Formula 1: The 75-year event that will probably never happen again
By Asher Fair
There have been seven driver changes confirmed at six different teams for the 2025 Formula 1 season, and there might as well be eight at seven following the recent confirmation that Daniel Ricciardo has been replaced by Liam Lawson at RB for the remaining six races of the record-breaking 24-race 2024 campaign.
Let's start at the very beginning – before that, even.
Before the 2024 season began, it was confirmed that Lewis Hamilton would be replacing Carlos Sainz Jr. at Ferrari in 2025, ending his 12-year run at Mercedes. The seven-time world champion's run with the Silver Arrows has been the most successful driver/team pairing Formula 1 has ever seen.
Sainz ended up signing with Williams to replace Logan Sargeant, whom the team have actually replaced with Franco Colapinto for the remainder of the 2024 season already, while rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli was called upon to replace Hamilton at Mercedes.
Throughout the rest of the grid, Esteban Ocon is set to be replaced by rookie Jack Doohan at Alpine. Ocon is set to join Haas, which have also signed rookie Oliver Bearman. Neither Kevin Magnussen nor Nico Hulkenberg will return to the team in the 2025, with Hulkenberg having been signed by Sauber to replace Zhou Guanyu.
Should Sauber also decide to replace Valtteri Bottas, that would mean that only 11 of the sport's 20 full-time drivers entering the 2024 season are staying put with their current teams in 2025.
This chaos comes after the first offseason in Formula 1 history which saw zero driver changes.
All 20 drivers who finished the 2023 season stayed with their teams for the 2024 campaign. Never before in Formula 1 history, which dates back to 1950, had that ever happened.
It's almost a miracle that it happened at all, because as this year has shown, it's probably not going to happen again. Everything needed to go right – the stars needed to align, per se – in order for no driver changes to be made at any team.
The only change from the start of the 2023 season to the start of the 2024 season took place at RB, as Ricciardo was called upon in the middle of the year to replace the struggling Nyck de Vries.
He was retained for the first 18 races of 2024 before encountering a similar fate ahead of the upcoming United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, with Lawson set to replace him and presumably remain with the Red Bull sister team next year.
Just three teams are set to enter the 2025 season with the same driver lineup as they have run this year.
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Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez are both set to return to Red Bull, despite both having been linked to early exits at some point(s) over the last nine months, while Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are both set to return to Aston Martin and Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are set to return to McLaren.
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