Attendance at Formula 1’s glitzy season launch was mandatory for the teams. Some came willingly, others less so.
Time was tight so each outfit was given just seven minutes to play with. How did they do? Here is our ranking of each presentation.
10. Mercedes
Long after the dry ice had spluttered and dispersed – as if the smoke machine, like Mercedes, quite frankly couldn’t be arsed with the whole thing – a dreary miasma of “do we have to?” pervaded the arena. An utterly by-the-numbers ‘sizzle reel’ presaged the arrival of last year’s car in what looked like last year’s livery, a fact emphasised by the vehicle lurching along the catwalk and spinning around as if suspended atop a giant Roomba.
The deletion of the red INEOS flash atop the roll hoop could have been a source of intrigue, given recent rumours of a schism between the shareholders. But, judging by the steady exodus of folk up the stairs, we had reached the equivalent of that point in a gig where the band’s lead singer says “Here’s one from our new album” and everybody heads to the bar.
Bonus points to George Russell for trying to be funny rather than cycling through the usual racing driver bromides in the insipid Q&A but, by this point in the evening, everything had already been done. Even raising the car on a plinth. And – Ye Gods! – if Dr Samuel Johnson were alive today he’d tell you that when a man is tired of plinths, he is tired of life.
Still, at least team boss Toto Wolff didn’t try to host the segment himself (also already done). Perhaps he’d had a phone call from Michael Masi screaming “No, Toto, nooooooo!”
9. Alpine
The chap sitting next to me and Autosport colleague Mark Mann-Bryans excused himself and bid us good night before lights-out for Alpine. Perhaps he’d had a premonition.
The team had outsourced the majority of its seven minutes to F1 theme composer Brian Tyler, here appearing as his DJ alter ego Are We Dreaming. Perhaps we were – if so, I can’t imagine what freakish variety of cheese would summon nocturnal visions of a man dressed in an oversized bin liner twiddling some knobs.
A thankfully short video montage was on brief nodding acquaintance with self-deprecation, though the use of Alex Jacques squawking “What is going on at Alpine?” aptly summed up the sentiments of those in the room.
By the time team boss Oliver Oakes and drivers Pierre Gasly and Jack Doohan appeared on stage, this farrago had gone on about six and a half minutes too long. Indeed, Oakes gave the impression of a man keen to get it all over with and return to the bar, batting one of MC Lawrence Barretto’s questions back so flippantly that poor Lazza, one of the nicest men in F1, was left floundering.
Neither was there mention of the elephant in the room, Franco Colapinto. Given the SFX technology available to the production crew it would have been simplicity itself to have a ghostly image of Alpine’s ‘reserve driver’ hovering over Doohan’s shoulder like a Shakespearean spectre at the feast. After all, the BBC could do likewise in the 1970s for the closing credits of Rentaghost on a budget of 10p.
8. Haas
The late Terry Wogan, whose laconic commentary lit up many a Eurovision Song Contest, famously had a rule not to start drinking until the ninth entry had come on stage. Haas was but act four of the F175 evening and yet Mark Mann-Bryans' arrival with a pint of overpriced beer was timely.
This was an earnest yet workmanlike effort, clearly influenced by WWE and yet missing a finishing move. The video package, complete with evocative voiceover, was slick enough and yet cleaved to a template which was already becoming familiar.
Team boss Ayao Komatsu was happy to let his drivers do the talking, a strategy his peers would have done well to emulate. Likewise the car spinning on its large-scale Lazy Susan; by all means show your car from all angles but only if, like Haas, you’ve bothered to show up to a livery launch with a new livery.
Even so, the most interesting element of this package was the presence of more white paint on the car. This was seven minutes in need of an edge; perhaps Esteban Ocon should have lived up to his reputation and put Oliver Bearman in a pre-emptive headlock, or given him a wedgie?
7. Sauber
Given the unenviable task of opening the livery launch with very little in the way of raw material – a short history in its present identity and nothing pleasant to report on track in 2024 – the team with the unwieldiest name in F1 came out of the blocks as strongly as it could. Granted, this was the audience’s first sight of the giant Faraday cage which enclosed the ‘catwalk’, but the Swiss equipe currently sailing as Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber made a little go a long way.
Initial auguries were not good as a fusillade of thunderous, portentous music was accompanied by screen captions along the lines of “It’s not about last season”, “We are united”, and “Ready to hustle harder”. The sense of diminishing returns was only mitigated by the voiceover seemingly channelling the spirit of Vincent Price at the beginning of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The 2025 livery mule duly arrived on stage flanked by drummers with luminous green sticks, a nicely creative touch in the absence of triumphant video footage. Setting the tone for the rest of the evening, the energy quickly departed the room once the personnel on stage actually started to speak. Team boss Mattia Binotto then hustled his charges off stage with a minimum of chat, as if recognising that speaking in front of 16,000 people is perhaps not his metier.
Post-show, Binotto made a point of visiting the room in the bowels of the Intercontinental Hotel which had housed the press conferences earlier in the day to thank the drummers in person for doing a great job. A classy touch.
6. Williams
“Greenwich, it’s James.”
A peculiar seven minutes of two halves began with the kind of historic video which might uncharitably be described as ‘route one’ – if the voiceover were being performed by a mere artist-for-hire. Here, though, were the unmistakable tones of Sir Frank Williams himself, economically describing his team’s philosophy: racing.
Cut.
“That was then. This is now,” came the screen captions amid much sub bass. A straightforward enough statement, and yet a triggering one for habitual pub quizzers who will of course recognise it as a minor 1983 hit by ABC, one which featured the peculiar lyric “Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble / Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.”
Perhaps not as triggering as the sight of team boss James Vowles taking centre stage and introducing both himself and his drivers. Given that wine is an exorbitant £40 a bottle at the O2, this could have been an expensive proposition for players of the James Vowles drinking game (a shot or two fingers every time he says “journey”, “direction of travel”, namechecks a sponsor or some such).
“You’ve met myself,” Vowles told the crowd, demonstrating that, while he has a firm grasp on business strategy, the rules governing the reflexive personal pronoun remain an undiscovered country.
Thankfully the drivers shone – there was a lot of love for Carlos Sainz in the room – but closing off the segment with the team boss taking a selfie called to mind the famous Steve Buscemi 30 Rock meme “How do you do, fellow kids?”
5. Red Bull
Famously, the French author and philosopher Albert Camus rejected suggestions that he was an existentialist, preferring to associate the absence of objective meaning in his works with the absurdist movement. You may think I’m putting Descartes before the horsepower here, but bear with me.
Christian Horner appearing on the catwalk solo represented nothing new in the context of an evening where his Williams counterpart had already done the same. He probably wasn’t expecting his walk-on music – The Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up – to be drowned out by churlish booing, but such is the nature of toxic fandom even in the VIP community which appeared to make up much of the evening’s demographic.
Faced with similar provocation the inexplicably popular funnyman Peter Kay would probably have called security, but Christian styled it out. That song, he explained, was a favourite of the late Dietrich Mateschitz, architect and animator of the Red Bull empire.
With that single, exquisitely delivered passive-aggressive flourish, a blanket of embarrassed silence descended.
Thus the stage was set for the most high-budget video package of the evening. No ho-hum montage of race footage, this: it was, Horner explained, “a celebration of car culture”. Ahead of the evening, word had circulated of the amount spent on the production, but Autosport cannot repeat it for fear of excommunication.
The plot of the film is best described as a group of car “influencers” and the like – including Japanese drift specialists Garage-D – follow a Red Bull team truck around central London. In the best tradition of absurdism it was exquisitely pointless. Albert Camus would have been delighted.
Also, pleasingly, there was no pointless driver chat – largely, we understand, because Max Verstappen hated the whole idea of the launch and didn’t want to do it.
Despite the positives, we’re marking Red Bull down on the grounds that this felt like a high-budget yin to long-time rivals Mercedes’ yang. “So, right, make us a film about car culture. We’re an edgy, fun brand, yeah? You’ve got a budget of [ACTUAL FIGURE REDACTED] and just make it better than everyone else’s, huh?”
4. Ferrari
Another slightly phoned-in effort – this was a box-ticking day for Ferrari, the only team not to run a press conference in the hotel next door – but the video package leant heavily on Enzo Ferrari, which was pleasing for the purists in the room, and the graphic representations of historic cars rather than old racing footage showed that someone had spent more than five minutes thinking how it ought to play. Ultimately you can’t argue with a team that’s been part of the scene since race two, especially since it’s fielding the most popular man in the room.
Lewis Hamilton got the biggest cheer of the evening while Charles Leclerc gamely shrugged off the awkwardness of Jack Whitehall’s man-flirting; team boss Fred Vasseur took the smart option of saying as little as possible and letting the spotlight focus on his drivers rather than the ugly white HP stripe on the car.
3. McLaren
Entirely ‘route one’ in the format of historic sizzle reel followed by soft interviews, the McLaren presentation achieved uplift by dint of wheeling not only the ‘new’ car on stage but also a collection of previous championship winners – along with the constructors’ trophy.
Well, it made up for the ‘new’ livery being virtually identical to last year’s.
Eschewing the standard F1 TV talent line-up in favour of Martin Brundle, this segment was heavy on interviews – first with bosses Andrea Stella and Zak Brown, then with drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. By this point in the evening, though, the interview format had been proven to suck all the oxygen out of the room, a sensation rendered all the more disquieting here as random background sub-bass noises punctuated the chat, as if some eldritch being from an HP Lovecraft novel was trying to break through the barrier between worlds.
Or maybe it was just background grumbling about the bar prices.
2. Racing Bulls
Weirdly polarising in the room – not helped by the production crew failing to put the video on the big screens until it was already rolling – the Racing Bulls package was the most creative on a low budget. Comedian Munya Chawawa has 1.7million followers on TikTok but, judging by the muted reception, not many of them were in the O2.
The tone of the evening had been unusually irreverent for F1 but perhaps this segment – Chawawa performing a comic vox pop which laughs self-referentially at the team’s seemingly constant changes of identity – exhausted the audience’s appetite. Some of his best zingers had to circle and dump fuel before coming in to land.
“Formula 1 needs a lot more fun,” said CEO Peter Bayer, before proceeding to ruin things by going on about platforms. They should have left him in Faenza and made the video a minute longer.
1. Aston Martin
The house lights went down, searchlights swirled, and the sound of police sirens wailed in the distance. Had someone stolen Lawrence Stroll’s wallet?
It wouldn’t surprise us if Aston Martin’s segment cost as much as Red Bull’s to produce, but what differentiated the two was the creativity poured into Aston’s staging. It was a veritable projectile vomit of ideas – in a good way.
James Bond? Of course. Cartoon recreations of the Aston hill climb? Just do it. Le Mans? Get it in there, we’ll worry about whether it fits into seven minutes later.
Staging which required Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll to appear in the audience in designer suits, before executing a quick change to go on the catwalk in their race gear, simply showed more ambition than anyone else all evening.
Naturally, to paraphrase PG Wodehouse, it is never difficult to distinguish between Lance Stroll and a ray of sunshine. So when he told the audience “It’s great to be here” he forgot to tell his face to reflect this sentiment. Par for the course.
