Five winners, five losers: Japanese Grand Prix
- Peter Johnson
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Written by Peter Johnson, Edited by Morgan Holiday
It wasn’t the most enthralling Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, but there were still some who came away from the weekend better than others…
Winner - Max Verstappen
Max Verstappen took pole position on Saturday with a new lap record before winning Sunday’s Grand Prix (credit: Red Bull Content Pool)
Verstappen is an obvious choice after the weekend he had. A couple of years ago Verstappen could get away with a bad weekend and still romp home to victory on Sunday, but in 2025 he is having to lean on every ounce of his talent to remain at the front.
Indeed, despite McLaren bringing the fastest car to Japan, Verstappen was able to make the difference around what is regarded as a driver’s circuit. His pole lap on Saturday, a new lap record around Suzuka, eclipsed Lando Norris’ effort by 12-thousandths of a second, but surely the faster McLarens would swamp Verstappen in the race?
This was not the case as Verstappen nailed the start and controlled the race perfectly from the front, never over-exerting himself but not coming under any real pressure from behind. He even managed to overcome early issues with his upshifts, which at one stage appeared more of a threat than any of his rivals on track.
The closest the Dutchman came to losing the lead was after an uncharacteristically slow stop from his pit crew, which led to the hairy moment with Norris at the pit exit, but otherwise it was as well-executed a race weekend as you are ever likely to see.
Just one point in arrears to Norris at the top of the championship and with his qualifying hoodoo broken, Verstappen proved this weekend more than ever that it takes more than just the best car to win races and indeed titles.
Winner - Andrea Kimi Antonelli
The young man at Mercedes took a short break from his academic studies to compete in a Formula One race this weekend and broke a couple of records while doing so.
A fine opening stint on his medium tyres meant Antonelli shuffled through the pack to run at the head of the field for a handful of laps prior to his pit stop, making him the youngest driver ever to lead a Formula One Grand Prix. At 18 years, seven months and 11 days old, Antonelli pipped Verstappen’s record from the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix by just four days, although unlike the Dutchman on that particular day he was not able to follow up with a race win.
However, the Italian rookie was not done there, setting off in hot pursuit after his teammate George Russell in the closing stages. He managed to claim a new race lap record around Suzuka in the process and in so doing became the youngest driver ever to claim a fastest lap. He eventually crossed the line in sixth place, within one and a half seconds of the more experienced Russell.
Sitting in fifth place in the championship and having finished in the top six of every Grand Prix so far, Antonelli is assembling a very impressive debut season and has become the first driver since Lewis Hamilton since 2007 to score points in each of his first three Grands Prix.
Winner - Isack Hadjar
As the lights went green for Qualifying on Saturday, it seemed that Hadjar was in for a painful weekend, both physically and figuratively. The young Frenchman drove through his rogue injury caused by a seatbelt issue to claim his best qualifying result of the season, out-qualifying his idol Lewis Hamilton and continuing to demonstrate his blistering one-lap speed.
From seventh place on the grid, Hadjar drove a fine race to come home in eighth, losing just one position to Hamilton’s Ferrari. He did demonstrate some excellent racecraft in the middle part of the race, though, scything through some slower runners after his pit stop, the highlight of which was a move around the outside of Carlos Sainz’s Williams into Turn One.
After his disastrous Formula One debut in Australia when he failed to make the start of the race, Hadjar has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the Lawson-Tsunoda saga as all of the attention at Red Bull has been deflected elsewhere. He has quietly but efficiently gone about his work to prove why he is on the Formula One grid and with his first career points now in the bag he has a platform to build upon going forward.
Winner - Oliver Bearman
Three races into the 2025 season, it is difficult to know exactly where Haas sit in the pecking order. They were the final two finishers at the curtain raiser in Australia, before taking a double points finish in China just a week later. In Japan, one of their cars looked competitive while the other languished towards the back of the field.
The Haas that was fighting for points at Suzuka was the one at the hands of Bearman. On Saturday he not only avoided Q1 elimination (the first time either Haas driver has done so this season) but he went all the way to Q3, achieving his first ever top 10 start.
He followed his impressive qualifying up with a second points finish of the season, coming home where he started in 10th place.
Winner - Alex Albon
A stellar start to 2025 for the Williams of Alex Albon has seen him collect points in each of the first three Grands Prix, the only driver outside of the top four teams to do so.
His consistently impressive performances have also shown that Williams possess the most competitive package they have had for several years. Once Sainz gets up to speed they should be the best of the rest behind the top four.
Once the dust settles on the Japanese Grand Prix, Albon himself may even reflect positively on his solid ninth-placed finish, despite publicly lambasting his team for their strategy choice mid-race.
2025 has the potential to be a real make-or-break year for Albon, finally having a competitive teammate at Williams who many expect to be as fast, if not quicker, than him. However, he has out-qualified and finished ahead of Sainz in each race this season so far, firmly demonstrating that he has the speed to match and indeed beat a top driver in the same car.
Loser - McLaren
One thing that was always likely to help Verstappen’s championship cause this season was his clear status as Red Bull’s number one driver, as opposed to McLaren’s evenly matched pairing of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
This weekend was the first time this season that Verstappen was able to capitalise on McLaren’s fence-sitting, as they failed to initiate a driver swap to allow Piastri to challenge the race leader.
This conundrum only arose in the first place because of McLaren’s lack of foresight to split their drivers’ strategies and potentially give Verstappen and Red Bull a headache.
Rather than pitting one driver early and letting one go long, McLaren chose to execute an identical strategy to Verstappen, providing no tyre offset or undercut or overcut opportunities. Piastri pitted to shed his medium tyres just a lap before the leading pair of Norris and Verstappen, and while McLaren’s pit crew almost helped Norris take the lead in the pitlane with a superb stop, the championship leader should have stayed out for longer and created a tyre offset.
It appears McLaren are reluctant to have any influence over the drivers’ championship battle by compromising either driver’s strategy for the good of the team, but surely it is too early in the season to make that call.
By failing to split their strategy, ultimately both drivers lost out to Verstappen, who claimed at least seven points at the expense of the two McLarens.
Loser - Sauber
While Nico Hülkenberg’s seventh-placed finish at Albert Park gave Sauber a dream start to their season, it was never really considered a true reflection of their pace. However, the hope has remained that they may be less detached from the rest of the field as they were last season.
This weekend was much more akin to the Sauber of 2024, as both drivers were eliminated in Q1 for the first time this season (they were also both eliminated in SQ1 in Shanghai).
Gabriel Bortoleto, who has shown glimpses of speed this season, sits bottom of the championship with a best result of 14th in China, which was aided by three disqualifications ahead of him, while the ever-reliable Hülkenberg has come nowhere close to repeating his heroics of Melbourne.
It is becoming clear that Sauber still have the worst package on the grid, albeit not by as much as last year, and they will need every point they can get in their fight against Alpine in the constructors’ championship.
Loser - Lance Stroll
Lance Stroll was one of my five “winners” in China, having had an impressive start to the season with two points finishes in the opening two rounds.
However, there can be no denying that he experienced a severe dip in form at Suzuka. The Canadian qualified slowest in the field on pure pace before finishing the race twentieth and last, and was the only driver to be lapped (although he was the only man to pit twice). His teammate Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, marked his first finish of the season with 11th place.
Stroll has shown in the early rounds of this season that he is capable of offering more to Aston Martin than he did last year - just 26% of the team’s points total, to be precise - but he will hope to avoid more weekends like this where he experiences an inexplicable lack of pace.
Loser - Jack Doohan
Jack Doohan had a rather disastrous Friday, sitting out of Practice 1 as Alpine utilised reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa before he suffered an almighty shunt in the opening minutes of Practice 2.
The young Australian was audibly shaken as he reported to his team that he was OK, before moving gingerly from the wreckage of his accident. To make matters worse, although it initially appeared that the crash was not his fault, it later transpired that his forgetting to close the DRS as he barrelled into Turn 1 caused the car to spin due to lack of downforce.
On Saturday, Doohan was only able to muster up a 19th-placed grid position, but on Sunday he did recover to 14th, making up more positions than any other driver.
Had he had a smoother Friday, the rookie may have had an opportunity to fight in and around the fringes of the top 10. However, at some point he is going to need a much more solid weekend to settle his early-season nerves and give him confidence moving forward.
Loser - Suzuka
It is well-documented that Suzuka is a track adored by Formula One drivers up and down the paddock, and indeed racing drivers across the world. Hamilton seems to sing the track’s praises every season, while many other drivers have also publicly expressed their love for the circuit.
However, there is a clear distinction between circuits that are fun to drive and circuits that provide good racing. Monaco is another track that springs to mind in this regard.
Had Hamilton not managed to overtake Hadjar, last weekend’s race would have been just the second Grand Prix in history to see the top 10 finish in the exact same order they started. The only race so far to suffer this ignominy was the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix.
The track itself has not really changed since the days that it provided some of the most memorable moments in Formula One history - think Senna and Prost colliding (twice) and Fernando Alonso overtaking Michael Schumacher around the outside of 130R.
The problem therefore clearly lies more with the current generation of cars rather than the track itself, although the event as a whole has probably not been helped by its move to an April date, as opposed to the traditional late September/early October. Cooler temperatures at this time of year in Japan have arguably limited strategy choices, as tyres don’t get up to temperature as quickly and limit racing action. This was proved by the ineffectiveness of the undercut in this year’s race.
The 2025 Japanese Grand Prix will be remembered mainly for the series of grass fires that disrupted practice and Qualifying and the total inability of the drivers to race wheel to wheel, demonstrated best by Verstappen and the McLarens at the front. Hopefully Suzuka will be one of the big beneficiaries of the new regulations for 2026, which should see the cars able to fight one another much more closely.
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