It’s that time of year again. Welcome back to the final round of #SeasonReviewSeason, and it’s time for me to take a deep dive into Formula 1 in 2024. It was a genuinely interesting rollercoaster of a season and a lot of variance in results, cars, drivers and drama.
As usual, this is a three-part season review as I go in reverse Constructors Championship order. I take a look at the team’s results and vibes over the year, as well as ratings for the team and the drivers, as well as stats, some fancy presentations and a lot of shitty jokes. Here’s the setlist:
Part 1 – Sauber, Williams, RB, Haas
Part 2 – Alpine, Aston Martin, Mercedes
Part 3 – Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren, Vibes
Before I get into this, a quick note on Supertimes as I’ll be mentioning it in this post – It’s an advanced metric used to help determine outright pace without outliers like crashes and outside influences. It compares the fastest time in a session like a race or qualifying session, to the selected drivers’ fastest time, and uses that as a weighted average across the season. I like to use it where I can as sometimes, Head-to-head teammate comparisons don’t tell the full story. You’ll see in Part 3 when I talk about Oscar Piastri for instance. Right, on with the show. Let’s get green…
Kick Sauber
Constructor Position: 10th (4 Points)
Head-To-Head Records: Bottas 21-3 In Qualifying / Bottas 14-10 In Races
Best Finish: 8th (Qatar)
Season In A Nutshell: “It was a mistake” – Valtteri Bottas
It’s never a good sign when you launch an F1 car and even the influencers they invited can’t pretend to be excited about it. The new creative direction for Sauber and their chassis partnership with Drake’s gambling addiction enabler Stake/Kick (region dependent of course), was probably the highlight of their season in hindsight.
It’s the same old story over in Switzerland. The season started reasonably well, but chances to score points were scuppered by horrendous pitstops and a new wheel nut material that sheared under pressure. But as the development race kicked on, Sauber got left in the dust as Haas, Williams, and even early 2024 Alpine got better as the year went on. In their defence, I think their final upgrade package that came around in Vegas helped, but by that point, it was far too late, with Zhou Guanyu’s eighth place in Qatar being the only points finish managed by the team all year.
The future remains promising but with strange wrinkles attached. Audi upped its committed team purchase to 100%, but it has sold a large minority stake to Qatar to offset some initial capital and startup costs for when it fully takes over in 2026. Allegedly, that number is 30%. But after 18 months on the project, CEO Andreas Seidl walked away, with former Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto now in charge. They’ve made a big signing from Red Bull by taking Jonathan Wheatley as their team principal when 2026 arrives too. I like these moves. If Binotto stays largely hands-off as CEO and lets the people do their thing, and Jonathan Wheatley can pull the strings together like he’s done brilliantly for Red Bull as their former Sporting Director, the top end of the management team should look after itself. In theory anyway.
The 2025 lineup is promising – Nico Hulkenberg will be talked about more later, but he’s about as good a midfielder as you can get in F1, even at 37. He makes total sense to lead this team into the Audi era. Newly crowned F2 Champion Gabriel Bortoleto feels a bit more like a punt with a junior record that looks a little cloudy on closer inspection, but I understand the gamble over a stagnant Bottas and Zhou lineup, that while nowhere near wholly responsible for the team’s shortcomings, felt underwhelming most of the time. Great vibes, though.
But this is a team that’s still a long way off where it was, and even further away from where it wants to be. So much is hinging on how Audi develops its 2026 power unit and car, that even next year feels redundant. It’s like a game you’re hyped about gets delayed for a year. You’re reasonable and you don’t want the developers getting “crunch” and want your game released in a finished state, but you also don’t want to wait that long for it. Let’s hope it’s more Balatro and less Forza Horizon 5. 2/10
Valtteri Bottas – 22nd in Points (0) / Best Finish – 11th (Qatar) / Average Finish – 15.8
Literally and metaphorically, the first pointless season of Valtteri Bottas’ career.
Real talk, I’m going to miss Val, a lot. As his career has wound down in his Early-Mid 30s, he’s opened up a lot in terms of his personality. He’s spoken in depth about his mental and physical struggles at Mercedes, from the eating disorders he had to deal with, to the mental realisation he just wasn’t as good as Lewis Hamilton in the same machine. But it also gave us ass calendars, a brilliant and dry sense of humour, a commitment to not taking himself too seriously and some incredible content. I’m pretty neutral as an F1 fan now that Sebastian Vettel’s retired, but if someone put a gun to my head, I’d support Val if given the choice.
On the track, Valtteri was fine. He massively outperformed Guanyu in qualifying over a single lap. On average, Val was nearly six-tenths quicker on Supertime comparisons. On any metric, Val laid the hammer. Not so strong in race trim, but still generally had the measure of Zhou over the season, but the latter got to stay in front due to his 11th place in Bahrain early on. But like I’ve said for the last three years with Sauber, it’s hard to get a true read on individual performance when the car has been so objectively bad in comparison to the field for the majority of 2024.
It’s not even like he had a headline performance that caught the eye. It was joked at one point that until his 11th in Qatar, he could have finished 24th in a 20-car Championship. And when the 11th came, his teammate brought home not one, but four points, on arguably Sauber’s best track (They double-pointed there last year).
Valtteri went out a little sad, locking up and clattering into Kevin Magnussen after a brilliant Q3 appearance in his final qualifying session. But it doesn’t take much away from an outstanding career. His admittance that the move to Sauber was “a mistake” came off more bitter than anything else. Back then, Sauber was the much stronger team compared to his other option, Williams. But I’m not sure anyone could have predicted Williams’ erratic form since then, and the field catching up to Sauber once everyone got closer to the minimum weight limit when the 2022 regulations came into effect.
Val walks away with nearly 250 starts, 10 wins, 20 pole positions, 67 podiums, and two Championship runner-up finishes. That’s an incredible innings for one of this era’s best and one of the sport’s genuinely good people. May his cheeks stay rosy, and his curiosity excite us all. What’s next? 4/10
Zhou Guanyu – 20th in Points (4) / Best Finish – 8th (Qatar) / Average Finish – 15.5
This season also marked the end of a three-year F1 run for Zhou Guanyu, a sweet and humble man with Sheffield blood in the veins. This man drove an F1 car and fell for chips and gravy, what’s not to love?
But seriously, it’s sad. He gave it a damn good go, and his race form wasn’t bad, certainly a driver with good peaks, he was great on the final upgrade package when he finished eighth in Qatar and was nearly in the points in Vegas too. But that awful qualifying form just dragged him down for all of his career, and he never looked like he could take control of the team away. While he wasn’t the worst of the full-time starters this season, he wasn’t far off that mantle again, and we all knew early on that this was certainly going to be his last season. I fear Zhou is done, and given his… let’s be nice and say “unusual” optimism post-season, I don’t know where he’s getting the idea he’s getting back on the grid for 2026.
There’s a chance he will end up at Ferrari as their reserve driver in 2025. At least he’ll look strapping in one of their blazers. May the fashion mega powers of Zhou and Hamilton combine. 2.5/10
Williams Racing
Constructors Position: 9th (17 Points)
Head-To-Head Stats: Albon 13-0/6-2 vs Sargeant/Colapinto in Qualifying / 11-2/4-4 vs Both in Races
Best Result: 7th (Baku)
Season In A Nutshell: Repair Bills
James Vowles could sell ice to the Eskimos, let me tell you.
I was hoping Williams would kick on from a pretty exceptional 2023. Alex Albon was a Top 5 candidate for Driver of the Year given how consistently excellent he was at letting the Williams punch above its weight, cracking the Top 8 multiple times. A better second driver and a little more development, and I think a Top 6 spot in the Constructors was a reasonable target.
This was not that.
Vowles anticipated a step back in 2024, but he surely couldn’t have expected this much of a regression. Now, to be fair, I don’t think this is all on them, part of the problem was that the teams around Williams, except for Sauber. Haas and RB pulled away from them in the mid-season and never really looked back. We got the revelation at Imola that Williams started the season with a chassis nearly 15 kilos overweight. Vowles reckoned that was worth nearly half a second in performance, and given Albon didn’t score points until Monaco at the end of May… that tracks.
And the management of the team has to come under scrutiny. Vowles gave Logan Sargeant every chan- Wait, who am I kidding, he didn’t. Albon wrecked a tub in Australia and took Sargeant’s chassis away to make sure Albon could still compete. You already left it to the last minute to keep Sargeant for 2024, and then you kicked him in the nuts, likely taking away any confidence he had left. It’s no wonder that by Monza, Sargeant was gone and replaced by reserve driver Franco Colapinto. Will talk about Colapinto in more detail in a bit, but he was the definition of swings and roundabouts.
Williams had several million dollars of crash damage and cars withdrawn from races this season. The drivers didn’t help, but at what point does the team take some degree of responsibility for building a car that was seemingly difficult to handle? I don’t envy the mechanics on this one, who had MANY sleepless nights trying to turn things around.
But despite all of that, Williams took advantage of a tame driver market that was locked down at the highest level and snagged Carlos Sainz fresh out of Ferrari. For the team that’s ninth in the standings to sign a Top 6 driver in the world is an insane hire, and immediately promotes Williams into having a Top 3 driver lineup on the grid for 2025. Vowles has gushed about this new hire and how this is only Year 2 of a five-year plan. Just one problem… We’ve all heard how well those usually go down in F1. No excuses now Williams, you’ve got to build these dudes a car. 3/10
Alex Albon – 16th in Points (12) / Best Finish – 7th (Baku) / Average Finish – 14.5 (23 Races)
It was always going to be hard to follow up the best year of Albon’s career in 2023. Some of that was a clear Williams regression in the quality of the car, as well as poor reliability. But Albon did himself and his team no favours. The Thai driver wrote off two tubs across the season in Australia and Brazil, the former causing an awkward stripping of Sargeant’s chassis just so he could race on Sunday.
At his best, his quality still shined through with four impressive points finishes in Monaco, Baku, Monza and Silverstone, the usual Williams’ hunting ground spots for good points. An average start of 12.9 is pretty good too. But some sloppy errors a driver of his experience level shouldn’t be making were sprinkled in there too, like Japan.
Overall, I think Albon was fine this season. Nothing too special, but a balance of good and bad on both sides of the fence. But we’ve all said that he needs competition in his team to see what he can do given Sargeant has not been an adequate yardstick. He ultimately handled Colapinto pretty well but Sainz should be on a different level, the steepest he’s had since Verstappen. That matchup will be fascinating. 5/10
Logan Sargeant – 23rd in Points (0) / Best Finish – 11th (UK) / Average Finish – 17.1 (13 Races)
Turns out a Kilometre is 3,280 feet. I feel bad for Logan, genuinely. It never truly felt like he was a Williams driver because Vowles inherited him from Jost Capito when he took the job. He wasn’t great in his rookie season, and I honestly thought the play was to let Sargeant go and take a swing at bringing Valtteri Bottas back. Sargeant was only confirmed for this season after the previous one was over, and then the Australia chassis swap happened early on.
And look, I get why people feel bad for him. I like empathy, we should have more of it, but let’s not pretend like there was something salvageable here. Sargeant just wasn’t F1 level for me. He had a year and a half, and he just didn’t kick on in Year 2 to justify any further seat time, especially when you knew what you had in Franco Colapinto. He was bottom for average start and average finish and only had three races out of thirteen in the Top 15. His wrecking in a straight line at Zandvoort’s practice was the final straw.
Sargeant’s heading back to the European Le Mans Series and I think he’s got a great chance of doing well over there. I wish him the best. 1/10
Franco Colapinto – 19th in Points (5) / Best Finish – 8th (Baku) / Average Finish – 13.6 (9 Races)
And in came Franco Colapinto, fresh off just half a season of F2-level machinery but given nine races to impress. Hard to say he didn’t do that. Argentina got behind their own and flew out to Monza for his debut and their fans got loud on social media with a quickness. It was like a slightly more serious Agustin Canapino out here.
Colapinto came out of the traps like a house on fire. Five straight Top 12 performances, including points in just his second start in Baku, and another in Austin. By the time we started the back-to-back Triple Headers, there were rumours that Sauber, Alpine and even Red Bull were eyeing up the Argentine for a last-minute 2025 hire.
Now, here’s where things got sketchy for Colapinto. #1 – Vowles overplayed his hand, allegedly setting a $20m price tag to break the contract of his reserve driver. Everything about the driver academy scene I can’t stand; hoarding talent so it can’t be used against you and not doing right by your driver. And then #2 – Colapinto crashed three times in the space of a week. A wreck in Brazil Qualifying, a silly full-throttle tailspin up the hill in Brazil in treacherous conditions, and then another big wreck clipping the wall in Vegas. A 50G wreck that ended up with Colapinto lucky to be allowed to race the next day. Just like that, the hype train felt like it was derailed, with Sauber taking Bortoleto instead and Alpine and RB cooling their interest. Almost like it’s risky running an inexperienced rookie on tracks he’s never been at before…
Colapinto clearly showed tremendous speed right out of the gate and wanted to impress but I also fear he was trying a little too hard down the stretch. I suspect he’ll play the 2025 Liam Lawson role, getting creative director camera cuts on TV when a Williams stacks it somewhere. Still, an interesting talent and I’ll be curious to see if he stays in the thought circle of teams if some of the newer drivers don’t work out. 4.5/10
V-Carb
Constructor’s Position: 8th (46 Points)
Head-To-Head Stats: Tsunoda 12-6/6-0 on Ricciardo/Lawson in Quali / Tsunoda 9-8/4-2 on Races
Best Finish: 7th (Australia, Brazil, Miami)
Season In A Nutshell: A Waste of Time
This has been a messy year all around for Alpha Tauri, Racing Bulls, V-CARB, or whatever you want to call them. I had a feeling it might be in Year 1 of life after Franz Tost, but Laurent Meikes had his work cut out here.
Team drama right from the opening bell in Bahrain after a lack of team orders meant Yuki Tsunoda nearly clattered into Daniel Ricciardo after the chequered flag fell. An act I still think should have had Tsunoda benched for a round.
The team’s early season form was generally pretty good. Tsunoda’s early form had a run of five-point finishes in six rounds, including a pair of seventh places in Australia and Miami. Ricciardo had a sensational 4th in the Sprint there too. But like so many teams in the 2024 season, they made their car worse with upgrade packages that didn’t work out, and the results dried up. Haas closed out the season a lot stronger than they did, and when Alpine hit the jackpot via their Brazilian miracle weekend, it destined RB to sink to eighth in the Constructors. Harsh given 46 points across the season is a pretty good haul, but when the bottom end of the field is genuinely competitive, someone Haas to miss out. Ba-dum-tish.
There’s also the management element of things and Red Bull’s outside influence that probably didn’t help matters. Ricciardo was jettisoned out of the team after Singapore in circumstances that got pretty ugly given Daniel didn’t want the farewell. Liam Lawson came back into the team and started great in Austin, but didn’t do a whole lot else. Again, circumstances, but Red Bull’s meddling was rather inefficient and likely compromised Lawson’s end of the garage.
Also, I wasn’t a fan of how often the team would try alternate strategies and it blew up in their faces. They loved a soft tyre switch and they loved rolling the dice, and a lot of the time, it didn’t work. If RB held out in Brazil rather than boxed for full wets, we’re talking at least one car on the podium. Instead, it cleared the way for Alpine to dropkick them from behind.
We await what happens next. It seems like Liam Lawson is heading to Red Bull to get the Oscar Piastri “Bundle him in, it’s all he knows” treatment, and F2 Championship runner-up Isack Hadjar will almost certainly get Lawson’s seat now we know that Helmut Marko’s cooled on Colapinto. I don’t think this is the right move personally, but more on that in a minute.
This is a Top 6 team and car that ended up eighth and while their shortcomings aren’t totally on them, it’s an ultimately disappointing season for Team Faenza. 4/10
Yuki Tsunoda – 12th in Points (30) / Best Finish – 7th (x3) / Average Finish – 13.2
You have to wonder how much more Yuki Tsunoda has to do to impress the powers that be. This was comfortably his best season in F1 to date. As mentioned earlier, excellent consistency in the first half of the season putting RB on his back, but with some unseriousness sprinkled in. His Bahrain petulance was exactly why people had a negative stereotype about his temperament in the first place. Copping a 40k fine during Austria’s qualifying session for using an ableist slur didn’t help either.
But the good of Yuki in 2024 far outweighed the bad. He needed a bit of a “prove it” season after people weren’t fully convinced of his 2023 speed against Nyck De Vries and the first Liam Lawson cameo but was much stronger this time around. He outclassed Ricciardo in qualifying in particular, even if the race pace was rather similar. But with Tsunoda, his wins were more prolific, getting into the points seven times with Ricciardo as a teammate, compared to just three for the Aussie. And while Lawson got the early shot in Austin when he made his second debut, Tsunoda handled the hype by coming back and winning the battle with Lawson pretty comfortably in the end.
This all begs the question – Why isn’t Tsunoda in the Red Bull seat? What more does he have to prove? I can just about see the “Lawson has more upside” argument, but I’m struggling to get there. Is there still resentment over the first two years of his career when Pierre Gasly outclassed him? Is it the character issues? If it’s the latter, and I feel like I’m reaching here – How much of an impact does it have on his driving?
I’m not sure it’s enough to the point where I take Lawson instead, who feels like another lamb to Max Verstappen’s slaughter. Red Bull needs a safe pair of hands who can get 200 points across the season, and the best option they have for that in my opinion, is Yuki Tsunoda. PS: He was my honourable mention for a Top 10 spot for Driver of the Year. 6.5/10
Daniel Ricciardo – 17th in Points (12) / Best Finish – 8th / Average Finish – 13.4 (18 Races)
Daniel Ricciardo was a “hail-mary” move by Christian Horner last year to try and rediscover his 2018 mojo and maybe solve the team’s long-standing Sergio Perez problem. Ricciardo was told he’d have to blow Yuki Tsunoda away to get the Red Bull job and jump the queue and on any level, he just didn’t do it.
In a vacuum, if this was a normal F1 team, Ricciardo was fine. He was a solid driver who occasionally punched above his means and got in the points, and on Sundays, he was almost there with Tsunoda, in one of the sport’s closest Supertime matchups (Around 0.04 in races both finished, around a tenth and a half down in Qualifying).
But this wasn’t a normal F1 team and Ricciardo was brought back with one specific purpose in mind – Be good enough to usurp Checo. And from that aspect, he just wasn’t good enough. RB wasn’t interested in close finishes, they wanted a conclusive resolution to their driver headache, and Ricciardo threw the paracetamol out of the window in his usual Aussie style.
It’s why RB let him go after Singapore. He’d served his purpose and in the bosses’ eyes, it was pointless having him in the seat with no chance at the Red Bull drive. I’m not sure I bought Marko’s explanation that he’d lost his fire for racing, but whatever. And that’s classic Red Bull/Marko snap decision-making. Because you insisted you keep the Ricciardo experiment going in 2024 and then cut bait early, you denied the chance of giving Lawson a full-season evaluation, which also compromised the Kiwi’s chances because he had to come in at short notice again.
Sadly, Ricciardo’s swansong felt more like a social experiment than anything else. He deserved a proper send-off but DR3 kept pushing, still thinking he still had a chance until the end. Doesn’t sound like a driver who’s lost his mojo, but I’m no psychologist. Daniel’s likely done but leaves with a great career – 8 wins, 258 starts (10th all-time), 32 podiums, and one of the sport’s great personalities. I’m going to miss him too. 5.5/10
Liam Lawson – 21st in Points (4) / Best Finish – 9th (x2) / Average Finish – 13.5 (6 Races)
Welcome back to the party Liam Lawson. Worthy of his section on account of getting a whole one race more than last time.
Lawson was… fine. Like last time, he hit the ground running with a brilliant comeback through the field to get in the points in Austin that immediately put him back in the RB Power Rankings lead. But then he didn’t kick on from there. He was out-qualified every weekend he was there (Unlucky in Mexico given his teammate stuffed it), and only got into the points again in Brazil, and it was directly behind Tsunoda.
Now, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. Lawson isn’t supposed to beat Tsunoda. The latter has nearly 90 career starts, but Lawson only had five coming into this season. If he can get close and flash that upside, you’d think that would be enough for Red Bull to take a punt on him. They were sniffing around at Colapinto for precisely that reason.
He definitely has some speed, and there is something there in terms of potential, but there were still moments where he looked very green and his racecraft clumsy, like when he took Bottas out in Qatar and banging wheels with Perez and Colapinto in Mexico. Lawson showed he has some of that fire that Red Bull loves in its drivers, butting heads with Fernando Alonso the moment he returned. But sometimes he drove like a man who knew what was at stake and came off a little desperate as a result.
In the eyes of Red Bull, it seems Lawson has shown enough for the Red Bull seat. As I said earlier, I think it’s the wrong decision personally, with Tsunoda a much safer pair of hands with the extra experience, but as I said, Red Bull wants to replicate the “Piastri” approach. Good luck to them, but I fear that Lawson may end up being another “one’er” on Verstappen’s conker. 5/10
PS: The average finish of all three RB drivers was within .3 of a position. Because of course.
Haas F1 Team
Championship Position: 7th (58 Points)
Head-To-Head Stats: Hulkenberg 16-6 In Qualifying, 16-5 in Races
Best Finish: 6th (Austria/Silverstone)
Season In A Nutshell: A New Hope
This was always going to be an interesting season. For the first time in their decade-long history at Banbury, the Haas F1 Team was freed from the cult of Guenther Steiner. The Italian boss had long since complained about the lack of investment from owner Gene Haas and their backward progress and it became an untenable situation. Steiner had a point – Haas only spent up to the cost cap level in 2023, but the results were poor either way.
So as Guenther moved into being F1’s biggest influencer, in his place? Ayao Komatsu, an engineer who started as a mechanic at Honda 20 years ago and worked his way up to the role working side by side with Romain Grosjean. And if I was giving out an award for best team boss, Komatsu would win with flying colours.
This was a transformed Haas team and given Banbury is just 300 or so employees deep, no one did more with less this season than they did. Their new approach of being pragmatic, hitting upgrades fast and early rather than just waiting for big packages once or twice a season like the Steiner era, worked a lot better. The car was a huge improvement, gone were the tyre-munching Haas cars of old and they actually looked like a good all-around solid car, and in particular, still very fast over a lap. They were very unlucky not to get sixth overall given nearly 60 points on the season, more in a single season than the last four combined.
And the cherry on top is a new technical partnership with Toyota that will help with manufacturing, engineering and resources. Just don’t call it a comeback. But by any measure, a sign of Haas’ genuine ambition and Komatsu’s influence that was able to secure such a sick deal.
They’ve lost their talismanic ace in Nico Hulkenberg and it was the right time for Kevin Magnussen to step aside as he heads back to Sportscars, but they have a fun lineup replacing them in Esteban Ocon from Alpine, and A-Tier F2 hotshot Ollie Bearman, who outside of Brazil, did an excellent job standing in on short notice in Jeddah with Ferrari and filling in for K-Mag’s race ban in Baku. A lot to look forward to in the Haas camp. And when was the last time we were able to say that? 7/10
Note: Ollie Bearman only did three GPs with two different teams, so I don’t think it’s enough of a sample size to get a full section, but I’ll say his first two performances were exceptional. To come in on less than a weekend’s notice in Jeddah and score good points was stunning, and to do it again in Baku for Haas when K-Mag was gone, genuinely outperforming Hulkenberg was immense. Brazil was ropey, but they were almost undrivable conditions and the toughest test for any rookie. Overall, an immense shot in the arm and I look forward to seeing more.
Kevin Magnussen – 15th in Points (16) / Best Finish: 7th (Mexico) / Average Finish – 13.4 (22 Races)
It’s going to be kind of strange saying goodbye to Kevin Magnussen in F1 and Haas in particular. He’s been there for 147 out of the team’s 190 starts, 77% of the team’s history. He’s become part of the furniture over there, but I think now is the right time for both parties to truly part ways.
But man, did we have fun on the way. Magnussen was an absolute menace in Jeddah and Miami by backing the wagon up so teammate Hulkenberg could keep himself in the points. Like I’ve said before, it takes a pair of steel ones to run Lewis Hamilton off the track in Miami, but he did. He was a fantastic team player and you don’t get those in this sport very often. He was the smart one who realised that the only penalty point that matters in F1, is your twelfth. Just a shame he made history by being the first one to get it and take a race ban. And no, don’t cry for him, every point he earned in 2024 was justified, and half of them were intentional.
I loved the entertainment, but when Haas gets the opportunity to bring in the UK’s most talented prospect since George Russell, you take the chance. K-Mag’s been outclassed as the second Haas driver for the last three seasons dating back to Schumacher, and if you’re on the back foot three years running, it’s probably time for a change. He found a little bit of form late on with Haas’ final upgrade package in Austin, but by that point, it was too late.
Magnussen was an old-school racer who raced you hard and expected it returned in kind. He laughed in the face of his ban and embraced his aggressive personality. I found that fun, and I nicknamed him the Arbiter of Chaos for that very reason. He’s going to be a lot of fun for BMW in Sportscars, that’s for sure. 4.5/10
Nico Hulkenberg – 11th in Points (41) / Best Finish: 6th (UK, Austria) / Average Finish: 11.6
Dre’s Top 10 Drivers of the Year – #7
There was quite a wholesome tweet left by Nico upon his final weekend for Haas in Abu Dhabi. A candid confession that he wasn’t sure if he could still drive at the highest level after three years of only being a COVID substitute and coming back full-time at 35. Nico, let me reassure you, that you very much still have it.
This was an exceptional season for Hulkenberg, who carried on his 2023 form of being Haas’ talisman and found another level in 2024. Top 10 in the field on average finishes, 11 Q3 appearances and making the points ten times. And another fun fact? With seven 11th-place finishes, no one has ever had more in a season where they were one spot out of the points in F1 history. He was a consistent threat to score almost every weekend and finished the season with points in six out of the final seven weekends (Shame about the Brazilian GP drainpipe and the lockup in Qatar that probably didn’t fit the crime.)
There were a couple of off-weekends sure, but overall, Hulk impressed week in and week out as the consistent force of the midfield all year long. He deserved a Top 10 finish in the standings, but that Brazil weekend for Alpine had Gasly pip him over the line by just a single point.
I say this with full sincerity – If Red Bull needed a stopgap while they figure out their youth movement, why not give Hulk a call? His timing has always been the worst and Sauber could be great as Audi in 2026 as a final roll of the dice as a factory driver for them, but there’s that niggling feeling that the Swiss team aren’t anywhere near where they should be. I hope it doesn’t sully the twilight years of one of the sport’s great midfield talents. Hulkenberg is him and he deserved a DEEP ranking in my Top 10 Drivers of the Year. 8/10
In Part 2, I talk about Alpine’s erratic year, the crossroads of Aston Martin, and the end of an era at Mercedes. See you then.
