Confession time: this month’s cover feature has been a long time in the making. We’ve put it off at least once. Perhaps the long era of Red Bull dominance has rendered us punch drunk. When McLaren applied a major update to its MCL38 in Miami and Lando Norris immediately claimed his first grand prix win, it was still too early to say definitively that this venerable team, which hasn’t been a genuine title contender since 2012, was back in the game. Larger sample size required.
Subsequent rounds seemed to confirm that McLaren’s car-performance uptick was real, rather than a track-specific outlier. But from Canada onwards there were a series of slips twixt cup and lip. Indubitably we can now say McLaren has gone from also-ran to an occasional poacher of victories to bona fide Red Bull beater – indeed, we’ve enshrined it in 20-odd-point type on the cover.
Equally, while allowing ourselves to become properly excited about an actual championship battle for the first time since 2021, we can also permit a tut-tut and a harrumph that it isn’t closer still, since the guys from Woking have left rather too many points on the table in the second quarter of the season. Still, seven different race winners over the first half of the season is an encouraging statistic for a championship which has come to rely on the augmented reality of Netflix’s cod-documentary series Drive to Survive to expand its fanbase.
All long-running TV shows need to introduce new characters and produce fresh storylines to sustain interest. Fortunately F1 doesn’t have to resort to the kind of absurdities that soap operas engage in when viewing figures dip or there’s regime change in the production office (although, with an American media corporation in charge, maybe we shouldn’t rule out a who-shot-JR moment). This month we bring the spotlight to bear on new talents being prepped for stardom by two of Formula 1’s biggest teams: Oliver Bearman, the Ferrari Driver Academy star whose next step up the ladder is a seat at Haas next year; and Mercedes protégé Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who has been quietly and at no little expense testing a 2022 Merc F1 car as team boss Toto Wolff ponders whether to promote him now or wait a little longer.
21 years ago, in our previous incarnation as F1 Racing, we put a very young Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen on the cover and duly announced: “You’re looking at the future of F1”. Each had only a single victory to their name at that point. Did we think both of them would enjoy 20-year careers in F1, though? That would certainly have exceeded our powers of prognostication…
