MPH: Assessing F1's rookie class of 2025 – the Mark Hughes verdict

Who has been the best rookie of 2025 from what has been an outstanding crop? It’s not a straightforward choice. Kimi Antonelli has had the best sequence of results – including a trio of top threes – but then he’s the only one of the rookies in one of the top four ‘super teams’, so he has had a significantly faster car at his disposal than Isack Hadjar‘s Racing Bulls, Oliver Bearman‘s Haas or Gabriel Bortoleto‘s Sauber.

Antonelli fares the worst of the four in comparison to the team-mate – he was 23-4 down on George Russell in qualifying, averaging 0.237sec slower. But in Russell he has a faster team-mate than Hadjar (Liam Lawson), Bortoleto (Nico Hülkenberg) or Bearman (Esteban Ocon). Antonelli came into F1 with probably the emptiest data banks too; a season of F2 and not even F3 before that but just a single season of Formula Regional.

Plus, his peaks were impressively high. A wonderful charge from the back to P4 on his debut in incredibly tricky conditions around Melbourne, including a brave round-the-outside pass on Alex Albon at the fast Turn 9. Pole in the Miami Sprint, a great drive in Vegas from near the back to an official third (fifth on the road) effectively without changing tyres. Keeping up the pace he did on tyres which had been on since lap three was quite remarkable. But he had a bad mid-season dip in between those performances when Mercedes switched to a new rear suspension, which totally confused his senses and which was subsequently binned after a few races. His confidence then began to rebuild and in most of the last few races of the year he was in generally competitive form and was genuinely faster than Russell in Brazil.

Bortoleto had a tough task in what was overall the slowest car of the bunch and with a quick team-mate. He was within two-hundredths of Hulk in qualifying and lost out in the head-to-head by the narrow margin of 13-12 (where fair comparison was possible). But there were days when Hulk had absolutely no answer to him, when he could force the Sauber into Q3. Beautifully judged drives into the points in Austria, Spa and Monza were stand-outs. Occasional feisty battles with his mentor Fernando Alonso – such as at Mexico – caught the eye too. His home race weekend was a bit of a mess with a big accident in the Sprint and a first-lap retirement (his fault) in the grand prix. It was a big occasion for him and we can forgive him that, though he did follow it up with a lairy locked-up Turn 1 collision in Vegas. These were untypical of most of his season, though.

Bearman – honorary rookie, having done two previous races in ’24 – had a sometimes-startling turn of speed in the Haas, one which completely eclipsed the experienced Ocon in the season’s second half. He headed the Frenchman 17-6 in qualifying and was faster by an average of 0.14sec. The highlight was his great drive to fourth in Mexico. Always fast on a green track, the speed comes very naturally. The first half of his season was compromised by silly incidents and penalties and at times he really did look like a very raw rookie, especially in Melbourne for the season-opener when he had one off after another. But his way of learning seems to be to press on and then dial it back. In the season’s latter half, the incidents stopped but the polished speed remained.

Then there’s Hadjar, a quite singular character, one seemingly oblivious to the fuss going on around him. Of all the rookies, he’s the one who seems the most certain of himself. He has that great combination of total confidence but willingness to learn. He puts it all on the line but rarely goes off. He is incredibly fast on a green track. The first laps of practice at Vegas, where he’d never been before, the track like an ice rink and hard walls just lying in wait, he was stunning, the fastest guy out there for a while. His podium at Zandvoort, close in the wheel tracks of Max Verstappen almost throughout, was fully on merit. The Racing Bulls was a well-balanced, driveable car but he maximised it and although his team-mate Lawson is little more than a rookie himself, Hadjar did trounce him convincingly (17-3 ahead in qualifying by an average of 0.162sec). For me, he’s rookie of the year.

But what happens to each of them in their sophomore years will likely be career-defining. Hadjar is going straight into the lion’s den, the seat that has finished many a career: that alongside Verstappen at Red Bull. But his driving style is not dissimilar, he has that combination of hard-headed belief but open-minded approach to finding more. He’s not going to go in there in his second year and beat Verstappen. But he just may have a better chance of flourishing in that environment than any of those before him. There is something about his personality which suggests that.