Up Next
The next moves in Formula 1’s wildly unpredictable driver market after confirmation of Kevin Magnussen and Haas's split should be made before the summer break - but the biggest unresolved elements could stretch into August, if not beyond.
Haas is now considered most likely to get its 2025 driver line-up locked down next, with outgoing Alpine driver Esteban Ocon widely expected to partner Ferrari protege Ollie Bearman next season.
Some reports had even suggested Ocon could be announced this week but Magnussen's exit looks like the only news coming out of Haas for now. An Ocon deal confirmation could still happen before the summer break between the back-to-back races in Hungary and Belgium, though.
Several others involved in this merry-go-round had hoped to lock down their futures by now too, but the impasse largely controlled by Carlos Sainz means that various teams and drivers remain in the dark.
Throw in the prospect of a race winner coming on the market and a young driver being removed from it if Red Bull makes a drastic mid-season change by replacing Sergio Perez with Liam Lawson, and this becomes an even messier sequence of events to be sorted out.
RED BULL’S PEREZ CHOICE
Perez has the final two races before the summer break to make a convincing case to Red Bull that he will not torpedo its constructors’ championship prospects this season.
A dreadful run of form, finishing no higher than seventh in the last six races and scoring just three times in that spell, puts Perez 137 points and five places behind Max Verstappen in the championship at a time when McLaren and Mercedes are putting Red Bull under more pressure than it's been under in this rules era.
That is rumoured to leave Perez vulnerable to a performance clause in his contract that was added when he signed his new one-plus-one deal earlier this year, allowing Red Bull to terminate his contract if he is more than 100 points behind Verstappen at the break.
Being able to do that and choosing to do it are different things, and Perez retains a degree of control. But Red Bull is considering its options and Lawson’s test in the 2024 car last week, limited though it was being a ‘filming day’, serves as proof of its intentions if Perez is not up to scratch.
Should Perez get dropped, a very experienced race-winning driver will suddenly be on the market. Regardless of his Red Bull form, he will inevitably appeal to teams such as Audi, Alpine and Williams – and he certainly would not be the first to thrive elsewhere after a bruising time against Verstappen.
His availability would be a significant curveball in negotiations those teams are having, as Perez could conceivably beat someone like Valtteri Bottas to a seat somewhere in the lower midfield.
RED BULL OR AUDI FOR LAWSON?
A simple Red Bull decision to axe Perez and promote Lawson would put the 21-year-old into F1’s dominant car of this rules era. That’s quite the opportunity.
And it would make good on Red Bull’s need to sort him an F1 seat before September, or else let him become a free agent for 2025.
Should that happen, though, then Lawson would have an interesting alternative: Audi.
There has been contact between Sauber/Audi representatives and the Lawson camp as he is seen as a serious back-up option should long-term target Sainz join another team, as has seemed increasingly likely over recent months.
That’s a good position for Lawson to be in, although with respect it says something about the Audi project that he is the kind of driver so seriously in the mix there.
Right now, Lawson looks to have the best chance of the remaining rookie prospects of getting on the grid. Formula 2 champion Theo Pourchaire is another outside option for Sauber, which has backed him for several years, but looks more like a last resort.
And at Alpine, current reserve Jack Doohan’s chances seem to live and die by whether Sainz and Bottas go elsewhere.
SO WHAT ABOUT SAINZ?
Sainz has been the cork in the bottle for months, as he has taken his time to decide his next move since learning way back at the start of 2024 he would lose his Ferrari seat to Lewis Hamilton.
The twists and turns the driver market has taken since then perhaps vindicate Sainz’s patience. Some seats are slowly disappearing, but maybe the best one of all is still achievable – more so than was once thought.
After Williams edged ahead of Audi in the race to sign Sainz, Alpine re-emerged as a credible prospect (at least in the eyes of the Sainz camp). But then came words of encouragement from Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, and the implication that maybe 17-year-old F2 rookie Kimi Antonelli won’t quite be ready for a Mercedes F1 seat next year, especially if the team’s current trajectory puts it in championship fight territory in 2025.
In such circumstances, a short/medium-term Sainz deal would be a big win for Mercedes, and for Sainz it would be a no-brainer over working out the least-worst of his alternatives.
That’s why his situation has frozen again. If Mercedes is going to give Antonelli more time in F2 and more private F1 testing to evaluate him properly, and if Alpine in particular is willing to wait to find out if Sainz is available, his situation looks the most likely to rumble on into the second half of the year.
WHAT WILL WILLIAMS DO?
Sainz has seemed to start slipping back out of Williams’s grasp, at least on the timeline it wanted as team boss James Vowles does not fancy the risk of missing out on good-level alternatives by hanging on for a driver that may eventually spurn him.
So while Williams has still been very keen on Sainz, it has also started preparing for life without him. Discussions with other drivers have been taking place anyway and Bottas, who started his F1 career with the team, looks most likely to head back there – although a chance for Mercedes protege Antonelli, a la George Russell’s three-year stint with Williams – cannot be ruled out.
It’s possible that Perez coming on the market would make Williams think twice but if the team wants to go the experienced route, he is in no way a clear upgrade on Bottas, who along with probably being a faster driver has the advantage of knowing the team well.
Bottas has been a contender at all the teams with vacancies but his current Sauber team does not seem to want him and he does not want to stay. Haas wants Ocon, and Alpine – apart from being a high-risk option given its chaotic recent history – seems set on Sainz and has Doohan as a fallback. Williams ticks a lot of boxes for Bottas and can be a good long-term project to commit to.
For Williams, with Ocon (who did not seem to be a favoured choice there anyway) heading for Haas, the situation now seems simple: wait for Sainz, lock down Bottas while it knows it still can, or take Antonelli on a multi-year ‘apprenticeship’ for Mercedes.
Pulling the trigger might just depend on Vowles getting a clear idea of the timelines for Sainz and Antonelli. If the Mercedes situation is really not coming to a conclusion any time soon, then a Williams/Bottas deal before the summer break or sometime in August would not be a surprise.
WHO MISSES OUT
All of this almost certainly means the end for Magnussen (Haas), Zhou Guanyu (Sauber) and Logan Sargeant (Williams). But it’s not impossible that there’s another casualty in the driver market either.
It’s also worth noting that Vowles continues to leave the door open to dropping Sargeant mid-season. But that would surely only happen were it to give the team an early start with its 2025 signing.
This is almost certainly only going to be an option with Antonelli, should Mercedes decide he does merit an F1 graduation but not straight to its works team.
It has been suggested that Ocon could be a contender for this given his tense Alpine relationship, but he would need to be Williams-bound in 2025 for it to make sense.
He is not thought to be Williams’s preferred choice and if he really is on the brink of a Haas deal for 2025, that would obviously harpoon it anyway.
But, for argument’s sake, let’s say the most chaotic choices (in terms of the knock-on effects) are made across the board, and Perez is dropped for Lawson, Mercedes signs Sainz and puts Antonelli at Williams.
That would leave three seats available at Haas, Alpine and Sauber/Audi, offering a reprieve for a Magnussen or a Doohan depending on which team ends up with the vacancy after all.
This level of uncertainty is exactly why a silly season that started unusually early is still up in the air as we approach the time of year it normally kicks off.
