Five winners, five losers: Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
- Peter Johnson
- Apr 25
- 8 min read
Updated: May 2
Written by Peter Johnson, Edited by Dhara Dave
The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix provided a weekend of highs and lows up and down the grid, but for whom?
Winner - Oscar Piastri
The only driver to win two races this season, the Australian is now well out on his own in 2025 with three victories under his belt. Furthermore, for the first time in his career and for the first time for an Australian since 2010, he deservedly leads the Drivers’ World Championship.
Every race so far this season had been decided in Qualifying, and while the streak of races being won from Pole came to an end, Piastri again underlined the importance of a good start. Ahead of Max Verstappen and claiming the inside line at Turn 1, Piastri was rightfully rewarded with the lead following the Dutchman’s five-second penalty.
On a weekend when teammate Lando Norris made a crucial error in Qualifying and World Champion Max Verstappen publicly seethed at the stewards, Piastri carved his way professionally through the 50-lap race to take the fifth win of his career. He has now drawn level with Norris for career victories, once more demonstrating his credentials in this year’s title battle.
Winner - Williams
A second double-points finish of the season for Williams leapfrogged the team from Grove above Haas once again to take the lead of the “Best of the Rest” Constructors’ Championship.
In a significant development, new signing Carlos Sainz appeared finally to have the car underneath him to be able to compete and race alongside, or indeed ahead of, Alex Albon. Great team play between the pair allowed Albon to maintain position ahead of Isack Hadjar as he camped in Sainz’s DRS, while the Spaniard led the pair home for the first time in 2025.
With two drivers of the quality of Sainz and Albon both now appearing at home in the car and displaying fine teamwork, Williams displayed all the ingredients in Saudi Arabia of a team who are very much in the ascendancy.
Winner - Charles Leclerc
Despite an underwhelming start to the season for Ferrari, Charles Leclerc has gradually been building up towards the front of the field on Sundays, improving his finishing position in almost every race.
An eighth-place finish in Australia was followed by fifth in China (before his disqualification), then a couple of fourth-placed finishes in Japan and Bahrain. Further progress in Saudi Arabia earned the Monegasque a deserved first podium of the season.
While teammate Lewis Hamilton continues to struggle in his new machinery (more on that later), Leclerc is beginning to find pace in his 2025 challenger and could prove to be a nuisance to the championship contenders in races to come.
Winner - Ferrari’s pit stops
Even when Ferrari had a serious race-winning or even potentially championship-winning car over previous seasons, you could often count on the Scuderia’s strategic shortcomings to undermine the team’s chances.
This season, however, Australia aside, Ferrari’s strategists have tended to get things right on a Sunday, including in Bahrain when the team refused Charles Leclerc’s request to reconsider their call for a pit stop.
The stops themselves have been magnificent too, with Ferrari recording the fastest pit stop at each of the first five races this season. Leclerc’s tyre change in Jeddah was completed in just 2.00 seconds, a record so far in 2025.
Even if the Ferrari does still lack fundamental pace on track, the men in red currently boast the strongest team in the pit lane.
Winner - The competitive order
In a season that has already delivered some unbelievably close Qualifying sessions, Saturday in Saudi Arabia topped the lot as Max Verstappen beat Oscar Piastri to pole by just one one-hundredth of a second. Come the chequered flag on Sunday, three different constructors occupied the top three places and were covered by just eight seconds.
Mercedes, however, were disappointed not to be in the mix too, with Toto Wolff lamenting the team’s “worst performance so far” in 2025.
While you may wish to caveat the tight finish by arguing that things could have been different had Norris not crashed in Qualifying or that Piastri had extra pace in hand, the fact remains that the outcomes of both Qualifying and the Grand Prix in Jeddah underlined just how close the top teams are in 2025, and how much every single error could potentially cost.
Loser - Lando Norris
The Qualifying session for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix provided what may transpire to be the first key moment in this season’s title battle.
Lando Norris, so evenly matched for pace with teammate Oscar Piastri so far this season, had appeared to have the upper hand throughout Friday and Saturday in Jeddah. However, just four turns into his banker lap at the start of Q3, the Brit hopped over the kerb at Turn 4 before careering into the barriers at the exit of Turn 5, ensuring a start from P10 on Sunday.
Norris was able to recover to fourth place, cutting his losses in the Drivers’ Championship, but this will be scant consolation in the bigger picture. For the first time this season, he now trails Piastri in the Championship, and on current form, that looks like a gap that is only likely to widen.
While Piastri fought and ultimately beat World Champion Max Verstappen, Norris had manners put on him two laps running by an ailing Lewis Hamilton, who, for all his woes, has not forgotten the racecraft that won him seven world titles.
The result for Norris also continues a worrying trend of having achieved a decreasing number of points at each round so far this season. Having started off emphatically with 25 points in Australia, Norris has garnered 19, 18, 15 and 12 points in the four Grands Prix since.
As Sebastian Vettel eloquently expressed, there is nothing wrong with showing emotion as a Formula One driver. In fact, even Piastri, often the calmest man on track, displayed moments of uncharacteristic panic over the team radio in Jeddah. However, if Norris has designs on winning this year’s World Championship, he will need to find a way to part with some of his emotion and hit a mental reset button before Miami.
Loser - Lewis Hamilton
Asked what he needed to do to get to grips with his new Ferrari machinery, Lewis Hamilton’s answer was simple, if a tad unrealistic. If the easiest way for the seven-time world champion to gel with his car is to get a “brain transplant”, there may be a long road ahead.
Hamilton appeared buoyed after his performance seven days prior in Bahrain, saying he had “figured out” how to extract speed from the SF-25. Fast-forward a week, however, and it appeared that he had taken two steps back from his one step forward in Sakhir.
The Brit was consistently half a second to six tenths of a lap slower than teammate Charles Leclerc all weekend, including during Sunday’s Grand Prix, in which he finished 31 seconds behind the Monégasque.
Five rounds in, and the Shanghai International Circuit in China has been the only track where Hamilton truly appears to have looked at home in his Ferrari, beating Leclerc in both Qualifying sessions, the sprint and the Grand Prix (even if both were disqualified from the latter).
By contrast, he has arguably never looked as far off the pace as he did in Saudi Arabia, and despite fending off the faster car of Lando Norris for a couple of laps, it was a bleak weekend for Formula One’s most successful driver.
Loser - Red Bull
You may remember that Yuki Tsunoda failed to make it out of the first chicane during Sunday’s Grand Prix following a tangle with Pierre Gasly. This, however, was only to be a minor subplot in a bizarre evening for Red Bull Racing.
Max Verstappen’s five-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage at the start of the race led to some very strange behaviour from both driver and team principal following the chequered flag, as Verstappen completely refused to engage with the media and Christian Horner emerged in the paddock with printed photographs to protest his driver’s innocence.
Neither Verstappen nor Horner seemed to reflect on why the overtaking rules that caused the Dutchman to receive a penalty exist as they do. For several years, Verstappen has, arguably to his credit, exploited the regulations by aggressively outbraking himself to ensure he was ahead of his rival at the apex. Previously, given the rules as they were, he could not be given a penalty.
Now that steps have been taken to outlaw manoeuvres such as the one he pulled against Lewis Hamilton in Brazil in 2021 or Lando Norris in Texas last year, Verstappen will have to rewire himself to concede position more readily, as opposed to what he did in Jeddah.
In refusing to accept that it was Piastri’s corner, Verstappen attempted to make sure that he was ahead at the apex. However, in carrying far too much speed in and running across the run-off area, his argument went out the window.
All in all, it was a chastening evening for Verstappen and Horner, with the former almost certainly requiring a rethink of his defensive driving if he hopes to avoid future penalties.
Loser - Liam Lawson
The Saudi Arabian weekend was far from Liam Lawson’s worst experience behind the wheel of a Formula One car. The man from New Zealand delivered a solid Qualifying performance with P12, even out-qualifying teammate Isack Hadjar, who has displayed some serious pace over one lap so far this season.
Again, the Kiwi was looking relatively strong in the race and would have finished 11th had it not been for an ostensibly incredibly harsh ten-second penalty. Having lined up Jack Doohan coming out of Turn 27, Lawson was well ahead of the Alpine as the pair barrelled into Turn 1 on Lap 28. He did out-brake himself and he did cut the chicane slightly, but attempted to make the corner rather than cutting across. A ten-second penalty appeared excessive when a punishment of an extra five seconds was also an option for the stewards.
Lawson eventually ended up back where he started in twelfth, while Hadjar claimed the final points-paying position in tenth. It was a relatively solid if unspectacular weekend, although the harsh penalty embodied his current predicament.
Lawson is yet to score a point and yet to finish ahead of a teammate this season, and while he came closer in Saudi Arabia, it remains a record he ought to get off his chest.
Loser - Pirelli tyres
Since Pirelli became Formula One’s tyre supplier in 2011, the company has continued to attempt to tread the line between producing tyres that are durable, but not too durable that they can last the whole race, and tyres that fall apart, but not so quickly that they are prone to exploding at their leisure. This tightrope is one that the tyre manufacturer has generally struggled to tread, with the tyres generally falling into one of the above two categories every year.
In Saudi Arabia, the Pirelli tyres were virtually indestructible. The compounds available to the teams were softer than in 2024, which should have yielded greater degradation and encouraged greater strategic flexibility.
However, throughout the weekend, tyre temperature appeared to be a greater limiting factor than degradation, with drivers able to do two push laps on the soft compound in Qualifying, for example. In the race, it meant that the overcut appeared to be at least as viable a strategy option as the undercut. That’s fine, but it certainly offered no incentive for anybody to stop any more than once.
In fact, two drivers - Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto and Haas’ Esteban Ocon - were able to pit for hard tyres at the end of Lap 1. Although neither was particularly competitive, both were able to run to the end, which illustrated that the tyres, or at least the ones that Pirelli selected for the weekend, were a little too durable.
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