There’s plenty of drama ahead of us in the 2024 Formula 1 season. Like last year, the year began with fears that Max Verstappen and Red Bull would take the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships, but this season the battle is much closer at the top. Both Red Bull and Verstappen are favourites to win their respective championships, but neither title is decided at this point.
However, the spectre of the 2025 driver transfer market has been hanging over us all season, and was kicked into motion early with Lewis Hamilton’s shock announcement that he will leave Mercedes for Ferrari next year.
The grid for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix is filling up in Barcelona, but almost half the places on next season’s grid are still open, including for two teams, Haas and Alpine, who are yet to announce their drivers for next year.
Of course, you can read what a single F1 writer thinks will happen, or you can find out what F1 fans think will happen. That’s the approach we’re taking today. Specifically, we’ll be looking at four drivers: Carlos Sainz Jr., Esteban Ocon, Valtteri Bottas, and the genius of the Mercedes driver program, Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Earlier this week, I posted a series of surveys in threads. Thanks to the fine folks at F1 threads, here are some questions for each driver:
Where will they be next year?
where should What will happen next year?
Here are some very scientific results.
Carlos Sainz Jr.
It is widely expected that Carlos Sainz Jr. will move to Williams next season. Williams team principal James Bowles has made it clear that Sainz is their top driver target, with Logan Sargent currently taking the role and although Bowles has said Sargent can still keep his place, it will be an uphill battle.
Perhaps not surprisingly,The overwhelming majority of respondents believe Sainz will head to Williams, with 84% of voters saying he will be at Williams next year, followed by Sauber/Audi on 12% and Mercedes on 5%.
but, should Will Sainz move to Williams?
That vote was much closer.
Williams remained the winner on this question with 44% of the votes, but it was Mercedes that made the big gains, with 31% of respondents thinking Sainz should go to the Silver Arrows, while Sauber received 25% of the votes.
Valtteri Bottas
What’s next? Valtteri Bottasis in the final year of his current contract with Sauber, which has already announced that Nico Hulkenberg will join the team next season ahead of the organisation becoming Audi’s works team in 2026. The combination of German driver Hulkenberg and a German team certainly seems like a good fit.
But will Bottas be his teammate?
According to 42% of respondents, Bottas will remain with Sauber next season. Interestingly, “other” came in as the second most popular answer with 16%. If Sainz were to move elsewhere, a return to Williams would be possible, but teams mentioned in the “other” category included Haas and Alpine.
When it came to where Bottas should land, Sauber was again the winner, with 50% of respondents choosing his current team as his place in 2025. “Other” was a clear second choice in this question, with Haas and Alpine again named as contenders.
Esteban Ocon
it was fun…
Esteban Ocon presented with four options The contenders for next season were Haas, Mercedes, Sauber/Audi and others.
Haas was the winner in the first question, with 49% of respondents saying they would see Ocon move to Haas next season, but ‘other’ came a close second with 30% of the votes.
And many of the respondents suggested Ocon will not compete in F1 next season.
Then came the real surprise of the exercise. Ocon should Next season, 56% chose “other”, with the majority of those respondents suggesting in the thread that Ocon should quit F1 altogether.
Will people get it right?
Andrea Kimi Antonelli
Finally, about the young geniusAndrea Kimi Antonelli. All indications are that he is on the fast track to promotion to F1, with the FIA tweaking the rules in recent weeks to allow under-18 drivers to be given permission to drive on the grid before their 18th birthday.
Antonelli will turn 18 in August.
The FIA has tweaked rules to require drivers on the grid to hold a national driving licence, and Antonelli is from Italy, where the driving age is 18.
So Antonelli may not be on the grid this season (though it could still happen sooner or later), but will he be on an F1 grid next year?
And should he?
The vast majority of respondents – 79% to be exact – believe Antonelli will drive for Mercedes next season. Indeed, it looks like Antonelli is headed there. There have been constant reports that Toto Wolff is looking to take a new direction with Mercedes. The Silver Arrows boss spoke about it in Montreal, clarifying the decision to rule Sainz out as an option.
“First of all, I think Carlos deserves the top spot,” Wolff said. Sky Sports F1 “He’s done a great job ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, but we’ve started down a path where we’re saying, ‘we want to reinvent ourselves a bit going forward,’ and Kimi Antonelli is definitely part of that.”
But should that part start in 2025?
Most poll respondents don’t think so.
According to 59% of respondents, Antonelli should remain in F2 next season, rather than skipping F3 entirely and jumping straight to F1 after just one season in F2.
Of course, some caveats are in order: this is a very small sample size of about 80 respondents per question; we did not select an overwhelming number of voters; and the question format could be adjusted; questions about where each driver would “land” received more votes than where they would actually land. We can blame the poll designers (signers) for the sample failure.
Still, the votes come from a highly knowledgeable fan base that follows F1’s inner workings on a daily, and in some cases hourly, basis.
Will their vote hold up in the coming months?
You’ll see it soon.
