Monaco GP conclusions: Norris’s big reset, Leclerc unleashed, F1’s failed experiment

McLaren driver Lando Norris claimed his second victory of the F1 2025 season at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Norris dominated from pole position to claim his first win since the F1 2025 opener in Australia, with Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc second and championship leader Oscar Piastri third. Here are our conclusions from Monte Carlo.

Lando Norris has the pace to storm to the F1 2025 title – will the mind let him?

It would have been typical of Lando Norris’s luck if the year he set pole position at the Monaco Grand Prix was the year pole in Monaco did not matter.

The spectre of Monaco’s two-stop rule brought with it an extra complication and something else to think about this weekend.

And if there is anything we have learned about Norris in his years of competing at the front of the field, stretching all the way back to Sochi 2021, it is that he tends not to respond well when he has to think about things.

If the Monaco Grand Prix is usually won the moment the polesitter makes it through the first corner, this year it was Ste Devote… and the snakes and ladders of the remaining 77-and-a-bit laps.

Or at least that’s how it was meant to be in theory.

The total failure of the two-stop rule (more on that shortly) meant this was a more normal Monaco than Norris could have possibly wished for.

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

The moment a driver starts to have the look and feel of a World Champion?

It often comes with the complete elimination of doubt, when he sets pole or takes the lead of a race and never once looks back.

Max Verstappen began to develop that habit in mid-2021, specifically around the time of his three straight wins in France/Styria/Austria, the first successive victories of his career.

Oscar Piastri has started to have that air about him lately too, rattling off four wins in five with a near-inevitable ease.

Lando?

Still there lingers that niggling fragility about him – recall his collection of poor starts from pole last year and the various close calls with the wall while otherwise leading comfortably in Singapore – and a sense that no matter how good it might look now, the moment he blows it is only ever just around the corner.

There were tiny traces of it again here, Norris locking up heavily as he defended from Charles Leclerc into the first corner.

And again in the closing laps when Charles could not help but note over team radio – always very interesting when drivers share observations of their rivals from the best seats in the house – that Lando was making “many mistakes” as victory neared.

Even in triumph, you see, Norris’s weaknesses – almost entirely emotional and psychological – are never far from the surface.

Yet do not underestimate the potential for this weekend to reset his season.

After everything so far in 2025 – the accident in Jeddah, the gridbox error in Bahrain, the weekend that never got going in China, the suspicion that McLaren’s change to the front suspension for 2025 has numbed his feel for the car – still he only sits three points behind Piastri.

For all the talk of Piastri blossoming rapidly into F1’s next World Champion, this has been no disastrous start to the season for Norris.

And Lando now appears to be taking his chance of a lifetime a little more seriously too, revealing last month that he has not touched a drop of alcohol so far in 2025 before letting slip in Monaco that he has recently given up social media as well – following PlanetF1.com’s advice from Bahrain to cut out everything that is not conducive to winning the title.

This week it was Piastri’s turn to have a weekend that never really got off the ground, his momentum lost to the other side of the garage, never to be recovered, the moment he speared into the barrier at Ste Devote in FP2 on Friday.

Even so, and for all the refinements Piastri has made in 2025, that Norris was able to see off Leclerc at his explosive, inspired Monte Carlo best for pole was a reminder that he, on balance and at least for now, remains the quickest of the McLaren drivers.

With parity effectively restored, the clouds parting once more, there is feasibly nothing to stop Norris from matching Piastri’s recent winning run from here and eliminating those last remaining doubts over his own championship credentials over these summer months.

He has the talent and the pace to blow Piastri away and storm to the title.

The key question, as ever with Lando, is whether the mind will let him.

Let us never speak of two mandatory pits stops again

The most jarring aspect of the decision to impose two mandatory pit stops for this year’s Monaco Grand Prix?

The thought that the most influential figures in F1 came away from the 2024 event, where they witnessed Charles Leclerc finally win his home race after a lifetime of trying in the emotional peak of last season, and effectively said: What a load of crap that was.

The danger, if this experiment had worked, was that the genie would have been out of the bottle.

The temptation would soon have grown to try it everywhere, starting with the remaining street circuits, then the other traditional one-stop races and the historically dull affairs on the calendar until, eventually, mandatory pit stops by regulation were a permanent fixture of every race on the calendar.

Instead, the Racing Bulls team – later followed by Williams – performed a public service as their spoiler tactics split the field into two tiers from an early stage of the race and exposed this rule for what it was.

And what was it? Farcical.

More confusing than chaotic, driving George Russell – a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, if you please – to such frustration that he committed the most blatant breach of the rules you will ever witness and willingly took the penalty for it.

At its root, this rule was a ham-fisted overreaction to the unique circumstances of last year’s race; a classic case of the mistake, usually one made by the fans, of seeing Monaco for what it’s not rather than embracing what it is.

It is the most half-baked rule change to have been made in F1 since the disastrous elimination-style qualifying system of early 2016.

Formula 1 is never more infuriating than when its desperation to be popular drives it into making these cock ups.

Now it’s all over, just let Monaco be Monaco.

And let us never speak of this again.

There’s a great car waiting to be unleashed by Ferrari

If Charles Leclerc wasn’t quite able to force a second successive win at his home race, it was not through a lack of trying.

There is no more spectacular sight in F1 today than Leclerc in the Ferrari detonating qualifying laps left, right and centre in a furious blaze of red and white.

No driver attacks the circuit with such visceral emotion and spirit than Leclerc operating at his peak (a bigger achievement than it sounds in the era of these wide, long, unloveable cars).

He showed great maturity and restraint, too, in deciding against a lunge on Lando Norris in the closing laps when the win he craves more than any other was right there.

It pained him to come so close yet so far here, but it just wasn’t to be. Not this year.

Not when Lando in the McLaren could absorb Charles’ biggest punches and still go a tenth faster, taking the track record in the process, even when Leclerc dropped the atomic bomb in Q3.

A more pressing matter is why Leclerc was even in a position to push McLaren so hard here in the first place, having started the weekend talking of the SF-25’s fundamental weakness in slow corners.

Why the turnaround, you ask?

The leading theory at this stage seems to be that unlike other circuits with a mix of slow and fast stuff, Monaco’s total slow-corner content meant the car was not compromised here in the way it has been recently, the Ferrari’s mechanical grip and its strong acceleration from low-speed corners doing the rest.

Yet was it a turnaround per se? Or a fleeting return to normality?

Until Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification for excessive skid-block wear in Shanghai shipwrecked Ferrari’s season, forcing the team to run the car’s ride height higher than it was designed for, the SF-25 was the fastest all in the slow corners across Bahrain testing, Australia (see above graphic) and China.

There has been much talk over recent weeks of a crucial upgrade to the rear suspension – expected to arrive in time for Hamilton’s home race at Silverstone, of all places – that is intended to cure Ferrari’s right-height woes, allowing the team to adopt more aggressive setups and access more of the car’s underlying potential on a more consistent basis.

There is little doubt that the SF-25 was badly born and that, yes, it was a mistake to gamble on a different design concept for the final season of the current regulations having run McLaren so close in 2024.

That Ferrari are already 177 points adrift of McLaren after eight races, having fallen just 14 points short in 2024, tells its own story.

Yet here was a sign that there is a potentially great car here just waiting to be let off the leash.

Isack Hadjar has been the great revelation of F1 2025

Never judge a driver by his results in the junior categories.

Only when he reaches F1 and is exposed to the pressures, the scrutiny and the rewards of motorsport’s top tier can you estimate his true potential with any accuracy.

It has never been more true in an era Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Oliver Bearman, stars of the future both, were plucked from F1’s feeder series without a moment’s hesitation despite some patchy results in 2024.

The perception of Isack Hadjar, without a championship title to his name in his entire junior career, before this season?

That he was Yuki Tsunoda with less natural talent, highly emotional and good for the occasional viral snippet of team radio, but extremely limited as a racing driver.

As recently as his first FP1 appearance for Red Bull at Silverstone last July – best remembered for a blocking incident with Lando Norris – there was a suspicion that Hadjar was out of his depth, the car moving at a faster speed than his brain could keep up with.

None of the other debutants to start the 2025 season had less mileage in an F1 car at the beginning of this year than Hadjar, but you would not know it now.

If not quite the Rookie of the Year at this early stage – that accolade has surely belonged to Antonelli since his pole for the sprint in Miami – Hadjar has been the great discovery of 2025.

Pretty much ever since the visor lifted and the tears started flowing after his formation lap accident in Australia, he has been close to faultless, matching Tsunoda lap for lap in their final qualifying session together in China, eventually nipping ahead at the end of Q3, before showing Liam Lawson the way home since Red Bull’s early driver swap.

The rate of his progress since pre-season testing – culminating in his best result to date with sixth in Monaco, best of the rest behind the McLarens, Ferraris and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull on one of the great driver circuits – has been astonishing.

Pity in a way, then, that as Tsunoda struggles persist at Red Bull, Hadjar’s impressive start to life in F1 will probably end up being rewarded with a trip to Max’s meat grinder sooner than later…

Adrian Newey has brought reassurance to Aston Martin

There is something to be said for Adrian Newey’s choice of attire on a race weekend.

Strolling into the Monaco paddock in full Aston Martin team kit, complete with pristine white cap, he looked for all the world like the captain of the ship.

And to a large extent, he is.

Lawrence Stroll may be the money man and Andy Cowell, one of the great organisers of modern F1, the brains behind the operation in his role as team principal.

Yet it is Newey upon whose shoulders the long-term success of Aston Martin depends, for a team can only ever be as good as the strength of their technical department allows and the quality of their car dictates.

Hence Mr Stroll’s preparedness to do everything and anything – even granting Newey’s long-held ambition, thought to stretch back to his Williams days, to become a shareholder in a team – to get his hands on him last year.

Much has been made of Aston Martin’s decision to effectively write off this season – though the team themselves do not put it in those terms – and prioritise the new regulations for 2026.

It is reminiscent of Ross Brawn’s approach to the final Honda season in 2008, refusing to compromise the following year’s fresh start in any shape or form.

It takes no shortage of courage for a team, particularly one attached to a car manufacturer with a fidgety and impatient boardroom, to willingly abandon an entire season with no way of knowing for certain if the gamble will pay off.

Yet the presence of a figure of Brawn or Newey’s stature, the closest thing you can find to a guarantee of success in this sport, makes it so much more straightforward.

How much calmer, for instance, would Ferrari be about their lacklustre 2025 if they were comforted by the knowledge that Adrian was slaving away on the 2026 car on his drawing board back at Maranello?

Taking a long-term view allows Aston Martin to lean into their lack of results in 2025, at ease knowing a bunch of upgrades for the AMR25 won’t make a jot of difference if it only means Fernando Alonso finishes 10th instead of 11th at Imola when their long-term ambitions are far bigger.

Asked why he is so uncharacteristically philosophical about the team’s current woes in Jeddah last month, Alonso told media including PlanetF1.com: “Nothing we can do now.

“Next year is a complete reset and we have now great people in the team working on next year’s car.

“The trust is maximum in the new management and the new people and the team is getting ready for that moment.

“If the regulations were stable, and next year we have the same cars as we have now, I think it will be more tough to digest.”

Newey and Cowell have detailed the true extent of Adrian’s involvement with the 2025 program over recent weeks, both confirming that he has been limited to mere “lunchtime conversations” over ways to improve the current car.

Yet the main impact Newey has had on Aston Martin so far? The most significant thing he has brought to the team in 2025?

Reassurance.

Reassurance that better days coming.

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