There’s a cliché usually heard at the first race of the Formula 1 season. James Vowles, the Williams team principal, recently repeated it.
“It’s not until qualifying in Melbourne that anyone will know where the order is.”
Vowles meant that because the teams guard the true speed potential of their new cars so closely during preseason testing, there is no point in suggesting which teams are quicker until the first race of the year. This season, it will be at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne this weekend.
The drivers and team bosses are also split about how much the Australian race really provides a reliable indicator of who is the quickest compared with other tracks.
“Melbourne is a pretty unique circuit,” Christian Horner, team principal of the Red Bull squad, said at the F1 75 Live event in London last month. “I think you need to see that first batch of flyaways to get a real true read of form,” referring to other tracks.
Vowles views things differently.
“You have outlier tracks,” he said at the same event. “Monaco is an outlier track, Baku as well, in that circumstance. Melbourne tends to fall more in the sequence of where you would expect cars to be.”
And while Melbourne may show who has the quickest cars, buried in the event’s history is that it has not been the best indicator for which driver and team will win the championships.
Since the English driver Jenson Button won the 2009 Australian race and then the drivers’ championship that season, the winner in Melbourne has gone on to clinch the drivers’ title only about 31 percent of the time over the intervening 15 years from 2010 to 2024.
By comparison, in the last 15 years the winner of the Bahrain Grand Prix, which along with Melbourne has hosted every season opener since 1996 except one, has claimed the drivers’ title about 64 percent of the time.
Formula 1 drivers have their own theories on why the winner in Melbourne often does not win the title
“These first few weekends, it’s difficult for everybody to be 100 percent, to extract 100 percent of the package,” Pierre Gasly of Alpine said last month.
George Russell of Mercedes said at F1 75 Live that when Melbourne came later on the calendar, the long travel time to Australia made it harder for the drivers already tired from the early rounds.
“And I think the last couple of years when it’s been race three on the calendar, you’ve already had quite a heavy start to the season,” he said.
“Whereas, at the start, things are a little bit calmer, and it takes less of a toll on the body.”
Still, tire wear can muddle Melbourne as a predictor of success. Tires wear quickly in Formula 1, so teams that have aerodynamic designs that slow that process usually do best overall.
In Melbourne, the design is less of a factor because the asphalt surface is smooth, reducing tire wear, so all teams benefit. In later races, like in Bahrain, where the surface is comparatively rough and causes more tire wear, cars with designs that reduce that wear have an advantage.
“Bahrain is obviously very old now and rough,” the Australian driver Oscar Piastri of McLaren said at the team’s season introduction in England last month. “I think that is probably a better indicator.
“But pretty much every track feels different to each other now. You can’t group them into similar characteristics that well anymore.”
But whatever the statistics may show for how a win in Melbourne may herald his chances of becoming the 2025 world champion, Piastri said, “I’m very excited to go there as the opener.
“I know the Australian fans are definitely going to be keen as well. To see who’s going to have what at the first race.”