Saudi GP conclusions: Hamilton issues diagnosed as Piastri puts Norris in corner

McLaren driver Oscar Piastri claimed his third victory of the F1 2025 season at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah.

Piastri won after Max Verstappen was hit with a five-second time penalty, with the Red Bull driver forced to settle for second and Charles Leclerc claiming Ferrari’s first podium of F1 2025 in third as Lewis Hamilton’s woes continued. Here are our conclusions from Saudi Arabia…

Oscar Piastri has got Lando Norris exactly where he wants him

Lando Norris should have been more prepared for a season – a battle – like this.

It has been obvious for some time now, at least as long ago as the 2021 Russian Grand Prix, that his temperament is – how to put this politely? – suspect in high-pressure scenarios.

If it wasn’t clear to him and McLaren back in Sochi almost four years ago, and identified as something to work on with some urgency, it really should have been at the end of last season.

The way he cracked even in a season in which he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, failing to make much of an imprint on Max Verstappen’s points lead despite having the faster car for most of the year, was a telling sign that he was unlikely to respond well to the pressures of a real title fight once the points were reset to zero.

So it should be no great surprise that, presented with what looks to all intents and purposes like the car of his dreams in 2025, Lando is somehow managing to conjure up a nightmare.

Enough has been made in this column over recent years about Norris’s frailties compared to the mentality monsters of modern F1 – yet why exactly is Lando the way he is?

Perhaps the answer lies in his support system – or, more accurately, his lack of one compared to his closest peers.

Jos Verstappen, strangely like many parents of highly successful athletes, is often knocked for his harsh treatment of a young Max.

Indeed, there are some who believe the tactics employed Verstappen Sr, including the famous story of Jos abandoning Max at a petrol station on their way home from a kart race, came close to the territory of abuse.

Orthodox parenting it may not have been, yet aren’t such stories indicative of a devoted father determined to ensure that his gifted son did not waste a single ounce of his potential?

If Max did not fully appreciate Jos’s cruel-to-be-kind methods in the early days, he sure as hell does now he stands as a four-time World Champion famed for his apparent immunity to pressure, drilled into him by his father at an exceptionally young age.

Look across the McLaren garage and you will find Mark Webber by the side of Oscar Piastri, likewise instilling those exact qualities – the same toughness, the same resilience – in his protege and putting into practice the harsh lessons of his own unfulfilled career.

Max himself, you sense, sees his relationship with his own father reflected in the master-and-apprentice dynamic between Webber and Piastri.

“I think with Mark by his side, he’s helping him a lot,” Verstappen told media including PlanetF1.com in the post-race press conference on Sunday night in Jeddah.

“It’s great. People learn from their own careers and that’s, of course, what I have with my dad and Mark is trying to also advise Oscar in that.”

Even Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have both spoken of the immense value of having Niki Lauda, the only one in the entire team who spoke their language, available as a sounding board during their years of success at Mercedes.

Lando?

There is no wise old F1 head by his side.

He is finding all this out for himself as he goes along, stumbling in the dark without someone who’s been there, done that to tell him the dos and the don’ts and to guide him every step of the way.

It does not necessarily have to be a barrier to success, but it has shown in the naive nature of the mistakes he has made over recent weeks.

And as this column noted after the Chinese Grand Prix, it makes the job of Piastri in 2025 painfully simple – to push and prod Norris into his little crisis corner, and bring Lando’s well-documented vulnerabilities to the surface, at every opportunity and with no easy escape.

The result?

Piastri is fast emerging as a champion in waiting, looking for all the world like the McLaren driver best placed to ascend to greatness.

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His Max-esque equilibrium has made Norris – despite generally still being the faster of the two on balance and most certainly in Jeddah up until his mistake in Q3 – look more like Sergio Perez on a bad day over the last two race weekends.

Rarely has a driver so evidently gifted seemed so ill at ease with the expectation generated by his talent.

With the overall talent level in elite sport so uniformly high in the modern era, it has never been more true that those who can handle the pressure, those whose technique holds firm even under the most intense scrutiny, are most likely to triumph.

Increasingly, major honours in sport are not won and lost with the body, but in the mind.

There has never been any doubt that Norris has the innate talent and natural pace to potentially ease to this title, yet the poise is sorely lacking.

Always has been. Probably always will be.

And as long as that crucial element of a racing driver’s armoury remains absent, Oscar will continue to have Lando exactly where he wants him.

Remember Lewis Hamilton’s off weekends? They’re now the norm

Long-term followers of Formula 1 will no doubt remember a strange old phenomenon called Lewis Hamilton’s Occasional Off Weekends.

They would occur once or twice per season from around 2008 until roughly the second half of 2017 when, no longer with Nico Rosberg around to cramp his style at Mercedes, Hamilton began the final ascent to his peak.

So inevitable were these off weekends that they would be pretty much priced into any Hamilton title campaign.

He might have the advantage now, people would mutter looking at their watches, but watch out: he’s due a bad one any week now.

The regularity of Hamilton’s off weekends reduced over time, but they never completely went away.

The classic ones were still happening as recently as Monaco 2021, the race time forgot when it comes to working out where that year’s World Championship was really won and lost, where Hamilton was four tenths slower than his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas in qualifying en route to a very nearly lapped seventh place.

Why would Hamilton throw in these stinkers from time to time?

Usually it was down to the tyres. Too hot, too cold, just not right.

Maybe it was the setup, the balance of the car or it just not being suited to a certain circuit layout in certain conditions.

And sometimes, particularly in the years Nicole from the Pussycat Dolls seemed to be very much in love with him one week and did not want to know him the next, the off weekends appeared to be inextricably linked to his emotional condition.

Yet here’s the thing: such weekends were only ever mere blips during otherwise exceptional years in otherwise exceptional machinery.

These days?

With cars he doesn’t very much like at the best of times, inspiring little confidence and lacking rear stability regardless of whether they are painted silver or black or red, those off weekends have become the norm.

Every weekend is an off weekend.

And there’s nothing much Lewis can do about it.

It does not help Hamilton’s case to be remembered as the greatest F1 driver in history that he is so easily shipwrecked by the limitations of his car, especially in a season Max Verstappen is gritting his teeth, getting on with it and dragging a reluctant Red Bull to heights it does not deserve.

Max’s recent feats of ambushing the dominant McLarens to set pole positions at Suzuka and Saudi Arabia are, and quite possibly always have been, beyond Lewis’s own capabilities in a car not exactly to his liking.

It has become fashionable since 2022 to suggest that Hamilton, now 40, is in the midst of some sort of terminal decline. And perhaps there is some truth to it.

Yet how to reason that theory with moments like his victory at Silverstone last year? His recovery from 10th on the grid to second in Las Vegas?

His pole-to-flag victory in the sprint race in China just a few short weeks ago?

If Hamilton were truly washed up, his best days truly behind him and never coming back, surely these little glimmers of hope would not be happening and it would be all constant, non-stop, never-ending misery.

So maybe, like all those years before, the Hamilton of old – or something close enough to it for him to re-emerge as a force – might be magically unlocked when (if?) he is finally reunited with a grippy, driveable car he can work with.

Until that moment comes, though, he is very likely to be stuck in a state of chronic Offweekendicitis.

The big danger here?

The older he gets, and the longer he goes without the car he needs, the more likely Hamilton is to convince himself that he’s finished too.

The Lewis Hamilton Show is working out just fine for Charles Leclerc

The signing of Lewis Hamilton was always going to end one of two ways for Charles Leclerc.

Either Lewis was going to stroll into Maranello, charm the pants off the whole of Italy, grab a few good results early on and drive Charles to self-destruction.

Or life at Ferrari for Lewis was going to unfold much like his Mercedes career ended, unable to live with the younger, quicker man more capable of driving around the car’s flaws.

Leclerc, to his credit, has been hugely welcoming and respectful of Hamilton since his move to Ferrari was announced last year, saying all the right things in proclaiming his eagerness to work with, learn from, measure himself up against a seven-time World Champion.

Yet he would not be human if, beneath the platitudes, he was not also secretly asking himself why on earth Ferrari would even want Lewis bleedin’ Hamilton when they already have Charles Leclerc.

Approaching what should be peak years at the age of 27, and having been at the heart of pretty much everything good about Ferrari over the last six years, isn’t it about time that the team finally threw their full support behind me?

Behind the smiles of pre-season this had the potential to get quite uncomfortable if Hamilton dared to lure Leclerc’s team away from him.

Yet Hamilton’s struggles so far this season have removed any trace of contest between the Ferrari drivers and taken the sting out of the situation entirely.

Leclerc, effectively in a different race with a 30.969-second advantage over Hamilton on Sunday in Saudi Arabia, can simply and quietly get on with the job of driving, racing and leading the team like he always planned to at this stage of his career.

And leave Lewis, the world’s most expensive human shield, to take the heat for Ferrari’s failings and be hounded for answers over why he’s still not the driver he used to be.

The blowback on Ferrari and Fred Vasseur will, as noted after Bahrain, be fierce if Hamilton does not show signs of life soon.

But for Leclerc?

The Lewis Hamilton Show is working out just fine.

Max Verstappen to Aston Martin? Sounds perfect – except for the timing

If you believe what you read, you might recall that it was at this race last year that Aston Martin effectively secured their ticket to the top.

With Red Bull’s behind-the-scenes tensions coming to the surface at the second race of 2024, it was reportedly that very weekend in Jeddah that Lawrence Stroll approached Adrian Newey with an offer he could not refuse.

Within eight weeks of that rumoured encounter, Newey’s departure from Red Bull was made public and the door was open to the most important signing in the history of the Silverstone team.

Twelve months on, are Aston Martin out to complete the set and reunite Red Bull’s holy trinity?

All the talk on Friday in Saudi Arabia, 24 hours before Max’s pole position briefly made everything seem right in Red Bull’s world again, was of a rumoured $300million offer Aston Martin are preparing to make to Verstappen.

Clearly there would be some emotional attraction to reuniting with Newey and Honda, the two key pillars of his recent success, and getting the band back together to conquer the world once more, only this time in green instead of blue.

Yet the obvious obstacle to any Aston Martin move for Verstappen has always been the time it might take for the team to truly emerge as title contenders.

As much as they talk of opportunity knocking under the 2026 regulations, it will likely require at least a couple of years for Aston Martin to fully harness the potential of Newey, their new facilities and their partnership with Honda, effectively re-entering F1 next year following its official withdrawal at the end of 2021.

Compare and contrast to Mercedes, the only other realistic destination for Verstappen, whose preparations for the new rules are widely believed to have been advanced for some time – a suspicion strengthened by the suggestion in Bahrain that only one engine manufacturer is ‘in good shape’ for 2026 as it stands.

If the rumours about Mercedes’ 2026 power unit are true, in other words, even the might of Newey and Honda will struggle to stop it over the next couple of years.

Assuming that both teams – regardless of what they might say publicly – would crawl over hot coals to secure Verstappen’s signature, then it leaves Max with a relatively straightforward choice and a question of his priorities at this stage of his life.

Is he prepared to invest time in another new adventure, probably sacrifice a year or two of title-winning potential in return for a big bag of money and sit tight in the knowledge that his new project, with such investment and brainpower behind it, is virtually guaranteed to succeed at some point?

Or, after all the success he’d had over the last few years, is he determined to get back to not just winning regularly, but dominating, at the earliest convenience?

There, almost certainly, is the difference between Aston Martin and Mercedes for 2026.

Knowing what we know about Max – relentlessly ambitious, career driven, never satisfied unless he is winning and winning right now – which one do you think he’s most likely to pick? Exactly.

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