McLaren driver Oscar Piastri claimed his first win of the F1 2025 season at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai.

Piastri converted pole position into victory with McLaren team-mate Lando Norris second and George Russell third for Mercedes. On a weekend when Liam Lawson’s season slumped to a new low at Red Bull, here are our conclusions from China…

Liam Lawson’s struggles show it’s never been harder to be Max Verstappen’s team-mate

More accomplished and experienced drivers than Liam Lawson struggled to adjust to life at Red Bull even when the car was a dream, the team were winning races with increasing effortlessness and Max Verstappen was only still just emerging as a force.

So what chance does Lawson – does anyone – have of making a success of it now?

Now that the car is, by Red Bull’s own admission, not quite how they want it? Now that the first little cracks are showing in the team, a team without some of the key pillars of their success over the last 15 years?

Now Max, already with a reputation for taking the light out of the eyes of his team-mates back then, has long cemented his status as a four-time World Champion and the most complete driver in F1 today with no weaknesses of note?

Throw in Lawson’s lack of experience – just 11 appearances divided across the last two seasons and with no history of racing at the first two circuits of the season in Australia and China – and a start like this was not unexpected.

The trick now, as noted in last week’s conclusions from the Australian Grand Prix, is to avoid being buried by the experience before he really gets the chance to find his feet at more favourable and familiar venues.

To get out of here without that famous self-belief of his – once again Lawson felt the need to remind the world how confident he still is after qualifying last for the second time in 24 hours in Shanghai, a suspiciously brash statement widely agreed by experts in these matters to be a sign of someone attempting to conceal an underlying insecurity when repeated so often, as if trying to convince themselves – left in tatters.

It should – should – get easier from here provided he is not scarred by the statistic of making a worse start to his Red Bull career than Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Sergio Perez, the other names on Red Bull’s roll of dishonour.

Yet is Lawson already fighting a losing battle?

Already there are suggestions that Red Bull could replace him ahead of the next race in Japan with a meeting in Milton Keynes expected to take place this week as the team work out how to proceed from here.

All sounds very Spa 2024.

One thing is clear: it will be far, far easier for Red Bull to make a mid-season change now than it ever was during Perez’s time.

Unlike Checo, whose portfolio of personal sponsors posed a complication for any plans for a mid-season swap last year, Lawson is beholden to Red Bull like pretty much every driver (with the notable exception of Verstappen) to have graduated from the team’s academy in the past.

And as we know from the famous Verstappen/Kvyat swap in 2016, the contracts of Red Bull-affiliated drivers give the team the power to interchange them between both F1 teams at will.

But if not Lawson, then whom?

Yuki Tsunoda? If Red Bull really, truly had any confidence in him, they would have given him a chance long before now.

Isack Hadjar?

Is that the same Isack Hadjar whose highly emotional reaction to his crash on the formation lap just one week ago was branded “embarrassing” by Helmut Marko?

And whose rants over team radio in the junior categories already drew unflattering comparisons to Tsunoda’s suspect temperament, the very reason Red Bull overlooked Yuki for a 2025 seat in the first place?

Sorry, what’s that? Arvid Lindblad, you say?

If he is, as the team seem to believe, the next Red Bull superstar, they would be well advised to avoid destroying his development too by exposing him to the same environment as Verstappen anytime soon.

Whatever Red Bull choose to do from here, in other words, only the name will change.

The struggle will stay the same in what has become the hardest job in Formula 1.

Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris will rescue a season of McLaren dominance

The bad news?

Nothing, it seems, is going to stop McLaren from painting F1 papaya in 2025.

There are still just enough weaknesses there to keep the opposition interested – see the complaints of both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri that the MCL39 is difficult to drive, for instance, and the team’s overconfident push-cool-push run plan in sprint qualifying that opened the door for Lewis Hamilton to steal pole position in China.

In all likelihood, though, this season – billed as one of the most competitive and unpredictable in F1 history barely a month ago – is likely to develop into one of McLaren dominance.

The good news?

Unlike the eras of Hamilton/Mercedes and Verstappen/Red Bull, both destructive displays of dominance by a single great driver/team combination that proved too good for the common good, a year of complete McLaren control should be redeemed by a title fight between Norris and Piastri.

It promises to be the most compelling rivalry between two team-mates this side of the Hamilton vs Nico Rosberg trilogy of 2014-16.

There was a sense of the air escaping from the balloon in Australia a week ago when Piastri’s spin in the rain, marring what had otherwise been a strong weekend, put him 23 points behind Norris after just one race.

That he has struck back so quickly, producing another impressive performance at a very different circuit posing a very different challenge, to get an early victory on the board is a very encouraging sign that 2025 could still meet expectations from an entertainment perspective.

Consistency was Piastri’s great weakness in the early years of his F1 career in 2023/24, his performance level fluctuating from race to race as he took an age – strangely longer than most rookies in the modern era despite his obvious promise – to master the vagaries of the Pirelli tyres.

Yet there were flashing indications last year – see that spell of four podiums in five races, bookended by his victories in Budapest and Baku – that those data banks were finally being filled out.

And now as he begins his third full season – incidentally the time it takes (take note, Red Bull) for young drivers to get fully up to speed in F1 according to the former Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost – Piastri looks ready.

Ready for what?

Ready to compete for victory at every race the car is capable of it. Ready to expose and exploit Norris’s pressure points often enough to potentially swing an exceptionally close title fight in his favour.

Ah, pressure. Still, after all this time, the greatest barrier to Norris realising his potential.

For all the talk that Australia heralded the birth of Lando 2.0, there remains a suspicion that Norris, not unlike Sebastian Vettel, requires a dominant car to mask his lingering shortcomings in other areas.

It was evident again here throughout a scrappy weekend as he abandoned his final laps in both SQ3 and Q3 and made a poor mistake in the sprint before talking himself out of contention for the win in the immediate aftermath of qualifying, citing his personal struggles with front-tyre graining.

An admirable honesty? No. Not in elite sport it’s not.

Call it plain old vulnerability, giving little victories away to the opposition before he even steps into the car.

Norris has done that so much over the last 12 months that you’d think he’d have learned, or someone close to him would have told him to stop, by now.

It makes the task facing Piastri, as was the case with Verstappen last year, really quite simple: seize every opportunity to bring Norris’s doubts to the surface, push and prod him into that crisis corner as often as possible and keep making sure that he remains his own worst enemy.

How Lando responds to the pressure exerted by Oscar, and the unique moments of friction and adversity inevitable in a World Championship battle between two team-mates, is likely to decide the destiny of this year’s title.

So, no. Sorry to disappoint.

Maybe 2025 will not be exactly what it promised over the winter.

Maybe it won’t be about Verstappen raging against a declining Red Bull in an attempt to bat off an ever-maturing McLaren pair with Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and a new-look Mercedes all somewhere in the mix too.

Maybe this season, the greatest of our lives in theory, will turn out to be a McLaren-a-thon in reality.

Yet fear not and stay tuned: a battle between Norris and Piastri, both equally talented yet still incomplete, will keep us keen.

The subject of Max Verstappen’s future is about to get very interesting

Max Verstappen had no choice but to grin and bear it last year.

He had a points lead to protect, a World Championship to win and a team of people to keep focused and motivated. Whatever it took to get the job done, he had to do it.

Beyond the occasional unflattering comment about the car’s handling over team radio and in the media, Max was the leader Red Bull needed him to be in the second half of 2024.

The more fierce criticism of the team and how badly they had lost their way with the car’s development? That was left to Jos, playing the role of The Enforcer to perfection.

Might be a different story this year.

Red Bull have been transparent over their approach with the RB21, initially producing a car with a lower overall performance ceiling for 2025 but crucially more driveable than its predecessor.

The raw pace? That, they say, will come in due course. Or that’s what they’re clinging to anyway.

But what if it doesn’t? Or doesn’t bring gains sufficient enough for Max to intrude on the battle developing over at McLaren?

That’s the moment when the subject of Verstappen’s future will start to get very interesting.

Max Verstappen to leave Red Bull? The potential F1 2026 domino effect

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If his second place in Australia owed much to Max’s genius at exploiting the variables, the first routine race of 2025 in dry conditions at a more conventional (albeit extremely front-limited) circuit offered a more accurate indication of where Red Bull really stand at the start of this season.

And if this is how it’s going to be in 2025, Verstappen cast adrift from the leaders to the point of anonymity for most of the race, his loyalty to Red Bull – without a title on the line to hold them together this time – is going to be tested like never before.

For if there is anything we have learned about Max Verstappen over the years, it is that his competitive spirit will not allow him to tolerate a period of underperformance for any longer than he has to.

A race in which he is not competing for victory is merely a wasted afternoon.

A wasted year? Now that’s just inconceivable. Especially after all the success he’s become accustomed to recently.

If this is starting to sound a little bit like Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes post-2021, a once-irresistible team/driver combination struggling to recapture the old magic no matter what they try, that’s because it is.

Only with a considerably shorter fuse.

Having spent the early years of his career helping build Red Bull into a title-winning force, Verstappen will surely not hang around to witness the fall.

And his regular warnings that he is likely to retire young do not suggest that this is someone willing to invest time in building another project, either again with Red Bull or elsewhere.

Time is short. He wants to win and win now. Or get back to winning at the earliest conceivable opportunity.

So expect to hear more about this much-discussed performance clause in Max’s contract if weekends like this threaten to become a pattern and F1’s 2026 season of change edges ever closer.

That an exit clause exists is beyond doubt, ever since Christian Horner told media including PlanetF1.com as long ago as last year’s Dutch Grand Prix that Verstappen’s deal contains a “performance element.”

The precise details of this clause are less certain, although a newspaper report towards the end of last year claimed that Verstappen will be free to leave Red Bull at the end of 2025 if he is lower than third in the drivers’ championship after a significant portion of the season has been completed.

If true, that would appear to mirror an arrangement widely reported to have been included in at least one of Verstappen’s previous Red Bull contracts.

So let’s for a moment assume that it is true and that the ‘significant portion of the season’ bit refers, as clauses of this nature often do, to the summer break.

Until now it was unthinkable that Verstappen, the dominant World Champion of the last few years, would be lower than third in the standings after the Belgian Grand Prix, the final race before the summer break at the end of July.

Yet if China is a sign of things to come, with the McLarens over the hill and far away and George Russell leading a rejuvenated Mercedes, it is not so difficult to envisage the circumstances of Red Bull’s worst nightmare falling into place.

That’s the same George Russell, by the way, who with his own contract expiring at the end of this season would almost certainly be the driver replaced if Max chooses Mercedes as his next destination.

The same George Russell who, after being spotted having a very public conversation with McLaren’s hierarchy in the paddock in Melbourne, was pictured embracing Flavio Briatore of Alpine this weekend.

Coincidence?

Maybe Slideshow George knows something we don’t know…

Ferrari’s double DSQ strengthens the case for increased pre-season testing

Qualifying day in Melbourne last week marked a decade since the most depressing season opener in Formula 1’s recent history.

Having made the long trip over to Australia, one financially troubled team failed to take to the track all weekend long due to an unresolvable software glitch.

Another found themselves at the centre of a legal row after signing two drivers to one seat, culminating in the unforgettable image of one of those drivers walking through the paddock wearing another man’s clothes.

One driver, meanwhile, was ruled out through injury after doing his back in during qualifying.

Two more were lost to technical issues on the reconnaissance lap, leaving only 15 on the starting grid, reduced to 13 (unlucky for some, etc…) after the inevitable shunt on the opening lap took out a couple more.

Eleven drivers finished in total, the winner lapping everyone but his team-mate and three other cars, none of which were within 30 seconds of the leading pair at the end.

Strange to think now that the 2015 Australian Grand Prix, the horror show that signalled the uncertain start of F1’s second season of’ V6-hybrid engines, was staged after three pre-season tests consisting of four days each.

Even with all that preparation, nobody looked remotely ready for the season to begin.

F1 has professionalised (no other word for it) beyond recognition over the last decade to the extent that just a single three-day test has sufficed for four of the last five years.

Yet how many of those to line up on the grid over the last two weeks in Australia and China can honestly say they were ready for the 2025 season to start?

Certainly not Carlos Sainz, unable to contain his frustration with the “ridiculous” lack of testing in Bahrain last month and whose early struggles against Alex Albon can be attributed directly to his shortage of experience in the Williams.

Not Liam Lawson, either, who lost a chunk of his day-and-a-half of test running (the maximum available to each driver if teams split their track time equally) to a Red Bull technical problem in Bahrain.

And not Ferrari, who after introducing so many design changes for 2025 would have doubtless welcomed more time to understand what exactly it is they’re working with this season.

The lack of testing these days meant Lewis Hamilton’s first-ever race distance in a Ferrari F1 car came in the wet in Australia in conditions in which he could barely see.

And to think people wondered he sounded a bit stressed over team radio…

A report from Italy last week claimed that Ferrari’s poor performance in Melbourne was rooted in a “serious” problem with the car’s baseline setup, forcing the team to run the SF-25 in a compromised state for most of the weekend.

It is said the team found that the car’s ride height was too low after Friday practice, with the threat of disqualification from excessive wear to the skid blocks leaving Ferrari with no option but to raise the car for Saturday and Sunday and take the performance hit.

With the predicted setup from the sim not translating to reality in Australia, it is likely an issue Ferrari would have a firmer grip on by now with the benefit of more testing and a fuller understanding of how, for instance, to pitch the car with its new pull-rod front suspension layout.

Yet being forced to guesstimate the setup may well have played a part in the disqualification of Hamilton for excessive skid-block wear (Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly were also DSQed in China but due to fuel-related breaches), an unusual transgression on a newly resurfaced track so smooth that it was likened to a bowling alley by George Russell.

That, by any measure, should not happen.

The arrival of the new-look cars will see F1 expand its pre-season schedule in 2026 with the first of a trio of three-day tests expected to be held in January next year.

If there is any sense, a multi-test winter will become commonplace going forward and not just be reserved only for years in which there are major regulation changes.

Just because F1 can get away with a condensed testing calendar these days does not mean that it should.

Not when so many have started the new season so clearly undercooked.

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