F1 summer report cards: McLaren beats Red Bull to the top of class (2024)

Christian Horner’s claim that Red Bull would not be able to repeat its 2023 domination looked in doubt through the early part of the year, when Max Verstappen was winning by an average of 15 seconds per race. While other teams had zigged towards its design concept after two years of defeats, Red Bull zagged, taking a radical approach toward the RB20. It appeared to have changed the game once again. But such dominance is now a thing of the past. Red Bull has only won three of the last nine races, all three courtesy of some Verstappen brilliance as McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari closed up. Red Bull’s two major upgrade packages have not provided the desired boost, much to Verstappen’s frustration, and Sergio Pérez’s floundering form has allowed McLaren to close up at the top of the constructors’ table. Red Bull continues to operate at a very high level, particularly when Verstappen shows what its car remains capable of producing. Yet this is a season that looks increasingly about clinging on at the front, instead of pressing home the advantage as in previous years. A near-perfect start has now faded, meaning for the first time in almost three years, Red Bull faces a serious threat to its status as the team to beat in F1.

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A gold star for the papaya. To be clear, it’s not an unblemished season for McLaren, a few iffy moments arising with strategy, for example. But McLaren’s upward trajectory has become one of the biggest storylines of 2024 as it challenges Red Bull and Verstappen. It’s one of the few teams that has made an upgrade package work, the package at the Miami GP bringing an immediate upturn in performance, for instance. McLaren has one of the most complete and consistent driver lineups on the grid with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, both of whom secured their first F1 wins this season. There’s been multiple moments that Norris has felt they “should have won,” like at the Spanish GP. As the final races ahead of summer break progressed, it became evident that a title fight is brewing for the second half of the season, the gap sitting at just 42 points.

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Ahead of the 2024 campaign, Ferrari revamped its car. The car was fairly finicky through an inconsistent 2023, and the team didn’t find its stride until later in the season. Drivability was a limiting issue so Ferrari overhauled the design. And at first, it had reason for optimism. Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc started the season quite competitively, fighting for podium positions and securing wins of their own at Australia and Monaco. But as the rest of the grid brought upgrades and developed their cars, Ferrari’s rate of improvement slowed by comparison, even though some upgrades worked, and it lacks pace. McLaren and Mercedes quickly have taken steps past Ferrari, the latter more recently. Leclerc said after the Belgian GP, “We thought that we were on a par with” the Silver Arrows. “It's good to see that everybody is so close, but unfortunately, we are still the fourth fastest team,” Leclerc said, “and the top three keep changing, but we are consistently behind them or on a par with Mercedes. So yeah, we just need more pace.” It is a game of fine margins, and even though it has as many wins as McLaren, Ferrari has found itself on the wrong side of the swing in momentum. As Leclerc showed at Spa with his pole position start, Ferrari has pace at the moment, just not enough to take the checkered flag.

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Had these report cards been written after Monaco, Mercedes would likely be failing the class. It was shaping up as another season of false belief that it had finally understood its struggles under these regulations, as it delivered a car well off the pace of leaders.This time, Mercedes finally has cured its issues and is back among F1’s leading group, with the upgrade that arrived in Monaco bearing fruit from the next race in Canada, where George Russell scored pole position.Since then, Mercedes hasn’t been off the podium. Russell won in Austria thanks to the Norris/Verstappen clash, but Lewis Hamilton's Silverstone victory was entirely on merit, as was the 1-2 at Spa prior to Russell’s disqualification. It doesn’t quite have the pace of McLaren or Red Bull just yet, but the turnaround in Mercedes’ season has set it up for a strong second half — one that will perhaps spark hope of a return to title contention next season, just as Hamilton makes the move to Ferrari.

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The backend of 2023 was a sign that Aston Martin’s rise last year may not be permanent, but few would have anticipated the team to have struggled this much leading to the summer break. Fernando Alonso, F1’s ageless wonder, has barely factored at the front this year. The start to the year showed the Aston Martin’s race day strength from 2023 had gone, turning into a better one-lap car, but even that hasn’t been the case of late. Alonso and Lance Stroll have a combined total of just one top-five finish this year, courtesy of Alonso in Jeddah. Alonso admitted he felt “a little bit disappointed” with Aston Martin’s season after the race at Spa. “We cannot hide the fact that we are fighting today with Williams, RB and Alpine,” he said. “Last year, we were looking maybe to the top four teams. Now they are out of reach, and we are just defending from the guys behind. Definitely, a lot of work for us to do.” Aston Martin’s focus remains on a future title challenge. The next phase of its new factory will open over the summer break, and its efforts to sign Adrian Newey remain serious. So far, 2024 has been a year with little else to herald or celebrate.

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RB entered this year with a new name and leadership (Laurent Mekies becoming the team principal). CEO Peter Bayer said at the team’s season launch in February that they want to “be a competitor on the grid at the top of the midfield.” Despite some driver performance struggles, they’ve scored points at 10 out of the last 14 race weekends. The team had a solid upward trajectory in late 2023 as multiple upgrades allowed it to put pressure on Williams, coming up short by three points. It continues this forward progression this season and has had a competitive pace to compete within the top of the midfield. The most recent upgrade did not work immediately, but the team understands it better. It is a tight midfield battle, and Haas is right on RB’s tail. While it is impressive that RB has continued to grow year over year, it needs to continue the forward progression to compete at the top of the midfield. It’s worth remembering that RB only had three points at summer break last year.

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Upon taking charge of Haas in January, new team principal Ayao Komatsu was eager to downplay expectations. Coming off a miserable 2023 and with late decisions on the development direction for this year, 2024 was likely to be a tricky season. It makes Haas’s performance this year all the more surprising. Seventh in the championship and with over double the points tally of last season already, it has flourished thanks to a car that drivers Nico Hülkenberg and Kevin Magnussen can actually race. The tire issues of 2023 are gone, while even over a single lap, the VF-24 has performed well, particularly in Hülkenberg’s hands. This always felt like a transition year for Haas as Komatsu got up to speed and started to lay his foundations for the future. The truth is that it could end the season at the head of the ‘Class B’ field, given it only trails RB by seven points in the final 10 races — a mightily impressive turnaround.

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Alpine was always braced for a tough start to this season, adopting an aggressive overhaul of its car concept in the belief it would pay off down the line. Few anticipated it would quite be this tough. After spending 2023 in no man’s land between the top five and the bottom four teams, Alpine’s abrupt slip into the backfield has been challenging and prompted yet another round of changes for a team so often in transition. The departure of its former technical leadership was followed by the arrival of David Sanchez from McLaren. The once-banned Flavio Briatore has returned to F1 as Alpine’s executive advisor and announced Oliver Oakes will start as its new team principal after the summer break, coinciding with moves to end its factory engine program for 2026. There has also been disharmony on track, notably in Monaco, when contact between Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly laid bare the tensions across the garage. Both drivers can more than fight for the minor points, but right now, that’s their ceiling. Like Aston Martin, Alpine has big hopes for the long-term, and 2024 is when it is going through the pain it needs for a better tomorrow. That does not make its performances this year any less disappointing.

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Last year, Williams captured attention by jumping from last in the constructors’ championship to seventh after Alex Albon fought in the top 10 across numerous race weekends. But this year, it lacks competitiveness, sitting ninth with just four points heading into the summer shutdown. The team has been delayed by producing spare parts. Williams didn’t bring a spare chassis until the Miami GP in May, and it only competed with one car in Australia after Albon crashed his during practice. At Suzuka, both drivers had incidents. The accidents over two race weekends put Williams on the back foot. According to team boss James Vowles, earlier this year, they “lost a number of floors, a number of rear wings, a number of front wings." The incidents also impacted both gearboxes and suspension components. “It will have an impact on what we do performance-wise later on in the year,” he said. “The performance components that we brought forward through hard work to Japan are unfortunately destroyed. So again, that puts us on the back foot for performance across the next few races while we build up stock of those again. So a little bit of a short-term, a little bit of a medium-term impact on where we are.” The car was overweight at the beginning of the year, and a heavier car hurts lap times. However, the team has taken weight-reducing measures, and despite the obstacles, Albon has secured three Q3 appearances and four points.

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With 10 races to go this season, Sauber remains the only team that has yet to score a point. The average finishing positions for Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas are 15.4 and 15.5, and Bottas has only advanced to Q3 once, in China. One clear area of improvement has been the team’s pit stops. In Belgium, Sauber executed a 1.9-second pit stop for Bottas, which starkly contrasted the near three- to four-second stops they delivered at the beginning of the year. Sauber had redesigned components like wheel hubs and nuts to improve their pit stops, team representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi said in March, but an issue with a part necessitated another redesign. But on-track performance shows only marginal improvements. Sauber finished 2023 ninth with 16 points, most of which came pre-summer shutdown. The team failed to continue an upward trend from last year; the car lacks pace and isn’t that easy to set up. But recent upgrades on the car have moved Sauber more into the midfield battle. “We've made some improvement since, but more like baby steps instead of big jumps, unlike some other teams around us,” he said Thursday ahead of the Belgian GP. “So we definitely have a clear direction for the second half where we need to improve the car, but that's just now what we need to do. We need to make it faster.”

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