85 days to pre-season testing, and 95 days to the opening race day, in 2024 with Red Bull's rivals determined to challenge for wins next season and aware of the crucial challenge ahead this winter in final development of their next cars
Tuesday 28 November 2023 16:43, UK
Formula 1's chasing pack enter a crucial winter off-season as they aim to find ways to close down Red Bull's advantage in time for the 2024 season, which begins at the end of February.
As the sport prepares to head back to their bases in Europe - with one final day of track running to first come in Abu Dhabi at a tyre/young driver test on Tuesday - thoughts are very much turning to next season and the challenge of responding to Red Bull and Max Verstappen completing the most dominant season in the sport's history.
Red Bull won all-but one of the 22 races this year while Verstappen, who claimed 19 of those triumphs, set a new benchmark season victory rate in F1 of 86 per cent, among with a host of other records.
So what chance former champions Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren - plus highly-ambitious Aston Martin, the big movers of last winter - got of bridging the gap and fighting for wins when next season begins in Bahrain?
Red Bull, at least, are expecting things to get tougher for them in 2024.
"We know our opponents that this [their domination] will have motivated them more than ever to come back at us hard," said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner after Sunday's season-ending Abu Dhabi GP.
"Nothing stands still in this sport; everything moves so quickly. You can see as we weren't developing the opposition coming closer and closer.
"We have seen competitors coming closer at different venues and I'm sure concepts will converge, stable regulations will always concertina, so I don't think we will ever be able to repeat the season that we've had.
"But hopefully we can take the lessons from RB19 and apply them into 20 and come up with a car that we can defend these titles with."
Beating Ferrari to second in the standings on Sunday acted as a nice winter boost for all at Mercedes after a second successive tough year spent in Red Bull's wake. But the longer-term focus at the team has been clear for some time now and that's how they plot a route back to the front of F1 in the shortest-timeframe possible.
Next year and their in-development W15 car represents the first chance to at least get back towards winning races after their first winless campaign in 12 years, having decided as long ago as March that they were on the wrong track with the way they were approaching the current ground-effect rules generation and needed a sharp about-turn.
Underlining the scale of change expected on the W15, Wolff said in Abu Dhabi: "We are changing the concept. We are completely moving away from how we laid out the chassis, the weight distribution, the air flow.
"Literally almost every component is being changed because only by doing that I think we have a chance.
"We could get it wrong also. So between not gaining what we expect, to catching up and making a big step and competing at the front, everything is possible."
But for a team who know better than anyone about dominating across a sustained era, Wolff is under no illusions about the task ahead to stop Red Bull's winning juggernaut immediately.
"There is a Mount Everest to climb in order to catch up with Red Bull," said Wolff, whose team finished 20s behind Max Verstappen in the season finale in third place.
"I have no doubt that McLaren is going to be right in the mix next year, maybe Aston Martin, maybe others. We must leave no stone unturned, which we do, in Brixworth and in Brackley. As tough as it is to be reminded it's just P2, it's also a great opportunity to come back and thrive for the start [of the season]."
He said that although "beating them under the "current regulations is against the odds" Mercedes and the rest of the chasing pack have simply "just got to do a better job". Wolff also made clear "I don't want to wait until 2026" when F1's regulations next change for that to happen.
"We have seen with McLaren, where an update unlocked a second a lap, AlphaTauri coming strong at the end, and Aston Martin over the winter, there is a key to unlock dramatically more performance.
"I think us assessing in an honest way [and saying] that this [2023] car is never going to be good enough to fight for a championship, we have taken the decision in the spring that we are going to go back to the drawing board and come up with something new year."
It was Ferrari who denied Red Bull F1's first-ever perfect season, thanks to Carlos Sainz's win in Singapore, but the wider picture of their 2023 season was that third in the standings was one place worse than 2022, when they won four times, with 148 fewer points.
Still, at the end of his first season in charge, team boss Frederic Vasseur took encouragement from their improved second half of the campaign when they also took five of the final nine pole positions, one more than Red Bull, and came within three points of overhauling Mercedes having been 56 adrift of them at the season's mid-point.
Ferrari, like their Brackley rivals, have promised major changes for their 2024 car too.
"We had momentum into the season where we are struggling much more and we had the reliability issue, so it's not just the last race that is making the championship [of finishing third]," Vasseur told Sky F1.
"Overall I will take the positive of this that we are improving. If you have a look at the last three or four events we are always on the front row and fighting with Red Bull, so we have to take this momentum into next year."
Asked if he thought they could fight the champions next year, Vasseur replied: "I think so. I'm not sure it's only on the upgrades we have to develop the car. We did a lot on the set-up, on the track operations this season and if you have a look we didn't bring upgrades [other than] for Monza [in the second half of the season] and the last one was July.
"If you compare with the pace that we had in Zandvoort [in August] and the pace we had today almost with the same car it means we did a huge step forward."
From an alarming start, McLaren's in-season resurgence which saw only Red Bull score more points than them in the final 14 races proved one of 2023's most impressive achievements.
Nine podiums, including seven second-place finishes, marks a season-best haul for them since 2012. Now the next challenge is arguably the steepest one, trying to take the crucial final steps required to truly challenge Red Bull consistently.
"I am super, super happy with how the team have done this year. We have taken massive steps forward," said Lando Norris to Sky Sports F1 at the end of the Abu Dhabi race, where he finished fifth.
"But it's clear we have got a lot of things [to work on]. I think we know what we want to improve, a couple more steps of what we've done but then some more specific things that will help in terms of driveability and ease of driving.
"I think we just have a very difficult car, that's why we have been making a lot of mistakes and so on. It's like quick enough just about on one lap but clear that when we get to the races and when we want consistency we just struggled a bit too much.
"We are really hard at work, we have been for many months, so I'm looking forward to it."
The big surprise movers of last winter will have sights set on another significant jump this time around, particularly after the second half of 2023 generally did not prove as competitive as the first when they started the year as Red Bull's closest challengers.
They had slipped to fifth place in the standings in the end but that still represented an improvement of two places and a four-fold increase in points over 2023, and the intention of billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll remains to get the team to the very top.
Fernando Alonso says there are "high expectations" for 2024 based on what has been achieved, arguably ahead of schedule, this season.
"It's not anymore a surprise if we are in the podium, we need to deliver that kind of performance next year and we are ready for the challenge," said the two-time champion.
"I am excited."
Technical director Dan Fallows said:" We've done a lot of work on next year's car. We've already released some of the main components for production, and we're putting the final touches to the aerodynamics package for launch.
"The work continues after that. We have a winter shutdown coming up soon and we have to account for that, but as soon as we've got the initial launch car out of the way, it's full steam ahead with the developments for next season. It's non-stop."
24 races in 2024! Watch every round of next season live on Sky Sports F1, starting with the Bahrain Grand Prix from February 29-March 2. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW
