From McLaren's fall to Mercedes' return: F1 since GTA 5

When Grand Theft Auto 5 launched on 17 September 2013, Sebastian Vettel had begun the run that would reach a record nine consecutive victories. McLaren's decline was setting in, and Mercedes had yet to win a championship. With GTA 6 due next week, the contrast is striking: McLaren won the constructors' title in 2024 and 2025, Lando Norris took the drivers' crown in 2025, and Mercedes won both championships in 2026, with Kimi Antonelli taking the drivers' title.

Lewis Hamilton left McLaren at the end of 2012. The MP4-28 proved badly flawed, and the team finished 2013 without a podium. McLaren reached its nadir in the Honda years, 2015–17: poor results drove sponsors away, and Ron Dennis was ousted amid a boardroom struggle in 2017. Under Zak Brown, the rebuild brought titles. McLaren's 2024 constructors' crown was its first since 1998; Norris's 2025 drivers' title was its first since Hamilton's 2008 championship.

Mercedes' trajectory moved the other way. In 2013, its fourth season back as a works team, Hamilton's Hungarian GP victory was only the team's fourth since its return; Mercedes had not yet won a championship. From 2014 to 2021, it claimed eight consecutive constructors' titles and seven drivers' championships. After a lean spell in the ground-effects era, Mercedes won the constructors' crown again in 2026, with Antonelli taking the drivers' title. Antonelli was seven when GTA 5 launched.

The years also remade F1's leading names. Hamilton had one world title and 22 grand prix victories in September 2013; by November 2026, he had seven titles and 106 wins. His 12-year spell with Mercedes ended in 2024, when he moved to Ferrari. Verstappen was still karting in 2013 and had never driven a car race. He made his single-seater debut in 2014, became F1's youngest driver at 17 in 2015 and was a four-time world champion by 2026. His 19 wins from 22 races in 2023 set a record.

Ferrari offers a counterpoint: five team bosses, seven full-time drivers and 28 race wins, but no championship. Its closest title challenge came in 2024, when it finished 14 points short of McLaren. Fernando Alonso's last victory was the 2013 Spanish GP, his 201st start. At his 445th start, in the 2026 São Paulo GP, more than half his F1 career had passed without another win.

F1 changed off track too. Bernie Ecclestone, who largely shunned social media, was still in charge in 2013. A proposal for three-car teams was floated in 2015 and rejected; Liberty Media bought F1 from CVC Capital Partners in 2017 and Ecclestone was ousted as CEO. Netflix's Drive to Survive helped bring the sport to new audiences as its public presence became more open and social-media focused.

The cars moved through six technical eras: V8 engines in 2013, turbo-hybrids in 2014, more radical aerodynamics in 2017, front-wing changes in 2019, ground effects in 2022 and the current package in 2026. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has said the sport will return to V8 engines, likely in 2030.

Nico Hülkenberg's route back to the podium was long. Dropped at the end of 2019, he returned as a COVID substitute in 2020, filled in again in 2022 and came back full-time in 2023. He moved back to Sauber for 2025; at that year's British GP he scored his first podium, finishing third in the wet on his 239th attempt. Jenson Button's one-off Monaco return in 2017 left a quirkier loose end. Standing in for Fernando Alonso while Alonso raced at the Indy 500, Button received a grid penalty for his next race after an incident with Pascal Wehrlein at Portier. Nine years later, he still had not served it.