Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s twice-weekly F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox.
Welcome back to Prime Tire, where we’re wondering when Ferrari will stop teasing us with photos of its drivers wearing awesome azzurro blue gear and reveal its blue Miami Grand Prix livery already.
Lots to get into today from the Formula One world. I’m Patrick, and Madeline Coleman will be along shortly. Let’s get to it.
Nico Hülkenberg seeks new pastures
Lewis Hamilton is off to Ferrari. Fernando Alonso is returning to Aston Martin. And, this morning, we got more driver market news: Nico Hülkenberg is leaving Haas for Sauber in 2025. It’s a multi-year deal for the 36-year-old that will ensure he’s on the team when it becomes Audi in 2026.
The Athletic’s Luke Smith has the full reporting and analysis here, including this bit on what it means for some of the drivers on the grid:
The signing of Hülkenberg means at least one of Sauber’s current drivers, Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu, will leave the team at the end of the season. It also opens up a seat at Haas for next year, which currently fields Hülkenberg alongside Kevin Magnussen.
The strong favorite to join Haas is British youngster Oliver Bearman, who made a surprise F1 debut in Saudi Arabia for Ferrari after Sainz was withdrawn due to appendicitis.
Hülkenberg has enjoyed a sort of renaissance since joining Haas in 2023. He has 13 points in 27 races and has started in the top ten 11 times – good enough to pique Sauber’s interest, where he’ll be number two if the team completes its rumored pursuit of Carlos Sainz.
How a new points system might affect F1
Luke wrote last time out about F1 weighing whether to change its points structure. The proposal would expand the points payout to 12th place – from the current 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 structure to a 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 structure.
Naturally, this made me wonder two things. What would the previous five F1 constructors championships look like under the new points system? And what kind of change would it have had to the backfield or midfield battles?
It’s important to note that this change isn’t as imminent as it felt earlier this week. On Thursday, the F1 Commission met and released a statement, saying, “It was agreed that further analysis of proposed changes was required with a view to a proposal to be presented to the F1 Commission meeting in July.”
Too late, I was already drowning in spreadsheets and my own choices! I applied the proposed points system to the past five F1 seasons (2019-2023). Here’s some takeaways from my number-crunching.
- Yes, there are clear winners from points being allocated to P11 and P12 over the last five seasons. And it’s precisely whom you’d expect: the same backmarker teams pushing for this change.
- This didn’t have a significant impact on teams actually moving up the standings (thus, increasing their prize money earnings). In fact, only two seasons would’ve seen multiple final standings positions change hands. In 2020, under the new points, Racing Point jumps McLaren for P3 and Williams jumps Haas for P9. And in 2022, Aston Martin takes P6 from Alfa Romeo and AlphaTauri leaps Haas for P8.
- Otherwise, the new points system only changed the final standings once per season, and those were almost always around P7-P9. This is nothing to sneeze at for smaller teams trying to take in as much prize money as possible.
- Consistently, the P7 or P8 finishers in the championship reaped the most points under the new points system. In other words, this new system really tends to help the best of the backmarkers rather than the actual “worst cars on the grid” in any given year. That said, Williams does earn 15 points in 2020 under the new system, when it actually earned zero points. So there’s that.
- Yes, the new points system would have let Ferrari finish ahead of Mercedes in P2 last season – but only by two points. And, no – this new system doesn’t magically deliver Lewis Hamilton’s eighth championship. He still loses the title to Max Verstappen in 2021 – this time by 12 points instead of ten.
TL;DR: I can see why the backmarkers want a shot at more points. Battles for P11 and P12 could result in at least one championship position swap per season – and a bigger prize money payout for smaller teams.
Alright, folks. Sound off! Oh wait, you already did—239 of you, and some were still coming in as I wrote this on Thursday. Here’s a sampling of reactions to the Chinese GP from you folks, our Prime Tire Changers (I know, I know—I’m still working on the name for y’all).
It Was Amazing!
“Looking beyond (behind!) Verstappen, it was another great strategy race. The midfielders put on a great show!”
“Lot of excitement with surprise moments throughout the race. The moment of recognition at the end for Zhou as the first/only Chinese F1 driver, and at his home race, was an emotional and special one to witness in this storied sport.”
It was good!
“Lots of fighting throughout the field. As long as you avoid watching Verstappen completely dominating the front of the field, you’ll have a good time watching this race. Plenty of overtakes, out-braking, and slick inside-line-of-the-corner moves. It’s nice to see a lot of friction and place-gaining outside DRS sections.”
It was meh!
“If you need a long safety car period and then a botched re-start to make the race nominally interesting, ‘meh’ is as high as you can grade it.”
“As my wife said on Sunday morning as we prepared to have breakfast here in Texas and watch the recorded race: ‘Well, let’s settle in and see who comes in third.’ Too true.”
It was bad!
“I had high hopes for a new (to me) track that had a lot of interesting elements and higher hopes when the race started with a suggestion of rain and Alonso’s wild pass, but when the broadcast regularly showed us the rousing battle for last place, it was clear that this was not going to be all I had hoped for.”
It was awful!
“So boring watching Max win by the second turn. I’ve mostly stopped watching the races now. I skip through at 1.5 speed.”
Inside the Paddock with Madeline Coleman
Red Bull caught people’s attention during the Chinese Grand Prix, and it wasn’t (just) because Verstappen won with a 13-second margin over Lando Norris. The Milton Keynes-based team pulled off two seamless double stack pit stops, the first taking 4.18 seconds and the second 3.95 seconds, per DHL.
A double stack is a tall order for a team as the pit crew readies for both cars to pit back-to-back. More people are involved in this kind of pit stop, as four more team members bring out the second set of tires. Red Bull’s Callum Adams, a wheel gunman, said earlier this year that these types of pit stops are “a situation of remembering and following your procedures and routines to get it right.”
In those seconds after the first pit stop is done, the crew members have to get back into position, the wheel on individuals need to have the second wheel in hand, and the wheel gunman needs to reset his equipment to undo.
It’s worth remembering that more than 20 people are involved in pit stops, and any number of things can go wrong. As Jonathan Wheatley, Red Bull’s Sporting Director, said, “Your perfect pit stop involves everyone having that perfect two seconds.” If you haven’t read our latest piece for Between the Racing Lines, our guide to F1, here’s more on what goes into the art of a pit stop.
GO DEEPER
How F1’s Red Bull mastered the art of the 2-second pit stop
Outside the Points
Thanks, Madeline. Definitely check out our Between the Racing Lines series, our guide to helping any fan navigate the pinnacle of motorsports. We also dropped our look at how F1 safety car periods work (what’s a virtual safety car, anyway?) and whether there’s room for the system to improve.
Finally, news broke on Thursday that Red Bull’s global chief technical officer, Adrian Newey, may be leaving the team. Newey is considered one of the greatest car designers in F1 history and helped spearhead designs on the RB19 that led to the team’s historically dominant 2023.
GO DEEPER
How Red Bull built the RB19, F1’s most dominant car ever
Clive Mason/Getty Images, Mark Thompson/Getty Images