🇦🇪 F1'25 R24: King of the Ring (Part One)

🗓️ What’s coming up…

The 2025 Formula 1 season is over and for the first time since 2009, a non-Mercedes or Red Bull driver has the crown.

Lando Norris becomes the 11th British driver to win the Drivers’ Championship, and became the first to win it in Round 24. For Max Verstappen’s brilliant comeback, Norris’ consistently brilliant results all year - barring a couple of blemishes - helped him to what looked like an inevitable conclusion once Oscar Piastri began to fall away.

So what of everyone else? Well, you know that everyone loves a completely subjective ranking, and I’m no different, so here’s the 21 drivers who took the wheel this year, sorted, ranked and split into two parts. We’ll do 21-11 here and then the top 10 next week as this piece weighs in at nearly 2,000 words.

Ranking is surprisingly difficult to do - the top 4-5 and the bottom 4-5 almost write themselves, but the bunch in the middle is difficult to separate. The 2026 rules change will help with this, as this ground effect era created convergence, with three big teams, and maybe Ferrari joined them on occasion, then Williams, then everyone else except Alpine, and Flavio Briatore’s bag of madness right at the bottom. 

In fact, it’s there where we’ll start, with a driver who, barring a miracle, I do not think will finish the 2026 season in an Alpine.

21) Franco Colapinto, Alpine, 0 points

The Argentine driver doesn’t seem like a bad person, or even necessarily a bad driver, but Formula 1 in an Alpine is not his strong point to say the least. He does bring with him a good level of sponsorship, but was never really a threat for points. Colapinto avoided being 21st in a 20-driver championship by virtue of an 11th-placed finish in Zandvoort.

Alpine, once with a famed driver academy, have a relatively bare cupboard at the moment. Paul Aron seems to be the natural successor, and has been driving around in a Sauber. Without being unkind to them, Kush Maini and Gabrielle Mini probably are not the long-term answer to the question “how can we get further up the field?”

With that said, Colapinto was in the worst car. There are bags of potential for Alpine if their engine move to Mercedes pays off.

20) Jack Doohan, Alpine, 0 points

The driver who was 21st in a 20-driver championship, Doohan only had a handful of unremarkable races to get the seat full-time. He did not impress, with a 13th in Shanghai a rare highlight, and even that was caveated by three disqualifications ahead of him.

I feel like I’ve been watching Doohan for years, but he’s still only 22. Unfortunately, he seems to have developed an ability to hit the walls at the Degner curves in Suzuka while testing in Super Formula. I would not completely rule it out, but I would be very surprised if Doohan starts in an F1 Grand Prix again. 

We can move from a driver with no job security to one with maybe too much?

19) Lance Stroll, Aston Martin, 33 points

Picture the scene, it’s Abu Dhabi 2026. Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are vying for the title after Adrian Newey’s leadership has pushed Aston to a storybook year. The team’s billionaire owner has a decision to make, his hand hovering over the team radio button to tell the Spanish driver to let his son through.

Which part of the story is the most far-fetched? Stroll Sr rolling the dice or Jr being in a title fight? 

Again, he’s not a terrible driver, and he turned heads with his ironman performance in 2023. But from his attitude, you might be forgiven for thinking he wasn’t coming into his 10th year in the sport and will race his 200th Grand Prix in his home country. Stroll has a job as long as he wants it, and that’s his blessing and his curse.

18) Liam Lawson, VISA Cash App RB, 38 points

Being demoted after two races at the big team would finish most people, but Lawson rallied after a shaky reintroduction to VCARB. Baku was a real turning point, coming through the qualifying chaos to start third and eventually finish fifth. 

It will not be easy to be the veteran presence in the team after winning the Red Bull carousel over Yuki Tsunoda now that Arvid Lindblad has joined the team, but this is the role that Lawson will have to step into. A statement result is a must for him in 2026, which would turn his perception around from a dangerous raider for the last points place to a consistent midcard driver who can help the team challenge for top five.

17) Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, 156 points

It all started so well with a photoshoot filled with as much symbolism as you want to include. Seven windows and a door etc.

5.7m Instagram likes on that carousel later and it didn’t finish how he wanted it to, with the legendary driver openly questioning his choices. A podium-less season has seen a fourth consecutive year where he has scored fewer points than the season before.

Even the one bright spark of winning the Shanghai Sprint was taken away from him with a DSQ and if you’re still searching for a silver (maybe not silver, given his move away from Mercedes) lining, the only saving grace for Hamilton was that he managed to score a few more points than his replacement, Kimi Antonelli. 

If Hamilton competes and wins his elusive eighth world title in 2026, it would be his best achievement in a career that - even if he walks away tomorrow - has already redefined Formula 1.

16) Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull, 33 points

It seemed like the Japanese driver had worked so hard to get to Red Bull, but once he was there, was mostly ineffective. He never really had the consistency that drivers further up these rankings were able to grasp. And that’s potentially a product of his early season move from Racing Bulls to Red Bull. 

He’ll start the season as a development driver for Red Bull, the odd man out in the five-driver equation within the team. I had a hunch that he would move to the remaining Honda IndyCar seat through Dale Coyne, but it looks like he’ll face at least one year as a reserve.

15) Esteban Ocon, Haas, 38 points

Quick show of hands, who remembers one highlight from Ocon in 2025? The French driver was out-scored by his rookie teammate Oliver Bearman, out-qualified, out-sprinted… you get the picture. 

Ocon has become both the worst and best thing for a mid-level F1 team. He is a reliable driver who can challenge for a couple of points a race, but in F1, reliability without podiums is anonymity. As a result, the quieter voices will get louder. Haas are truly out of the bad old days, and the team is growing.

As the team develops, it seems inevitable that Oliver Bearman has a prancing horse in his future. Ocon might be lucky as a veteran presence who is the lynchpin of the team as Haas welcome a new driver from 2027.

14) Gabriel Bortoleto, Sauber - 19 points

The Brazilian driver actually finished 19th in the championship behind the Alpine pair, but here is where the context is needed for his rookie year. The Sauber was a terrible car as the season began, with Nico Hulkenberg stealing seventh in Melbourne before the team went pointless for the next seven races. Bortoleto went all the way to Round 10 before scoring points.The Sauber improved, Bortoleto improved and scored points in four of six races including the Red Bull Ring.

The problem is Bortoleto didn’t really push forward after the summer break. Most notably, a crash put his Sauber into another dimension in Interlagos, yet another example of the safety advances the sport has made, turning an utter wreck into a new question. Previously, the question used to be “is the driver alive?” to “will the driver race the next day?”

13) Pierre Gasly, Alpine - 22 points

In his three years at Alpine, Gasly has scored fewer and fewer points as an emblem of the team’s uncertainty and decline. The bright spots in the Zandvoort rain in 2023 and the genuine joy at the unexpected double podium in Sao Paulo last year distant memories as he tried to pull a performance out of the Alpine A525.

This was a team, a driver and a car that was limping towards these new regulations. They moved to developing the 2026 package before the opening race of 2025, and it showed as other teams tried to eke out milliseconds. Alpine scored just two points after the summer break. That Gasly ninth-place in Brazil was still not enough for Alpine to climb out of the basement -  their worst finish ever since Renault returned to the grid in 2002.

12) Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes - 150 points

There has probably not been as daunting a rookie season in the modern era as the seat given to the young Italian. There is no way to adequately replace Lewis Hamilton, and a win would have given Antonelli that confidence that he can enter 2026 as a contender on equal footing with George Russell.

But a mid-season blip of six bad or non-finishes punctuated by a podium in Canada was an interesting arc. His sprint pole in Miami, only to lose the lead in the first corner showed his relative lack of experience. But late-season podiums in Brazil and Las Vegas showed that Antonelli has the potential to be one of the faces of the new era. 

11) Nico Hulkenberg, Sauber - 51 points

It took 239 races for Hulkenberg’s first career F1 podium, taking third place during a rain-affected Silverstone, with other teams sending Sauber champagne to celebrate a universally popular result. What most people don’t realise is that the brilliant British result was his fourth consecutive points top-10 finish. Only one driver below him had more than four scoring Grands Prix in row (Bearman, five). 

This is a fun second life for the German driver, who enjoyed his revival with Sauber and will now be the German driver for a German team. Hey, with so much history within Formula 1, we should bring back the German Grand Prix! 

We’ll leave Part One there, with the second part of this focusing on the top 10. There will almost certainly be disagreement, and I’d love to hear your reasons.

📖 Good reads

News you may have missed…

• A look at VCARB’s social media presence (disclaimer, I have a very small part in this)

• Max is moving to number 3 next season

• JodieWritesRacing has picked five women to watch in motorsport in 2026

🪦 The headline reference 

All the headlines in 2025 are wrestling references.

King of the Ring is a bit neglected now, but during the Attitude era, WWE used the tournament as a PPV event with some prominence. The 1993 edition has some analysis below, or you can just Wikipedia it.

Thanks for reading