Formula 1 in 2025 is odds on to deliver | Frankel’s Insight

One more thing. I understand the reasons for returning the Australian Grand Prix to its once traditional position as the season curtain-raiser, geography-based environmental considerations being only one of them, but whichever team and driver wins in Melbourne on Sunday week, don’t go thinking the die is necessarily cast. It’s not; Albert Park is one of those circuits, tracks whose peculiarities tend not to give a clear indication of season long form unless one team is clearly streets ahead.

And that, emphatically, is not the case here. So if your man is nowhere to be seen come chequered flag time, don’t cancel the Sky subscription just yet. The truth – so far as it can be known before one lap has been completed in anger – is that this is likely to be an incredibly close racing season, with no one team dominant throughout and that’s partly luck, but mainly the fact that this is the last year of the current regs and all the cars have long since optimised their cars to them.

That said, it would be a stunning upset if any team other than McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari even won a race on pure merit, let alone one or other of the Championships. And with apologies to all F1 pundits, at times like this I find the best steer regarding likely form comes not from them, who have little to lose if they get it wrong, but the bookies who have their own money on the table.

As I write this, Lando Norris is favourite to win the Driver’s Title. Just. But he’s not odds on which means in literal terms the bookies think he’s actually unlikely to do it, just less unlikely than anyone else… He has Max Verstappen snapping at his heels followed by Charles Leclerc – three drivers from three different manufacturers. But in the Constructors’ the order is different: McLaren still leads but with Ferrari ahead of Red Bull.

Interestingly too, despite racing for the team most likely to win the title, no one reckons Oscar Piastri is in with much of a chance. He places behind Lewis Hamilton, whose team isn’t favourite to win title. Why?

I guess it’s because over the course of a season Oscar didn’t quite have Lando pace, and if McLaren is going to have a shot at the title the gentlemanly approach employed last year (such as at the Hungarian Grand Prix simply won’t wash. If Lando still has the edge on outright pace, McLaren will have to commit to his title push very early in the season.

Max’s position in the pecking order says a great deal about the man and not much about the car he’s in. No surprises on the odds on Liam Lawson winning the title, but I’d bet plenty he’ll do a better job for the team than Sergio Pérez in recent seasons. Yet the low odds of Red Bull winning the Constructors’ caught my eye, too, and might just be worth a tenner.

It's no surprise you’ll get longer odds on Lewis Hamilton taking the title than team mate Leclerc. It gives me no pleasure to say it (and I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong as I often am) but while everyone talks about the massive motivation for Lewis of winning an eighth title and returning Ferrari to the top step after the longest drought in its history, no one seems to be talking about Charles’ motivation to prove himself better than the very best of his generation, and according to some, of all time.

In Lewis’ career he’s been beaten to the title just once, in fortuitous circumstances for Nico Rosberg who, being smart enough to realise that things were never likely to get better than that, retired on the spot.

Factor in the likelihood that Charles is probably still getting better and that, at very best, Lewis has plateaued, the fact that Lewis failed to keep up with a team-mate last season who I think most would rank below Charles, and finally the fact that Lewis has gone to the most Italian organisation on earth with no command of the language while his team-mate is fluent, and… Well, if Lewis defies all that and still wins the title, it will rank for me among the greatest feats in F1 history.

You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned Mercedes-Benz, despite them winning eight titles in a row, the longest run in F1 history, and all within the last 11 years. But the loss of Hamilton, his replacement of a precociously talented but still rookie driver in Kimi Antonelli, combined with its struggles to find consistent form over the last four years makes them plumb last in both my reckoning and the bookies, at least among the top four teams. But if any of those teams is capable of springing surprise, it’s this one.

Of the others, Williams stands out. The Grove outfit looked strong in testing and James Vowles constantly saying he’s writing off 2025 to concentrate on 2026 has allowed them to develop the car away from the spotlight. Plus, and I really do mean this, in Carlos Sainz and the always underrated Alex Albon I suspect they have the third strongest driver line-up on the grid. They won’t win other than through freak circumstances, but could they be best of the rest? I wouldn’t rule it out.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.