This week, F1 launch season reached its climax, with all the top teams unveiling their 2024 challengers. Here’s every new F1 car that’s been launched over the past few days.
The 2024 Formula One season is just around the corner, but before pre-season testing gets underway, first there’s launch season to deal with. Last week we saw the likes of Alpine, Stake, and the lower half of the field unveil their cars, but this week the expected top dogs lifted the lid on their creations for the new year. Here’s a first glimpse of the expected 2024 F1 frontrunners.
Aston Martin AMR24
Aston Marin launched its 2024 F1 car alongside the brand new Vantage road car and Vantage GT3 racecar, each sporting the now-familiar (and achingly beautiful) green and yellow livery. As is the trend this season, the AMR24 does feature more bare carbon than previous years, but thankfully that is reserved solely for the sidepods and front wing, rather than the entire chassis of the car. Some teams could take note…*cough* Alpine *cough*.
As for the technical aspects of the car, Aston Martin’s Dan Fallows says, “the chassis design is new, as well as the nose, front wing, front suspension and rear suspension. We want to compete in the development race this season and this car is designed to do just that.”
Last year, Aston started incredibly well, but tailed off as the teams around them developed their cars more successfully. Clearly, that’s been taken to heart. Check out this video to learn more about the AMR24 in its launch guise.
Ferrari SF-24
Yes, it’s red. But look – it has white and yellow stripes now too! I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this addition to the familiar Ferrari color palette, but it does bring the F1 team closer in line with the livery on Ferrari’s Le Mans hypercars. Of course, much of the noise around Ferrari recently has been about its signing of Lewis Hamilton for the 2025 season, but understandably, the Italians weren’t particularly willing to talk about it at their launch event in front of outgoing driver Carlos Sainz jr.
As for the car itself, most of the attention has gone on refinement rather than revolution. In 2023, the Ferrari concept was quick in qualifying, but would often fade away in the races. So, attention has gone on making small developments to the car to make it better over long distances. For all the nerdy tech updates, watch this.
McLaren MCL38
McLaren surprised everyone when it dropped its new 2024 livery earlier in the year, however this is the real deal – the MCL38 in its official launch spec. The British-Kiwi outfit had quite a rollercoaster 2023 campaign. After starting the year at the back of the grid, McLaren brought an aggressive update package along by the midway point of the season, and by the winter they had arguably the second-fastest car behind Red Bull.
Naturally, Zak Brown’s crew will want to build on that momentum. Team principal Andrea Stella said, “there are a number of innovations on the car, but not all the areas we want to address have been completed for our launch-spec car. Those areas now become the focus of our in-season development, which is already in progress.” Watch this to get a glimpse of what some of those initial innovations might be.
Mercedes-AMG F1 W15 E Performance
Lewis Hamilton’s final Mercedes F1 car is a thing of beauty. Blending Mercedes’ traditional silver with the new-age black, it’s a mixture which summarizes the team’s presence in F1 perfectly. It’s not just the color scheme that has changed either – Merc has opted for a fresh new car concept which they hope will get them back on track after a couple of years of barking up the wrong aerodynamic tree. To see what I’m on about have a watch of this video.
As well as a new chassis and new gearbox architecture, Mercedes has also been busy redesigning the car’s aero and suspension. “A big focus has been on improving the previous car’s unpredictable rear axle,” explained technical director James Allison. “We have worked hard to ensure that both axles, but particularly the rear axle, retain better control of the tire than on the W14. There’s also been some housekeeping on areas in which we had room for improvement, including the DRS effect, and pit stop performance.”
Red Bull RB20
Although the rest of the teams have clearly been hard at work over the winter break, there was an inevitable feeling that Red Bull would shift the goalposts again this year. Sadly, for enjoyers of competitive racing, it does appear as though Adrian Newey has found some more magic to sprinkle over the design. This video explains exactly what the RB20 appears to have up its sleeve, and weirdly, some of it will be familiar to Mercedes.
Of course, whether or not the RB20 works in practice remains to be seen – as is the case with all of these cars – however if I were a betting man I’d put money on it being as strong a package, if not more so, than the dominant RB19. Perhaps, if there’s one thing that could dislodge Red Bull from its perch at the top of the F1 tree, it could be the current ongoing investigations into team principal Christian Horner’s conduct towards employees. Depending on the fallout of that, who knows how the race team will be affected. One thing’s for certain though – the RB20 looks like a rather impressive beast indeed.
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