McLaren driver Lando Norris opened the F1 2025 season with a win in the Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park.

Norris converted pole position into victory in a rain-affected race, with Red Bull driver Max Verstappen second and George Russell third for Mercedes. Here are our conclusions from Melbourne…

Lando Norris and McLaren are stronger for the experience of 2024

If the cars were all painted white in Melbourne this weekend, you would have sworn that the one at the front was Max Verstappen in the Red Bull.

That, perhaps, is the biggest compliment you could pay Lando Norris and McLaren in the aftermath of the Australian Grand Prix.

After all the lost wins and missed opportunities of last season, it was striking just how controlled both team and driver were as they carefully and strategically navigated their way through this race, the kind of dramatic, rain-affected race they would have found a way to lose less than a year ago.

Much of that, of course, is down to the work on the MCL39, which has reversed the trend of recent years of McLaren falling behind their rivals with winter development to not merely maintain but increase the pace advantage with which they ended last season.

As noted by this column after last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, it is amazing how much easier life is when you have the quickest car at your disposal, one to conceal any lingering shortcomings in other areas.

Yet there is a deeper change affecting McLaren, who along with both drivers have entered the new season with a self-assuredness befitting of their status as reigning Constructors’ Champions – a sure sign that they are better, stronger, sharper, more complete for the experiences of 2024.

Having the fastest car is one thing, but on this early evidence they now appear to have the poise and clarity of thought to go with it too.

Norris and McLaren have consistently rejected the suggestion over recent years that Lando’s temperament risks holding him back and that he struggles to keep his composure in high-pressure moments.

Actions speak louder than words, however, and a little anecdote recently revealed that, deep down, the team have sensed it too at times.

Zak Brown let slip over the winter that McLaren decided against telling Norris the true state of play in the Constructors’ title fight in Abu Dhabi after a first-lap collision with Max Verstappen rendered Oscar Piastri no help.

Why?

The only plausible explanation, surely, is that had he been made aware that the team’s hopes were resting on him and him alone, Lando would have started to overthink, felt the burden and potentially made a mistake or two to give Ferrari a sniff of stealing the Championship.

Better, Zak and Andrea Stella reasoned, to keep it from him. Save him from himself.

You suspect that the Norris of the 2025 Australian Grand Prix – the birth of Lando 2.0, anyone? – would have shouldered, perhaps relished, that additional responsibility.

There were more than a few moments when this race could have slipped away from him: when he ran perilously wide at Turn 12 as the rain returned, for instance, or timing the jump from slicks to intermediates or during those all-important Safety Car restarts too.

The final hurdle?

That came with around two-and-a-half laps to go when he ran wide through Turn 6 and suffered damage to the floor, the lost momentum up the following straight losing most of his 1.6-second lead over Verstappen in an instant.

Now this was pressure.

If there was ever going to be a moment when the edgy Norris of old was going to resurface, it was right here and now with the Red Bull of the reigning World Champion darting around in his mirrors with DRS enabled, knowing that one snatched brake or one tyre on a damp patch of track would ruin all his fine work up to that point.

Then came exactly the right words at the exactly right time from his engineer: “Verstappen has DRS. The pace is in the car, do not overpush it.”

It’s amazing how much easier life is when you have the quickest car at your disposal.

It was just what Lando needed to hear at that moment, an engineerspeak remix of Norris’s clumsily worded comment over the winter – unfairly twisted as an attempt to downplay Verstappen’s talent and achievements – that he does not need to do “anything special” (by which he really meant try too hard or overstretch) to beat Max.

There was some awe last year when Verstappen held off a charging Norris in the closing laps to win at Imola, a sense that perhaps only he – the great Max Verstappen, born with an immunity to pressure – could have pulled off such a feat.

Yet there was Norris, finally laying the ghosts of Sochi 2021 and Canada/Silverstone 2024 to rest by passing the stress test too.

A breakthrough moment? Too early to tell.

Right here, though, was an early sign that we’re dealing with a very different, more mature Norris in 2025.

A Norris blossoming before our very eyes, quite possibly into F1’s next World Champion.

‘The Max factor’ will buy Red Bull time in F1 2025

Given the way 2024 unfolded, and how dramatically they lost their way with the development of the RB20, nobody was expecting any miracles from Red Bull at the start of this season.

The worst-case scenario?

Last year’s lowest moments becoming the new normal. Fifth the maximum result on any given weekend. Max Verstappen struggling to contain his anger with each passing weekend and activating that much-discussed exit clause in his contract before he reached the summer break.

The best-case scenario? Probably something like this, actually.

Not the fastest, but quick enough to get Max close. Close enough to make the leaders wary. Close enough to turn third on the grid into second, maybe even second into a win, if circumstances fall favourably.

Even better? A more benign, driver-friendly car from the start of the year, offering a more stable platform to build on as the season develops.

Red Bull ticked all those boxes in Australia, Max producing a performance convincing enough for some to ignore the papaya-tinted evidence of their own eyes and still tip him for a fifth straight title in 2025.

That it came barely two weeks after the RB21’s muted outing in testing, where the most common complaints over the 2024 car (reacting unpredictably to setup changes, unstable over kerbs and bumps) resurfaced, serves as a reminder that Red Bull still set the standard when it comes to troubleshooting and resolving a car’s issues.

How much more of the RB21’s potential will have been unlocked, you wonder, by the time it returns to Bahrain a month from now?

Certainly, Verstappen’s remark after qualifying in Melbourne that he felt at “one” with the car, something he never once said of its predecessor even when it was dominating a year ago, would have increased McLaren’s urgency to cash in while they are clearly fastest of all.

In the weeks since the Bahrain test, Helmut Marko has often spoken of “the Max factor”, the belief that even though others may have a faster car Red Bull have by far the best driver on their side to single-handedly bridge the gap.

Red Bull are more reliant on Verstappen’s genius than they would like right now. Have been for the best part of a year.

Yet the Max factor will buy the team time at the start of this season, keeping himself in touching distance of the McLarens before the development race begins in earnest.

Or until the FIA’s Spanish Grand Prix technical directive potentially brings McLaren back into Red Bull’s clutches.

It’s up to Red Bull, specifically Pierre Waché and his technical team, to use that time wisely.

Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari are still in the process of getting to know each other

A very amusing meme, depicting an imaginary 2025 team radio conversation between Lewis Hamilton and the Ferrari pit wall, did the rounds on social media last month.

“Are we going Plan B?” Hamilton asks.

“Si,” replies his race engineer.

“Plan C?”

“No, B.”

“OK, Plan B then.”

“Si.”

“What the hell are you talking about, man!”

It wasn’t quite like that during a stressful Australian Grand Prix as Hamilton drove a Ferrari F1 car in the wet for only the second time following his brief outing at Fiorano with the 2023 car two months ago.

Yet his very-polite-but-equally-quite-firm dismissal of his race engineer’s attempts to guide him though the race was indicative of a team and driver still very much in the process of getting to know each other.

A distant 10th-place finish on his Ferrari debut was surely not what he had in mind when he posed for that photograph outside Enzo Ferrari’s former office, looking every inch the $57million the team are reportedly paying him this season, back in January.

There were encouraging signs, though, as Hamilton lapped within two tenths of Charles Leclerc, widely regarded as the fastest driver over a single lap today and fully up to speed in his seventh full season as a Ferrari driver, throughout qualifying.

There was no shame in that. Not this early in his time at Ferrari. Not when he’s coming off the back of a season in which his one-lap pace deserted him at Mercedes to the extent that he publicly declared himself “not fast anymore.”

Expect that gap to shrink over the coming months as the communication between team and driver develops, his knowledge of Ferrari’s processes and systems starts to become second nature and his confidence in both the car and the team around him grows.

And if it doesn’t? Then we can jump to conclusions about where this partnership may or may not be heading.

Only a fool would do so after the first race.

Liam Lawson must survive these tricky first few weeks at Red Bull

So why did Red Bull elect to sign Liam Lawson, not Yuki Tsunoda, as Max Verstappen’s new team-mate for 2025?

Christian Horner and Helmut Mark0 have hit home the point often enough over recent months.

In short, they sense that he’s made of the right stuff to be a Red Bull Racing driver in the era of Verstappen.

They believe he has the required resilience, the composure, the personality to take a beating from Max most weekends and still remain standing once the avalanche has done its worst.

Crucially, they feel he holds the key to co-existing alongside Verstappen – being smart, realistic and pragmatic enough to concentrate only on himself and avoid becoming obsessed with trying and inevitably failing to match, let alone beat, Max.

For all the sympathy that followed when Tsunoda was overlooked last December, most neutral observers would have agreed with Red Bull’s assessment that Lawson is far better equipped to face all the challenges that come with the hardest job in F1.

All that, however, was just theory.

Now, after he followed in the footsteps of Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Sergio Perez by failing to reach Q3 on his Red Bull debut before crashing out in the wet, comes the cold, hard reality.

In his defence, Lawson was prepared for a start like this.

Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com at Bahrain testing, he outlined how he had never even visited some of the early venues on the calendar before and would be spending as much time getting up to speed with the circuits as he would adapting to the Red Bull at the beginning of the season.

The great challenge facing him now?

To ensure that when these tricky first few races are over and the calendar takes him to more familiar venues, he is not already at the spiralling stage, left psychologically shattered by life in the same team as Verstappen.

To ensure that he is not, for instance, sent down the same maddening path as Gasly, who became so utterly fixated on small details – going through a variety of seats, setting up the car for specific corners rather than the entire lap – that Red Bull were left with no option but to drop him after just half a season in 2019.

If Verstappen managed to wear down drivers of the calibre and experience of Gasly and Perez – even Daniel Ricciardo, still fondly remembered as the best team-mate Max ever had, was feeling the strain come the end of his Red Bull career in 2018 – Lawson, a veteran of just 11 F1 starts entering this season, could be just the latest to have his face pressed into the mud in 2025.

Another reason Red Bull chose Lawson? His confidence.

He’s spoken a lot about that over the last few months, exclusively telling PlanetF1.com how he was just “born with it” after picking fights with Perez and Fernando Alonso in his cameo at the end of last season.

That famous self-belief of his? It’s about to be tested like never before.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Is Fernando Alonso starting to look his age?

Haven’t you heard? There’s a generational shift happening in F1 right now.

Fernando Alonso has been around for so long that he’s even managing a member of the new breed, Gabriel Bortoleto, one of six drivers who embarked upon their first full season in Australia.

Three years after he expressed incredulity that Oscar Piastri was born a month after he made his own F1 debut in 2001, the humbling moments keep on coming.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the impressive Mercedes debutant and the youngest of this year’s cohort of rookies at 18, was born in August 2006, two days before Alonso finished second to Felipe Massa at that year’s Turkish Grand Prix as he closed in on a second World Championship with Renault.

Feeling old, you say? Just imagine how it makes Fernando feel.

One of the greatest achievements of Alonso’s career has been his ability to stop the clocks, delaying the effects of age on his performance to race competitively at a high standard into his fifth decade.

At the beginning of a season during which he will turn 44, however, are we finally witnessing the first serious signs of Alonso starting to look his age?

There was once a time, and not too long ago, when an Alonso mistake was an exceptionally rare occurrence. For his last major error, though, rewind just four races to his crash in qualifying at last year’s Brazilian Grand Prix.

It was no great surprise that Alonso’s latest accident in Australia came in remarkably similar conditions to Brazil 2024.

As explained in this column in the aftermath of that race, Fernando belongs to the group of ‘reactive’ drivers whose technique sees them literally react to whatever the car is doing at any given moment.

These drivers live almost entirely on their reflexes – their ability to catch the slide when the rear threatens to step out of line – and their jerkier steering and pedal inputs leave them with a considerably smaller margin for error than their more ‘manipulative’ peers.

It is why so many of those drivers spun after touching the painted white lines back in Brazil; why Isack Hadjar, Jack Doohan, Carlos Sainz and Liam Lawson – reactive drivers all – ran into trouble in the challenging conditions in Australia on Sunday; why Oliver Bearman, another one, was unflinchingly aggressive to the point of reckless in both the wet and dry in a difficult Haas.

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Alonso’s recent spate of accidents would not be sparking quite such alarm if it wasn’t for his particularly shaky end to last year, marred by his absence on two consecutive media days in Mexico and Brazil as he struggled with an intestinal infection.

Then came the sorry sight at the end of the Brazilian GP, where the walking wounded was seen hobbling away from his Aston Martin in parc ferme after having his ageing body pummeled by porpoising.

Then came the revelation in Abu Dhabi that he had also been quietly struggling with a shoulder injury in the closing weeks of the season, followed by a vow that he would return “more prepared physically” in 2025.

Not because he was in any way unfit last season, of course, but likely because his age dictates that he must push his body harder than ever these days just to keep up with competitors young enough to be his children.

Having found joy even in the little things for a while following his 2021 comeback, he is becoming increasingly irascible about life generally in F1 too, not for the first time expressing frustration with the mind-numbing routine of post-practice media engagements – hardly a new development – on Friday in Melbourne.

Old man yells at cloud, in other words.

With Aston Martin coming as close as any team to writing off this season, there is an assumption that Alonso can afford to coast through 2025 before at last being presented with the car of his dreams by Adrian Newey next season.

But not so fast. Not when Aston Martin have been heavily linked with an ambitious move for Max Verstappen in the very near future.

Alonso is unfortunate that Verstappen’s potential availability comes at a time when he has reached an age that typically makes those in charge of sports teams a little…triggerfingery (technical term).

See, for instance, the case of James Anderson, the forty-something England cricketer ushered into retirement last year by his bosses, condemned for disrespecting a fan favourite but understandably anxious to safeguard the long-term competitiveness of the team.

It does not help either that Aston Martin’s current state makes it difficult to judge Alonso’s own performance level – never more than a tenth ahead of Lance Stroll in qualifying here (a Stroll overperformance, an Alonso underperformance, the car’s current limit or just the maximum this pairing can extract from it?) – and whether he would be magically restored to his brilliant best if handed a more competitive car.

At Renault (2009) and McLaren (2015-18) previously, Alonso could be sometimes guilty of allowing his standards to drop when he realised that he was fighting a lost cause, as though saving himself and preserving his energy for bigger battles to come.

He will not be alone at Aston Martin in longing to press the fast-forward button and wake up in 2026.

Yet if he thinks he can go through the motions again now, with all those question marks over his age and with the spectre of Max hanging over Aston Martin, he will be playing a dangerous game.

If Aston Martin prove successful in their rumoured pursuit of Verstappen, after all, it won’t be Lance being forced to make way.

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