It’s the morning after the night before. We’ve just come off the back of F1 75, the sport’s attempt at a huge live event to get people excited for the 2025 season, and the sport’s 75th anniversary season, live from The O2 Arena in East London, with over 15,000 in the crowd, a bunch of B-List celebrities (And Gordon Ramsay), and all the teams getting seven minutes of presentation time to show off their brand new… liveries because we’re not seeing the cars until pre-season testing in Bahrain next week.
So, what did I make of F1’s attempt at being down with the kids? Let’s get into it.
The Presentation
I can’t lie, it was a very slick production, the people they brought to pull this off did a very good job. The big runway to run down to being centre of the set was great, the light box was very cool up top and the lights and pyro looked great when Take That was performing. F1 wants their shows to have the same feel as the US Sports that Liberty Media is competing against such as the NFL and NBA and a 2-hour live concert with all the teams getting an open floor (and mic night in some cases), more on that in a bit.
Jack Whitehall deserves some praise as host. I admit, I’ve not been a fan of his work over the years, but he did a great job with the brief he was given. F1 is a stuck-up, pretentious sport that has an inflated opinion of itself at pretty much all times. Jack came in and took the piss out of it, and I’m glad he did, sometimes the sport needs to not take itself too seriously and at times he was genuinely funny, and you could tell he was a genuine fan of the product, something award show organisers need to realise helps sell it.
Ever since Liberty Media bought the sport in 2017, I think they’ve always wanted a night like this, the “25 Superbowls” mentality, as a big “We’re here!” moment. They got that bit right.
Now then, every team got seven minutes as an open floor to essentially do what they like to present their car, so let’s break it down, and judge some of the liveries too.
Sauber: If in doubt, keep it simple. Maybe too simple. I don’t hate this one from Sauber, it’s a clear improvement from last year, but honestly, with the lack of sponsors, it puts all the eyeball real estate on the fade of the livery and yeah, it’s fine, very safe.
Watching their segment, CEO Mattia Binotto looked like he’d just finished an evening shift at a busy ASDA, and Nico Hulkenberg didn’t look like he was into it, bless him.
Williams: Probably my favourite livery of the night, I am a sucker for a good blue car, and the blue and white from new title sponsor Atlassian popped quite nicely. James Vowles giving it large on the stage was one of the hilarious highlights of the night. I’ve worked with James for a podcast I produce, and that’s not normally how he gets down, so I wonder if someone had a word with him. Maybe it was Steve Jones after how awkward William’s launch event was. (Seriously, if he talks about romancing his wife on stage again, I’m going to jump out of a three-storey window)
V-Carb: Points for boldness. A complete do-over as the team goes white, which we all know is an easy way of getting a cheap crowd pop. They did a really solid job here, I like white as a striking base colour, and the VISA logo works on the sidepod (Even if the unpainted carbon creeps in a bit too much on the bottom). I think the CashApp sponsor on the front wing takes some of the looks away, but I love the little touch of the blue bulls on the rear as part of the transition, nice stuff.
Also, a shame that the Munya Chawawa skit died on its arse in the room because it was very funny and self-deprecating over the name of the team, the man is brilliant and glad V-CARB think so too.
Haas: I love the fact that Haas’ livery had already leaked out online the day prior due to their shakedown test going public. Whoops. Still, it’s giving Spicy Minardi. The more I look at it, the more it grows on me seeing the black, white and red, with the Moneygram integration looking pretty seamless. It’s grown on me since last night and I think it’ll keep doing so as I see it on track more often.
Alpine: Brian Tyler being advertised for the event was cool, his F1 theme has stood the test of time as a fantastic anthem for the sport. Not sure about doing a DJ set for way too long while dressed like he was wearing a bin-liner. Still, I’ll give Alpine this, they were panned last year for publishing fake bits of their 2024 car as well as having way too much black on it, they’ve certainly gone the other way here. I’m not the biggest fan of the blue and pink clash, you’d think with BWT as a title sponsor the pink would have taken precedence, but alas not. Still, points for changing it up, we respect that in the livery ranking circles.
Aston Martin: The 007 energy was strong on this one, it was a theme they were always likely going to lean on James Bond, and… it didn’t quite work. The reveal of Stroll and Alonso coming in was a little janky with the camera work, which was more of a distraction than anything else. Beautiful performance by Tems though.
The car is… a bit of a downgrade for me. I like the incorporation of the lime green from Aston’s Endurance racing heritage, but the black on the sidepod to highlight the new Aramco title sponsor hurts it for me, as well as the white air intake on top for Maaden just doesn’t fit the Aston aesthetics for me. Not bad, not great.
Mercedes: Mercedes were really safe on this one. A pit crew and some tyres, riveting stuff! The car itself looks largely the same, but to be fair, like with a few more teams, it’s got a clear and obvious brand identity, and it wants to merge the Silver Arrows with the black branding inspired by Lewis Hamilton back in 2020, and that’s fine. (I’m trying really had not to be critical for purely the reason of – it’s the same).
Red Bull: This was… spectacularly pointless. The most interesting thing about Red Bull’s presentation was Christian Horner getting the mic to introduce their VT and he got boo’ed out of the building. Man was clearly a little rattled by that. The FIA is allegedly not happy that Horner and Verstappen got boo’ed. Now in a rare defence of the governing body, they have made a genuine effort to work with other sports leagues to find ways to mitigate online abuse. From Darth Sebastian Vettel of Multi 21 to Rosberg/Hamilton and the 2021 season at large – I’ve made this point many a time on here that the footballification of F1 is bad, but I also admit that it’s a futile battle that you’ll never be able to win. If you’re hosting a live event with 15,000 fans in the house who have paid three figures to be there, they’re going to let their opinions be known. You cannot separate the two.
Anyway, it was a genuinely outstanding VT from Red Bull of driving the cars down from Milton Keynes to the O2, embracing a lot of street culture, from the tuner racing scene to skateboarding and dirt biking. And look, as a Londoner, I have to appreciate a good Morley’s reference, they’re a fried chicken institution down South. But then they wheel out the new car, which you can’t see because there’s a bunch of street dancers on either side of it, we get nothing from the drivers and their segment just ends? Bizarre stuff. Maybe they were running over. PS: The car looked exactly the same, and that’s fine. It’s a damn good livery in a vacuum.
A small tangent here as well, Whitehall asking Gordon Ramsay for his opinion on the swearing ban was such an easy layup for the sport it almost went full circle to being cringe again. It hasn’t helped that Adrien Formaux, Hyundai’s World Rally Championship driver became the first victim of the new ban, copping a $30,000 fine (20k of it suspended) for saying he fucked up after a stage. But I need to stress, that if you’re in the car, you’re still allowed to swear and it’s ultimately down to the FOM producers as to whether that’s broadcast. And for all roughly 100 press conferences we had in F1 last year… two of them had bad language. This isn’t going to be what you want to hear, but just how big a problem is this, and are we overreacting in response to Ben Sulayem’s overreaction? Just a thought.
Ferrari: The one that most people had been waiting for, and to be fair, I didn’t know that the day of the event was Enzo Ferrari’s birthday. It was an excellent VT, even if it probably went on a couple of minutes too long. I suspect given we were about 90 minutes in at this point, maybe there was some general fatigue at seeing a bunch of videos in the background. Anyway, they wheeled the car out, Lewis in red is still something I have to get used to, and the car looked great. A matte red, a genuine surprise… not going to lie though, the white engine cover stripe seemed like a move to further highlight the HP title sponsorship, and I think it certainly took some of the edge off of it, an unfortunate move. Still, Lewis is in red, wooo!
McLaren: Apparently by now, some of the VIPs up the front had already started getting up and leaving. Woof. Still, another VT celebrating McLaren’s history and new status as Constructors Champs, then they wheel the car out and it is virtually the same as last year. Again, I get it, the standard McLaren look is fine as is, the bigger teams all have clear brand identities that they’re not going to deviate from very often, it is what it is. I’m still missing a potentially blue Ferrari. Oh and we got Zak Brown and Andrea Stella waxing lyrical. Lovely.
We got Take That out there to sing as we led up to the outro. Worth a mention that the musical selection here was… bizarre. Machine Gun Kelly and Kane Smith signing songs vaguely about cars, Brian Tyler on a DJ deck and then Take That is a strange mix and I’d love to see the cross-section of fans on that one. This show hinged a lot on the rock concert vibe, but Take That might sadly be cooked. Don’t know how much of this was on the dodgy acoustics, but they struggled live on the night.
Finally, we had Alex Jacques narrate the upcoming 2025 season and we had all 10 teams and 20 drivers on the “grid” to close out the show.
Overall Thoughts
Do I think this was aimed at me as a hardcore F1 fan? Not a chance. I had a fair few tell me they didn’t focus enough on the cars, to which I say, if they did, it’d be boring as shit from an entertainment standpoint. This was an event aimed at the uneducated fan, wanting that first glimpse of the season ahead and a reason to get excited. The music lineup was hit and mess but that’s ultimately a subjective critique. I’m glad the teams were given a platform to do what they wanted to do, a rare thing in a sport that’s often incredibly restrictive and tight on creativity, even if the quality of the show can kind of hinge on it.
You need the teams and drivers to be fully onboard to gas this up, and well… when Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc are caught on camera playing a game of chess on their phones, it might be a long-term fight for acceptance. The whole thing felt very “WWE”, and in a sporting landscape where F1 is battling between its sporting integrity and pushing harder than ever into the entertainment zeitgeist, this was always, and did, split the room.
And that’s what could make the future of this event sketchy. On the one hand, it peaked with 1.1 million viewers on YouTube and 7.5 million tuning in at some point, smashing the record for a live event, it’s hard not to call that a resounding success. Even if it didn’t make a profit on the 20,000 sold tickets, F1 will eat that loss for the coverage it got.
The long-term issue might be a fight with the teams as to whether they want this or not. The F1 teams are limited to how many days they can spend with their driver in the off-season and this counted as one of those days. Not ideal. Ferrari had to travel across Europe for it and didn’t even bother showing up to the press pen. Red Bull was the only team that did a full press conference with the media. And having one big live show blunts the 24-hour news cycle of their launch events, taking some of their hype and coverage away. Ferrari’s launching their SF-25 as I type this and it’s blocked out of the news cycle by Jack Whitehall social cuts. It’s not ideal and if this becomes the norm, especially out of the UK and in different countries, I fear the teams will push back harder against the idea of a “season launch”, especially if second or third attempts naturally take some of the gloss away.
As I said, this wasn’t aimed for me, but I think F1’s gamble has ultimately paid off here, and I think it was a good show and served its purpose to introduce F1 2025, in the sport’s 75th anniversary year. See you back here after testing for The Hater’s Guide.
