The 2025 Formula 1 Season Is Ready to Roll. Here’s What to Know.

The current weather for Melbourne, Australia, goes from hot and sunny on Friday to clouds on Saturday to rain on Sunday. That forecast is a perfect match for the state of mind that most of the Formula 1 teams and drivers will be in as they begin their 24-race season there at the Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit this weekend. After the optimism for their new cars and drivers that emerged from the three-day preseason test in Bahrain last month, Sunday’s race could end in tears for a majority of the grid as reality sets in.

Whatever happens, the 2025 season is the most unpredictable and anticipated in years, as a new era unfolds. It may be the last season of the four-year-old ground effects aerodynamic regulations before next year’s technical revolution in engines and chassis, but a radical change of drivers and personnel up and down the grid is sure to provide a first-class mix-up of its own in 2025.

It’s as if Shakespeare took all his characters from Hamlet and put them in the The Tempest—and vice versa. At the top of this new production is, of course, the plot twist that Lewis Hamilton has moved to Ferrari, where last year’s self-questioning prince of the sport, the most winning driver in history—but now 40 years old—suddenly has returned to a bouncy version of himself not seen since he began his career with McLaren at the opening race in Melbourne in 2007 as a Formula 1 rookie.

“Starting with McLaren here in 2007 was an epic feeling,” said Hamilton in Melbourne on Thursday. And then starting with a new team, Mercedes, he was, again, incredible. As for his move to the Prancing Horse, Hamilton is on record as stating: “Over the years, I’ve gone up and down the paddock looking at the red garage, and now I’m actually in the red garage. So it’s a really nice feeling.”

Winter testing raised more questions than it gave answers, though, about whether Hamilton would have the Ferrari needed to win a title, or the speed to beat his own teammate, 27-year-old Charles Leclerc. No sooner did he look at ease in the cockpit than Leclerc reminded us why he has remained a great hope for the Italian team for the future.

Yet how do we interpret Ferrari’s lap times next to the stratospheric results from last year’s stragglers, Williams and Alpine, which cut off between 1.6 and 2.0 seconds a lap from testing last year? Winter testing has always been notoriously difficult to use as a measure for which driver or team is truly the strongest of the moment. Only rarely have we seen occasions like that of 2009, where it was clear that the Brawn of Jenson Button was untouchable. We appear to be far from any such scenario this year.

Still, the top four teams from last year look likely to remain the strongest entering the new season. But which among McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes will have made the most progress is difficult to tell. Playing it low key during testing was Red Bull, which, again, won the Drivers’ Championship title with Max Verstappen for the fourth straight year in 2024. Yet Red Bull failed to take the Constructors’ Championship title, raising the question of which way its development is heading, especially with the loss of its leading designer, Adrian Newey, to Aston Martin this season.

After mentioning at a press conference last week that he thought they could not win the first race on Sunday, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen stated: “I know that we are not the quickest at the moment, but again, it’s a very long season. If you would have asked that question here last year, and then at the end of the season again, you know it looked completely different.”

Sure, but everyone who watches this series regularly knows that teams and drivers often underplay their potential and “sandbag” during the off-season testing so not to give away their true strength. Equally, the weaker teams often try to run their cars with less fuel in setups designed to make them look fast, especially to potential new sponsors.

Not surprisingly, the biggest question probably surrounds the team that Hamilton has left after winning six drivers’ titles with the squad: Mercedes. The pressure is on Hamilton’s replacement there, 18-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who is carrying both the weight of his own future and that of the team’s next year. On Thursday, Antonelli said it all felt “surreal,” adding that in Formula 1, “when you used to see them on TV, and then finally you’re able to share the track with them, it is an incredible feeling.”

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McLaren poses  another big question. Will the team build on its success, or fade out? In what looks like an effort to take a little pressure off the shoulders of one of its two racers, the team announced earlier this week that Australian driver Oscar Piastri–who will feel added pressure at his home race–has had his contract renewed in a multiyear deal. Piastri will need all the confidence possible to beat his teammate, Lando Norris, who fought almost to the end for the drivers’ title last year. It doesn’t help that no Australian has ever won his home race.

“I’m very confident in what I can do,” said Piastri on Thursday. We’re going into the season starting from zero for both of us, and we’re both obviously going to be trying to fight for a world championship, says Piastri, referring to the team dynamic. Another Australian driver, Jack Doohan, will be feeling more pressure still as he begins his first season in the series, racing for Alpine. But he said that the one race he did, at Abu Dhabi last season, helped relieve some of the pressure.

The only thing that looks clear is that we will not have another season like that of 2023, when Red Bull won 21 of the 22 races: The competition this year will be extremely close. “It’s likely we’ll often see as little as 10 milliseconds determining who progresses through the different stages in qualifying,” says Andy Cowell, the team principal at Aston Martin. “Those 10 milliseconds have a bearing on the race too—they can make or break your weekend.”

As can a tempest. If it does rain during the race on Sunday, then all predictions can fly out the door—except that, as with the season itself, the spectacle should be a passionate one. Whether it turns out to be a Shakespearean tragedy or a comedy will depend on who you are rooting for, but rest assured, there will be plenty of drama.