The F1 Offseason Has Spun Out of Control

As the curtain fell on the Formula One season last year, the sport found itself facing an existential question: Had F1 become too boring?

Max Verstappen, in his unassailable Red Bull car, had won all but one race in 2023. The driver lineup was set to stay the same for 2024. And the kind of technical rule changes that can shake up the grid were still three years away.

Three months later, no one is worried about dullness anymore. Without a single race being run, the F1 offseason is now louder than revving a V12 engine.

One of the sport’s most popular team principals was fired and another is under investigation by his own bosses. An all-time great driver announced that he was trading in his Mercedes for a Ferrari. A prospective new team led by Mario Andretti and Cadillac was refused entry into the sport. And the series’ organizers announced a new circuit in Madrid was coming for 2026.

The most stunning news of all was seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton’s decision to join Scuderia Ferrari in 2025, putting the sport’s most successful driver on F1’s most storied team. After a dominant run with Mercedes that lasted more than half a decade, the 39-year-old Hamilton had become clearly frustrated by an underperforming car over the past two seasons. So for his next and perhaps final act in F1, he has decided to suit up in Scuderia red. But first, there is the slightly awkward matter of seeing out the last year of his contract with Mercedes, the team where he won six of his seven titles.

“I will always respect the difficulty of the situation that he faced,” Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said. “But I hold no grudge.”

Not only did the move end the longest association of Hamilton’s career—and create a sudden need for him to learn Italian in his late 30s—it also touched off a multi-million-dollar round of musical chairs in the sport. Ferrari has already said that Hamilton’s teammate will be the Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc, who is signed to a long-term contract, which leaves current Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz on the hunt for a new drive.

Mercedes, meanwhile, must now look for someone to partner George Russell with the promise of producing a competitive car again in 2026, once a fresh set of technical regulations comes into force.

“Let me say if you told me two days ago that Lewis would be going to Ferrari I didn’t think it was possible,” Wolff said earlier this month. “Situations and things can change quickly… Who knows what’s happening in the driver market that could be unexpected or opportunities for us?”

Even larger questions surround the future of Wolff’s greatest rival, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. He is currently the subject of an internal investigation over alleged “inappropriate, controlling behavior,” after his assistant lodged a complaint with the team. Horner, who has run Red Bull Racing since it first entered F1 in 2005 and guided it to seven drivers’ world championships, has denied any wrongdoing.

“The company takes these matters extremely seriously and the investigation will be completed as soon as practically possible. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time,” Red Bull said earlier this month.

Horner was interviewed by lawyers on Friday as part of the probe, according to a person familiar with the investigation. And although Horner is scheduled to appear when the team launches its car for this season on Thursday, it’s clear that the allegation has weakened his position in the midst of a wider power struggle between Red Bull headquarters in Austria and the Red Bull racing outfit, based in the U.K.

Should Horner be removed from his post, the sport would be losing its longest-tenured team principal.

That same fate has already befallen one of F1’s most prominent team bosses this winter, albeit for very different reasons. For all of his on-screen charisma and charmingly foul-mouthed outbursts, Guenther Steiner was fired as the team principal of Haas in a move that was both deeply surprising and completely logical.

Steiner, an Italian engineer with an Austrian accent, had become a cult hero of the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive for wearing his heart on his sleeve as he battled against richer, quicker teams—and for his liberal use of profanity. He was F1’s most lovable loser. Except in a sport where just showing up can cost around $100 million a season, being a perennial loser constitutes an extremely expensive problem. Haas has finished dead last in the constructors’ standings in two of the past three seasons. Team owner Gene Haas felt he had to make a change.

“If you own something you’ve got the right to do what you want,” Steiner said.

For all of the people who tuned into the Drive to Survive era, this offseason of change is the equivalent of a reboot. Favorite characters have been written off the show. Relationships have been turned on their heads. And it feels like the scriptwriters have become a little desperate.

Not that there’s any shortage of material to work with. With 24 Grands Prix on the calendar, this season will be the longest in F1 history, with races on five continents. Even the locations of those races are changing all the time. F1 announced that a new race in Madrid would replace the Barcelona Grand Prix from 2026, while speculation that yet another U.S. event could be on the way caught fire when F1 appeared to register a trademark application for a possible Chicago Grand Prix.

All of which has become a little much, even for the sport’s defending champion. Not even Max Verstappen has the stomach for anything beyond 24 Grands Prix.

“If there will be even more races,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, “I don’t see myself hanging around for too long.”

Write to Joshua Robinson at [email protected]