Seven things that will definitely happen at the F1 Live 75 event 2025

As you might have noticed, Formula One is changing. Once merely a sport, it’s a spicy Netflix drama series now, and it’s had considerable injections of both glitz and glamour administered by Liberty Media since they started running the show. F1 Live 75, a different format of multi-team presentation to kick off the 2025 season, is just one such example.

But will it be all that different to the time-honoured unveilings we’ve been watching for decades past? There’ll probably be higher production values, but we’re betting the prevailing sense of stifling awkwardness will be just as present as it ever was. You can take F1 out of the paddock, Liberty, but you can’t take the cringe out of F1. Here are seven phenomena we’re absolutely sure will happen.

However tightly choreographed, well rehearsed and smoothly scripted these things are, whatever plans are laid to ensure an effortless run-through on the night, sooner or later chaos always prevails at a live motorsport media event.

Sadly for the presenters, who have the ultimate of thankless tasks, that chaos concentrates itself most viciously around them. With a producer in their earpiece, the wrong segment on the autocue, and Flavio Briatore having invited himself onstage when he shouldn’t be, it’s left to them to try and riff on the situation and pretend they’re just a couple of mates who – who – sorry, no, go ahead. Mates who – sorry! Please welcome Peter Sauber.

'Introducing the 2025 Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber Monster Energy Zero Sugar Petronas Singha 0%', breathes an increasingly panicked presenter as the last molecules of oxygen are leaving their poor, depleted lungs.

Look closely enough and you might even see the moment their eyes flicker as they consider how to say the ‘TM' in ‘Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One™ Team’ that’s fast approaching on the autocue.

If we’re all being honest with ourselves for just a moment, team presentations are all about one specific moment when the drivers stand in their race suits next to this year’s new cars. That’s the important bit, because it’s the bit when you decide whether they look cool or not, and then get on with your life.

You know this. Teams know this. Event organisers and media know it. But nobody’s more aware of it, clearly, than the drivers themselves, who generally look like they’ve been bundled out of a van with a cloth sack on their head and led onto the stage by the butt of a rifle.

Their eyes dart around between presenters and cameras, looking for the cue to do one of two things: announce how excited they are for the coming season with Full Team Name TM, or pull a big sheet off the car. The latter cue is given about 14 weeks after they’re initially called onstage.

F1 cars aren’t very much like dining tables. They’re good at a great many things, like generating downforce, maintaining structural integrity on impact, and looking nice. What they are not good at is providing a nice easy surface that a sheet can be dramatically pulled back across.

We can all look forward, then, to the jolly tradition of watching of a driver who patently didn’t want to be onstage in the first place trying to unhook some fabric from around their car’s T-cam at some point. Or yanking a bit of front wing endplate loose. It all adds to the drama of the reveal.

There’s an ongoing challenge for the sport’s livery designers: less paint means lighter weight, and higher performance. Ergo, a lot of cars have opted for that stripped-back, exposed carbon aesthetic for the last couple of seasons, ramping up notably in 2024.

We fully expect a 90-95 per cent adherence to this colour scheme in 2025. Maybe Alpine, Haas and Williams have even gone the extra mile and spent the winter securing sponsors with all-black logos and colour schemes.

What’s the key to performing at a really high level in Formula One? Reactions, racecraft, strategy, consistency, smoothness… These are all important facets, but judging by the sponsors associated with the sport, none of them are as important as energy drinks.

To most of us, these are simply worryingly large cans of fizzy yellow syrup that taste faintly like a Duracell Plus has been dissolved in them. But the fact that we don’t see how such a substance is integral to an F1 team’s successful operation only reveals our ignorance. That’s why we need multiple executives onstage to tell us how excited they are about a particular corporate partnership deal.

There’s no one else in this sport – or indeed outside it – who can so effortlessly transition from asking a journalist what they’re doing after this to detailing the devastating effects of carbon emissions. Sebastian Vettel, you are one of a kind.

If he doesn’t hop onstage at some point, with the hair of a rebellious sixth form politics student, to crack a few jokes and talk about sustainability initiatives, then honestly, what are we even doing here?