The 2024 F1 Season is almost here, with hopefully a more exciting season or at least a more open one being prepared for Netflix. But before the reality of the new season kicks in after just a few races, allow The Gurgler to look into the crystal ball and produce some choice Bold 2024 F1 Season Predictions.
Last year our Bold predictions pointed to Lewis Hamilton moving to Ferrari, Sergio Perez struggling, Logan Sargeant to be better than Nicholas Latifi and an Aston Martin civil war. So hit and miss but could be worse. This year we might go even bolder.
So get your time travelling brain ready to go on a journey into the future with our Bold 2024 F1 Season Predictions.
READ MORE: Our 2024 F1 Calendar & Stats
READ MORE: Our 2023 Driver of the Year Rankings and Stats.
Bold 2024 F1 Season Predictions
SERGIO PEREZ WILL LOSE HIS SEAT MID SEASON
No driver is probably under more pressure heading into the 2024 F1 season than the Mexican at Red Bull. Very few drivers in history would be under pressure after winning races and coming second in the Championship the season prior, but such was Perez’s underperformance in the second half of the 2024 F1 season that it is deserved.
With Christian Horner gone after his off track issues come back to bite him and take his job, things will be left to the more volatile Helmut Marko who will have zero patience for further underperformance from Perez. Not that anyone else will do any better, but still Marko will demand the change.
The rumours will intensify after a dreadful Monaco where a Q1 exit leads to a finish outside the points. And few missed Q3 efforts after that won’t help, and the final straw will be a shocker in Hungary, that will leave Marko starving for success from the Red Bull number two.
So who will the Perez replacement be? Daniel Ricciardo we hope.
ADRIAN NEWEY WILL LEAVE RED BULL TOO
Adrian Newey has never worked with Ferrari or Lewis Hamilton, and after designing yet another opposition thrashing Red Bull the design genius will somehow work his way out of Red Bull and into Ferrari, to nail down his all time F1 genius tag.
CHARLES LECLERC WILL TAKE MORE POLES THAN MAX VERSTAPPEN IN 2024
Charles Leclerc is fast and given an equal car with reliability and a strategy team with skills above Primary school, he would give Max Verstappen a real run for his money.
But in all likelihood, none of those will happen in 2025, so Leclerc will have to settle for beating Verstappen more regularly in qualifying than over the race in 2024.
So our bold prediction is Leclerc will take more pole positions than Verstappen in 2024, but will convert just two of them into wins – Austria and Italy. The pole and win at Monza making little difference to the Championship but will keep the Tifosi happy.
CARLOS SAINZ WILL BE POINTLESS AFTER FIRST FOUR RACES
Carlos Sainz is a pretty unlucky guy, the only non Red Bull winner of 2023 is left without a drive for 2025 before the 2024 season starts.
Despite his pace, our crystal ball sees the bad luck compounding to four consecutive finishes outside the points. It will be a mix of mechanical gremlins and accidents between Bahrian and Japan which leaves him in a dark space about his final season at Ferrari.
This sees Audi put a contract under his nose which he gladly take for 2025 onwards, announced during the summer break.
LANDO NORRIS TO WIN THE AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX FROM POLE AND THE BRITISH GRAND PRIX TOO
McLaren were a team on the rise in the second half of the 2023 F1 season, and Lando Norris was in our top three of Driver of the Season for 2023.
He came close to winning his first Grand Prix in 2023, and we believe it won’t take long in 2024 for him to reach that top step of the podium.
With the Australian Grand Prix usually one of the more action packed and bigger opportunities for different results in the first half of the calendar, we can see the shiny new McLaren killing it around Albert Park and Lando Norris securing pole position on the Saturday before staying ahead of the predictable chaos behind to win.
Norris will be Max Verstappen’s closest championship rival for a long while, and will scare the Red Bull driver later in the season where he also wins the British Grand Prix.
Sadly for him and McLaren that will be as close as they get as Max Verstappen dominates the post Summer break season (except for Singapore) but Norris will end up second in the championship.
OSCAR PIASTRI TO WIN THE QATAR GRAND PRIX
Oscar Piastri won many admirers in 2023, and that will continue into the new season as he blows away any doubts of second season syndrome.
Podiums will be regular as he and team mate Lando Norris enjoy the new competitive McLaren from the early rounds of the season, not halfway through like in 2023.
Lando Norris will have Piastri covered in more races than not, but Piastri will completely outperform Norris from time to time, and our crystal ball says one of those occasions will be the Qatar Grand Prix. It may be the second last race of the season, and the Championship likely decided, but that won’t matter for the Australian who will dominate all weekend for his first Grand Prix victory.
HAAS WILL FINISH DEAD LAST WITH TWO POINTS WHICH MAKES THEM SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH BETTER THAN A NEW ADNRETTI BACKED TEAM. US F1 FANS START SEEING THROUGH SOME OF THE BS.
One of the biggest news items from the off season was the F1 teams rejection of the US based Andretti team. Whilst unsurprising, it is a shame, and shame on the F1 teams for their greed.
So we have one less team, a chance lost for having something shiny and new that is not a street circuit somewhere, and two additional seats for up and coming drivers.
Take a look at Haas. Although we love Nico Hulkenburg and have no beefs with Kevin Magnussen, they are hardly drivers to get excited about, but currently they are in one of the 20 seats that are available. An Andretti team would probably have had two new drivers on offer.
Then Haas also get rid of cult hero Gunther Steiner, one of F1’s more interesting characters because he tried to push them to a higher level. And possibly because it was becoming more about him than the team.
Unlike Sauber/Stake/Kick, they don’t even have an interesting livery to get excited about.
So our bold prediction is that Haas go even further backwards in 2024, scoring two points from two tenth places as even the qualifying king that is Nico Hulkenberg struggles to push the car out of Q1. Thus completing the bs why a new Andretti team would be worse for the sport than a team going nowhere.
WILLIAMS WILL BE LOOKING FOR TWO NEW DRIVERS IN 2025 – ONE WILL BE A MERCEDES PROTÉGÉ
Alex Albon was one of the unsung heroes of F1 in 2023, dragging the Williams up places higher than it warranted, and as such is a driver on the radar in 2024. Conveniently for him it is a driver’s market, with guaranteed one Mercedes and likely one Red Bull drive up for grabs.
Our bold prediction is that Alex Albon will continue where he left off in 2023 and will secure a couple of top six finishes before the summer break. Which will be the convenient timing for Mercedes to announce that Albon will take over from Lewis Hamilton.
As part of the deal Mercedes will put their F2 protégé Andrea Kimi Antonelli into one of the Williams cars who will be on his way to championship success before coming into F1.
The second driver? Maybe Williams will go for broke and put two young drivers in their cars and steal Victor Martins, Frederik Vesti or Theo Pourchaire from other teams young driver programmes.
THE NEW LIVERY AND TEAM NAME WILL BE THE ONLY INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT SAUBER/STAKE/KICK F1 IN 2024
Before the junior Red Bull team announced their new moniker for 2024, the Sauber team, formerly Alfa Romeo and BMW and BMW Sauber and Sauber, had what was going to be the worst team name in F1 in 2024.
Although we’re still not quite sure what the team name is, it involves various words like Stake, Kick, Sauber and F1 Team. Which at least makes it more interesting than an Alfa Romeo badge.
Then there’s the striking livery, featuring some bold green colouring. Sadly F1 has been missing green for the past few decades, the 7Up Jordan was a classic, the 80’s/90’s Benetton always had a welcome amount of green and the forgotten Forti F1 hookup with a company called Shannon back in 1996 is possibly as obscure as we will get. This reminiscing about green does not involve the Honda Earth cars back in the 2000’s. They were truly terrible.
But for the F1 team formerly known as Alfa Romeo, that is about as exciting as it gets. They won’t be terrible like the Haas team, nor dominant like half of the Red Bull team, or up and coming like McLaren. They will be solid Q2 qualifiers, run midfield, and occasionally score an 8th to 10th with conditions or attrition suiting.
Mostly, they will be a team that you will barely notice in a grand prix, only recognising the excellent green paint job when the TV camera get bored mid race and find a five car midfield battle to follow, where the Sauber/Kick/Stake driver will be fourth in line.
FINANCIAL PROBLEMS MEAN ASTON MARTIN-HONDA ARE RENAMED AS HONDA F1 IN 2025
Aston Martin were one of the surprises early in the 2023 season, with Fernando Alonso proving his considerable talent as the closest competitor to Max Verstappen at many races in the first half of the season. And despite the Spaniard continuing to race hard until the end of the season, there was a noticeable drop off.
So we’re predicting that decline will continue into 2024, which will put the notoriously impatient Fernando Alonso in a dark mood, a mood that deepens quicker when he misses out on the Mercedes and Red Bull drives on offer.
That’s not to say that Alonso won’t pull out the occasional piece of magic, like in Canada where he will qualify in the top three and lead the race before retiring with a cruel mechanical fault.
And with performances overall dipping, and financial troubles off the track, the shock announcement will come in September that Aston Martin will rebadge itself as Honda F1 and the sport will once again have a works Honda team. For two seasons until they pull out again. By which time Michael Andretti will be waiting with a cheque book.
ASTON MARTIN DRIVER LANCE STROLL WILL GET BORED OF F1 AND RETIRE AFTER CANADIAN GRAND PRIX
With his Aston Martin struggling to get out of Q1 for most of the opening to the 2024 F1 season, and the Canadian Grand Prix seeing his team mate completely thrash him, Lance Stroll will make the shock announcement that he is leaving F1 immediately after the Canadian GP.
Stroll will be replaced by Felipe Drugovich for the rest of 2024 before he is replaced by a Honda back driver. Having been overlooked for the Perez replacement seat, Yuki Tsunoda will sign for Honda for 2025.
VISA CASH APP RB F1 TEAM STARTS OFF 2024 WELL, WHICH LEADS TO PROTESTS FROM OTHER TEAMS.
Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team will be one of the big improvers in 2024 off the back of their closer ties with the Red Bull team.
Led by a refreshed Daniel Ricciardo, they will secure a few early podiums, including a fine second place for Ricciardo at the Monaco Grand Prix.
They will be a clear fourth best team behind Max Verstappen, Ferrari and McLaren.
But that will be the last straw for some team owners who immediately protest the result and all results for Visa Cash App RB F1 Team so far in the season.
This will lead to months of arguing and the FIA and F1 management themselves arguing, becoming the big talking point off the track, to go with the Max Verstappen dominance on it.
