The three F1 drivers who unexpectedly lost to their team mates last year · RaceFans

At the beginning of last year we asked RaceFans readers which of the 20 drivers on the grid would beat their team mates over the course of the season.

You correctly named seven of the 10 winners. But three drivers fell short of your expectations.

Two of them are without an F1 drive for 2025 and are likely at the end of their careers. But the other faces one of the biggest challenges of his career to date, amid claims his form last year shows he’s no longer the force he once was.

The expected winners of 2024

Pierre Gasly vs Esteban Ocon

71.6% said Gasly would win

There was little to choose between the two Alpine drivers and long-term rivals when they first teamed up in 2023. Pierre Gasly pipped Esteban Ocon by just four points.

The second time around, more of you were confident Gasly would lead the way, and he did, by 38 to 23. But that didn’t tell the whole story: Ocon scored the team’s best result of the year with second place in Brazil, and didn’t have access to their best parts at the end of the season as he was on his way to Haas. Still, Gasly can consider himself the narrow winner in what looked like a grudge match at times.

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Charles Leclerc vs Carlos Sainz Jnr

74.3% said Leclerc would win

Carlos Sainz Jnr out-scored Charles Leclerc in their first season together as team mates at Ferrari and nearly did so again in 2023. More than a quarter of our readers fancied his chances of doing so again, but even factoring out his missed appearance in Jeddah this was a clear 340-290 points win for Leclerc.

Lando Norris vs Oscar Piastri

81.7% said Norris would win

Oscar Piastri made an excellent start to his Formula 1 career at McLaren in 2023. He showed a lot of promise in the second half of the season especially.

That emboldened quite a few of our readers – almost one in five – to predict he would beat Lando Norris in their second season as team mates. It did not come to pass, however, partly because Norris raised his game as he went up against Max Verstappen in the championship fight. Norris led Piastri 374 to 292 at the end of the year, the pair collecting enough points between them for McLaren to win the constructors’ championship.

Nico Hulkenberg vs Kevin Magnussen

83.4% said Hulkenberg would win

The Haas drivers only made occasional forays into the points during 2023, and Nico Hulkenberg’s sixth place finish in Australia was the main reason he came out ahead.

Both drivers picked up far more points last year as the VF-24 proved far kinder to its tyres and Haas’s upgrades worked as intended. Hulkenberg led the way once again though, out-scoring Magnussen 41-16, as most of our readers expected.

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Fernando Alonso vs Lance Stroll

98.4% said Alonso would win

The next three votes were by far the most emphatic and in each case the expected winner did not disappoint. Lance Stroll has not out-scored a team mate since joining his father’s team in 2019 and that didn’t change last year, Fernando Alonso thumping him by 70 points to 24.

Alexander Albon vs Logan Sargeant

98.9% said Albon would win

Almost no one expected Logan Sargeant to out-score Alexander Albon. Sure enough, he failed to collect a single point before his season ended early at the Dutch Grand Prix, during which time Albon picked up four.

But how many would have tipped Franco Colapinto to do so well as Sargeant’s replacement?

Max Verstappen vs Sergio Perez

99.5% said Verstappen would win

Only one person tipped Sergio Perez to out-score Max Verstappen. To be fair to Perez, his season began relatively well, then went off the rails badly and never recovered. His 437-152 defeat to Verstappen may well be the final word on his 15-year F1 career.

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The unexpected losers of 2024

Daniel Ricciardo vs Yuki Tsunoda

68.4% said Ricciardo would win

It wasn’t just the RaceFans readership who predicted Daniel Ricciardo would fare better than he did at RB last year – the Red Bull leadership clearly expected more. But he never consistently had the upper hand over team mate Yuki Tsunoda, and eventually Red Bull realised the magic was gone, and cut him loose, by which time he was 12-20 down on points.

Lewis Hamilton vs George Russell

72.2% said Hamilton would win

George Russell out-scored Lewis Hamilton during their first season as team mates. However that year Hamilton bore the brunt of the team’s early experiments to work out how they got the W13 so badly wrong, which arguably compromised his points-scoring.

This year was a different matter. Heading for the exit at Mercedes, Hamilton never got comfortable with his car’s performance over a single flying lap and often found himself playing catch-up as a result. Even Russell’s disqualification at Spa, which handed victory to Hamilton and a massive points swing in his favour, couldn’t stop the younger driver coming out on top by 245 to 223.

What that says about Hamilton’s abilities as he heads into his fifth decade is one of the most intriguing questions for the upcoming season and his big-money move to Ferrari.

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Valtteri Bottas vs Zhou Guanyu

76.2% said Bottas would win

More than three-quarters of our readers expected Valtteri Bottas would continue to out-score Zhou Guanyu at Sauber. But while he was consistently their best performer over the season, Sauber had the slowest car on the grid on average and were therefore at the mercy of their rivals’ performance in terms of points-scoring opportunities.

In Qatar, one of their better weekends, Bottas was hit by Liam Lawson, and Zhou grabbed his chance to score the team’s sole points of the year with eighth place. It proved moot, however, as at the end of the year both Sauber drivers were dropped.