It was oh so quiet! The engines revs on the grid were still and the driver market was in a formation lap holding pattern in anticipation of a guaranteed silly season to come ahead of 2025. But as Bjork would say, 'Zing boom'.
The upheaval started with backmarkers Haas parting ways with Guenther Steiner, the occasionally foul-mouthed and moustachioed team principal who had become viewed as a mascot of sorts by those drawn into the sport by Netflix's Drive To Survive but whose vast experience within motorsport was highly respected by the people following F1 for far longer.
Then Andretti's hope of being accepted into the fold as an 11th team for 2025 was turned down with a "no, not yet" and an emphasis on the potential detrimental impact adding another team would have on the commercial value for the existing ten.
But the moment the sky really caved in was February. Lewis Hamilton had signed a new Mercedes deal late last summer and given that he will be 40 by the end of 2025 when that contract was due to expire, the expectation was that the seven-time world champion would finish his career with that team until at least then.
All of a sudden though, the drip, drip of rumours became a deluge on 1 February, claiming that Hamilton, statistically F1's most successful driver of all time, would leave and join forces with the sport's most iconic and historic team Ferrari.
Jaws were very much hanging low at kerb level and, by that evening, were resting on the asphalt when Ferrari and Hamilton had finally confirmed that he will be racing in red for the twilight of his career.
With the gifted Charles Leclerc signing a lucrative and lengthy contract extension with Ferrari a week before to confirm his status as the driver the Prancing Horse will continue to build around in the longer-term, it left Carlos Sainz - the only non-Red Bull driver to win a race in 2023 - as the odd one out and in search of a seat for next year, essentially kicking off the F1 silly season earlier than expected.
Mercedes have a seat to fill in 2025 and with a dozen of the current grid out of contract at the end of this year, speculation will be following in the wake of their exhausts throughout the year about who will move to which team and who might leave the grid altogether.
Away from the driver market, it also emerged that Red Bull's Christian Horner, the longest-serving team principal on the current grid, was under investigation by the team's Austrian parent company following an allegation of "inappropriate behaviour" against him by a female colleague, a claim the 50-year-old emphatically denied.
It led to doubts about his future at a team that has been dominating the drivers' and constructors' championships for the last couple of seasons.
But on Wednesday, the eve of the first practice sessions ahead of this weekend's season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, Red Bull confirmed that the investigation has cleared Horner and he will remain in his post as team principal, with the statement confirming that "the grievance has been dismissed" and that "the complainant has a right of appeal".
The paddock's focus will now switch fully to the first staging post of the longest season in history - more on that later in the calendar section below - but the question is who will stop Max Verstappen and Red Bull's current run of dominance?
There's a blunt Verstappen-esque answer to that but let's elaborate...
The 2024 Contender(s)
Max Verstappen was the class of the field in 2023 at the wheel of a dominant RB19 that plundered all before it.
It was a record-breaking individual season which saw the Dutchman win 19 of the 22 grand prix on the way to sealing his third championship on the trot.
Teams tend to converge closer together the further one goes into a contemporary set of regulations and the next shift will come in 2026.
But from the evidence of pre-season testing in Bahrain last week, Red Bull's new machine, the RB20, looks set to be right at the apex of the grid and Verstappen will be the overwhelming favourite to win the drivers' title again.
The main question mark will be hovering over his team-mate Sergio Perez, who might have eventually finished second in the championship last year but after a bright start that featured two wins, struggled badly at times thereafter - especially in qualifying - despite driving one of the most dominant cars in history.
Checo, like many of his fellow competitors, is out of contract after 2024 and a mid-season change can't be ruled out if the Mexican starts off poorly in these upcoming races.
Ferrari and Mercedes emerged from testing relatively happy but knowing that there is a significant amount of ground to close on Red Bull.
The soundings from Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are that the Ferrari will be more stable than in 2023, with improvements on tyre degradation, and may well have retained the capacity to excel over one lap.
Sainz will be using the year as a reminder to other teams about what he can bring to the table, while Leclerc, who is arguably the quickest driver over one lap, will be aiming to get back to winning on Sundays (and the trio of Saturday races) after finishing last year in good form.
Future Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton will be hoping for a not-too-awkward Mercedes swansong after a decade of almost peerless success, while George Russell will spy an opportunity to carve out his spot as the team leader in their post-Hamilton plans as the car concept underwent a makeover in the winter after the team got it badly wrong in 2022.
The top four will be rounded by McLaren. They started off last year well off the pace - that's an understatement by the way - before growing into the season with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri often challenging for podium places once they got their upgrades on board.
Norris is one of the leading talents on the grid but has yet to stand on the top step of a podium so a first race win will be high on the agenda.
Australian Piastri, meanwhile, is an almost eerily unflustered character and will be expected to build on arguably the most impressive rookie season since Hamilton burst on the scene at the same team in 2007.
Coupled with a rise by Aston Martin in the first half of last season, Fernando Alonso enjoyed a revival and a return to regular podium finishes but, in his typically mischievous manner of dealing with the media, the veteran former two-time world champion already seems to be hinting at potentially being interested in the impending vacancy at Mercedes, who are engine suppliers to his current team.
He will have no bother seeing off any challenge from his team-mate Lance Stroll, whose position at AM is cemented by the fact that his billionaire father Lawrence owns the team. Although Stroll has shown the occasional flash of talent before, including a brave and admirable sixth-place finish in Bahrain this time last year as he nursed still-broken wrists, inconsistency has been a hallmark. But the Canadian will be spared the uncertainty of silly season speculation regardless of results.
As for the rest, the bulk will know that they will be jostling for seats in 2025 and the affable Daniel Ricciardo is aiming to audition for a return to Red Bull as he tackles a full season with the newly cumbersomely-named sister team, Visa Cash App RB F1 (the artist formerly known as AlphaTauri).
However, the diminutive but fierce Yuki Tsunoda will also have ambitions given that the team looked impressive in testing as they use more parts supplied by their parent team.
They are tipped to be the sixth-ranked team in 2024 ahead of Williams, who enjoyed an upturn at least where Alex Albon was concerned, while American team-mate Logan Sargeant is under pressure to improve on a difficult rookie season.
There are doubts about Alpine's ability to mix it at the top end of the midfield after testing and the battle between former childhood pals Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon is likely to be keenly contested, particularly due to the latter's propensity to skirmish on track with team-mates.
Ahead of an anticipated 2026 metamorphosis into the Audi factory team, Alfa Romeo are now known as Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber for this season and will again have the driver pairing of Zhou Guanyu and the uber-experienced Valtteri Bottas, although both are among the names out of contract at the end of 2024.
And bringing up the rear is the Guenther Steiner-shorn Haas outfit with Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hulkenburg having a tough challenge on their hands, with race pace rather than qualifying being the main issue that plagued them last year.
2024 F1 CALENDAR
Last season was meant to be the one billed as the longest season in history but with the Emilio Romagna Grand Prix at Imola being called off due to extreme weather conditions and China also chalked off due to lingering Covid-19 restrictions, 2023 ended up being a 22-race calendar.
But 2024 is slated to have its full gamut of 24 Grand Prix weekends which will continue to put a strain on drivers - Verstappen has said "this is not sustainable" - team personnel and possibly the attention spans of the growing cohort of casual fans seduced by Netflix if this season's title race proves as uncompetitive as the last one.
With the climate impact in mind, there has been an attempt to cluster races together geographically which is one of the reasons why Japan - historically a location of legendary championship deciders - has been shifted to the early part of the season away from its traditional spot towards the latter end.
There will also be three grand prix where the race will take place on a Saturday rather than the traditional Sunday, the first of those coming this weekend in Bahrain. It's the same story in Saudi Arabia next week, while Las Vegas will also do so in November.
Six venues will again host an additional sprint race and this year they will be China, Miami, Austria, the US GP in Austin, Sao Paulo and Qatar.
And here are the dates for your diary.
2 March: Bahrain Grand Prix
9 March: Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
24 March: Australian Grand Prix
7 April: Japanese Grand Prix
21 April: Chinese Grand Prix*
5 May: Miami Grand Prix*
19 May: Emilio Romanga Grand Prix
26 May: Monaco Grand Prix
9 June: Canadian Grand Prix
23 June: Spanish Grand Prix
30 June: Austrian Grand Prix*
7 July: British Grand Prix
21 July: Hungarian Grand Prix
28 July: Belgian Grand Prix
25 August: Dutch Grand Prix
1 September: Italian Grand Prix
15 September: Azerbaijan Grand Prix
22 September: Singapore Grand Prix
20 September: United States Grand Prix*
27 September: Mexican Grand Prix
3 November: Sao Paulo Grand Prix*
24 November: Las Vegas Grand Prix
1 December: Qatar Grand Prix*
8 December: Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Irish Interest
Fermanagh native Bernie Collins, a former strategy engineer with Aston Martin, is always an insightful voice when she is on Sky Sports' coverage given her experience of day-to-day life in the paddock and the quick thinking that goes into strategy calls on race day.
The other person to look out for is Offaly's Alex Dunne. This year the 19-year-old will be driving in FIA Formula 3 for the MP Motorsport team, which is two rungs down from F1 and some of the ten F3 rounds will coincide with F1 race weekends, including the current one in Bahrain.
As Dunne told this writer back in December, the dream is very much to get to where the likes of Hamilton, Verstappen and Alonso have been operating and from the perspective of hoping to see an Irish driver in Formula One again, it's worth keeping a very close eye on his progression as 2024 goes on.
