What does Audi have in its new Formula 1 leadership signing Mattia Binotto? What has Binotto taken on?

They have been rather thrown into each others’ arms. On the one hand, the German parent company without any prior F1 experience has decided itself dissatisfied with how preparations are going, the buck has stopped with Andreas Seidl, and Binotto is the most experienced available replacement.

On the other, Binotto has been on the sidelines for a season and a half since being relieved of his position at Ferrari and really needed to get back into F1 soon in a suitably senior position before his currency was spent.

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But happy marriages can come out of such circumstances.

Binotto is first and foremost an extremely capable engineer. The value of that background in an F1 managerial position is increasingly recognised. Having a good grasp of the processes and timelines of building up engineering facilities and integrating them with each other, he should be able to identify what needs to be fast-tracked, which are secondary order requirements.

He will be a very safe pair of hands in overseeing the expansion and structuring of the Hinwil Sauber factory. He will recognise where the talent is and he is a skilled communicator.

It’s significant that he has taken on the twin roles of chief operating officer and chief technical officer - a repeat of his then unique position at Ferrari. It sounds a heavy burden being both the Christian Horner and Pierre Wache of the team. How good is he ultimately at each of those roles and can they really be combined? That’s what we’ll find out over the next couple of years.

Critics will say Ferrari has made progress since he left. In some respects it has, yes. It’s more sure-footed in its race operations. But it also made progress in his time as boss there and before that it made a lot of technical progress when he was technical director.

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He's also very seasoned in the political games which invariably play out when corporations are involved. There are few more political environments than Ferrari. But his whole F1 career has been with one team, a very singular team with its own culture. Going from Ferrari to Sauber isn’t such a big culture shock - and there are many who have gone back and forwards between the two. But there’s Sauber and there’s Audi. Going from Italian senior management to German is going to be an interesting challenge for him.

There is probably going to be some chafing around the edges as they each get comfortable, but here’s a perfect task to test the resolve and ambition of both parties.

In releasing both Seidl and chairman of the board of directors Oliver Hoffmann, Audi has given Binotto a clear pathway to take charge of the programme. In this corporate age team bosses are not really bosses, but just employees - as Seidl has just found out.

It’s a tough gig, but Binotto has been given a lot of responsibility here and a chance to really build something special. It’s going to stretch him and it’s going to require a steep learning curve from the parent company too. But I wouldn’t write either of them off.

Formula 1 pre-season testing will be tripled in amount for 2026 when the series’ significantly different new technical regulations come in.

The F1 Commission - comprising the FIA, F1 and all teams - agreed on Tuesday that there will be three three-day tests in early 2026 to give the field more time to get their new cars and engines up to speed.

In recent years pre-season testing has been steadily reduced, going from a pair of four-day sessions to a pair of three-day sessions before being cut right back to a single three-day test over the last two years.

The nine days of winter 2026 running will be the most teams have had since 2015, when the same three tests of three days each format was used.

It’s still not as much as teams had when the last major engine rules changed in 2014 - as that winter there were three four-day tests, and even with 12 days of winter running reliability was a substantial challenge for manufacturers in the early races as the hybrids made their debut.

The F1 Commission also reported that an updated version of the 2026 regulations will be presented to the FIA World Motor Sport Council on October 17, after an extraordinary Commission meeting on October 2 “to discuss 2026 matters”. That follows disquiet from teams in particular over several elements of the rules as originally presented in June.

POINTS FORMAT STAYS THE SAME

Despite discussions in the paddock earlier this year about the possibility of extending the number of points scorers in a grand prix, the Commission unanimously agreed to stick with the present top 10 points distribution.

The most likely scenario for a change would’ve been points being extended down to 12th place with the distribution from eighth downwards altered.

Consideration of a points change had grown due to the increased competitiveness of the field and lower attrition rates creating a feeling that it was both harder than ever to get into the top 10 and that strong performances outside it were going unrewarded. At three grands prix this year all 20 cars have finished.

But the stakeholders have agreed that for now there’s not a sufficient case for changing the format.

If Mattia Binotto's exit from Formula 1 at the end of 2022 felt like something of a foregone conclusion by the time it was announced, Audi's decision to hire the ex-Ferrari team principal came as a major surprise.

A surprise not in the sense that his candidacy for any job in F1 should be questioned, but that he's been tasked with the dual role of chief operating officer and chief technical officer.

But is Binotto the leader Audi needs?

That's a fair question given the doubts raised both before and since his Ferrari exit. His replacement, Fred Vasseur, has done what is widely accepted as a decent job in his first 18 months of steering Ferrari along an upwards competitive trajectory (although Ferrari is now starting to stumble again).

As a result, the jury is out on Binotto's leadership qualities and whether he's the right fit for a major F1 project. You can make almost as many arguments for him being a good leader as you can a flawed and limited one.

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But Audi clearly recognised its project was in trouble and deemed it necessary to make a change. The transformation at McLaren in the absence of Andreas Seidl and technical director James Key (who followed Seidl to Sauber) indicates that they might have been very effective at putting in place the building blocks for success, but weren't necessarily making the most of the potential in the moment and maximising that to the necessary degree in the short-term.

Sauber could be in a similar situation, where the right decisions and strategic choices have been made, but that leadership isn't the one capable of getting the most out of it, whether that's short-term or long-term.

We never saw their work pay off at McLaren by making it a frontrunner. Now we won't see it in the long-term at Audi, either.

A change is perhaps what's needed to turn that potential into results and at least ensure Sauber's performance during what remains of this transitional period improve as the team ramps up for 2026. The question is whether Binotto is the right person for the job.

There's something to be said about bringing an outsider in. Binotto is neither aligned with Sauber nor Audi meaning that any divisions between the two sides can be dampened. When you're trying to integrate two separate entities and cultures, a leader without a foot in either camp is better placed to be a unifying force.

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That will be needed given he will inevitably want to have an immediate impact in course-correcting a Sauber team that's so far gone nowhere on track.

He will want to recruit people he knows and trusts and change aspects of the team he doesn't believe are up to scratch. There will be ideas and approaches he will apply from his time at Ferrari in terms of philosophy, structures and even facilities. All of this will take time to do but for it to work he needs those on both the Audi and Sauber side to buy into his vision.

There might be one other happy consequence for Audi. Could this revive its bid to secure Carlos Sainz's services?

Sainz was close to Seidl, that much is true. But Binotto recruited him for Ferrari and had a good relationship with Sainz. At the very least, Sainz might be willing to have another conversation to understand the new plan even if such a major change is hardly likely to inspire confidence.

As for Binotto, this is his chance to redeem himself - to solidify or improve his F1 reputation and do things right in his way.

Mattia Binotto in, Andreas Seidl (and Oliver Hoffmann) out. Something of this magnitude has felt like it's been coming at Audi’s Formula 1 team for a couple of months now.

The on-track performance hasn't improved enough in the short-term for Sauber, the team Audi is buying, and there have been issues getting long-term driver target Carlos Sainz to commit. It has looked for a while like he would rather go to projects that are, on paper at least, lesser projects than the Audi works team - a major public vote of no confidence in the project.

With some rumoured wrangling behind the scenes over who should really be in charge, it looked like it might be a case of Audi having to stand behind one of Seidl (Sauber CEO and Audi F1 team CEO) or Hoffmann (chairman of Sauber's board of directors who had overall responsibility of the programme). The fact it's both of them going is a big surprise, as is the fact it's both of them making way for Binotto to join as both chief operating officer and chief technical officer.

This is, Audi says, all about streamlining the process - and one of the positives of Binotto having both roles is that on the team side there will be a slightly clearer chain of command.

But it remains to be seen exactly how broad his remit is going to be, because those are two distinct areas with very different responsibilities. Binotto will need people to delegate to. So, will there be a team principal, with current Aston Martin boss Mike Krack linked to the organisation by German publication Auto Motor und Sport? And what happens on the technical leadership front, given technical director James Key was emphatically a Seidl hire?

Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the uncertainty this kind of change brings. Then there's another one - of how much of a disrupting factor this is 18 months out from an Audi works team being on the grid for the very first time.

Everything has been planned over the last 24 months for a Seidl-led team to go in a Seidl-led direction. Binotto will want to do things his way, and that's going to take time to implement. It's months and months down the road before this project moves out of Seidl's image and becomes more in Binotto's.

It's an aggressive move, but clearly one Audi has deemed necessary to save a project in trouble, and that had looked somewhat drifting and not joined up enough between the Audi and Sauber sides. It’s been rudderless in terms of addressing the on-track performance. Sauber's progress has not been quick enough or clear enough with the changes Audi’s played a part in supporting.

Recently, Alessandro Alunni Bravi - the often-forgotten team representative but someone who is undoubtedly aware of whatever confusion and inadequacies might exist at Sauber - has said openly that more should have been achieved with what's been invested and improved in the team.

There's been a big misstep this season: Sauber hasn't delivered to the potential anyone involved wants or expects, and is the only point-less team on the grid. Clearly, Audi's reacting to that. And whether that’s really Seidl’s fault or not, the responsibility has presumably been put at his door, and Hoffmann’s.

For all the short-term pain that any Binotto-led reshaping might entail, it's much better doing this now than to have any doubts and try to redo everything 18 months down the line, or two years down the line, when in 2026 the Audi works team isn't performing at an acceptable level.

Such action shows two things: that Audi is willing to be decisive, and felt its F1 team needed a big course correction. The latter is problematic given it has already had two years to start shaping its team for the better.

Audi’s only silver lining is that there is still time to find a solution - and it desperately needs these personnel changes to be the start of that.

Spanish racer Raul Fernandez will remain with the Trackhouse Aprilia team for the 2025 and 2026 MotoGP seasons.

Fernandez has signed a new deal with the US-based team in a move that comes as little surprise given strong hints dropped by both rider and team management in recent weeks.

However, the duration of the deal - a two-year commitment, which is the norm for factory deals but not for satellite teams when their riders aren't directly factory-contracted, as Trackhouse's won't be in 2025 - is revealing, reinforcing that the enthusiasm over Fernandez's potential on the side of both the team and Aprilia is genuine.

The news, announced during MotoGP's summer break, comes just ahead of Fernandez’s expected debut on 2024-spec factory machinery at the next round of the championship at Silverstone, jumping from last year’s machine onto the same latest-spec bike that his current team-mate Miguel Olivera already has.

A target for Aprilia's ranks ever since he put together one of the most impressive rookie Moto2 seasons ever seen, the Spaniard initially stepped up to the premier class with KTM for a rookie campaign by the end of which the two sides appeared only too happy to go their separate ways.

Switching to Aprilia machinery in the RNF Racing squad for 2023, things didn’t go considerably better for him in the rocky realities of the Razlan Razali-run team's final season - but he was able to weather the collapse of the outfit at the end of the year and has quickly built himself a strong reputation with its successor Trackhouse.

He seems to be finally starting to live up to his Moto2 potential in 2024 by often being ahead of team-mate Oliveira despite the mismatch in bike spec - though Oliveira shone last time out at the Sachsenring.

“I’m super happy to remain with Trackhouse Racing MotoGP,” Fernandez said in a team press release. “That’s all we wanted; this new project, with [team owner] Justin [Marks] and [team manager] Davide [Brivio], is great and they have built a very good team.

“I am delighted to hear their plans for the future as they have a clear idea of what they want to do and for me, from the beginning of the year, it was my priority to try to stay in the team. At the end, I get to be here for the next two years which leaves me very satisfied but, of course, this also means we have a lot of work to do.

“We will have the full factory material in 2025 and 2026, obviously great news and right now, we are gearing up to start with a new bike in the middle of this year, so we have to make good use of this to prepare for next year as well.

“We need to stay calm, understand everything about the bike and see what we have to do for the 2025 season – it is very important.”

While one side of the box might now be sorted, it’s less clear what will happen on the other side of the garage as Trackhouse mulls its options.

Believed to be leaning heavily towards Australian racer Jack Miller as a replacement for Miguel Oliveira, the teaser for Tuesday’s announcement had seemed to hint that it would be a new rider who Trackhouse was preparing to unveil rather than a contract extension.

Should that news still come before the next round of the championship at Silverstone, Miller’s expected move to the American team and the imminent announcement that Italian racer Fabio Di Giannantonio will remain with the VR46 Ducati team for next year would help fix in place the remaining places on the grid by opening a path for Oliveira to now find his way onto a Pramac Yamaha for 2025.

POTENTIAL 2025 MOTOGP RIDER LINE-UP

Ducati: Pecco Bagnaia, Marc Marquez
Gresini Ducati: Alex Marquez, Fermin Aldeguer
VR46 Ducati: Fabio Di Giannantonio, Franco Morbidelli
KTM: Pedro Acosta, Brad Binder
Tech3 KTM: Enea Bastianini, Maverick Vinales
Aprilia: Jorge Martin, Marco Bezzecchi
Trackhouse Aprilia: Raul Fernandez, Jack Miller
Yamaha: Fabio Quartararo, Alex Rins
Pramac Yamaha: Miguel Oliveira, Sergio Garcia or another rookie
Honda: Joan Mir. Luca Marini
LCR Honda: Johann Zarco, Takaaki Nakagami or Ai Ogura

Unconfirmed riders in italics

Former Ferrari Formula 1 team boss Mattia Binotto is taking up a senior role in Audi's F1 programme, as part of a "realignment of the control structure" that comes with two major exits - including that of Andreas Seidl.

Binotto, whose two-decade stint in Ferrari ended with a four-season run as team principal, has been out of F1 since moving aside at the Scuderia at the end of 2022, when he was replaced by Fred Vasseur.

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He will start now at Hinwil - where the Sauber team that will take on Audi's identity and power unit in 2026 (and that, coincidentally, Vasseur ran before joining Ferrari) is based - as early as August 21.

Binotto will serve as the chief operational officer and chief technical officer.

"Our aim is to bring the entire Formula 1 project up to F1 speed by means of clear management structures, defined responsibilities, reduced interfaces, and efficient decision-making processes. For this purpose, the team must be able to act independently and quickly," Audi CEO Gernot Dollner said in providing the justification for the move.

And as part of that move, both Seidl and Oliver Hoffmann will now be departing.

Seidl left McLaren to head up the nascent Audi project at the end of 2022, while Hoffmann stepped down from Audi's management board earlier this year to serve instead as chairman of Sauber's board of directors.

That both are now out is a remarkable development just a year and a half before Sauber becomes Audi and the Audi power unit designed to the new regulations makes its debut.

Seidl was known to be a major factor in bringing in Audi's first driver signing Nico Hulkenberg, who is arriving at Sauber next year on a multi-year deal.

But the programme has struggled to lock down a team-mate to partner Hulkenberg. It was long expected to be in line to benefit from Carlos Sainz being dropped by Ferrari and failing to get a satisfactory offer from a rival frontrunning team, but Sainz has been aggressively pitched at by the likes of Williams and Alpine, and it's the latter now seen as being in pole position for his services - which would come as a public vote of no confidence in the Audi project.

But such a decision would also easily pair with the on-track form of what remains the Sauber team for now. Its 2024 car, the green-liveried C44, was repeatedly let down by operational issues early in the season but has now established itself as probably the championship's weakest car, and is yet to put a single point on the board this season.

Renault looks increasingly likely to drop its works Formula 1 engine as its Alpine team focuses on closing a Mercedes customer deal.

Ex-Renault F1 boss Flavio Briatore was appointed executive advisor for F1 to company CEO Luca de Meo last month and has made it a priority to re-evaluate its engine strategy.

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It quickly emerged Renault could abandon its own works engine - which has been uncompetitive throughout the V6 turbo-hybrid era - and pursue being a customer instead, with Mercedes the preferred option.

The rationale is Renault and Alpine are wasting money on an unsuccessful engine when the more efficient and competitive choice is to take a supply from someone else, as McLaren is proving with Mercedes power that a customer team can be a frontrunner in the V6 turbo-hybrid era.

No official announcement is expected until after F1’s August summer break because of the protracted timeline for agreeing all the details of a Mercedes deal, and concluding all the associated discussions around shutting down the F1 engine that is designed and built in Alpine’s Viry-Chatillon facility in France.

However, The Race understands that steps are being taken with that outcome in mind.

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While Briatore has been gung-ho with his pursuit of the Mercedes deal, Renault needs to seriously evaluate the consequences of abandoning its F1 engine programme. That means that, at least officially, no final decision has been made or communicated internally.

It is understood that a transformation of the Viry facility is being formally explored, with a study to determine how personnel and resources could be redirected to benefit the Alpine brand. The priority will be to ensure that nobody is at risk of losing their job.

For Alpine, the human and technical resources at Viry can be redeployed for various upcoming hydrogen and electric technology projects, and there are other Renault-backed motorsport projects there as well - primarily the engine for the Alpine World Endurance Championship Hypercar programme, in partnership with Mecachrome, and the Nissan Formula E powertrain.

It has been reported by the Motorsport Network that this could all be concluded in time for Alpine to have a Mercedes engine in 2025, but this is thought to be unlikely, not least because of the significant undertaking it would be to accommodate the Mercedes engine and associated components in a car designed around something else.

The same story has indicated that the nature of the supply will be the same as Aston Martin’s, and therefore include a gearbox and rear suspension - which will have consequences for Alpine’s chassis base at Enstone, given it currently produces those components itself.

Going in the customer direction sooner or later, though, means abandoning the 2026 F1 engine that has been under development at Viry for a long time already, and that Alpine team boss Bruno Famin had insisted last month he was “quite happy” with.

“We have quite high-level targets,” Famin said at June’s Spanish Grand Prix, the first race after Briatore’s arrival had been confirmed and speculation about the engine project emerged.

“For the time being we are optimistic in our ability to reach that target.

“People are very focused now, since a lot of months, on this target. And we are all pushing to reach it.”

Alpine has had no choice but to continue this development while awaiting a final decision and formalising the details of its new strategy, and switching to being a customer is not necessarily an admission that the 2026 engine was set to be another disappointment - just that it is not in Renault's best interests to have a fully-fledged works team anymore.

It reflects a desire to make the F1 programme as cost-effective and successful as possible, even if that means relinquishing the kind of control and potential that most teams yearn for.

Many in F1 still believe that there is a long-term intention to offload the team given decoupling it from Viry and having a high-quality engine supply with Mercedes does make it easier to sell eventually.

However, the short-term priority for Renault and Alpine is obviously to conclude its new engine strategy - as it now looks like a matter of when, rather than if, that will happen.

It feels a long time ago now, but there was a spell when Pascal Wehrlein’s squeals of derision from the cockpit were just as commonplace as a Mitch Evans machine gun-style F-bomb unloading or a brutalist Oliver Rowland takedown of a Formula E opponent.

Not now. There’s a new Wehrlein on the airwaves, one that gives little earache to his lyrically precise Porsche engineer Fabrice Roussel.

Formula E is partly about energy saving, yet Wehrlein extends those skills to his own percentage countdown going on in his brain and in his reflexology at the wheel.

It was a long time ago, too, when The Race used to write opinions on who the real Wehrlein was. An enigma? A fragile prima donna? A great talent but one needing direction?

Maybe he was once a bit of all of those things. Maybe he wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter anymore because what we see now is much more of the real Wehrlein in every sense. Someone who is happy and content. A family man, a dad, and still of course a fantastic racing driver.

It’s all combined to make him a world champion now, and he deserves it. Three wins this season, two podiums and three poles in only half the story. The other half is how he built his campaign - "the real hard work", Porsche Formula E chief Florian Modlinger tells The Race.

"Look back at some seasons and listen to the radios," says Modlinger. "We worked on it. Therefore, I enjoy working with Pascal a lot.

"I’m very hard and direct, but all the feedback he gets he tackles. Listen to season eight [2022] radios and now, it’s a big difference in his approach."

There were threats to the momentum such as clashes at Misano (he broke his front wing on the back of Jean-Eric Vergne's car) and Shanghai (Sam Bird clipped his Porsche and gave him a puncture), which were the only two non-scores of Wehrlein's season.

But they weren’t overtly his fault. Mistakes were at an absolute minimum and that means he was always one of the title favourites. It wasn’t often spectacular but neither were the last two championship-winning seasons from pillars of consistency Stoffel Vandoorne and Jake Dennis.

Wehrlein is clinical when he needs to be and he’s as resourceful as any worthy champion too. Think of the second race at Portland when, in a state of disrepair with a missing front wing assembly, he stayed in the game and even prospered somehow to finish fourth. Others would have let the damage get to them and allowed themselves to doubt a result could come.

Not Wehrlein. Amid the reputation for precision, there is real grit and determination there, too, and he can scrap with the best of them.

The precision impressed Porsche when it signed him from Mahindra in 2020, a time when he was still a bit bruised from his fractious parting with Mercedes and the realisation that his F1 dream had died.

Wehrlein's F1 legacy

Ben Anderson

Wehrlein’s brief Formula 1 career ultimately ran aground because of Force India’s decision to pick Esteban Ocon over him when offered the choice of Mercedes junior drivers to sign for 2017.

At the time, Ocon and Wehrlein were Manor-Mercedes team-mates. Wehrlein was theoretically ahead in the pecking order - having joined the Mercedes scheme a year ahead of Ocon, become the youngest ever DTM champion, and done more than half a season in F1. Both had tested for Force India in 2015 too.

The team gelled better with Ocon, so chose him to replace Renault-bound Nico Hulkenberg. So that question of character, and how a driver communicates and builds bonds with the team around them, was pivotal in Wehrlein’s F1 career trajectory too.

Wehrlein’s ability in F1 was abundantly clear - some of his qualifying laps to get that 2016 Manor out of Q1 were stunning. But ability is only ever one part of the equation and career momentum is as easily lost as gained.

Mercedes rightly thought Wehrlein was plenty good enough to be in F1, but not so good that he required a clear path to the works team. He and Ocon are similar in that way.

They are also similar - as so many ex-F1 drivers in Formula E are too - in that they couldn’t count on private backing to extend their F1 careers.

Mercedes helped place Wehrlein at Sauber instead, and he did well - but as new team boss Fred Vasseur began forging the alliance with Ferrari that would bring generational talent Charles Leclerc into that team, the fact Marcus Ericsson’s Swedish backers were still heavily invested too meant it was always likely to be Wehrlein making way.

Wehrlein was never a Leclerc-level F1 driver, but he was an Ocon-level one - so in a different world perhaps could have won a grand prix and still been scrapping for his place on the grid to this day.

Such is the life of an F1 driver who belongs, but isn’t considered essential. It's to Wehrlein's credit he has rediscovered that vast motorsport world outside of F1 - and made a success of it too.

"When we took him onboard I was already convinced he was one of the most skilful racing drivers you can get," Porsche motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach tells The Race.

"If you look at his driving style it’s extremely precise, it’s extremely clean, and I think that’s something that helps him here in Formula E. But maybe he still had to grow, he still had to mature.

"He’s another personality today, and I think that’s a result of how we work together. We always try to give him the support, he gives it back to us, something that probably throughout the last years really also did grow.

"To me, he’s a different personality today than he’s been, and therefore probably a more complete racing driver."

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This is all evidenced by Wehrlein’s crucial building blocks that he put in place on Saturday in London when he won his third race of the season and avoided getting sucked into a needless shunt with a defensive Evans.

"He tried to stay out of trouble, he saved energy, and he was guided really well by the engineers, but once it came to the point he had to execute, he did it himself," adds Laudenbach.

"You saw that we were running late in taking the attack mode, and we wanted to get him to take the attack mode and he said, 'No, let me get Evans'.

"So, we said, 'Go for it' and he went for it. If it comes to the point where you have to execute, he’s a lot more spot on than I have seen him years ago, and that’s great to watch."

The pressure, too, doesn’t get to Wehrlein anymore. It used to. It wasn’t outwardly visible - more self-contained - but he used to get tense and sometimes self-doubt appeared to kick in. That’s changed.

"For me, the way he deals with pressure is crucial," says Modlinger.

"But this is what I said also on the grid before he started when German TV asked me if it was too much pressure and I said, 'No, because Pascal now handles the higher pressure so well'.

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"The better we perform the less pressure there is and my job is to keep the team calm, he needs to stay calm in the car and it was all perfectly executed.

"We actually look for the challenge. It’s motorsport, so you have to be like this."

Formula E is so much a team game and Wehrlein could not have done what he did without the support of a team that includes some seriously strong and unique characters in the shape of Modlinger, team manager James Lindesay, engineer Roussel, chief race engineer Olivier Champenois and team management director Carlo Wiggers.

The fundamental final say on becoming a champion, though, stops at the driver. And Wehrlein earned his trophy wholeheartedly with some individual brilliance.

"In the end you're the person in the car, you can also take the decisions you think would be best for you," Wehrlein explained after clinching the title, pointing to his overtake on Evans on Saturday.

"We're all performing on a really high level; sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. And I think this weekend has been favouring us."

It definitely did. But the judgement far outweighed the luck for Wehrlein and Porsche this season, adding a strong seam of authenticity to their combined achievements, of which they should be rightly very proud.

Spa-Francorchamps, home of the Belgian Grand Prix, is a firm favourite among Formula 1 drivers and fans. It's home too to one of the most iconic corners in motorsport: the Eau Rouge/Raidillon combination.

Round 14 of the 2024 F1 season on July 26-28, which concludes the first half of the campaign before a four-week summer break, comes at a time when the competitive order looks as close as it's ever been in the ground effect era.

Belgian GP (July 26-28) timings

Belgium is one hour ahead of UK time (BST).

Unlike last year, the Belgian GP isn't a sprint race in 2024 - which means a full day of practice on the Friday.

The action gets under way with first practice held at 1.30pm local time (12.30pm UK time). This is followed by second practice at 5pm local time (4pm UK time).

On Saturday, the third practice session kicks off at 12.30pm local time (11.30am UK time), followed by qualifying at 4pm local time (3pm UK time).

The 2024 Belgian Grand Prix will begin at 3pm local time (2pm UK time) on Sunday July 28.

BELGIAN GP SCHEDULE (LOCAL TIME)

Friday July 26

Practice 1: 1.30pm - 2.30pm
Practice 2: 5pm - 6pm

Saturday July 27

Practice 3: 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Qualifying: 4pm - 5pm

Sunday July 28

Grand Prix: 3pm

BELGIAN GP SCHEDULE (UK TIME)

Friday July 26

Practice 1: 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Practice 2: 4pm - 5pm

Saturday July 27

Practice 3: 11.30am - 12.30pm
Qualifying: 3pm - 4pm

Sunday July 28

Grand Prix: 2pm

McLaren's team orders drama took a little focus off Red Bull and its star Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen's exceptionally grumpy Hungarian Grand Prix - but now what the dust has settled, it's McLaren that can move forward with some degree of comfort while Red Bull's big issues lie unresolved.

Is the RB20 bumping up against a worrying ceiling of performance - and has Verstappen been irritated enough, or even just concerned enough, to start envisioning a future away from Red Bull more seriously?

Our team offer their viewpoints.

Specifics of Verstappen's ire are important

Scott Mitchell-Malm

Verstappen frustration when things aren’t going well is nothing new. What felt so significant was the complaints about other individuals in the team.

It went beyond ‘I’m annoyed with this specific strategy’ or ‘I’m annoyed with this specific blunder’ that meant he lost a race. It targeted something bigger: whether the whole team is buying in to the level he expects.

Describing the situation as Verstappen did, he accused some unnamed team members of not recognising the severity of the threat to Red Bull. These mystery underachievers are not on the same “wavelength”, Verstappen said. He might be right – Red Bull says he isn’t, that everyone is working as hard as possible, but maybe not.

Maybe the recent success and the healthy 2024 championship leads have induced complacency, and some people in the team did start to think too early this year that it would be a walk in the park. Maybe Verstappen’s specific complaints about limitations in the car could and should have been heeded earlier.

Hungarian Grand Prix driver rankings

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It’s worth wondering if Verstappen is handling it as well as he could. He is intensely single-minded in the pursuit of success. It is what drives him to the level of a three-time world champion and what can make him a tense and potentially dispiriting team-mate when he is so critical.

Red Bull’s always said it knows Verstappen well enough, and he knows and trusts the team in return, that the relationship is built on solid foundations and benefits from such direct exchanges. This was something else though. Verstappen’s not questioned the team like this before.

It might be he realises he’s crossed a line and apologises to the team and all is well. If not, will anyone be in the scope? Will there be pressure to make changes in the design team, the race team, or Verstappen’s engineering crew? Is race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase – the only person who can speak to Verstappen as bluntly as he speaks to/about the team – going to come under fire?

Red Bull doesn’t need scapegoats right now. But Verstappen needs reassurance, and if he doesn’t get it, that’s the kind of thing that will drive him out of the team and towards Mercedes. Not his father bickering with his team boss, or anything like that.

Red Bull's ace in the hole is now a limitation

Ben Anderson

It’s becoming clearer that Red Bull’s biggest problem now is that ultra-stiff suspension that Adrian Newey had such a key hand in designing for the start of this ground-effect rules set.

Prioritising a super-stable aerodynamic platform that worked superbly at high speed and helped give the car incredible high-speed efficiency was exactly the right trade-off when Red Bull could afford to come up on ride height on bumpier/slower tracks and still have enough downforce and a decent-enough car balance (except in Singapore, maybe) for Verstappen to win almost every race comfortably.

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But now the field has converged and it seems other teams - McLaren and Mercedes especially - have worked out a more comfortable performance trade-off.

Mercedes has always been happier at higher ride heights, but now has the ability to balance the front and rear of its car between high and low speeds, too.

McLaren seems to be close enough to Red Bull at high speeds, but better at low and medium speeds, thanks to a mechanical platform that is far more forgiving.

Perhaps the only edge Red Bull retains is its excellent ‘raceability’ - it appears to have less drag than the McLaren does and so Verstappen is more likely to pull off a marginal overtake than Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri is - as we saw with Verstappen versus George Russell in the first stint of the Spanish Grand Prix.

The cracks exposed by Red Bull's tense and bitter race

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Red Bull obviously went for a bold upgrade strategy in Hungary to try to extract more performance on a track less than ideally suited to its car concept. Verstappen’s frustration with his team in Budapest suggests that experiment didn’t work.

Now is perhaps the time for Red Bull to seriously consider overhauling that mechanical platform to create a better all-around performance profile.

The counterargument is that RB20 has looked genuinely second-rate on only three occasions - Miami, Monaco and Hungary - so far this season - so perhaps it’s not the time for panic stations just yet.

But if Verstappen fails to win either of the next two races - his home grands prix at Spa or Zandvoort - you can bet the clamour for Red Bull to change course will reach fever pitch.

The maths has changed for 2025

Edd Straw

It wasn't long ago that it was reasonable to consider Red Bull leading the way in 2025 a given. And even if rivals caught up, the RB21 would still be plenty good enough to win the world championship.

It would be exaggerating to say the prognosis is now bad, but there are very obvious questions about whether one or more of Red Bull's rivals - McLaren in particular - might have a car concept that makes for more of an all-rounder.

That's significant because the notion Verstappen might force an exit to join Mercedes for next year once seemed absurd as it meant sacrificing the 2025 title. Now, it seems less clear-cut. Making such a move for '25 is still a remote possibility, but you can at least construct an argument for doing so.

This may not have changed Verstappen's perspective as he's been warning for some time that this could happen. But winning papers over a lot of cracks and the ratio between those two things at Red Bull has become much less favourable recently.

No easy out if this is personal

Glenn Freeman

What fascinates me about what's going on at Red Bull at the moment is trying to work out where this tension is really coming from.

Is it just a simple case of everybody getting short-tempered with each other because a previously dominant winning machine is now finding winning much more difficult to achieve? If so, perhaps it'll calm down, post-summer break, when everyone's had more time to come to terms with how quickly F1's competitive sands have shifted. Right now, it would be understandable for a team (and its lead driver) to be struggling to come to terms with the sudden fall from looking almost untouchable to feeling vulnerable every weekend.

But, could it actually be that the tension we've been hearing about behind the scenes at Red Bull for a while now is no longer being covered up by unprecedented levels of F1 success?

Perhaps the key players involved were able to put their differences to one side and stay roughly on the same page when doing so allowed everyone at Red Bull to enjoy victory after victory.

If that's the case, then unless Red Bull miraculously unlocks a load of performance in the second half of the season to re-establish its dominant position on track, I can't see this situation improving very quickly.

It's now less risky to leave

Josh Suttill

A bizarre statement to have written just a few months ago, but it's really starting to feel like Verstappen sticking with Red Bull into F1's new era would actually be riskier than walking away.

Red Bull no longer has F1's outright fastest car, it certainly doesn't have the strongest rate of development and every doubt there already was about its potency in 2026 remains or has been amplified.

You'd surely get longer odds on Verstappen sticking with Red Bull until his contract expires at the end of 2028 than him leaving before then.

Hungarian Grand Prix winners and losers

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And that's a big problem for Red Bull because come up with a contingency and you're simply making the thing you're making the contingency for just in case, more likely. It can't install a potential successor to Verstappen within the team as his team-mate like Carlos Sainz, without that hire itself increasing the chances of a Verstappen exit.

It's surely going to be difficult for Red Bull to avoid second-guessing Verstappen's faith in the team.

Red Bull needs to show progress now. But it also has to balance 'fixing' 2024 and 2025 while continuing to make 2026 as attractive as possible and less of a risk worth leaving Red Bull over.

No other frontrunning team has to worry about losing its star driver before 2026 and it just so happens Red Bull has the star driver every other team would bend over backwards to snatch away.

Is Red Bull heading where Mercedes used to be?

Rob Hansford

McLaren and Mercedes have shown the F1 development race might be more important than ever this season.

And so with a raft of new updates, Verstappen will no doubt have been expecting that his advantage over the rest of the field would be restored in Hungary.

Clearly, that didn't happen, and throughout the race Verstappen complained several times about the balance of his Red Bull. That likely fuelled his frustration, and will no doubt weigh heavily on his mind going forward.

We've become so accustomed to Red Bull bolting on new parts and finding several tenths worth of laptime almost immediately in the past. But that doesn't seem to be happening right now.

There are hints that it's starting to fall into a similar trap to where Mercedes had been, with Horner saying after the grand prix that the performance window for the car is quite peaky, meaning small. That's definitely not helpful, especially when you need your car to be performing well on a wide range of circuits.

Combine that along with the fact Newey is about to depart, and it could well get Verstappen wondering about where this leaves Red Bull and - more importantly - him going into the future. 

Amid all the angst on the McLaren pitwall during the closing stages of the Hungarian Grand Prix, eventual winner Oscar Piastri kept arguably the coolest head as he waited patiently for a maiden Formula 1 grand prix victory to be passed back into his hands.

"The longer we leave this the riskier it gets," was as close as he got to breaking focus on the team radio with five laps to go, as team-mate Lando Norris showed little sign of handing back a lead that he'd inherited through McLaren's offset pitstop timings.

Norris did eventually cede the position with three laps remaining, but prior to that had pleaded his case for staying ahead at length over his own intercom.

Part of Norris's rationale was that he was actually the faster McLaren driver - he'd caught up to Piastri in the second stint, and then reeled off significantly faster laps as he stretched away from Piastri.

But was that actually the case?

That was an area of debate on the latest post-race episode of The Race F1 Podcast.

The argument in Norris's favour

"I’m going to caveat this by saying Oscar Piastri has been super impressive in his time in Formula 1 so far," said Valentin Khorounzhiy.

"He's been an incredible signing for McLaren. He’s going from strength to strength.

“There’s clear development going on there and the pace was already there to begin with. And on the balance of his efforts in what has been a really good car, he has earned this win.

McLaren only just passed Norris's test of its culture

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"But I have to admit that my impression throughout the race, an impression conditioned by prior knowledge, was that the faster car was Norris's, and that in the first and second stint he was constrained.

"OK, Piastri was pulling out at the start of the second stint and at the start of the first stint, but then Piastri in doing so made a mistake [he had a big moment at Turn 11].

“That brought Norris close enough into dirty air where Norris stayed fairly comfortably for the remainder of that stint. And then when Norris had clean air, he vanished even with a tyre offset.

"It's slightly annoying, because it’s not that the best, fastest driver always has to win the race. You can talk about deserving to win but that doesn’t matter so much. I think Norris was faster on Sunday."

Join The Race Members' Club - now available on Patreon - for the chance to have your questions answered on our post-race F1 podcasts and a whole host of exclusive content from The Race

The argument against Norris

"The point I would contend with on Norris versus Piastri, especially in that final stint, is you had one driver adhering to the team's requests to bring in the tyres carefully, then you had another driver who was very clearly not doing that and who was interested in proving a point and was going to build that gap as much as possible," said Scott Mitchell-Malm.

"That felt like that was what was going on to me. Once you’ve done that and the dynamics of the stint are kind of set, that final stint becomes quite tricky to judge.

"I think Norris was the faster driver in the final stint but you could easily argue that Piastri was managing the tyres in the first stint and still built a nice gap. He was very impressive there."

Where Piastri has undoubtedly improved

When McLaren was just at the start of its return to being a force at the front of the F1 field in Hungary last year, it was again Piastri who got the better start (up from fourth on the grid to third on that occasion) to head Norris in the early stages.

But his pace faded badly late on in a high-degradation race, as he admitted to struggling with tyre management - one of the lingering question marks levelled at the 23-year-old now he's in his second season. Piastri eventually finished fifth that day, nearly half a minute behind third-placed Norris.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella even cited that example after Piastri's 2024 Hungaroring triumph, saying last year's race was "a bit of a turning point" where McLaren made tyre management its main priority for Piastri's development.

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And there was agreement among the podcast panel that those efforts have had an impact.

"I think some damage did exacerbate Piastri’s struggles relative to Norris, but he was nowhere compared to Norris at this race 12 months ago," said Mitchell-Malm. "It shows how much he has come on in that tyre management side."

"This part of the game is what comes on the latest, this stint management; it's what takes longest to set in, it's what you can’t really shortcut, it's experience," added Khorounzhiy.

"He’s getting better all the time and he was obviously better than last year and I think better than at the start of the season.

"I think Norris still has more, and that’s what makes this result a little complicated in my head.

“But I love it for Oscar, he deserves it."

Jake Hughes will leave the McLaren Formula E team and is expected to conclude a move to the Maserati MSG squad next season.

The Race understands that Hughes privately told both senior team members and also his side of the McLaren garage in London last weekend that he would be moving on from the team after failing to reach an agreement to get a new deal. 

This triggered accepting an offer from Maserati recently, where Hughes will make his public debut for the team at the pre-season Valencia test week in November.

He is expected to be confirmed as leaving McLaren and then joining Maserati MSG later this month.

Speaking to The Race in London last week, Hughes wouldn’t comment directly on his future but did say that McLaren had “made me into the racing driver I am.

“I’m a much better racing driver than I ever have been and that’s very much down to the team I’m in.

“I believe in the project and I believe that the team will be successful, and then for me you’re always trying to perform well and to the maximum of your ability and if you do that you’ll hopefully be in a position where you're thought of well up and down the pitlane.

“And that doesn’t mean things change or things stay the same but it means you’re doing something good. You’re on the path to something successful. 

“So, from my side I’m not really looking at it from any other point other than keep doing what I’m doing in the racing car and the rest will sort itself out.” 

Maserati MSG is expected to have a completely fresh line-up next season after Maximilian Guenther signed with DS Penske, and Jehan Daruvala will be surplus to requirements after a season in which he took just two points scoring results with a highlight of seventh place at the second Berlin E-Prix in May.

Outgoing DS Penske driver Stoffel Vandoorne is favourite for the other Maserati MSG seat alongside Hughes.

Who Will Replace Hughes at McLaren?

There will be paddock-wide surprise that McLaren has allowed Hughes to leave after two impressive campaigns since joining Formula E as a race driver.

Prior to that Hughes had been seconded to the Venturi team as a reserve and development driver in 2020 to gain experience in the all-electric series, before he filled out a similar role at Mercedes - the team McLaren acquired to join FE - from 2021 to 2022. 

He got his chance to race when Mercedes EQ metamorphosed into NEOM McLaren at the end of 2022, partnering Rene Rast, who he outscored in a rookie season that also featured two pole positions and eight points scoring positions.

This season the 30-year-old has had a similar season, claiming two poles and a podium finish at Shanghai in a campaign where he's performed strongly against his more experienced team-mate Sam Bird, who joined the team from Jaguar at the end of 2023. 

Hughes’ departure from the team is expected to offer current test and reserve driver Taylor Barnard an opportunity to become a full-time driver after he scored points in two of his three substitute appearances earlier this season. 

Barnard filled in for the injured Bird at Monaco and Berlin, finishing 10th eighth in the latter two races.

This piqued McLaren’s interest in the teenager, who is believed to have an option on his services for racing as part of his deal with the team.

Currently racing in F2, Barnard is the favourite to replace Hughes, essentially mirroring the deal in which Hughes entered the grid and generally flourished last year.

Speaking to The Race about future driver plans early in the London event, McLaren team principal Ian James said Hughes “had been such an instrumental part of this team throughout its history. 

“He's been a huge part of its success as well. I want to make sure that we go out of London this weekend on a high and using that momentum to carry us forward. I met with Jake earlier and we discussed exactly that and said ‘listen, we're not even going to talk about the future.’ 

“We're not going to talk about what's coming beyond Sunday.”

Formula E's title-deciding London E-Prix provided a fittingly dramatic end to one of the closest title fights in the championship's 10-year history. 

The weekend-long drama produced some obvious winners and losers but there were plenty of others who ended the season on a notable low or high.

Below are Sam Smith and Josh Suttill's picks from the 2024 season finale:

Winner: Pascal Wehrlein

It was interesting how the three real title protagonists handled the championship pressure cooker at the ExCeL. 

Wehrlein was at the cooler end of the spectrum, seemingly immersed in a calm ice bath of psychological strength. And it showed on the track.

Both of his races were moulded by calm communication with his team and elements of his own decision-making (overtaking Mitch Evans on-track on Saturday and taking his tow on Sunday). 

The way Wehrlein executed Saturday’s race to gain the title momentum was crucial, and he never looked like getting flustered, managing his own energy as efficiently as he did his Porsche 99X Electric.

“We had some tough fights, sometimes fairer, sometimes less, that's how it goes but I think overall it has been a very cool season,” said Wehrlein after he'd been crowned champion.

“A lot of drivers were in contention, a lot of different winners as we see very often but again this year it was more than last season.

“I think last season it was a bit more obvious who is quick. And the cool thing is, three drivers pretty close in the last race and we knew whoever would finish in front would win the championship.”

Loser: Jaguar

Seldom has there been a more confusing scene than witnessing Jaguar attempting to initially celebrate its first world title for 33 years on Sunday evening. 

A mass of emotions couldn't be fused into one appraisal of a season in which the team enjoyed statistically its best-ever campaign. It was rewarded with the teams' title and the manufacturers' trophy, both of which it thoroughly deserved, yet that won’t be the primary memory from London 2024.

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Instead, it will be a picture of strategic confusion and two quietly raging drivers struggling to comprehend how they both missed out on the drivers' title after running 1-2 in the early stages of the final race. 

Ultimately Jaguar got this wrong, which in an overall picture of the 2024 championship is a shame because more often than not it has got it right - until the crunch time of the title fight.

The recriminations may linger for a while on this one, especially via Nick Cassidy and team-mate Evans.

They each have claims of being let down by their team. Yet at the same time that has to be measured in the context of the pressure of the drivers’ title fight, and the intricacies of managing two drivers in the middle of that while ensuring you still take the teams' title.  

On the whole though Jaguar lost out in London from a position of strength when it should have been in charge of its own destiny - or at the very least able to provide a strong and fair platform for two responsible and fair drivers to race it out between themselves.

Was this ultimately a lack of trust in its own drivers playing out in real-time to make sure of the teams' title?

That is open to debate. But the clumsy attempts to choreograph things in the Docklands ended with Jaguar metaphorically slapping itself in the face, leaving the door wide open for Wehrlein to gracefully walk through and stash the big prize for himself.

On the way out of the ExCeL, late on Sunday, several of Jaguar's troops were lugging a case of well-deserved beer back to their hotel. They were justifiably celebrating a brilliant season, but it’ll be one that its drivers will need a good chunk of time to toast readily themselves.

From the team’s perspective, it really should savour the title-winning accomplishment because of the ground-up build of the operation and the fact that Jaguar’s only involvement in motorsport is now through its Formula E set-up.

“We built from a blank sheet of paper, it seemed, to win an incredibly competitive world championship and this is a testament to every single person on the team,” team principal James Barclay told The Race.

“It’s been a really incredible year for us. If you look every season, the points we scored would have won the world championship some time ago, and Porsche have given us a really hard fight.

“I’m so proud of what this team has achieved this year; the car has been phenomenal, the teamwork has been phenomenal, when it comes down to the last race of the season it’s always a bit of jeopardy and we saw that.”

Winner: Oliver Rowland

How tempting it must be for Oliver Rowland to be in a mental wonderland of ‘what ifs’ this Monday.

Finishing 49 points off Wehrlein after missing two races through illness and also losing at least 18 points at Misano back in April (when he suddenly ground to a halt after an energy management disaster) has to tempt the soul into thinking where he might actually have ended up had those two circumstances not occurred.

The London weekend gave us the best and worst of the Nissan driver. A clumsy and needless tete-a-tete with occasional 2024 nemesis Antonio Felix da Costa on Saturday finally knocked him out of a long-shot title crack.

TWO CHAMPIONSHIP CONTENDERS IN THE WALL 🫨

Rowland puts da Costa in the wall at the final corner, ending the @PorscheFormulaE driver's title hopes for Season 10.@Hankook_Sport #LondonEPrix pic.twitter.com/Y9Pr4soEok

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) July 20, 2024

A day later there was the best of 2024-spec Rowland, a driver who looks as if his time in Formula E has at last arrived. Taking attack mode twice early on and forcefully ensuring he lost minimal track time, Rowland became the title protagonists' stalking horse, picking off the leaders and heading for a memorable home win.

He also had time to see the bigger picture of the safety car overtake on Wehrlein too, giving the position back and so avoiding the ire of the stewards.

Two wins in his first season back at Nissan and fourth place in the final standings, contributing all but 26 of the 182 points gained by the team, is way beyond any pre-season expectations.

In appraisal, Rowland rationalised how different his second era at Nissan is, telling The Race: “There's a handful of guys who were here the first time but there's a lot of new people; I don't want to say inexperienced, because they're very experienced in other things, but inexperienced in Formula E.

“It takes time for everybody to gel together and that's what we've done as a team. The future is pretty bright for Nissan.”

Loser: Andretti and Jake Dennis

While Andretti's supplier Porsche romped to drivers' title success, last year's drivers' champion and his team were only really notable in London for the multitude of incidents they were involved in.

It all started with an opening-lap clash with Robin Frijns on Saturday, an incident that was followed by up two further collisions that left Dennis with three penalties.

The only effective use of the rest of Dennis's race was to back up the pack to ensure maximum damage was done to Sacha Fenestraz, who was hoping to nullify a penalty that was going to cost Nissan, Andretti's rival for third in the points. 

In the end it was effective and Fenestraz didn't score but that offered little solace for Dennis, who had to watch on as three other drivers battled over the crown that had now mathematically slipped away from him.

There were plenty of 'Dennis world champion' posters adorning the London ExCeL but he'd have felt anything but that on Sunday when things got even worse with a season-ending crash with Edoardo Mortara.

"Apparently there was some contact made at Turn 2 which then meant Edo couldn’t turn for Turn 3 or something like this," Dennis told The Race. 

The chaos starting early again today! 😳

Dennis and Mortara come together, bringing out the @PorscheRaces Safety Car.@Hankook_Sport #LondonEPrix pic.twitter.com/l3CeKQxEdZ

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) July 21, 2024

"I don’t really know how he picked up front suspension failure, but it was just a bit of an incident, a bit of a strange one, and unfortunately took me out of the race."

The stewards judged it to be Dennis's fault and he accumulated six penalty points for his four London incidents - putting him halfway to a race ban based on one weekend alone.

The fact that Dennis had a clean record pre-London shows how out of character this weekend was.

Perhaps it was simply the unique nature of the track - many other drivers were caught out in dramatic fashion too - but you can't help but feel Dennis and Andretti being in a very different position to 12 months ago played the biggest role in such a wild weekend. Team-mate Norman Nato fared no better with a single point on Saturday after a clash with Fenestraz.

A fresh start when the Gen3 Evo era kicks in can't come soon enough. 

Winner: Mahindra and Abt

A strong end to the season for what had been pretty conclusively Formula E’s most recalcitrant car meant Mahindra deservedly and finally translated a better understanding of its package into solid results.

Nyck de Vries’ fourth and Mortara’s fifth on Saturday was Mahindra’s best combined points haul since the Marrakesh E-Prix in January 2018. In truth, it had been coming with each driver showing on occasion that the pace and efficiency of the Mahindra M10Electro could bring home strong points.

A clean run by both De Vries and Mortara was exactly what was needed for the team, which now says a not-so-fond farewell to its first Gen3 offering before it knuckles down to make the next iteration a car that can get it back into at least podium contention.

It also comes at a critical time as Mahindra board members get ready to make a crucial decision on whether it will go for an extended stay in Formula E beyond 2026.

Abt Cupra was hands down the biggest surprise of the season in the teams' championship, finishing ninth ahead of Mahindra and ERT.

Not a surprise in the sense that it could achieve that because it is a title-winning team with a tight, committed squad of real racers. But more so that it was able to get some extraordinary giant-killing results on such a consistent basis via Nico Mueller.

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The Swiss has to feature in any given top 10 drivers analysis of this season, which is precisely why he has had multiple offers of interest in his services and why he will eventually end up as a Porsche Formula E driver in the near future. 

Again, he was brilliant in London grabbing two well-crafted sixth places to finish a superb season 12th in the points and underline his overachieving two-season stint at Abt, which will now continue its test and development of the Lola-Yamaha package with Lucas di Grassi throughout the summer and autumn periods.

Loser: Antonio Felix da Costa

The momentum that da Costa had bulldozed into his own rollercoaster season ended in London, although to be fair to him his Saturday dismissal into the wall had little to do with his own faltering after Rowland tipped him straight to the scene of the accident.

But on Sunday he just failed to make it into the duels, where he was badly needed by Porsche to both keep it realistically in the teams' title hunt and to aid Wehrlein's successful bid for the drivers' title against the Jaguars.

The moment title contender Cassidy fell out of the running for the Championship! 💔@Hankook_Sport #LondonEPrix pic.twitter.com/GKZhpLBrIH

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) July 21, 2024

Da Costa though did have a role to play - although not in the way anyone would have wanted, himself included - when he clipped Nick Cassidy’s tyre and sent his occasional golf buddy out of title contention. 

A tearful da Costa apologised wholeheartedly for the incident afterwards, saying: “The one thing that is breaking my heart at the moment is that I did have a huge influence on Nick’s race, on his outcome.

“The minimal touch that resulted in heartbreak for him when, in that moment, as the race was standing, he was in the best position to take everything. So, I feel horrible.”

Winner: Envision

Envision has recovered some dignity from the last four races of the season after an otherwise difficult campaign underpinned by a damp squib of a title defence. 

Sebastien Buemi and Frijns' efforts in the Portland and London races helped the Jaguar-supplied team leap up the teams' table from eighth to sixth, vaulting McLaren and Maserati MSG. 

It was still a disappointing campaign but the way it concluded might contribute added stability as the team now looks likely to stick with its drivers and strengthen in other areas for next season.

Buemi had a strong weekend with third and fourth, although he was a bit disappointed with his second podium of the season given he'd been in the lead fight earlier in the Saturday race.

“Taking the lead early, I thought that was going to be OK and it was a mistake,” he told The Race. 

“I feel like I'm still maybe not doing a good enough job on strategically knowing exactly what to do. I think with the [lap/energy] target [for Sunday's race], that would have been fine. The target of today, no.”

DRAMA ON LAP 1 😳

Dennis squeezes Frijns into the wall, bringing out the @PorscheRaces Safety Car!@Hankook_Sport #LondonEPrix pic.twitter.com/PfN9yG1xO8

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) July 20, 2024

Frijns meanwhile had a bruising Saturday when he was caught up in the Dennis-activated shunt.

A good recovery, given the circumstances of his resulting hospitalisation, came on Sunday when he qualified fifth and raced to seventh.

Loser: Maserati

Maserati and Maximilian Gunether's 2024 season started so brightly but the results have fallen away badly since his Tokyo win and Misano podium. 

The potential was there in London though. Guenther had a "heartbreaking" gearbox problem on Saturday that cost him second place and then on Sunday, a mystifying lack of pace meant he backslid from the front row. 

Just as he was getting on top of his pace, Guenther, unaware that da Costa in front had a puncture, steamed into the back of the factory Porsche.

It meant Guenther walked away from a weekend empty-handed for only the second time in 2024 and his stint with Maserati ends on a frustrating note.

A new adventure with DS awaits and based on the way Guenther has spearheaded Maserati this year and demonstrated more consistency than ever, you can why he's an attractive replacement for Stoffel Vandoorne.

OH NO! 😩

Daruvala and Bird make contact and the NEOM McLaren driver is out of this race.

The @PorscheRaces Safety Car peels out of the pit lane and the race is neutralised.@Hankook_Sport #LondonEPrix pic.twitter.com/JAfNyEPDe7

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) July 21, 2024

Jehan Daruvala's rookie Formula E season also ended on a sour note as incidents squandered some rare points-threatening pace.

Nobody in the Formula 1 field had a fault-free weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix - but that's perhaps for the best considering the two major battles that developed in the closing stages of the race.

So which drivers made the best of things at the Hungaroring - or rather, how punishing were some of their errors?

Here's Edd Straw's verdict in his Formula 1 driver rankings:

How do the rankings work? The 20 drivers will be ranked in order of performance from best to worst on each grand prix weekend. This will be based on the full range of criteria, ranging from pace and racecraft to consistency and whether they made key mistakes. How close each driver got to delivering on the maximum performance potential of the car will be an essential consideration.

It’s important to note both that this reflects performance across the entire weekend, cognisant of the fact that qualifying is effectively ‘lap 0’ of the race and key to laying the foundations to the race, and that it is not a ranking of the all-round qualities of each driver. It’s simply about how they performed on a given weekend. Therefore, the ranking will fluctuate significantly from weekend to weekend.

And with each of the 10 cars fundamentally having different performance potential and ‘luck’ (ie factors outside of a driver’s control) contributing to the way the weekend plays out, this ranking will also differ significantly from the overall results.

Started: 2nd Finished: 1st

Piastri’s race has to be viewed not as one where he was given victory by team orders, but one in which he sacrificed five seconds of race time by team-mate Lando Norris being given a two-lap undercut at the final stint.

Our verdict on McLaren's team orders

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There were a couple of moments in the race, one at Turn 11 then another when he grazed the gravel after his second stop, and his pace in the final stint wasn’t as strong as Norris’s (on top of his team-mate being ahead in qualifying).

But he also did an excellent job of taking the lead at the start and controlling the first half of the race until things started to get complicated.

Verdict: Not perfect, but then again nobody was this weekend.

Started: 5th Finished: 3rd

Aside from the fact he could perhaps have opened out the steering to avoid the risk of damage posed by contact set in motion by Max Verstappen steaming up the inside late on, Hamilton had a strong weekend.

He struggled with the car being a little too snappy in the warmer temperatures but qualified decently and then produced a strong race. He used the undercut to get ahead of Verstappen then held him back in the second and third stints.

Verdict: A strong weekend’s work.

Started: 1st Finished: 2nd

Norris’s failure to win from pole position wasn’t really because of team orders, it was down to losing the lead at the start.

Four ways Norris tried to convince McLaren to let him win

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Regardless of whether he might have chased down and passed Piastri in the final stint had he not been given a two-lap undercut on his team-mate, that wasn’t the race that played out. Instead, he was promoted to the lead with a strategy that Piastri wasn’t allowed to cover - meaning ceding first place was a reasonable, if painful, request.

Verdict: Only the start let him down.

Started: 6th Finished: 4th

Leclerc’s needless FP2 crash got his weekend off to a bad start, but it got better with each day.

He had a decent Saturday, admitting “I didn’t do the lap of my life” having opted to use his one set of softs for the first Q3 run before being denied a second run by the red flag. His race was excellent, making a good start to jump to fifth before showing good pace in both the first and, in particular, second stint. Verstappen’s incident with Hamilton allowed Leclerc to pick up fourth place.

Verdict: Poor Friday, decent Saturday, superb Sunday.

Started: 4th Finished: 6th

Sainz continues to make close to the best of a bad job as Ferrari battles through this difficult phase and was far from convinced it had made gains with the floor tweak introduced in Hungary.

He produced the best possible result in qualifying, albeit with his advantage over Leclerc stretched by Q3 strategy.

Wheelspin in what he called his first bad start to the season dropped him to seventh behind Leclerc and Fernando Alonso. He soon repassed Alonso to take a vice-like grip on sixth place.

Verdict: A bad start lost him the intra-team battle.

Started: 9th Finished: 12th

Ricciardo was the only driver to improve his time after the red flag caused by team-mate Yuki Tsunoda in Q3, moving him ahead of his team-mate on the grid.

A tricky first lap meant he was shuffled back to 11th and, having started on mediums, he was surprised to be called in early - which left him stuck in the early-stopper train and ultimately not quite in the hunt for points. With a different approach, he likely would have finished ahead of his team-mate.

Verdict: With a different strategy, points were on offer.

Started: 11th Finished: 13th

Despite finding the car “tricky” and “not as good as I was expecting” at the Hungaroring, Hulkenberg put in a strong lap on used softs late in Q2 to miss out on Q3 by just one hundredth of a second.

A poor start dropped him to 14th, meaning he stopped early for hards. And while that led to short-term gains, it didn’t pay off in the long term with two more long stints required.

Verdict: Poor start ruined his points shot.

Started: 7th Finished: 11th

This was a weekend that promised more both in qualifying and the race.

The lap Alonso was on when Q3 was red flagged was reckoned by the team to be good enough for fifth, while the early stop made in reaction to the early stoppers meant Alonso “knew that the race was over” - meaning his subsequent strategy partly played out to assist Lance Stroll.

He held 10th but was unable to threaten Tsunoda in the closing stages, ceding the final point to let Stroll, on fresher tyres, have an unsuccessful crack at the RB.

Verdict: Unfortunate in both qualifying and race.

Started: 8th Finished: 10th

While Stroll’s single-lap pace wasn’t as good as Alonso’s, he executed the race well.

He went longest of the four drivers to start on softs by some margin, which meant he could capitalise on fresher rubber in the final stint when the early stoppers struggled. He passed three of them - Hulkenberg, Ricciardo and then, with a wave-by, Alonso to pick up the final point but couldn’t do anything about Tsunoda.

Verdict: A decent weekend’s work.

Started: 3rd Finished: 5th

Verstappen swung between realism, frustration and anger at Red Bull’s struggle for pace. Nonetheless, he made the most of a tricky car to qualify right behind the faster McLarens before losing a couple of places in the grand prix.

Being undercut by Hamilton (and Leclerc) was down to strategy, but the fact he couldn’t get back past and then made a rash move that could so easily have put him out of the race and led to him dropping behind Leclerc wasn’t Verstappen at his most well-judged.

Verdict: Could have finished two places higher.

Started: 10th Finished: 9th

Tsunoda’s weekend was going well until the moment he ran wide out of Turn 5 in Q3 and was pitched heavily enough into the barrier to trigger a visit to the medical centre and a chassis change.

But he largely made up for that in the race with an unexpected, and well-executed, one-stop strategy that yielded ninth place, having held off the Aston Martins, both on fresher rubber, in the final stint.

Verdict: Crash hurts his ranking, but unlikely one-stopper compensates.

Started: 12th Finished: 16th

Bottas qualified well, getting the Sauber to just a tenth away from Q3. But the speed wasn’t there in the race to threaten for points, with Bottas avoiding the early stop but then facing too much traffic to make the most of any tyre-life advantage gained.

He came close to nicking 15th off Kevin Magnussen on the last lap after the Haas driver lost momentum being lapped, but missed out by a tenth.

Verdict: Did what he could with a limited car.

Started: 13th Finished: 14th

Albon felt there was more pace in the car in qualifying, but the run plan in Q2 meant he lost performance in dirty air. He made up for that with a great start on softs, taking advantage of the outside line at Turn 1 - but never trying to grab too much - to take ninth on the first lap.

He was always destined for an early stop and ended up in the queue behind Hulkenberg. He also felt Alonso was backing him up at times to help Stroll, which ensured there was no chance to fight back into the top 10.

Verdict: Pace was better than he could show.

Started: 17th Finished: 8th

Russell summed his weekend up as “you make a mistake, you get punished”. That referred to the Q1 mismanagement that meant he didn’t set a time in the best of the conditions, which was down to miscommunication and poor strategy that both driver and team had a stake in.

He chased Sergio Perez for most of the race - Russell was actually ahead after the start - but ran longer in the first two stints and was never able to threaten a pass on track on his way to salvaging four points.

Verdict: Q1 disaster defined his weekend.

Started: 16th Finished: 7th

This was a weekend that promised so much more. Perez described Friday as his best of the season and wasn’t able to prove whether or not that was wishful thinking because of his qualifying crash.

The shunt itself should have been avoided as he knew the rain was falling so could have been more wary with the Turn 8 entry kerb, but it didn’t completely ruin his weekend.

Perez showed genuinely good pace in the race and recovered to seventh, keeping on top of the chasing Russell in what was probably his best race drive of the past couple of months.

Verdict: Crash set back encouraging weekend.

Started: 15th Finished: 15th

After his departure from Haas was announced ahead of the weekend, Magnussen showed decent pace in fits and starts, only for a “messy” session to cost him what he thought was a Q3 shot.

He did a great job on the first lap to make the most of the soft Pirellis, including a superb pass on Ricciardo around the outside at Turn 5, to hold 10th briefly.

But that inevitably meant an early stop and, given the car's pace, no chance of points - although he did just keep Bottas at bay on the last lap after falling into his clutches when he was lapped by Russell.

Verdict: Again, second-best of the Haas duo.

Started: 14th Finished: 17th

Sargeant wasn’t afraid to let his irritation, either with what he felt was unjustified criticism of his performance or traffic on his final qualifying lap, shine through at the Hungaroring.

If nothing else, it shows he’s not going to fade out of F1 with a whimper and he continued his quiet improvement by qualifying 0.114s slower than Albon. But that was only after getting away with dinging the front-left in the Turn 1 barrier in Q1 after locking up in slippery conditions.

His race was among those stymied by wheelspin at the start and an early pitstop that meant a long afternoon down the order.

Verdict: Good pace, but fortunate to get away with Q1 wall-tag.

Started: 19th Finished: 18th

Like his team-mate, Ocon’s Q1 was ruined by not running in the best of the conditions after the red flag.

That was made worse by opting to stop him early in an attempt to undercut and gain positions, which paid off short-term but not long term. That showed by the fact he made an extra stop late on after a long hard stint, but that only turned a bad finish into a slightly worse one.

Verdict: On a hiding to nothing.

Started: 20th (pits) Finished: DNF

While this weekend was slightly more fruitful for Gasly than his disastrous Silverstone outing, it wasn’t by much.

Qualifying started well, but then turned to disaster when the Alpine’s stayed in the pits when Q1 restarted having misjudged conditions, which meant there was no chance to improve.

After taking fresh power unit components and starting from the pits, running long on hards was the only option, but it was a strategy that went nowhere before he retired with what was described as a suspected hydraulic leak.

Verdict: Again, little chance to impress.

Started: 18th Finished: 19th

Zhou wasn’t able to follow his team-mate out of Q1, with an early stop condemning him to what he called a “lonely and uneventful race” with Ocon his only company at the back come the chequered flag after the Alpine driver made an extra stop.

The car's race pace wasn’t great and Zhou struggled owing to his longer hard stints than Bottas.

Verdict: A weekend of toil at the back.

The severity of the test McLaren just passed at the Hungarian Grand Prix can be best conveyed by team boss Andrea Stella’s words post-race: “The interest of the team comes first - if you mess up on this matter, you cannot be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team.”

As Lando Norris wrestled with the instruction to let team-mate Oscar Piastri back by into the lead, having undercut his team-mate because of McLaren’s strategic choice at the final round of pitstops, he would have been aware of the consequences of defiance.

Even though Stella’s not necessarily saying in hindsight that a single bad act would have led to Norris being dropped, this incident was a test of the ethos behind this era of McLaren.

Would Norris fail to live up to a core Stella principle? Would the team’s authority be undermined as a result? Would it compromise trust between the team and driver, and the two team-mates?

As it was, Norris ceded. Eventually. Stella insists he had no doubts that would be the case: “I know Lando enough. I know when you have a race driver and you deal with a race driver, sometimes you have to communicate to all the sides that exist inside a race driver, but I know well enough that inside Lando we have the race driver and the team player.”

All fair, but if there was not any doubt on the pitwall, then race engineer Will Joseph would not have had to be so insistent. That’s probably where needing to “communicate to all the sides that exist” comes in.

McLaren knew it would have to urge Norris to respect what Stella calls a “fair” decision by the team, even if it was confident he would comply.

It was not a perfect situation by any means. And it was self-inflicted, almost consciously. McLaren brought the problem on itself by the timing of its final pitstops, bringing Norris in early to cover Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.

While this seemed unnecessary given the gap was big enough not to need to do this immediately, Stella explained that it was to avoid the pitstop being too high-pressure.

Waiting another lap or two would have meant the pitstop needed to be perfect and - armed with that confidence that even if Norris did undercut Piastri they would just be able to invert the positions again - the easier choice overall was to keep the pressure away from the pit crew and control the scenario from the pitwall.

Mark Hughes: Four ways Norris tried to convince McLaren to let him win

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Norris’s delayed compliance meant this ended up more stressful than hoped. It would have been even more agitating had he followed through with his original plan to wait until the final lap.

Again, lessons to be learned. Did McLaren really need to pit Norris when it did? Should Piastri have been brought in sooner? Was Norris philosophically in the right but guilty of spending too long proving his point, and did he therefore make this play out more publicly and dramatically than it should have?

That’s for McLaren to debrief and determine. Stella felt that the right principles won out “to generate what was the right thing to do for the team, for Oscar and for Lando”.

“We are very happy from this point of view,” he said.

“There's no race driver that's such by nature that would say: 'OK, team, when are we going to do that?' They always hope. They are P1 in a Formula 1 grand prix. They hope, 'Oh, maybe the team will let me get it'.

“But we were very clear already before the race, so it's a situation that I think it proves, it shows and it demonstrates once again [what is required] to be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team.

Trust damaged? Our verdict on McLaren's team orders

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“These are the values. Sometimes they conflict with some instincts of a race driver. But the values, the culture and the good of the team stay always the most important thing.”

And if we return to those fundamentals of Stella’s McLaren, perhaps the big victory here is that Norris did comply, the team culture was preserved, and McLaren has shown it can handle a unique challenge.

A great car and a great driver line-up always bring the risk of trouble and McLaren faces a unique predicament compared to its F1 rivals for the rest of 2024.

McLaren’s MCL38 does now look like the best all-rounder of the 2024 cars and, in Hungary, was also the outright fastest in both qualifying and the race. In Norris and Piastri it has two drivers who will keep starting at the front and will race for wins and podiums. They are likely to keep being in conflict.

That alone is not particularly special but McLaren’s the only team at the front with a consistently strong pairing that it is keeping beyond this season. Ferrari and Mercedes have two drivers capable of warring with each other but at least they don’t have to concern themselves with sustaining it for much longer. And Red Bull’s only got one car in the mix at the moment.

For McLaren to survive and thrive in this situation, without its own drivers warring with each other, to take advantage of a genuine shot at winning the constructors’ championship, it needs everybody on the same side.

Likewise the clash of priorities - the team’s interest versus the individual driver interest - is very tough to manage. It needs strong leadership and total buy-in from those involved. McLaren must be sure its drivers will follow orders, Piastri needs to know he is not just a number two, and Norris has to have confidence that if he will sacrifice his own interests in the short-term (seven points in a very long-shot championship bid) he will get it back with interest in the future when they are fighting with each other and McLaren/Piastri owe him one.

Biting criticism and tense race expose Verstappen, Red Bull cracks

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This was all tested on Sunday but nothing was broken. That’s really important. Stella says that “this becomes part of the way we go racing and that's why we invest so much in culture, in values and in the mindset - because we want to be able to manage this situation if we want to be in the championship with Lando, with Oscar and with McLaren”.

Some will argue that McLaren needs to back Norris in the drivers’ championship. Some will even say it should have done so already. Stella believes McLaren is in a “lucky” position not to need to have a number one or number two driver but, pragmatically, says if the circumstances dictate it later in the season then this will need to be reassessed.

Until then, McLaren is standing by the approach that Stella says is “deep in our ethos”, that “we race fair, and if one of the two drivers gains on merit a result, this is protected”.

“Maybe if it's the last couple of races and there's a strong championship interest for one of the two drivers, we may revise this,” Stella accepts.

“But what I'm expecting is the other driver is coming to me and saying, 'If you need my help, with the other driver, because he's in the championship competition, I'm available'. And I think you build this ethos if you manage days like today in a fair way, like I think we have done.

“This may give a lot of material for rumours and media [stories], that's fair enough, that's racing. To be honest I enjoyed this as a spectator or as a fan when these things were happening even when I was not in Formula 1.

“That's fair enough. But please acknowledge that we just did what was fair. And this is what I want the entire team at McLaren to realise, and hopefully our fans as well.”