Added on July 30, 2024  Kurt Verlin  2024 FIA Formula One World Championship , Charles Leclerc , ferrari , George Russell , Lewis Hamilton , max verstappen , mclaren , Mercedes , racing , Season Report , Sergio Perez

F1 2024 Mid-Season Report

With the Belgian Grand Prix weekend behind us, the 2024 Formula 1 season has begun its summer break. It will be four weeks before the drivers return to the track, and with 14 of 24 grands prix completed, it’s a great time to look back and evaluate what has so far been one of the closest and most exciting F1 seasons in recent memory.

Red Bull – 408 points

Max Verstappen – 277 | Sergio Pérez – 131

Red Bull kicked off the season in enormously strong fashion. Three 1-2 finishes in the first four races gave the team a massive head start and seemed to suggest a repeat of their historic 2023 season. But McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes all closed the gap, and even Max Verstappen couldn’t maintain Red Bull’s run of success. Nonetheless, despite being on the back foot, the three-time champ managed to outscore every other driver in the past seven races, and will likely comfortably claim a fourth title in 2024 — a testatement to his consistency and ability to maximize points at every race. Red Bull’s headache lies with Sergio Pérez, who is by far the worst of the drivers in the top four teams, and whose constant underperformances may well cost it the constructor’s championship. Do not be surprised if he is replaced before the end of the season, even if Red Bull insists his seat is safe. It does help him, however, that he is by far the most popular driver in Latin America, and backed by one of the world’s richest men.

McLaren – 366 points

Lando Norris – 199 | Oscar Piastri – 167

It was McLaren who first stepped up to properly challenge Red Bull, and the data suggests they’ve now had the best car for the most part of the season. But driver and strategic blunders have prevented the sport’s second-oldest team from reaching its true potential. Lando Norris claimed his first win in Miami and has stepped on the podium five times since, but there’s the sense he could have done more at nearly every race. With proactive strategy, better starts, and slightly more precise driving, it’s easy to imagine Lando winning at Imola, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain, which would have put him in striking distance of the drivers’ title. Even in Austria, where he and Verstappen came to blows while fighting for the lead, he could have more carefully nursed his car to the pits — as Verstappen did — to at least survive to the end and snag a handful of points. Meanwhile, teammate Oscar Piastri has not had the pace to genuinely challenge Norris, but his cool head and maturity have ensured good results and contributed to McLaren claiming more points than any other team over the last 12 races.

Ferrari – 345 points

Charles Leclerc – 177 | Carlos Sainz – 162

As is tradition, it’s difficult to root for Ferrari. The team is always experiencing sudden, unpredictable shifts from highs to lows, and the only exception seems to be the driver leaving to Williams at the end of the year: Carlos Sainz. Sainz doesn’t have the sheer pace of teammate Charles Leclerc, and has been outclassed by him more often than not, but his consistency has insured they are nonetheless one of the closest driver pairings on the grid. To be fair, Leclerc’s only genuinely bad weekend was the Austrian Grand Prix, where he tried too hard in qualifying and was simply nowhere in the race. An engine issue in Canada and horrid strategy call in Great Britain left him out of the points. Ferrari is competitive but not currently on the sharpest end of the top four, which makes it all the more impressive that outside those three major lows, Leclerc has managed to finish in the top five at every race. But it has just been passed by McLaren in the championship, and if things hold, it may even get passed by Mercedes by the end of the season. Ferrari is the lowest-scoring top-four team since Leclerc’s win in Monaco, which is beginning to feel like all too long ago.

Mercedes – 266 points

Lewis Hamilton – 150 | George Russell – 116

Mercedes is experiencing a resurgence that the points don’t accurately reflect. A reliability issue lost them a 1-2 finish in Great Britain, and a 1.5-kg underweight car did the same in Belgium, with George Russell being on the losing end both times. Consequently, he lags behind the other drivers in the top four teams, despite having generally performed better than Pérez, Sainz, Piastri, and even his illustrious teammate Lewis Hamilton — who seems to have woken up now that his car is finally capable of winning again. After a relatively poor start to the season, Mercedes have some making up to do, but it seems realistic to expect it can at least catch Ferrari, and perhaps even Red Bull if the latter doesn’t find a new teammate for Verstappen. Still, it would be an amazing feat.

Aston Martin – 73 points

Fernando Alonso – 49 | Lance Stroll – 24

There’s an enormous gap after the top four teams. The start to the 2023 season, when Aston Martin was the clear second-best competitor after Red Bull, seems like a distant memory. Last year, it consistently lost ground as the season progressed, and that trend continued into 2024. The team struggles to understand its car, continually bringing chassis “upgrades” that don’t materialize into real-world gains. Fernando Alonso is still a world-class athlete and steadily beating nepo-teammate Lance Stroll, but due to the car’s own failing performance, the gap isn’t quite as pronounced as in 2023.

RB – 34 points

Yuki Tsunoda – 22 | Daniel Ricciardo – 12

RB is consistently on the edge of the points with two drivers who have proved to be quite a close pair on the track. Daniel Ricciardo did have a fairly terrible start to the season, leading to cries that he was far past his best and ought to be replaced — but since Canada, he and Yuki Tsunoda have each finished three times ahead of the other. Ricciardo might thus have kept his seat, but that doesn’t mean he deserves the promotion to Red Bull, despite how much Christian Horner seemed to want it in the last season of Drive to Survive. That said, if Red Bull does want to replace Pérez, the organization doesn’t seem to be spoiled for choice like it used to be in years past.

Haas – 27 points

Nico Hülkenberg – 22 | Kevin Magnussen – 5

Thanks to a great string of performances by Nico Hülkenberg, Haas has managed to pull itself firmly out of the lower end of the grid. One always wonders what The Hulk could have managed at Red Bull, should it have elected to hire him instead of Pérez at the end of 2020. He’s been dominating teammate Kevin Magnussen, earning him a contract with the future Audi Sauber team, though the gap is in part due to Magnussen’s own poor form. The Dane is out of a contract for next year and is likely not getting a new one. In 2024, some teams pushed for a new points system that would award points to the top 12 drivers rather than just the top 10, but it was regrettably shot down. Should such a system have been in place for 2024, Hülkenberg would have seen the biggest gains, thanks to an incredible run of five 11th-place finishes in seven races, from Japan to Spain.

Alpine – 11 points

Pierre Gasly – 6 | Esteban Ocon – 5

Alpine is a hard team to take seriously, and this was true even back when it was called Renault. It had a multi-year plan to success in the early days of the turbo-hybrid era, but the team never managed to wrest itself into the top three. When it became Alpine, it proclaimed a new 100-race plan, but this time instead of merely stagnating, the team simply went backward. Now, Renault says it will pull out of the sport as an engine manufacturer. And neither of the team’s two French drivers, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, are impressive on the track or particularly likeable off of it, making the entire Alpine operation all too easy to forget on any given weekend.

Williams – 4 points

Alexander Albon – 4 | Logan Sargeant – 0

Williams has been on the tail end of the grid for some time now, despite having a fairly competent driver in Alexander Albon. Logan Sargeant, on the other hand, has done too little to show he deserves to keep his seat, and no longer has his rookie status to shield him from criticism. Indeed, he’ll be replaced by Carlos Sainz in 2025, and it’s tempting to find it meaningful that Williams was able to win the Spaniard over, as he presumably had many other offers. He must have seen something of promise, surely — after all, Williams doesn’t have the finances to give him a paycheck worth overlooking a bad car. But none of his other prospects, as numerous as they may have been, were particularly juicy either. The reality is that Sainz doesn’t have the it factor, and he’ll likely never again drive a car as good as the one he has right now. Might as well sign with another one of the sport’s oldest teams on the way out.

Sauber – 0 points

Valtteri Bottas – 0 | Zhou Guanyu – 0

Sauber is the only team to have failed to score even a single point so far in 2024, and thus has somehow managed to be more forgettable than even Alpine. Zhou Guanyu seems like a nice person, but in the 2.5 years since he was hired, he has never shown anything to change the notion that — as with Sargeant and Stroll — there were and continue to be junior drivers more deserving of a shot in the sport. Regrettably, they have money, and that’s usually good enough to get 1-3 years to show whether you’ve got what it takes (or in Stroll’s case, to rig the junior formulas, then have your daddy buy a whole F1 team). In 2024, Zhou has been soundly beaten by a Valtteri Bottas who is clearly coasting in the twilight years of his career. Audi’s takeover in 2025 will hopefully mark a turnaround for Sauber, but it’s likely to take years for genuine success to come, if it ever does. Perhaps a podium for Hülkenberg before he retires for good?

Closing thoughts

If it weren’t for Red Bull’s dominance in the first five races, the 2024 F1 drivers’ championship would be wide open, with at least six drivers in realistic contention for winning the whole thing. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less competitive as it stands. So far this season, seven different drivers have won a race, and three teams have scored a 1-2 finish (and it was so, so close to Mercedes making it four in Belgium). At every grand prix weekend, four teams have a genuine shot at winning, making this is the closest, most competitive season since 2012.

The thousands of people involved in the sport now get a well-deserved summer break, and when they return, they’ll head to Zandvoort for the Dutch Grand Prix, which only Max Verstappen has won since its return to the F1 calendar. It should be a good one.