F1 2024 report cards: McLaren gets top marks, Aston Martin needs improvement

This was a standout season for McLaren, which secured its first constructors’ championship since 1998 thanks to a steady driver duo in Norris and Oscar Piastri. It held off a late surge from Ferrari to win the title by 14 points.

McLaren’s climb to the top started last season with an upgrade package at the Austrian GP weekend. But 2024 began quietly, with Norris securing two podium finishes in five races. Then came his win in Miami, and the title battle began to shift. Between upgrade packages and the consistency from Norris and Piastri for much of the year, McLaren rarely missed a beat. The car performed well across different types of circuits, and the development remained on track (no pun intended).

While McLaren did many things right, 2024 was not a perfect year. The team made strategy errors during a few races this year, such as not double-stacking pit stops and delaying Piastri’s stop during the British GP. During the Italian GP, the team orders debate flared again, and by the Azerbaijan GP, McLaren said it would give Norris the priority. But many wondered if the call came too late for the drivers’ championship, at least. It’s worth remembering that Piastri and Norris fought cleanly, never impacting the team side of the championship.

McLaren wasn’t expected to contend for a title (and neither was Norris, who didn’t win an F1 race until Miami). The experience of being in championship battles will help iron out any issues that arose en route to the trophy, and the team will learn from the mistakes and missteps.

Following his second season at the helm of Ferrari’s F1 team, team principal Fred Vasseur admitted to having mixed feelings. While all the barometers for success were up compared to last year — 60 percent more points, five wins instead of one, improved reliability and pit stops — the team still had to digest a narrow defeat to McLaren in the constructors’ championship. “Fourteen points, it’s a lot, and almost nothing,” Vasseur said.

Without its mid-season slump after going in the wrong direction with its car development, Ferrari would likely be toasting its first constructors’ title since 2008. Leclerc and Carlos Sainz both enjoyed their strongest F1 seasons to date, performing at a remarkably high level throughout the year. Leclerc found an added completeness to his race weekend management, while Sainz, even knowing he would be departing Ferrari, was sometimes untouchable. His victory in Australia, just 16 days after undergoing abdominal surgery, served as an incredible show of steel.

Like McLaren, Ferrari would never have seriously entered 2024 thinking that either championship was truly within reach, considering Red Bull’s domination of the previous year. For the team to come away with so many wins and run so close to the team title is a hugely positive sign.

As it prepares for Lewis Hamilton’s arrival in 2025, Vasseur can take heart that Ferrari appears to be on the right trajectory. The operational side, which faced regular criticism, has taken a step forward. The competition may be tough, but at last, Ferrari has all the ingredients it needs to end its championship drought.

Red Bull knew it would be a challenge to get anywhere close to its 2023 success, a “unicorn year,” in the words of team principal Christian Horner. But never would it have expected 2024 to turn into such a struggle.

Off track, the team dealt with allegations made by a female employee against Horner regarding his behavior, which led to an internal investigation (the grievance was dismissed along with the subsequent appeal). On track, Red Bull started the year strong. Verstappen routinely won with ease, while Sergio Pérez racked up four podiums in the first five races.

And then the team lost its way. The upgrades made it harder to extract peak performance out of the car, leaving Verstappen to fight alone at the front as Pérez’s form tanked. Even the great Verstappen endured a 10-race winless run, leaving him to fear around Monza that both titles could slip out of Red Bull’s grasp.

The drivers’ championship ultimately fell Verstappen’s way for a fourth straight year thanks to his heroics behind the wheel, his finest hour coming in the charge from 17th to first in Brazil. But Pérez’s slump, failing to register a top-five finish after Miami at the start of May, resigned Red Bull to third place in the constructors’ standings. It’s only the third time since 2000 that the drivers’ champion has not raced for the teams’ champion.

Red Bull believes it understands where it went wrong with the RB20, and it hopes to make the car more forgiving for Verstappen and new teammate Liam Lawson in 2025. This is a team that has gone through shifts — Horner referred to it as “evolution” — in 2024 behind the scenes with the departure of car design great Adrian Newey to Aston Martin and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley to Sauber. The subsequent restructure will know the target next year is to get back to its dominant best amid fiercer competition than ever.

When Ayao Komatsu took over from Guenther Steiner as team principal at Haas in January, he quickly sought to lower expectations. Considering where the team had finished in 2023, struggling with a car that chewed through its tires and was difficult to race with properly, it would take time to change course and get back to regular midfield competition.

As it turned out, the developments for the Haas car helped bring it alive for Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen, giving them the ability to fight once again. In the hands of Hulkenberg, the car particularly excelled, his peaks coming at the Red Bull Ring and at Silverstone, where he finished sixth. Magnussen put in some cunning tactics in the early part of the year to help the team snare some points, but it led to a race ban in Baku when he hit the penalty points limit.

The final package of the season that arrived in Austin offered another step in performance, allowing the team to sign off with 10 points finishes in the final 10 races. It would’ve been enough for Haas to secure P6 in the championship had it not been for Alpine’s massive step toward the end of the year. Even as Magnussen put in superb displays in Mexico and Qatar (Mexico, in particular, being one of his strongest in Haas colors), it wasn’t enough, the team falling seven points shy.

More change follows for 2025 as Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman become its race drivers, but the trajectory for Haas looks positive. Komatsu’s engineering background has helped the team, and internally, the feeling is its communications and processes have improved. With the Toyota partnership announced in October also getting up to speed, there should not be the same kind of downplaying of expectations going into next year.

Let’s be honest — it was a nightmare start to the season for Alpine. It overhauled its car design, and by summer break, it had only 11 points. Personnel changes occurred, with Bruno Famin stepping away from the team principal role and Oliver Oakes replacing him. David Sanchez joined the team as executive technical director from McLaren, and Flavio Briatore became executive advisor. Then came the news that it would become a customer team in 2026, with the Renault F1 power unit program ending.

The second half of the season — mainly the final six race weekends — saw the team progress towards the right path. An upgrade package during the U.S. Grand Prix weekend improved performance, with Pierre Gasly advancing to Q3 four out of the six final race weekends. When Sanchez was asked in Qatar if he was surprised by the qualifying pace over the last few races, he said, “Yes and no. No, because the package we brought to Austin, we had our simulations before; we knew the sort of performance we wanted to see, and we saw all of it. Nothing more, nothing less, we were quite happy. Then, the interesting point which we asked ourselves beforehand was if we deliver the performance, where does that bring us? This was the nice surprise, that that performance clearly lifted us in a decent place.”

The team’s big shining moment came in Brazil a few weekends prior, where Gasly and Ocon secured a double podium finish, rocketing the team to P6 in the standings. That’s millions of dollars in prize money compared to finishing ninth, where Alpine once sat.

The restructure paid off, but the top four teams still have a big performance advantage. And there’s the unknown with rookie Jack Doohan, who will race his first full F1 season next year after competing in Abu Dhabi.

2024 was a strange season for Mercedes. The year was always going to be long and awkward from the moment Lewis Hamilton announced on Feb. 1 that he was moving to Ferrari in 2025. But any hope of a final championship hurrah to end their enormously successful partnership was dashed when the team again found itself off the pace at the start of the season.

Progress arrived through the car updates, and when the conditions got cold, the W15 came alive. George Russell put it on pole in Canada and came close to victory before finally reaching the top step in Austria, cashing in from Norris and Verstappen’s late collision. Hamilton’s emotional victory at Silverstone and the 1-2 on the road at Spa before Russell’s disqualification handed the win to his teammate pointed to an upswing after the summer break.

Instead, Mercedes slipped backward. It rarely made significant steps forward with its pace from Friday through to qualifying, an area where Hamilton particularly struggled this year, and the race on Sunday, limiting it to a single podium between Zandvoort and Interlagos. It was unfortunate at points, such as with the timing of the red flag in Austin during sprint qualifying or Russell’s decision to pit just before the red flag at Interlagos, but the outright pace just wasn’t there often enough.

The 1-2 in Las Vegas, again run in cold conditions, was a reminder of just how dominant Mercedes could be when everything clicked for the car. It simply didn’t have those days as frequently as McLaren, Ferrari or Red Bull. That left it to slide to its lowest constructors’ finish in 12 years, continuing a challenging period with this generation of ground-effect cars.

It was out with the old and in with the new as RB entered 2024 as a rebranded team with the same lineup as ‘23 with Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo. RB had high hopes heading into the season, with CEO Peter Bayer saying at the February season launch that they want to “be a competitor on the grid at the top of the midfield.” When you take Aston Martin out of the equation, which was off on an island of its own in P5, RB was in the battle for P6 all the way until the final tripleheader.

RB showed a competitive pace early on, but some upgrades, like the floor in Spain, didn’t work as anticipated. And driver struggles did occur. Ricciardo didn’t consistently unlock performance from the car, particularly in qualifying, and Tsunoda’s performance wasn’t error-free either. A midseason driver swap occurred, with Ricciardo being replaced by Lawson, and Tsunoda had an edge over his third teammate in two seasons. The team’s best moment of the year arguably was Brazil qualifying, where Tsunoda was third and Lawson fifth. They converted the performance to a double points finish, Tsunoda in seventh and Lawson ninth.

RB will enter 2025 with a new name (Racing Bulls) and driver lineup, as Lawson replaces Pérez at Red Bull and Isack Hadjar joins the sister team. There are plenty of unknowns, but with development improvements and key personnel like Alan Permane and Tim Goss joining the team in 2024, the latter of which joined in October, RB will likely be back in the competitive midfield mix, fighting at the top.

‘Patience is a virtue’ may be the best phrase for Williams’ 2024 season. The Grove-based team faced a host of challenges, such as the chassis debacle at the start of the year and a high number of crashes that delayed upgrades. By season’s end, the team endured “17 fairly major accidents,” team boss James Vowles said in a team video after Abu Dhabi.

Williams started the year on the back foot, as the car was overweight and then low on parts. But as the team started cutting weight, the car’s performance improved. The first big upgrade came at Zandvoort after the summer break, although Logan Sargeant endured a fiery crash that weekend. A few days later, Williams announced Franco Colapinto would replace the American driver, starting with the Italian Grand Prix weekend. Alex Albon scored points in consecutive race weekends (Monza and Azerbaijan). That seventh-place finish in Baku initially lifted Williams past Alpine in the constructors’ standings and signaled the car’s potential.

Colapinto may have pressured Albon, but the team’s final six race weekends were filled with crashes and retirements from both drivers due to power unit issues on two different weekends. Brazil was another low for the team, as Williams endured three crashes across that sprint weekend.

The winter will provide the team the opportunity to reset, and it has a more experienced driver pairing with Albon and Sainz for 2025. This season may have looked like a step back — and it wasn’t pretty at times. But Vowles has made it clear that this is a long-term project. Sometimes, the progress looks better than it does on paper. Vowles said in Qatar, “The position of the championship is the position of the championship. But we have a car that’s able to, since we’ve updated it, fight for qualifying three. We had a car that in Brazil was still up there in that top three position before we crashed.”

After being the surprise package of 2023, vaulting up the order as the most consistent challenger to Red Bull in the early part of the year, Aston Martin faded into no man’s land this year.

Too quick for the lower midfield, particularly in the early part of the season, yet not quick enough to fight with the leading quartet of teams, Aston Martin had to make do with being content with semi-regular points. Fernando Alonso’s best efforts often put him in qualifying positions far beyond the car’s performance ceiling — P3 in China being the standout display — but he was often powerless to stop a backslide in the races, while teammate Lance Stroll failed to score any points in the final 11 races of the season.

Change is on the horizon for Aston Martin. Former Mercedes engine chief Andy Cowell has started as its new group CEO ahead of Newey starting in March, with technical director Dan Fallows stepping down from his role. It needs to rekindle some of the magic from early 2023 and understand where it went wrong with its car direction.

There’s no getting away from it being a disappointing year for Aston Martin. 2026 may be the big year it is targeting, given the regulation changes and the arrival of Honda as its works engine partner, yet it would still have wanted more from this season.

Sauber’s season became a year of trying to survive and taking baby steps. It took the team until the penultimate round to score points — round 23 in Qatar.

Early in the season, Sauber was hampered by a pit stop issue, which began because it redesigned numerous components. The team found a problem in a part’s design and had to redesign it. Sauber’s pit stops did improve after that. According to DHL, Sauber’s average pit stop during Bahrain was 15.635 seconds and 14.603 seconds in Australia before drastically dipping to the three-second range or below for five races. From Spain onward, the pit stop averages were fairly consistent, showing improvement.

As far as performance, Sauber soon found itself on the back foot compared to others after how long the pit stop issues persisted. Zhou Guanyu said that the car had the chance of competing closely for a top-10 finish earlier this season, but the pitstop issue lasted for seven race weekends. A loss of performance comes with that. It took time for the car to become more comfortable, but that didn’t mean it was in the points-scoring range. Sauber didn’t look like it could score points until Qatar, and Valtteri Bottas wasn’t far off that weekend either, finishing P11.

It’ll be a ‘wait and see’ type of off-season for Sauber, which will become Audi in 2026. This year, the team underwent big personnel changes, with Mattia Binotto joining as Chief Operating and Chief Technical Officer and Wheatley leaving Red Bull at season’s end to become Audi’s team principal after serving gardening leave. Plus, the team will have a fresh driver lineup in ‘25 with Hülkenberg and rookie Gabriel Bortoleto.