McLaren predicted to lead start of 2025 season

Red Bull consultant Helmut Marko has predicted that McLaren is set to lead the beginning of the 2025 Formula 1 season, following what he saw during pre-season testing. The former Austrian racing driver believes that Max Verstappen, gunning for his fifth consecutive title this year, will likely see stiff competition from McLaren's Lando Norris.

It's fair to say that the Papaya team is the favourite going into the Australian Grand Prix. After a successful 2024 campaign where they won the Constructors' Championship for the first time since 1998, their performance in Bahrain looked promising.

The long run from Norris on the Thursday was rapid and consistent, but with the usual caveats surrounding testing, plus the fact that even Zak Brown has admitted their design direction this year is a "brave risk," there's no way of knowing exactly how far ahead they're going to be, or if they will even be at the front at all.

Red Bull's technical director Pierre Wache has already given his thoughts on the MCL39.

"Some things are interesting, some are less so. The McLaren is very interesting. After all, they have a lot of flexible wings at the front and at the rear," he told Canal+. 

"Their front suspension is very interesting, but also very risky from our point of view. It will be very interesting to see if they can make it work."

Marko, who has developed Verstappen from a young age, shared his thoughts after he left testing early.

"You have to say that Lando Norris is the favourite. Obviously, he looked a lot better than Piastri in Bahrain. The main thing is to hope that they take points off each other and that we take advantage of that," he told Sport1.de.

"If you look at the data from the test days, you have to conclude that McLaren start the season with a lead. That is on both the shorter and long runs."

Liam Lawson, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

From what's been said around the garage of the Milton Keynes team, they have, for the most part, fixed the balance issues that plagued their season last year. But Verstappen and Wache still expect more.

"It was not as smooth a test as we expected and the team expected, but it is better to find some problems here than later down the line and it is why we are here, to understand the car," Wache said.

"The weather was not with us and not very representative of this track, but we tried to explore the potential of the car and tried to understand how it responds to different set-ups, and I think we more or less achieved that.

"I think it’s very difficult to see a starting order for Melbourne across the grid right now, you see that four teams look quite quick, including us, but we didn’t look too much at other teams, we tried to focus on our programme.

"I am not as happy as I could be because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected and it’s something we need to work on for the first race and future development.”

Marko is of a similar opinion:

"We have made a good step. McLaren are only the favourite at the moment," he concluded.