Five Winners, Five Losers: Qatar Grand Prix
- Peter Johnson
- 8 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Written by Peter Johnson, Edited by Meghana Sree
The 2025 Qatar Grand Prix was marked by a unique tyre regulation and a curious McLaren strategy call, but who won out and who didn’t?
Winner - Max Verstappen
The four-time world champion can surely scarcely believe he is in the position he now finds himself, second in the championship and just 12 points adrift with a single race remaining.
Verstappen has much to owe McLaren for their catastrophic strategy blunder, but there can be little argument that he remains the class of the field whatever direction the world championship heads in Abu Dhabi.
The Dutchman struggled throughout Friday and Saturday morning, well off the pace of the two McLarens in the sprint. However, as he did in Qatar last year and in Brazil just a few weeks ago, he and his team transformed the Red Bull into a monster ahead of qualifying proper.
There is surely no more frightening prospect than a Verstappen with “nothing to lose”, but that is exactly how he described himself before Sunday’s race. Snatching second from Lando Norris at the start made sure he would be a nuisance at the very least to the two McLarens, but he turned out to be much more than that.
Piastri tried as he might in his second stint to cut the arrears to Verstappen and ultimately finished within eight seconds of him, but you cannot give the Dutchman an entire pit stop’s head start, in this case amounting to around 25 seconds, and expect any other outcome than the one we saw.
Verstappen said during the week before the Qatar race that had he had a car as dominant as the McLaren, he would have wrapped the title up long ago.
It is nigh-on impossible to refute that claim.
Winner - Carlos Sainz
Carlos Sainz warned his fans ahead of his first season at Williams that they would not see him challenging for podiums in the foreseeable future following his switch from Ferrari.
As disappointed as he may have been to have lost his seat at the Scuderia, and as difficult as his first half-season at Williams may have been, it has been clear over recent months that the Spaniard has come to embrace this new chapter of his career and is truly reaping the rewards.
Even without McLaren’s disaster strategy, Sainz would still have been nailed on for a top four finish, even with issues in the closing laps that saw him come under pressure from Kimi Antonelli.
A second consecutive top-five finish, delivered emphatically in the form of a second podium finish of the season, surely casts aside any lingering doubts that he has not found a home at the Grove-based team.
Contrast that to the complete absence of pace shown by the Ferrari drivers, not to mention their disarray off-track, and it appears with every passing race that Sainz truly dodged a bullet.
Winner - Williams
With six double-points finishes in the first eight races of the season, James Vowles’ team catapulted themselves into a comfortable fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship.
What followed for the Grove-based outfit was a slightly concerning wobble throughout the European leg of the season, before results once again began to click from the Dutch Grand Prix onwards.
Williams still have not registered a double points finish since the Monaco Grand Prix in May — 15 races ago –- but over the course of the season they have clearly been a cut above the rest of the midfield.
From ninth place in the championship in 2024, aided by Sainz’s two podiums and Alex Albon’s consistent scoring, the team has consolidated fifth place in the standings with a race to spare.
Things are looking bright for Williams going into Formula One’s new era.
Winner - Mercedes
It was not the most convincing weekend for Mercedes, even if George Russell did pick up a second place in the sprint.
The Briton lost several places at the start of Sunday’s race and was a big loser in the pit stop melée on Lap 7, while Kimi Antonelli showed great pace but ultimately surrendered fourth place to Norris on the penultimate lap.
For a team that has won eight Constructors’ titles and seven Drivers’ titles since 2014, and indeed has won two races this season, the weekend in Qatar will not go down in Silver Arrows folklore.
What it did, however, was all but confirm second place in the Constructors’ Championship.
Even if Verstappen were to win the race in Abu Dhabi and neither Mercedes were to score, the team would still finish second provided Yuki Tsunoda could not muster a top-six finish in the sister Red Bull.
Tsunoda has managed just one such result all season, and given the number of “ifs” in place here, Mercedes would seem to be sitting quite pretty in second.
Winner - Fernando Alonso
Again, in the long storied history of Fernando Alonso’s F1 career, a seventh place for Aston Martin in Qatar will not necessarily register as a career highlight.
However, the manner in which the Spaniard achieved the feat served as yet another reminder that, at 44 years old, the two-time world champion still has it.
Alonso led the mother of all DRS trains (13 cars, in fact) for the first of the two 25-lap stints during the race, running at a pace controlled enough to preserve his tyres, but just quick enough to remain at the head of the midfield.
It is not the first time Alonso has demonstrated such a feat –- see Monaco last year — but it again demonstrated his sheer racecraft and level-headedness behind the wheel.
Laps before his second pit stop, he bolted up the road, leaving Isack Hadjar and co in his wake.
A spin midway through his final stint saw the young Frenchman and Russell steal positions — Alonso would recover his position to the former later on — but his seventh-placed finish delivered surely enough points to consolidate Aston’s seventh place in the Constructors’ ahead of Haas.
Loser - Oscar Piastri
Around the time of the Canadian Grand Prix in June, when Oscar Piastri had a commanding championship lead, Norris was generally lacking in relative pace and Verstappen was not in the title picture at all, it was a reasonable assumption that all the Australian had to do was regularly outscore his teammate and the title would eventually be his.
Fast forward to the start of December, and Piastri has just beaten Norris in a race for the first time in three months, but even in doing so now finds himself third in the championship and a rank outsider in the title showdown.
Since his horror weekend in Baku, Piastri has looked a shadow of his early-season self, but rediscovered his form across the weekend at Lusail, topping every single session –- except the one that really mattered.
While Norris lost a certain three and possible six points due to McLaren’s strategy, Piastri not only lost the seven additional points that come with a first place finish, but was on the wrong side of a 14-point swing to Verstappen, who swept in and stole victory.
What could –- and should –- have been a nine point deficit to Norris is now a 16-point gap, while he also finds himself needing to beat Verstappen in Abu Dhabi too.
Piastri’s best weekend for a while in terms of performance may well prove to be his most disastrous in terms of his diminishing title hopes. A first non-European world title since 1997 seems a distant possibility now.
Loser - Lando Norris
He was not a loser to the same extent as Piastri, missing out on a likely three and possible six points, but any distant hope of Norris wrapping up his maiden title at Lusail went up in smoke with McLaren’s strategy.
For the first time in months, Norris was discernibly slower than Piastri across the weekend and lost second place at the start of the Grand Prix to Verstappen.
That lack of fight into Turn 1 was reasonable and pragmatic behaviour from the championship leader, but meant that it would have been hard enough from that point onwards to come through to take victory.
Overall, it may favour Norris that Verstappen is now his nearest challenger rather than Piastri, as the likelihood of a scenario in which the Australian may have to play the team game in Abu Dhabi have surely increased, given his long title odds.
However, Norris could well have done without the drama of a title decider and his performances in recent weeks would surely have given him hope that he could have had the job done already.
Loser - McLaren
It’s a McLaren clean sweep in the “Loser” section this week, as the team’s absolute commitment to equality between both drivers proved to be their undoing at Lusail.
Had Norris been further back from Piastri at the time of the Safety Car’s deployment on Lap 7, thus mitigating any potential time loss caused by a double-stack, the pair would surely have come in.
However, the team’s unwavering stance on ensuring fairness between both drivers was certainly a factor in the decision to keep both out on track, putting Piastri and Norris a full pit stop behind Verstappen.
The team’s “papaya rules” represent a noble endeavour and McLaren’s management deserves credit for the fact that 23 races have come and gone, both are still in title contention, and relationships within the team remain harmonious.
A complication for McLaren is, of course, that both drivers are in contention, while Red Bull can put all their eggs in the Verstappen basket. However, a lack of real killer instinct and ruthlessness needed to win titles was once again demonstrated at Lusail.
If Verstappen is to wrestle the title from the grasp of either McLaren driver, of whom one or the other has led the championship all season, then neither can complain they did not have a fair crack at the whip.
The team will surely not have a better chance to win their first Drivers’ Championship since 2008 than this, but it beggars belief that neither Piastri nor Norris has yet done so.
Loser - Ferrari
What else can be said about Ferrari at the end of this truly miserable season for the Scuderia?
Lewis Hamilton’s season nosedived to even greater depths of despair as the seven-time champion suffered elimination in the first round of qualifying for both the sprint and main race. Following his early departure in Vegas, he became just the third Ferrari driver in history after Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella to suffer consecutive Q1 eliminations.
The great man is firmly staring down the barrel of the worst season of his career, with one more opportunity to achieve a top three finish and extend his record of at least one podium in every F1 in which he has competed. Such a feat in Abu Dhabi seems unlikely at best.
Teammate Charles Leclerc, meanwhile, fared little better at Lusail. Even the Monégasque, running something of a workable setup on his car, showed pace barely better than that of customer teams Haas and Sauber.
Loser - Yuki Tsunoda
It is something of a cruel irony that Yuki Tsunoda delivered one of his best weekends of the season for Red Bull in Qatar, only to lose his seat two days later.
The Japanese driver outqualified Verstappen for the first time ever as teammates in sprint qualifying and achieved a career-best fifth-placed finish in the shortened race.
He then recovered somewhat admirably from a lowly P16 on the grid on Sunday, collecting the final point with a tenth-placed finish.
However, the writing has been on the wall regarding Tsunoda’s future for some time and it is little to no surprise that Hadjar will take his seat next season.
The Japanese driver, who long fancied himself to be the man to shake Red Bull’s second seat hoodoo, will have to settle for being a test and reserve driver next season.
