McLaren’s triumph in last year’s F1 constructors’ championship brings with it some clear and obvious benefits – which will include it being at the head of the pitlane from this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.
But there is one area where McLaren’s success will not leave it top of the rankings – and that is F1’s prize money payments for this year.
For although the better you do in the constructors’ championship the bigger the share of F1’s commercial rights income you get, the final divvying up of the prize pot is based on a host of other factors that do not relate to performance over a single season.
This includes a long-standing bonus Ferrari gets for its historical significance, as well as extra payments relating to success over the past 10 years.
So when everything is shaken out, McLaren will actually end up as only the fourth highest earner.
We’ve done some digging, and got our calculators out, to explain why this is the case
A secret formula
The first thing to make clear when calculating prize money payments in F1 is that these are not made public – so there are no officially published and confirmed figures.
The prize money structure forms part of the secret Concorde Agreement, the document by which grand prix racing is run, so there is no way to access anything that lays out the details of the structure, nor specifics if some payments come from extra pots.
This makes it impossible to give a definitive and totally accurate table of payments – as this is something that perhaps only FOM knows itself. However, we can estimate what the figures are to give us a close representation of things.
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That is because over the years since the current Concorde Agreement came into force in 2021, various elements of the prize money structure have leaked out – and they can give us a pretty decent base to estimate how much each team is due to get.
This is especially helped with F1 owner Liberty Media needing to make public in its official accounts how much the teams are paid overall each season.
For 2024, Liberty recently announced that the combined payment to teams was $1.266 billion (USD). This was up 4% from the previous year ($1.215 billion in 2023), and it estimates it as being 61.%% of F1’s OIBDA (Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization).
That baseline figure gives us a chance to calculate the three main ways that the payments are dished out to come up with a final best estimation.
Ferrari's historic payment
As Formula 1’s longest serving team, Ferrari has always enjoyed some special privileges for remaining a part of the series.
This includes its famous (but rarely used) veto over technical changes, but also an extra payment that it is given as a nod to its historic significance.
This is understood to be around 5% of the entire prize fund. However, the exact figure is understood to vary, because if F1’s commercial income gets above a certain point then Ferrari enjoys a further escalator element.
Sources have suggested that this maxes out at 10% of anything above and beyond the $1.6 billion (USD) mark – something that has not been hit yet.
While the exact percentage Ferrari gets cannot be verified, if we take the 5% figure as a close enough estimate, then that means $63.3 million in its coffers before a wheel has turned.
Previous success bonus
There is also understood to be a second column of payments that is taken off and accounts for a further 20% of the entire prize fund – so $253.2 million in total.
This is awarded to recognise previous championship success for teams, and acts as an incentive to reward frontrunners over the long haul.
It is understood that a points system is used to calculate this – with teams finishing in the top three positions over the past 10 years awarded either one, two or three points for finishing either third, second or first in each campaign.
Going back over the previous decade (so from 2015 to 2024), five different teams have finished in the top three over that period.
Using the points metric, the points can be divided out as below. And, splitting the bonus point based on the scores (so $4.22 million per point), can give us an estimate of how much extra each of these teams gets.
These calculations are below:
Mercedes (22 points) = $92.84 million
Red Bull (17 points) = $71 million
Ferrari (16 points) = $67.52 million
McLaren (4 points) = $16.88 million
Williams (1 point) = $4.22 million.
The prize pot
With the first two payments taken out, the remaining 75% of the prize pot – which based on our calculations is $949.5 million - is then divided up among all the teams based on the 2024 finishing positions.
The split is fairly even across the grid and, while the exact percentages are not known, there is understood to be roughly a 0.9% difference between each position.
Using our $949.5 figure, we can then estimate how much each team gets based on their finishing position:
1st: McLaren - $132.9m
2nd: Ferrari - $124.4m
3rd: Red Bull - $115.8m
4th: Mercedes - $107.3m
5th: Aston Martin - $98.8m
6th: Alpine - $90.2m
7th: Haas - $82.6m
8th: Racing Bulls - $74.1m
9th: Williams - $65.5m
10th: Sauber - $57.9m
The final totals
Bringing all the payments together allows us to come up with a representation of what the prize money payments look like as a total for 2025 - based on what's happened over the last 10 years.
And, while these are far from confirmed or official, they do give us an idea of how things roughly shake out.
They show Ferrari easily remains F1’s top earner, but that the previous dominance of Mercedes and Red Bull has also helped it stay ahead of McLaren in the prize money payouts for now.
