Abu Dhabi GP conclusions: Lando’s big realisation, Max error punished, the McLaren way

McLaren driver Lando Norris was crowned the F1 2025 world champion in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina.

Red Bull’s four-time world champion Max Verstappen dominated from pole position to take his eighth victory of the season, but it was not enough to stop Norris collecting his maiden title by a margin of two points. Here are our conclusions from Abu Dhabi…

Maybe now Lando Norris will realise just how good he is

Lando Norris has always been a fascinating driver to watch by traditional F1 standards.

All the talent in the world, but with only a fraction of the self-belief.

Usually in sport one thing tends to lead to another: talent breeds performance, breeds confidence, breeds even more performance.

Yet Lando?

Somehow he’s always needed convincing all over again every time he lowers himself into the cockpit of a racing car.

Lando Norris vs Oscar Piastri: McLaren head-to-head scores for F1 2025

? F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

? F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

It was, fittingly for a driver with the Gen Z touch, one of the first series of Drive to Survive that truly opened eyes to the extent of his crushing – at times debilitating – self-doubt.

One particular scene revealed how Lando effectively locked himself in his room inside McLaren’s hospitality unit at the 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix, muttering that he was “one-nil down” already to Daniel Ricciardo after their first qualifying session together as teammates.

The gap between them that day, you ask? A mere half a tenth.

Norris soon put that right, leaving Daniel behind in the race to set the tone for a season in which he surgically removed Ricciardo’s mojo.

Turned out that Lando didn’t know his own strength. His worst fears were proven to be totally unfounded.

But his highly emotional, disproportionate response to a single qualifying result at the start of a new season raised an interesting question: if he was like this after a relatively minor setback, how exactly would he react to real moments of adversity?

Sochi 2021?

Watching Oscar Piastri come along and beat him to a first victory for McLaren at the Qatar sprint race – a disappointment he seemed to take particularly personally – in 2023?

All the various missed opportunities of 2024, culminating in that wretched, rainy afternoon in Brazil?

Look for the signs and it is something both he and McLaren have become mindful of, and sought to manage, over the years.

It was revealing, for instance, when Zak Brown said last winter that the team had decided against keeping Norris informed of the race situation with the constructors’ title on the line in Abu Dhabi.

See also Norris’s recent revelation that he removed the delta time on his steering wheel in qualifying earlier this season, similarly allowing him to concentrate on the simple act of driving without worrying about what it all might mean.

Together they have worked on his weaknesses and tried keep his job as simple and straightforward as possible.

So much so that when Norris was last confronted with real, potentially season-defining disappointment with his retirement at Zandvoort, it was not the end of his world but, instead, the best thing that ever happened to him.

Finally, having been stifled by the scrutiny and pressure of the title fight almost all year long with only fleeting moments of relief, Lando was liberated.

And there is nothing more lethal than a racing driver with nothing left to lose.

Recap: How the closing races of F1 2025 unfolded

? Qatar GP conclusions: Mindless McLaren, Piastri turns Norris tables, Hamilton bombshell?

? Las Vegas GP conclusions: Max spooks Norris, McLaren DSQ silver lining, Hamilton’s Ferrari regret?

The title may have only been secured in Abu Dhabi, but it was those nerveless, un-Landolike victories in Mexico and Brazil – now rising to the challenge in scenarios in which he had previously crumbled – that pulled him clear.

The exciting thing is that Norris remains so perfectly imperfect.

Even at the end of his seventh full season, even with a world championship already to his name, still he is a work in progress.

There is potential in there still untapped. His main limitations are still under maintenance.

Perhaps the true value of this title triumph, then, will be found not in the achievement itself and the feel of that trophy in his hands, but in what it might do to him and how it might transform him.

The confidence it will bring. The inner peace. The self-assurance and self-satisfaction.

He’s always struggled to see it for himself.

Maybe now, though, Lando will finally realise just how good he really is.

Let this be a lesson to Max Verstappen

Regrets?

Max Verstappen must have a few (don’t we all?). Not that you’d ever know, though.

Max, you see, doesn’t really do regrets. They’re not really his thing.

His mentality is that of the old-school generation of athletes, to whom admitting weakness – any form of weakness – is to giftwrap an advantage and present it to an opponent.

So it was revealing a few weeks ago when he spoke candidly about “the only point of criticism” of his season at the Spanish Grand Prix and that collision with George Russell.

“All signs went red.”

That’s what Max said of the moment he was instructed to give a position to Russell, obeyed the request, then thought about it again for a moment – the heat of the moment – and decided to give the Mercedes a bump.

The result? A post-race penalty that dropped him from fifth to 10th in the final classification.

A glance at his 2025 results quickly reveals that was pretty much the only race all season long that Verstappen himself failed to squeeze every last drop out of a volatile Red Bull.

How he could have done with those lost points from Barcelona in Abu Dhabi on Sunday as he fell short of Lando Norris by just two.

It ultimately ended up denying him a fifth straight title in 2025, but that sort of incident could just as easily have cost him last year too.

Think back, for instance, to his mid-race meltdown in Hungary last year, when Max spent the race sounding as if he wanted to watch the world burn before a final, rash, ugly lunge on Lewis Hamilton.

Or his two 10-second penalties in quick succession for incidents with Norris in Mexico.

If McLaren and Norris had been better at taking their chances last year, and if it hadn’t rained on that Sunday at Interlagos, Max may well have found himself dethroned 12 months before now.

It has become fashionable to describe Verstappen, like so many multiple world champions before him, as a driver without weakness, yet these self-defeating moments of head loss have developed into a nasty habit.

And, at last, one has been duly punished.

The good news is that Max is humble and self-critical enough to acknowledge his own shortcomings and work on his weaknesses, a strength common among the greatest drivers in the sport’s history.

“That was a mistake from my side,” he said of Barcelona. “And of course I learn from it.

“Those moments won’t happen again next year, even if we’re in a similar situation with the car.”

Let this, then, be a lesson.

Mindlessly giving away crucial points to the opposition, knowing how much it could cost him at the end of a season?

Bet your bottom dollar that he won’t be making that mistake again.

Oscar Piastri’s time will come

Did the 2025 title fight come a little too soon in Oscar Piastri’s development as a Formula 1 driver?

Was he promoted into a slightly false position this season given the extent of McLaren’s dominance and Norris’s struggles – both emotionally and with the feel of the MCL39 car – in the first half of 2025?

These thoughts have nagged over recent months as Piastri slid from being the overwhelming favourite for the championship after Zandvoort – his 34-point advantage after that race was the biggest lead enjoyed by any driver all season – to the clear outsider in a three-way fight in Abu Dhabi.

Mark Webber, Piastri’s manager, seemed to hint at it in Brazil last month, acknowledging that it is “pretty unprecedented” for a driver in just his third season to find himself competing for the biggest prize the sport has to offer.

The pattern of this season – Norris’s greater experience and comfort within McLaren (team and car) showing as the year developed, especially after his front-suspension upgrade in Canada unlocked his feel for the front end – suggests Piastri was never quite as equipped for this battle as he sometimes made it look.

As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from the Qatar Grand Prix, as the weeks have passed it has become apparent that Piastri’s late-season dip came in two distinct phases: psychological and technical.

First came his error-ridden and bad-tempered performances in Baku and Singapore respectively, where the resentment of being forced to give points to Norris at Monza – the first time in his career that Piastri consciously showed weakness – manifested itself in his driving.

After that came the rounds between Austin and Vegas, which highlighted the lingering flaws in Piastri’s technique and his heavily data-led approach to beating Norris.

Recent history indicates that it takes time for drivers to recover from the disappointment of defeat in the world championship after leading the standings for a large chunk of the season.

Webber himself, for instance, did not win again until the last round of the following year after missing out on the title to Sebastian Vettel at the final race of 2010.

And as much as he is remembered for his resilience against Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes, Nico Rosberg seemed to spend most of 2015 recovering from his defeat the previous year, only really returning to full charge as 2016 hovered into view.

In that context, it feels potentially significant that Piastri has managed to recover his poise before the end of 2025.

As with Verstappen’s performance in Brazil, there was something inescapably noble about Piastri going down fighting in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, where there were glimpses again of the driver who made the new world champion so unsure of himself at points this season.

Missing out on the title, having led the way for so long, will hurt, but the shoots of recovery have already appeared.

That’s how you know Piastri will be just fine.

His time will come.

And breathe! McLaren’s big F1 2025 gamble has paid off

A wise man once said that the problem with principles is that they die with you.

Winning the F1 world championship, on the other hand? Now that’s the sort of achievement to stand the test of time.

For so much of this season it seemed that McLaren’s hierarchy had failed to grasp this simple reality, the team’s refusal to prioritise one driver over the other constantly allowing Max Verstappen a way back into this world championship when all seemed lost.

Now with a drivers’ and constructors’ title double in the bag for the first time since 1998, however, McLaren can at last breathe a sigh of relief and say that the great gamble of 2025 eventually paid off.

Just.

In the stampede to criticise McLaren’s philosophy this season, few have stopped to ask themselves what the alternative might have been.

Would you have preferred it, for instance, if the dominant team of 2025 had locked down a clear number-one driver all the way back in Bahrain testing?

If Zak Brown and Andrea Stella wanted an easy life, they would have kept Daniel Ricciardo at the end of 2022.

With Ricciardo as his wingman, doing roughly the same job Sergio Perez performed for Verstappen at Red Bull, Lando Norris would probably have won the drivers’ title around the time McLaren secured the constructors’ crown in 2025.

As in: Singapore. Two months ago. With six races to spare.

The day Oscar Piastri, a driver so close to Norris to be considered his equal, arrived was the day McLaren signed itself up to having to play fair every step of the way.

And in doing so, the team has attempted to do right by the drivers and the sport itself – providing entertainment in a season that could have so easily been painted papaya from beginning to end – even if it has sometimes meant McLaren making its own life horribly complicated.

Its decisions have not always been the correct ones, of course, with the weird team orders call to Piastri at Monza and the no-strategy strategy in Qatar among the biggest blunders.

But here’s the thing: these moments came not from a position of bias, as anti-social media howled, but a place of fear.

Fear that a single decision or mistake by the team – like, yes, Norris’s slow pit stop in Italy – would ultimately end up costing one driver the title.

Among the most touching tributes to Norris on Sunday night in Abu Dhabi came from Carlos Sainz, who spent two seasons with McLaren across 2019/20.

Lando’s triumph, Sainz said, was proof that nice guys don’t always finish last.

That drivers don’t have to be “ruthless or tough” and follow “typical stereotypes” to be successful.

The same can be said of McLaren, which has shown a different way to win in 2025.

Brown and Stella? They danced constantly on the fine line between bravery and stupidity this season.

But at least they were successful in the end.

And more, much more than this, they did it their way.

Yuki Tsunoda should have cut ties with Red Bull when he had the chance

The great unanswered question of Red Bull’s decision to drop – sorry, demote – Yuki Tsunoda for next season?

Would he still be an F1 driver in 2026 if he had never been promoted to the senior team?

Yuki himself hinted at that alternative reality on Thursday in Abu Dhabi, telling media including PlanetF1.com that his only regret about joining Red Bull was giving up a “pretty good f**king car” at Racing Bulls.

Imagine how differently he would be perceived now, at the end of his fifth full season, had he remained where he was.

What if it happened to be Yuki, not Isack Hadjar, sneaking a rare podium for the team at Zandvoort and revelling in the general drivability and compliance of a punchy upper-midfield car?

If the Formula 1 driver market is often likened to musical chairs, Red Bull’s driver situation in 2025 saw that game play out live and uncut.

Liam Lawson was fortunate that he got his implosion out of the way early, affording him the opportunity to reset and rebuild and eventually secure a seat for 2026.

Tsunoda’s own case, of course, was severely weakened from the start by the imminent parting of ways between Red Bull and Honda, giving the team(s) little reason to retain him beyond this season.

Yet it is true also that he just happened to be the one taking the beating from Max Verstappen, still standing but barely so, when the music stopped.

It would be a shame if it hadn’t been so utterly inevitable.

It was obvious long before his promotion that Tsunoda was fundamentally unsuited to the role of being Verstappen’s teammate, a reality Red Bull effectively acknowledged by overlooking him in favour of Lawson a year ago.

The great risk of putting him in that position was undoing all the progress he had made since his highly erratic debut season in 2021.

But because the team burned through its other options in quick succession, it was left with no real option but to give Yuki a go when Lawson was left punch drunk by Max.

Perhaps Tsunoda’s real mistake was failing to push harder to leave the Red Bull system when his reputation was at its peak.

There were rumours of interest from the likes of Haas, now under the steady management of Tsunoda’s compatriot Ayao Komatsu, around the time his contract was extended in June 2024.

It would have been perfect for him, having a team boss who literally spoke the same language and could have filled the hole left by Franz Tost, the former AlphaTauri team principal, by becoming something of a mentor to Yuki.

Tsunoda hinted on Thursday that the terms of his Red Bull contract had prevented him from seriously considering opportunities with other teams.

Yet maybe, as with Carlos Sainz in 2017, he could also have been more forceful on the matter and taken charge of his own destiny.

And now Toyota’s tentacles are spreading ever wider at Haas, that avenue is almost certainly closed off for good to Tsunoda, a Honda man to the core, without an unexpected turn of events and the sort of tough decisions he should have taken 18 months ago.

After a patchy start to his F1 career, Tsunoda had been threatening to emerge as a seriously good – perhaps never quite great – grand prix driver in 2023/24.

The team was finally beginning to reap the rewards for its treatment of him  – making him move closer to the factory in Faenza, persuading him to take his fitness and diet more seriously and engage with the less appealing aspects of F1 life – in the early days.

Yet it only took a matter of months – 22 races of being exposed to the same environment as Verstappen – for those years of hard work to be left in ruins.

And so let’s throw Tsunoda on to the pile of drivers to have their faces rubbed in the mud, the light taken from their eyes and their reputations torn to shreds by Max.

What a waste.

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