As shown by McLaren’s Silverstone “launch” event on Thursday, Formula 1‘s launch season will look a lot different from normal in 2025.
Last year’s constructors’ champions kicked off their season with a filming day at Silverstone in a 2025 car boasting a camouflaged livery, featuring no sponsors and with the intention of making camera shots hard for other teams to inspect too closely. Williams will kick off their season in similar fashion on Friday with an interim livery in a Valentine’s Day theme. Haas will run at the circuit on Sunday in what is expected to be a livery close to what they will use in 2025, but they will not release official images to the public.
So why all the debuts in colours different to what the teams will actually run this season?
This year features a unique and landmark event. To mark the 75th anniversary of Formula 1, the sport is hosting an event at London’s O2 Arena, featuring all 10 teams, all 20 drivers and every team boss. It is something the sport has never done before. For the first time, all 10 liveries will be seen in real time by fans, released one after the other, in a live, televised event.
Why the change?
Formula 1 launch season — and the launches themselves — has become a hard thing to define.
There is no officially designated period of time for them to take place. Teams are free to decide when they unveil their new colour scheme or new car, although they are not inclined to do either. Rewind back through the decades and launches were the whole shebang: the real car, the real livery, the drivers, the team boss and a host of celebrities.
When Liberty Media took over the sport in 2018, they found this part of the year bizarre. There was no official beginning. Instead, there were a series of unofficial launch events scattered throughout the weeks leading up to what used to be a closed preseason test — Liberty has since made that a televised event. The season would then, in the eyes of some of the executives now overlooking the sport, start very abruptly with qualifying for the opening race.
It felt like Formula 1 was missing a trick.
Different ways of tackling this can be seen in recent seasons. In 2022, F1 introduced a grid photo featuring all 10 teams and the 20 drivers before the first morning of testing, although this also came with classic F1 quirks: cars featuring garish aero rakes that measure air flow, aesthetically ruining much of the preseason photography. This is a perfect illustration of the disconnect that existed between the necessity of testing and the commercial benefits in promoting the beginning of a new campaign.
This year’s anniversary gave F1 a chance to do something different.
What’s happening at the London event?
F1 has created a plan to give all 10 teams equal treatment. Each team has been given seven minutes to present the car and two drivers, with on-stage interviews required. The car underneath the paint does not have to be the 2025 model, but the livery it wears will will be. Teams will be presented on stage in reverse championship order from last season, giving the smaller teams a chance to get their presentation out there before the bigger stuff.
While some have wondered whether the smaller teams will be overshadowed — notably, by Lewis Hamilton‘s unveiling as a Ferrari driver in the penultimate slot — sources at several teams at the top of the order have said the feeling is that it will be beneficial. Haas is a good example of this.
The American team has traditionally launched their car in low-key fashion, either with rendered photos or simply by unveiling it in the pit lane on the morning of the first day of testing. The F1 75 event gives Haas a chance to get blockbuster billing.
Will a preseason event become the norm?
That remains to be seen.
F1’s official line is that it is for this year only, to mark the 75th season, but it is fair to wonder whether a successful event will change the mindset. Liberty’s approach to engaging fans has been fantastic and hugely successful — opening the doors to Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series the perfect example — and it seems like the kind of thing the sport would continue doing if it proved to be popular with fans.
How drivers feel about the event is more of a mystery. World champion Max Verstappen joked last year that he hoped he would be sick so he could miss the event. He wasn’t a fan of the opening ceremony ahead of the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, either, and the London event is being overseen by the same production company.
So why are teams having their own launches, then?
This is one of the quirks of the buildup to this year.
The day after the launch, Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will take the new Ferrari around the Fiorano test track back in Italy in their official launch of the car. Like McLaren, Williams and Haas a week earlier, this will be an example of a team utilising one of the “filming days” allocated to them in the regulations. It effectively is used to break in the new car and give the drivers their first taste of the machinery, while also allowing the team to run crucial operational and system tests so they do not waste valuable time doing so when preseason testing itself begins in Bahrain a week later.
In an era of massively limited testing, every minute of running is crucial and every delay can be counterproductive.