F1 2024, Bahrain Grand Prix: Five bold predictions for new season, Daniel Ricciardo to Red Bull, Oscar Piastri and Land Norris battle at McLaren

F1’s 2024 season is here with this week’s Bahrain Grand Prix kicking off another 24-race odyssey sure to be filled with drama and intrigue.

Not even a wheel has been turned in anger yet and we’ve already had one of F1’s biggest ever driver moves confirmed, and another massive figure left fighting for his career after being embroiled in an off-track matter.

Who knows what happens next — but it feels like nothing is off the table.

And so, from a Daniel Ricciardo bombshell to a motor giant’s shock call, it’s time to look into the crystal ball and make five bold predictions for this year’s F1 season.

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Daniel Ricciardo will be confirmed for Red Bull by mid-season

It’s happening.

We’ll have to wait some time – likely around the summer break – but Ricciardo’s stunning career redemption will take the massive step of being promoted to a championship-winning team.

Effectively, three outcomes need to play out simultaneously for this scenario to come to fruition: Ricciardo needs to have a strong season, VCARB teammate Yuki Tsunoda must be kept under wraps, and Sergio Perez needs to underwhelm once again at Red Bull.

There’s a very realistic chance all these things happen.

Starting with Ricciardo; there’s little doubt that he’s regained many of the powers he lost over two miserable years at McLaren. By all accounts, he’s working well with the Faenza outfit, which, based on pre-season testing numbers, is poised to at least jump into the midfield. That jump sets the platform for Ricciardo to impress further – especially as a driver with a track record of maximising marginal opportunities, such as when he won for McLaren at Monza in 2022, or his miracle wins for Red Bull at Canada (2014) and Azerbaijan (2017).

Perez is already firmly on the ropes at Red Bull coming off a season in which he finished a whopping 290 points behind champion Max Verstappen. With major changes to shake-up F1’s status quo still only on the horizon, the slate is yet to be wiped clean – meaning Perez will need to generate a full-scale turnaround purely from within. Early signs from pre-season testing are not promising, depending on how much stock you want to put into them. Verstappen looks like he could well mop the floor with his teammate once again, meaning Red Bull is sure to look elsewhere.

And then there’s the somewhat forgotten figure in the Red Bull race in Tsunoda. True, the Japan pocket rocket is criminally underrated, and could throw a spanner in the works for Ricciardo yet. But his inconsistencies could only be exacerbated in the pressure cooker environment that the Australian is sure to create, especially given the cost of failure in 2024.

As such, even though the outcome is not completely within is hands, Ricciardo’s path towards Red Bull looks the widest its been since he left.

There will be SIX different race winners... including a wild bolter

Six might even prove to be conservative but, based on last year’s oligopoly, it’s certainly bold enough.

2023 produced just three winners across only two teams; Verstappen and Perez for Red Bull, and Carlos Sainz for Ferrari.

The F1 hierarchy this year almost certainly has Red Bull at the very top again, meaning Verstappen will add many more wins to his record and – who are we kidding here? – another championship.

Sifting through all the pre-season sandbagging on and off the track below him is difficult, but the general consensus is that through F1’s equalisation measures, the field is slowly bunching.

F1’s salary cap, and the sliding scale of wind tunnel time allocation, means that Ferrari and Mercedes should be closer to Red Bull.

Ferrari already won a race last year, so it’s well within the realms of possibility that multiple wins are on the horizon in 2024. Sainz is capable of doing it again, while the brutally unlucky Charles Leclerc will surely catch a break – perhaps he will finally snap the hoodoo of his home Monaco Grand Prix.

Meanwhile, consecutive winless seasons for a giant like Mercedes feels unfathomable, especially given the mooted improvement of its 2024 challenger. Even harder to believe is that Lewis Hamilton will go a third year without a Grand Prix win, especially given the thirst for a fairy tale ending at the team he won six of his seven world titles.

Then there’s McLaren, who in the past two seasons has won a Grand Prix and a sprint race. While McLaren won’t compete for wins regularly, the team, too, is believed to have gained some ground in the development race. The door will open at some point this year, and Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri are poised to walk through.

We should also allow a one-race contingency for the totally random event that has a way of rearing its head every few seasons. Think Esteban Ocon in Hungary in 2021, or even Perez for Racing Point in Bahrain the year before. A wild weather event, big crash or other freak phenomenon – we’re certainly due.

Verstappen, Sainz, Leclerc, Hamilton, a McLaren driver and another midfield bolter brings us to six. In truth, you could easily tip Perez to sneak in a win or two for Red Bull, and Russell for Mercedes, which would take us to eight – but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

A THIRD Australian will get on the grid

One team where you won’t see a winner from, based on the overwhelming weight of pre-season chatter, is Alpine.

The place is an organisational mess, which likely comes as little surprise given the clean-out that has been taking place.

Alpine is facing an exodus of engineers having already parted ways with team principal Otmar Szafnauer and sporting director Alan Permane last year.

Making matters worse is that there are whispers that Alpine could even be the grid’s backmarker at the start of the season, so dire is the state of its 2024 car.

In the short term, it means pain for the underachiever and its two drivers, Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon.

What does this have to do with a third Australian?

Both the incumbent Alpine drivers are coming off-contract in what promises to be a wild year for F1’s driver market, given more than half of the grid is in the same position.

Both Gasly and Ocon are well-established, talented drivers who undoubtedly will be on rivals’ radars and could easily test the market given issues at home.

How things will shake-out is impossible to tell, but it would surprise no one to see at least one of these drivers move.

That can only mean good news for 21-year-old Australian Jack Doohan, who is Alpine’s reserve driver.

Like Piastri before him, Doohan has come through the team’s Renault academy and impressed across two seasons in Formula 2, picking up six race wins, following on from four in Formula 3.

In a promising sign for the son of MotoGP legend Mick, Doohan is being kept close to the team in 2024 rather than taking up a spot on the Formula 2 grid again. It suggests that Alpine is comfortable enough with him driving for the senior team now, should the situation be necessitated.

His stocks are already high and, in being kept on the bench, he can now do no harm to those stocks.

Also working in his favour is the fact that F1 is going younger and younger.

Alpine itself wanted to promote 22-year-old Piastri for the 2023 season before he slipped through their fingers. Verstappen debuted in F1 as a 17-year-old, Lance Stroll at 18 and Lando Norris at 19.

Then there’s the potential for Mercedes to move on another highly regarded young gun, 17-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli, to fill Hamilton’s spot in 2025.

Such a bold signing from one of F1’s heavyweights would almost make the promotion of Doohan at Alpine seem conservative by comparison.

Motor giants are heading for a stunning exit

Another note on Alpine; patience at its parent company Renault is sure to be already running thin given how poorly managed the F1 project has been.

Since Renault made its return to the F1 grid with a works team in 2016, everyone has gone – the team principal, technical director, engine chief, drivers, you name it.

This extends to former Alpine chief Laurent Rossi, who was described by one-time Renault advisor Alain Prost – who has also left – as an “incapable leader who thinks he can overcome his incompetence by his arrogance and lack of humanity towards his troops.”

Needless to say, championship success has not been forthcoming even with the massive turnover of personnel.

Now, one of its worst ever seasons could be looming.

Already with the worst performing power unit bolted in – Renault clearly trails Mercedes, Ferrari and the Red Bull-managed Honda – Alpine has continued a steady slide back through the field.

It feels a case of Alpine being stuck in the mud at the development table while McLaren, Aston Martin, and now even Williams and VCARB, have made major leaps.

Times during pre-season testing have only fuelled the concerns for Alpine.

Asked if Alpine really could now be at the back of the grid, Ocon said: “We don’t know exactly.

“(The media) are selling it (as) the worst. It is a possibility, because we haven’t pulled it together with everyone else. But it’s not over.”

So just how much more can Renault tolerate of the F1 project?

Even if 2024’s doomsday prediction comes to fruition, it’s unlikely a team with Alpine’s resources will stay there long with Haas also tipped to deeply struggle.

But this was a project that was meant to add to the world championships won in 2005 and 2006 by Fernando Alonso in the team’s previous F1 life.

Such an embarrassment when combined with ongoing management issues could be the last straw for Renault, who is no closer to winning a championship in 2024 with Alpine than it was when it returned in 2016.

Norris vs Piastri will become the hottest battle on the grid

It always starts all chummy, but it can never stay that way in F1.

Oscar Piastri produced the best rookie season since Lewis Hamilton in 2023 to show the F1 world that he is the real deal.

And while Lando Norris still comprehensively won their intra-team battle, the Australian did enough to prove that the Briton’s powergrip on the McLaren garage won’t go untested for long.

Already has Piastri fired major warning shots, namely by winning the Qatar sprint – Norris is yet to achieve a win in any F1 race – but also by only trailing him by 0.047 seconds on average in qualifying.

Norris’ race pace was consistently better than Piastri’s, but the Australian’s sharp upwards trajectory is clear. If you need any further proof of that, there’s the fact McLaren has already extended his contract through to the end of the 2026 season.

Norris, too, is on a long-term contract at McLaren - but he can no longer sit with the comfort of being a young and relatively inexperienced driver like Piastri can.

Already he is a senior F1 figure of more than 100 race starts, driving at a team that made massive development leaps in 2023, and is expected to contend for more podiums in 2024.

A team of McLaren’s calibre expects rare opportunities to be taken.

As such, the pressure on Norris is only set to rise. In truth, signs of that are already showing.

When Piastri won in Qatar, one of Norris’ first thoughts was what it meant for himself.

“His first win – earlier than mine – so a big well done to him,” Norris said.

Norris was also downbeat after pre-season testing, which led to Ricciardo saying that his former teammate is “always negative”.

It was said as a joke with a beaming Ricciardo smile – but like all jokes, there was an element of truth to it.

Norris sits on edge and knows that it’s time to deliver a big, defining performance that warrants his lucrative McLaren contract, and not just a series of good results.

Piastri has shown he’s already capable of producing that. With a full season under his belt, there’s no reason to believe he can’t do it again.

Now, we sit back and wait for this combustible situation to explode.