missed a race, which for both the team and me, it could be costly in the championship. We’re competing in one race less, but at the same time, we’re going to give it our best shot. It’s my last year in Ferrari also, so yeah, nothing to lose and we will try everything to make it back.”
In recent weeks the theme has been Ferrari’s progress made with its car in areas of weakness last year, which was high-speed corners and tyre degradation. While Fred Vasseur is aware of the advantage Red Bull has right now, he reckons that just getting close to the pace-setting team right now is enough to start putting it under pressure and for it to make mistakes, like it happened in Melbourne.
Aston Martin
Fernando Alonso has signed a two-year deal to say with the team until the 2026 which would make him the oldest driver in modern F1 as he would race two decades after winning both his world titles.
It means Alonso will be driving in F1 at least until he is fourty-five, and possibly beyond, passing his old rival Michael Schumacher who retired at forty-three. He said retirement “never went to my mind”, adding: “I felt I love driving too much to stop at the moment.”
Staying at Aston Martin was a “natural decision”, once Alonso had made up his mind that he was prepared to make the life sacrifices that would be required by staying in F1.
Team principal Mike Krack says the two-time world champion “is hungry for success, driving better than ever, is fitter than ever”. Krack added, “We have built a strong working relationship over the last 18 months and we share the same determination to see this project succeed.”
This is a key decision as it takes Alonso out of the picture for Mercedes and Red Bull, it could lead to others confirming their drivers for 2025 and onwards. He was widely regarded as one of the outstanding performers of the 2023 season, with a series of impressive drives before the team slipped from competitiveness.
It also buries claims that Honda’s role with Aston could be a problem for Alonso, who upset the Japanese manufacturer with some public complaints about their engine when they were working together at McLaren from 2015-17.
However he has not won a race since Barcelona 2013, the deal means he will be the first driver to pass four hundred starts in the middle of 2025. The driver market has been in flux following Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari and the infighting, fall out and infighting at Red Bull, over allegations about team principal Christian Horner’s behaviour towards a female employee. Horner has denied any wrongdoing.
Earlier in the week Alonso joked that he could not rule out getting disqualified for the rest of the season after unleashing some impressive defensive tricks in the Japanese Grand Prix. The Spaniard received a penalty for potentially dangerous driving against George Russell during a last-lap battle in Australia, Alonso found himself needing to hold his rivals back once again at Suzuka.
While last weekend he was at the head of an intense fight for sixth place, as George Russell back in eighth unleashed a late fightback on fresh tyres and started closing in on seventh-placed Oscar Piastri. Aware that fresher tyres would give Russell a huge advantage if they had to fight wheel-to-wheel, Alonso knew that his best hope of disturbing his Mercedes rival’s advances was to give Piastri behind him the benefit of DRS.
By keeping the McLaren within one second of him, Piastri having the straight line speed boost made it much harder for Russell to be able to find a way past. Speaking to DAZN after the race, Alonso said it was just normal racing, but cheekily suggested that after his penalty in Australia nothing could be taken for granted now.
He said “I don’t know what to say anymore after Australia, let’s see if I get disqualified for the rest of the championship. It’s clear that having Piastri behind, it was a way to defend myself from Russell, so I was probably taking a bit of battery off on the last straight to get Piastri within a second. It’s a normal racing thing.”
Alpine
Alpine’s disappointing start to the season has already fuelled talk that its parent company Renault could consider offers to sell the team, any sale of the team would likely to come with the condition that any buyer would continue to use Renault engine power for the foreseeable future.
The team’s poor results in the first four races see the French manufacturer bottom of the constructors on zero points, with Sauber and Williams having finished higher than them in the bottom half of the field more often. It looks based on the opening races to be the least competitive team, despite being a works team.
After finishing fourth in the 2022 constructors’ championship, the new target was to finish on the podium as much as possible and get closer to the top three, which at that time was Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes.
Just more than one year on, the scenario is very different. In the intervening period, CEO Laurent Rossi, team principal Otmar Szafnauer and two historical figures of the team, sporting director Alan Permane and technical director Pat Fry, have gone. Rather than the management changes having helped the squad move forwards, it has slumped backwards to the bottom of the rankings.
The reasons are very complex, and it is not surprising that its situation has prompted talk that parties are interested in a takeover. It is a market law that you buy when a company value is at its lowest, that doesn’t mean its good for selling cars and that damages the brand.
The complication is the future of the Renault engine division. According to information gathered in the Suzuka paddock, one of the conditions of the sale of the team is the stipulation that the Renault power unit continues to be used for a specified number of seasons – believed to run until 2029. This would ensure a future for the group of engine engineers who are already working on the new turbo hybrid power unit which will debut in 2026.
RB
CEO Peter Bayer says that Yuki Tsunoda is “mentally on a different level now” in the wake of his strong start to the 2024 season. The Japanese driver has qualified in the top ten for the last three races, outpacing his more experienced teammate Daniel Ricciardo.
At his home race he scored points for the first time at Suzuka the first Japanese driver to do so since Kamui Kobayashi in 2012 Bayer told Motorsport.com “He went out with the samurai spirit. I think it was an amazing achievement for him in front of the home crowd and Honda. A great achievement from Yuki, honestly.”
“It was an immaculate drive from him, and he was managing the tyres when he had to, he was pushing when he had to. He had great support from the team with that pitstop. Overall very, very happy with him.”
Bayer said that Tsunoda soaked up the pressure of performing in front of his home crowd, reflecting an overall change in his approach this year. I think he has step up this year and made progress in all areas, he didn’t buckle under pressure last weekend.
Tsunoda has outqualified Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll at every event so far this year. However, Bayer says that it’s too early to suggest that RB can continue to outpace the Canadian and infiltrate the tail-end of the group of top-five teams. But warned the that they couldn’t take it for granted as the upgrade race begins.
Haas
Nico Hulkenberg labelled his recovery last weekend at the Japanese Grand Prix “half a miracle” after the Haas driver lost many positions early on. The German lost out at the second start because of anti-stall dropping him to P17, before he had the first pitstop of the race, as early as lap five.
However, the German subsequently had two strong stints on hard tyres. He overtook five drivers on the track, including Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll in the last lap, on his way to P11, fewer than six seconds off Yuki Tsunoda in P10.
Hulkenberg says that the result was ‘as good as it can get’ following his failed second launch: “I’m honestly a bit surprised that I managed to come back to where I did. I think it’s half a miracle, to be honest. It showed that we had good pace.”
“It’s obviously a pity because probably we could have fought Yuki or beaten Yuki to one point, that was up for grabs, but Hamilton is fifty seconds up the road, so that’s obviously a bit out of reach.”
The car is looking better than we thought given the team were expected to be at the back. Hulkenberg says that means they can fight in the midfield, and he looks forwards to be able to move forwards in races despite not having scored since Bahrain.
Andretti
Michael Andretti remains convinced that his prospective F1 team will eventually join the grid and the sport will reach “a point where they can’t say no”. F1 owners Liberty Media rejected the bid in the short term saying that an entry before 2028 would not be sufficiently competitive or add value to the championship.
F1 did however leave the door open for 2028 by saying it would “look differently on an application” if it included a full engine supply deal from General Motors, who last year registered with the FIA to be a power unit manufacturer from that season.
Despite that announcement on Wednesday, they opened a European base at Silverstone. Speaking to Sky Sports, the former McLaren driver and son of Mario who was champion in 1978, said, “We are still working along with FOM and we will show that we are bringing a lot to the party.”
“General Motors is huge coming to the party. They are not just coming to be here, they are coming here to be a big part of our team, and I think it’s not been understood yet how big that is. think once everybody understands what we are really putting together it’ll be a point where they can’t say no.”
Although an entry before 2028 has been ruled out by F1, Andretti insist they would be ready to compete in 2026 and “that’s what we’re pushing for right now”.
He made the argument that it would make sense to enter earlier than GM, which will have a partnership through Ford with Red Bull and RB from 2026, then they could get competitive for 2028 when they plan to partner with Cadillac also owned by GM.
While not having a formal say in the matter, several existing teams publicly and vocally argued against the immediate expansion of the grid on financial grounds.
But, speaking on Wednesday, Michael Andretti argued: “We feel that we’re not going to be diluting the pot, we feel like we’re going to be helping raise the pot, and when the pot gets bigger, then everybody is going to share more in it.