Max Verstappen wins the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, his 19th race win this season.
And breathe. For one of the first times in months, Formula 1 fans received a break from listening to the Dutch and Austrian National Anthem. The 2023 F1 season was one for the record books for Red Bull Racing and Verstappen, but one for the drain holes at the Las Vegas Grand Prix for the fans. Verstappen, a 3x World Champion, won 19/22 races last season, even boring some of his fans with his dominance at the end of 2023. By the time the season ended, fans were left hoping that the 2024 season would be slightly more competitive. A select few fans even grew delusional, attempting to manifest former Williams Racing driver turned businessman Nicholas Latifi into the second Red Bull seat, thinking that at minimum he would crash out Verstappen, leading to a new race winner in 2024. At best, he would show his true driving capabilities and out-drive Verstappen, but alas that was just the dream of a young, misguided Williams fan. These dreams were crushed when it was discovered that Red Bull was already shifting their work towards their 2025 car. Although yet another uneventful F1 season loomed, fans were (#blessed) with one of the most chaotic and legal-battle filled offseasons in years. F1 team personnel were not as fortunate as the fans. So what all went down in the short two and half months of the 2023-24 offseason?
What’s That Team Called Again?
As the 2023 F1 season came to a close, Alphatauri, Red Bull Racing’s sister team, experienced some major changes. First, Franz Tost, the team principal, retired, which was followed by rumors of Alpha Tauri changing its name for the next season. These rumors finally became reality a few months later, as the team officially announced they would operate under the name Visa Cashapp Racing Bulls. The public was infuriated despite having known this would be the team name nearly two months prior when a document giving the team rights to the name ‘Racing Bulls’ was leaked. Many proudly announced in Instagram comments sections that they would refer to the team as Toro Rosso, Racing Bulls’ name prior to their change to Alphatauri because obviously, that will make a difference. Heading into the first races of the season, both fans and race commentators have referred to the team as Racing Bulls or even simpler, VCARB. The team has only been around for 18 years, yet has changed their name more times than half the F1 grid. Personally, I think they could have done a better job choosing a new name, but at this point, I think it’s time they follow in Ferrari’s footsteps and just pick a name and stick with it.
Don’t Fock Smash My Door!
Franz Tost wasn’t the only team principal to leave after the 2023 season. Haas’s team principal Guenther Steiner left Haas after eight underwhelming years with the team. This news was both shocking and heartbreaking to F1 fans since Steiner brought a unique and likable personality to the F1 grid, something uncommonly found in team principals; hint hint Christian Horner. More on that later though. On top of Steiner’s personality, fans remember Steiner for some of his famous quotes, most notably telling driver Kevin Magnussen to not “fock smash [his] door” after an intense conversation. Netflix was also hurt by this news seeing as Steiner was one of the major draws to the popular Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” Funny enough, Steiner also wrote a book called “Surviving to Drive,” a recount of what a season in F1 looks like for a team principal. Although he won’t be in the F1 paddock in 2024, Steiner will likely appear for a cameo in the next season of “Drive to Survive,” hopefully alongside former Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto for the third straight season.
Forza Ferrari!
The biggest news of the F1 offseason came surrounding one of the most prestigious F1 teams and drivers. Lewis Hamilton, a 7x World Champion, decided to sign with Ferrari for the 2025 season, this coming after an incredibly successful 10-year stint with Mercedes. Hamilton, who is currently 39 years old, is likely approaching the end of his lengthy F1 career, so therefore is hoping to finish his career with a well-renowned team like Ferrari, and maybe bring home one final championship. Ferrari’s signing of Hamilton alone brought about a major media storm, but shortly after this announcement, rumors about where Carlos Sainz, a relatively successful Ferrari driver signed through the end of 2024, would end up in 2025 started to spread across social media and news sites seeing as Ferrari locked in Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton as their drivers for the 2025 season. Ferrari has arguably been the second-best team on the F1 grid for the past two seasons and are now looking to be THE best on the grid next season, but all at the loss of one of the drivers who has brought them much of their current success.
Let’s Keep Americanizing F1, Just Not With Your Team
In just two years, F1 has added two new races to the F1 calendar, both taking place in the US. Prior to 2022, F1 already had a race in the US at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas that had been taking place since 2012. However, this wasn’t enough as Americans grew more interested in F1 due to the popularization of “Drive to Survive.” As a way to make more money, F1 added a race in Miami at Hard Rock Stadium and a race in Las Vegas which races down the Las Vegas Strip. No other country hosts three F1 races and most don’t even host more than one, with the exception of Italy, which hosts two races. Despite the ‘Americanization’ of F1, directors of the sport denied Andretti Autosports’ most recent request during the offseason to join the F1 grid in 2026 as an 11th team. Andretti, owned by famous racing driver Michael Andretti, is an American-based company that runs a team in IndyCar and is currently looking to expand into F1. Despite seeming to have met all of the requirements to join the F1 grid, their requests continue to be denied, leaving many fans wondering why F1 directors won’t let the team join the sport.
Who Let the (Horn)Dog Out?!
Hamilton’s move to Ferrari was the biggest news of the F1 offseason, but the news surrounding Christian Horner, Red Bull Racing’s team principal, was much more controversial. Just a few weeks before the start of the 2024 season, a female employee at Red Bull filed an official complaint accusing Horner of inappropriate behavior. The team supposedly did their due diligence and investigated this claim, but ultimately came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of Horner displaying inappropriate behavior towards the female employee. One day later, an anonymous source sent a file containing pictures of Horner’s WhatsApp messages to the employee to members of the International Automobile Federation, which oversees F1, other team principals, and the general public. At first, it was difficult to determine if these messages were fake or not, but Horner never publicly claimed that they were fake. There was quite a bit of scathing evidence of inappropriate behavior in these messages, especially considering one of the messages included a photo of what appeared to either be Horner’s finger or his penis. The F1 community still cannot tell, but who takes a picture of their finger? A few days after these messages were leaked, Red Bull suspended the female employee who filed the claim, and did so during Women’s History Month. Yikes. The employee is now looking to file a claim with the FIA in hopes that they will find Horner guilty and relieve him from his role as team principal.
Those were just a few of the biggest news stories from the F1 offseason, but there was still a lot more going on that didn’t receive quite as much attention. It was officially confirmed that there would be no rookies on the grid in the 2024 season, one of the only seasons in F1’s storied history for this to happen. Also, the FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem was accused of interfering in one of the races during the 2023 season. No further news has been released regarding that claim. Finally, the Alpine F1 team, who recently received hefty investments from several celebrities and athletes including Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Ryan Reynolds, Rory McIlroy, Michael B. Jordan, and Trent Alexander-Arnold, lost several key members of their technical staff and now have one of, if not the, slowest car on the 2024 F1 grid. Sadly, not really, Mahomes and Kelce can’t win everything. As of March 16, 2024, the day I am writing this article, the 2024 F1 season is two races underway and Verstappen has won both races by 22 seconds and 13 seconds respectively over his teammate, who placed second in both races, driving the same car. It’s looking like the predictions were accurate and the 2024 season will be just as, if not more, boring than 2023, but maybe that means the 2024 offseason will be even more eventful than 2023, just hopefully not including the team principal misconduct.
