F1 through a different lens: the best of Matt Bishop from 2025

For one final time in 2025, it’s time to enter into Matt Bishop’s Formula 1 Hall of Mirrors, where nothing you see is quite as you’d expect.

This year Matt’s Tuesday columns brought a first-hand account of dealing with Lewis Hamilton’s run-in with the Australian police, and one of witnessing a history-making moment from Michael Schumacher.

He offered a unique perspective on Max Verstappen’s contract negotiations, then brought the same level of insight and attentiveness to the burning issue of the fastest F1 driver names, while also reassessing famous grand prix winners and casting fresh light onto forgotten figures.

But while the subject matter might be unpredictable, you can guarantee that each article will contain a trove of obscure information, fascinating statistics, and revealing observations, drawn from Matt’s encyclopaedic knowledge and his meticulously-kept notebooks.

That much is clear from the selection below: five of his favourite columns from 2025 to revisit and savour once again.

Magnificent, merciless Riverside: the F1 circuit too lethal for racing

November 11, 2025

Every so often, when Formula 1 revisits its most recently inaugurated venues, the roar of the F1 cars’ power units echoing off grandiose facades of glass, steel, and concrete whose creators mistook size for beauty – such as the Hermann Tilke-designed cathedrals to glitz that will host the next three F1 grands prix, in Las Vegas (USA), Lusail (Qatar), and Yas Marina (Abu Dhabi) – I find myself thinking of the great long-lost circuits of the past. Specifically, right now, I find myself thinking of Riverside.

No, I am not referring to the pleasant but unremarkable city of Riverside that lent the RIR (Riverside International Raceway) its name, but the circuit that shimmered like a mirage in the desert heat of Southern California’s Moreno Valley; burned brightly for a brief, bloody, but glorious era; then vanished beneath the inexorable advance of suburban sprawl. It hosted just one world championship-status F1 United States Grand Prix, on November 20, 1960. Today, almost exactly 65 years later therefore, you can buy a decaf caramel macchiato where Stirling Moss once drifted his Rob Walker Lotus 18 through Turn 6, for there is a shopping mall where the RIR once was; and, as you sip it, if you love racing it is difficult to decide whether to laugh, cry, or order a chaser shot of espresso to give yourself strength.

Riverside’s story is a very American one, for it was born in optimism, made in haste, loved by enthusiasts, and killed by commercialism. Opened in 1957, it had been neither conceived by committees nor planned by architects; rather, it was scratched out of the desert floor near the Box Spring Mountains, east of Los Angeles, with the kind of reckless ambition that defined post-war California. Its 3.3 miles (5.3km) were made up of high-speed sweepers, treacherous kinks, tricky hairpins, and a formidable series of uphill esses that demanded both courage and caution from those who might dare to tame them. There were nine corners in all, most of them wide and fast, a couple of them blind and gnarly, all of them requiring respect. The layout grew organically from the terrain, following its contours rather than imposing a pre-conceived shape on them. In that sense, it was the antithesis of the modern Tilke-drome. The earth, not the drawing board, dictated the challenge, for the RIR had been laid rather than constructed.

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Strange tale of the F1 podium with just one driver

October 21, 2025

The contrast is ridiculous – almost comically so. A Formula 1 post-race ceremony is nowadays a ritualised bacchanalia of exhibitionism and marketing: booming anthems, confetti cannons, Champagne choreography, celeb interviews, camera cranes swooping like vultures, sponsor logos everywhere, and the dutiful trudge to the cool-down room where the victors sip mineral water with passive-aggressive civility.

But cast your mind back, if you will, to the 1977 Japanese Grand Prix – at Fuji Speedway, on October 23, almost exactly 48 years ago therefore – and consider just how different were the festivities, if we can even call them that. The race was won by McLaren’s James Hunt — who once said he liked racing, girls, and having a good time, but not necessarily in that order — who avoided the podium entirely. Second place was claimed by Carlos Reutemann, that mysterious tango of polish and melancholy, who likewise vanished while his Ferrari’s flat-12 engine was still white-hot. Both men — winner and runner-up — skipped the post-race celebrations entirely, disappearing into the thin, crisp, mountainous air, chasing flights to Malaga and Nice respectively.

What we got instead — what, with a mixture of confusion and amusement, the watching world saw on the Fuji podium — was the lonely figure of the third-placed finisher, Tyrrell’s Patrick Depailler, wearing frayed overalls, baseball cap, street loafers, and shades, soothed by a ciggie already on the go, looking more like a plumber waiting at a bus stop than a sportsman saluting glory, still less a daring lead-foot who had just raced a six-wheeled F1 car quite brilliantly.

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Giuseppe Farina: Stylish daredevil who snatched F1’s first world title

September 2, 2025

Travel back with me, if you will, to a late-summer Sunday, in northern Italy. The date is September 3, 1950: 75 years ago tomorrow. The skies above Monza are shimmering with a metallic light, that singular Lombardy haze that blends the heat of August’s embers with a cool hint of autumn. But no-one is talking about the weather, for three men are standing on the cusp of seizing for themselves something that, although newly born, already promises them immortality: the first ever Formula 1 world championship.

The 1950 Italian Grand Prix was not merely the last world championship-status F1 race of the season; it was its climactic final act. The new F1 world championship, created under the auspices of the FIA as a post-war tonic to Europe’s bruised but not beaten spirit, had visited Britain, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium, and France. The United States of America – Indianapolis – had also been included, but in those days the Indy 500 was an entirely star-spangled event. In 1950, indeed, all 33 starters had been born in the land of the free.

At Monza the three contenders for the F1 crown were all Alfa Romeo drivers. There was Juan Manuel Fangio, 39, the gracious, charismatic, yet fearless Argentine who had won at Monaco, Spa and Reims; there was Luigi Fagioli, from the small town of Osimo, near Ancona, Italy, the oldest of the trio at 52, who had not won a grand prix that year but whose metronomic consistency – second at Silverstone, Bremgarten, Spa, and Reims – had kept him in the hunt; and there was Giuseppe Farina, 43, also Italian, a descendant of Turin aristocracy and a doctor of political science, who had won at Silverstone and Bremgarten. Fangio had 26 points, Fagioli 24, and Farina 22.

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‘Not even the best F1 driver in his family’ – Pain of being the other Schumacher

July 1, 2025

When, on March 9, 1997, in Melbourne, Ralf Schumacher made his Formula 1 grand prix debut, he was 21. Yesterday, June 30, he turned 50. I therefore hope that you will join me in wishing him a very happy birthday, albeit a day late and therefore a Deutschmark short.

By comparison with that of his elder brother, Ralf’s F1 career was an unremarkable one. But then, alongside Michael Schumacher‘s F1 magnum opus, the record of every F1 driver, with the sole exception of Lewis Hamilton, has been pretty pedestrian, statistically at least. Nonetheless, Michael’s little bro was a fast driver, and for a while he was quite successful. In 11 F1 seasons, he started 180 grands prix, standing on 27 podiums, six times from the central position, and he scored six pole positions and drove eight fastest laps. Not too shabby.

In 1997, his F1 rookie year, he was outscored by his Jordan team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella by 20 points to 13, but Fisichella had had half an F1 season’s more experience than had his younger team-mate. It was not surprising that Giancarlo made fewer mistakes therefore, but Ralf was sometimes as quick or quicker in qualifying, Fisichella edging their season’s quali count by 10 sessions to seven.

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Lewis Hamilton’s police stop for burnout: the silly story of ‘hoon-gate’

March 25, 2025

Let’s flashback to the evening of Friday March 26, 2010, in Melbourne, which, given the 11-hour time difference between the UK and that part of south-eastern Australia, namely the state of Victoria, is now exactly 15 years ago to the day. I had just started the third season of what would be a decade-long stretch as McLaren’s comms/PR chief, and we were moderately but not exuberantly satisfied with the way in which our 2010 campaign had begun, in Bahrain, two weeks previously; for, although Jenson Button had qualified only eighth and had finished only seventh, Lewis Hamilton had qualified fourth and had finished third. A podium is a podium. Nonetheless, the fact that the old enemy, Ferrari, had delivered a one-two finish, Fernando Alonso first and Felipe Massa second, was ominous. Sebastian Vettel’s pole position for Red Bull was also a concern.

Friday practice at Albert Park was tricky to read that year. In FP1 Robert Kubica was fastest for Renault; second was Nico Rosberg for Mercedes, but that team was not yet close to being the Formula 1 powerhouse that it would later become; Button was third; Hamilton was seventh. In FP2 Lewis put things right, topping the time sheets, and Jenson was second-quickest. Better still, the Ferraris were 15th (Alonso) and 17th (Massa). So it was that we McLarenites left the circuit on Friday evening with a spring in our steps.

Three days before, on the Tuesday, I had met a man called Angel Bautista in a bar in downtown Melbourne, and we had seen each other every evening since then. He is now my husband, but that is another story. Anyway, he and I had arranged to meet for dinner on the Friday at a beautiful Chinese restaurant overlooking the Yarra River, and as we were eating we engaged in carefree and animated conversation. After we had finished our main courses, Angel popped outside for a cigarette, and, as we all do when left alone at a restaurant table, I idly reached for my mobile phone, which was a clunky old Blackberry in those days. To my consternation I saw that over the past few minutes I had missed a dozen calls from Lewis. Panicking – what on earth could be so urgent? – I called him back. He answered immediately, but he said only, “I can’t talk now,” then he hung up.

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