There is a cliché that usually sounds in the first match of the Formula 1 season. James Vowles, the team manager Williams, recently repeated it.
“It’s not until Melbourne qualifies that someone will know where the order is.”
The voices meant that because teams guard the real speed potential of their new cars so closely during the presidential tests, it makes no sense to indicate which teams are faster until the first race of the year. This season, it will be at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne this weekend.
The team’s guides and bosses are also separated for how much the Australian race really provides a reliable indicator of which is the fastest compared to other pieces.
“Melbourne is a pretty unique circuit,” said Christian Horner, director of the Red Bull Squad team, at the F1 75 Live Event in London last month. “I think you need to see this first batch of Flyaways to get a true true reading of the form,” referring to other pieces.
The shouts see things differently.
“You have excessive pieces,” he said at the same event. “Monaco is also an Outlier Track, Baku, on this occasion. Melbourne tends to fall more into the sequence of the place where cars would wait.”
And while Melbourne can show who has the fastest cars, buried in the history of the event is that it was not the best indicator that the driver and the team will win the championships.
Since the English driver Jenson Button won the 2009 Australian race and then the driver championship at that time, the winner in Melbourne went to secure the driver’s title only about 31 % of the time during the 15 years from 2010 to 2024.
In comparison, in the last 15 years, Bahrain’s Grand Prix winner, who together with Melbourne, has hosted every opener of the time since 1996, except for one, claimed the driver’s title about 64 % of the time.
Formula 1 drivers have their own theories about why the winner in Melbourne often does not win the title
“These first weekends, it is difficult for everyone to be 100 percent, to export 100 percent of the package,” Alpine’s Pierre Gasly said last month.
George Russell of Mercedes told F1 75 Live that when Melbourne later came to the calendar, the long travel time to Australia became difficult for drivers already tired of the first rounds.
“And I think that in the last two years, when the race was three in the diary, you already have a pretty big start for the season,” he said.
“While, at first, things are a little calmer, and it needs less than a tax on the body.”
Still, tire wear can confuse Melbourne as a predictor of success. The tires quickly wear Formula 1, so groups that have aerodynamic designs that slow down this process usually do better overall.
In Melbourne, design is less factor because the asphalt surface is smooth, reducing tire wear, so that all groups benefit. In later breeds, such as in Bahrain, where the surface is comparatively rough and causes more tire wear, designs that reduce that wear are an advantage.
“Bahrain is obviously very old now and rough,” said McLaren’s Oscar Piasstri driver in the group’s introduction to England last month. “I think it’s probably a better indicator.
“But almost every piece feels different from each other now. You can’t group them to similar features so well.”
But regardless of the statistics can show how a victory in Melbourne can regain its chances of becoming the world champion of 2025, Piasstri said: “I am very excited to go there as a opener.
“I know that Australian fans will surely be intense. To see who will have what in the first race.”
