Rating every 2025 F1 driver so far: the good, the bad and the lovely

Formula 1 is a game of the finest margins. A slight lapse in concentration, a snatch of oversteer or a lock of the brakes can send you from the front to the back.

And so, how do you appraise such intense competition? By getting into the decimal points, under the microscope, splitting the hairs.

We’ve rated each driver’s performance so far this season out of 10 – from the downright abominable to the brilliant best.

21. Jack Doohan – 0.5/10

When Doohan ripped into his team on the radio at the Miami GP for messing up his qualifying attempt, it was the sole time he publicly showed the kind of fight needed to keep his Alpine seat.

Put under massive pressure after executive agitator Flavio Briatore signed Franco Colapinto as the team’s third reserve driver (clearly with an eye to getting him into a race seat), the usually polite Aussie appeared to wilt under the pressure.

A litany of crashes and, more importantly, zero points after six races meant he was demoted to the Enstone broom cupboard.

Maybe he should just enjoy the quiet life at Alpine’s WEC team in place of Mick Schumacher, who’s rumoured to be off to Cadillac’s sports car team.

20. Franco Colapinto – 1/10

The spunky Argentinian gets half a point more than Doohan for being slightly more entertaining, but it’s been a dismal second F1 shot for Colapinto.

The 2025 Alpine is clearly difficult to drive, and only Pierre Gasly can get a tune out of it, if anything emphasising the Frenchman’s talent.

The South American has gradually got better as the season has progressed. Can he persuade the team to keep him on next year?

19. Carlos Sainz – 1.5/10

It’s ironic that the person who replaced Colapinto at Grove, Carlos Sainz, has also struggled.

After team boss James Vowles made such loving overtures to the Spaniard to sign him last year, the big-money signing has been roundly gazumped by his Williams team-mate Alex Albon.

Following four races and a sprint, Sainz had just one point to his to his name, and his meagre offering since means the much-vaunted Spaniard lies 16th in the championship, with Albon eighth and not far behind Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.

This is emphasised by the fact if you took away Sainz’s points from Williams’s constructors’ points tally, it would still be fifth in what is a tight midfield battle i.e. at this point Sainz is not contributing much.

18. Yuki Tsunoda – 2/10

Poor Yuki Tsunoda. He looked fast for RB in the first two races but the team managed to mess up his strategy in both.

He was then given the Red Bull RB21 to drive, which is the F1 equivalent of being handed a venomous snake to use as a bathroom sponge.

Like so many of Max Verstappen’s team-mates before him, the Japanese driver has entered into his own personal spiral, without a point in the last seven races.

However, his plight has been exacerbated by F1’s tight field in 2025. Tsunoda was just over 0.2sec slower than Verstappen in the first round of qualifying for Austria, and a tad more than 0.15sec behind him in Hungary, but exited in Q1 while his Dutch team-mate would progress to Q3 both times.

A turnaround could be possible.

17. Kimi Antonelli – 3/10

If it weren’t for Hamilton’s underwhelming Ferrari stint, Antonelli would probably be cited as 2025’s biggest disappointment.

To be frank, he just doesn’t look ready. The young Italian gave the impression of being the unfinished article last year in F2, mercurial at best. He was capable of race wins, but was ineffective on some weekends.

And so it’s proved at Merc in 2025, but only more so – and it’s getting worse. There’s been bad luck, but Antonelli’s form has collapsed recently, scoring points only twice in the last eight races.

Similar to Williams and Alpine, his plight is amplified by what a good season his team-mate is having.

Brackley should have spent more time nurturing Antonelli’s talent, rather than just throwing him in at the deep end.

16. Gabiel Bortoleto – 3.5/10

You almost worried that Bortoleto joining Sauber might have been the F1 career kiss of death for 2024’s consummate F2 champion, so incapable did the C45 look.

Car updates though have breathed new life into his season, the Brazilian scoring points in three of the last four races.

Bortoleto will be well within the midfield fight by the end of the season should he continue this trajectory.

15. Ollie Bearman – 4/10

The Brit can race. We know that. But too often this season Bearman’s laboured in qualifying, giving himself too much work to do.

This makes him an F1 Fantasy gold, as he usually spends grands prix doing a lot of overtaking but it means, for all his pace, his championship points return has been relatively poor this year.

The Ferrari junior sits second-bottom out of the active drivers in the series. Still, not bad for a team run out of a lock-up in Banbury and spare bits from Maranello.

14. Liam Lawson – 4.5/10

2025 started as a nightmare for Liam Lawson, but the Kiwi is now finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Lawson got the ultimate Red Bull treatment, dumped after two races in its difficult 2025 car.

Since then, he’s slowly built himself back up to 15th in the championship table, only two points behind much hyped team-mate Isack Hadjar.

There’s obvious irony in the fact that he was rapidly demoted back to Racing Bulls by former Milton Keynes boss Christian Horner, who was then himself fired.

If Laurent Mekies were in charge at the time, would he have been so hasty?

13. Lance Stroll – 5/10

Old man Lance Stroll – now in his ninth F1 season at the age of 26 – could be on for one of his better years in grand prix racing.

He’s currently 12th in the standings, equal to his third-best year, which was his debut in 2017.

The Canadian is probably F1’s most bizarre prospect. Stroll often looks like he wants to be nowhere near a racing car a lot of the time, but every now and then turns in an impressive performance.

He scored a sixth and a ninth in his first two 2025 GPs, then went nine races (save for a fifth in the Miami sprint) with no points finishes. However, Stroll has now grabbed two seventh places in the last three outings.

Aston’s recalcitrant car has been partly to blame for this but, compared to his team-mate Fernando Alonso, the billionaire’s son is a picture of inconsistency.

12. Isack Hadjar – 5.5/10

Isack Hadjar is F1’s funniest driver, if you judge him by his radio transmissions – 2025’s answer to Jean Alesi, if you like.

He’s also its most impressive rookie. Racing Bulls managed to throw away points finishes for him early on this year via strategy bungles, but since then the French driver has scored points five times.

It could have been more, though. More pitstop faffing and a few crashes have blunted his challenge.

Can the new Alesi help Faenza climb back up the table?

11. Esteban Ocon – 6/10

Along with Stroll, Estie Bestie – sorry, won’t say that again – is F1’s other enigma.

He seems pretty slow a lot of the time, but then he gets his elbows out to get the job done the rest of the time i.e. he’s usually good for about seventh, or 17th, depending on which race you’re at.

This has been one of the Frenchman’s better years though, and he’s spearheading the Haas charge in midfield, demonstrated by him currently sitting 10th in the table.

That’s all we have to say about Esteban Ocon, to be honest.

10. Lewis Hamilton – 6/10

The good bit: Hamilton has been pretty consistent this year, helping Ferrari to second in the title race.

The bad bit: he looks slow. Shaded by team-mate Charles Leclerc, a yawning 50-point gap has opened up between them over the last two races.

Was it ever going to be any other way? You wonder if not.

Hamilton’s last three years at Mercedes were like the latter days of the Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal homogeneity. They’d either win a grand slam (in Hamilton’s case, a race win), or go out in the first round (i.e. Q1 in qualifying), looking totally bewildered.

Now, the Brit isn’t even doing that, though admittedly his car isn’t up much either.

It can’t go on like this…

09. Fernando Alonso – 6.5/10

Will he ever just give up and retire? It took Fernando Alonso nine GPs and a sprint to score a point in 2025, but he’s since gone on a run of five top 10s in the last six.

Aston was terrible in Belgium and great in Hungary, but doesn’t know why, amusingly. All that money from Bond villain Lawrence Stroll, and you haven’t got a clue.

08. Nico Hülkenberg – 6.8/10

Motor sport’s greatest-career-that-never-was is having an Indian Summer, and rightly so.

The German obliterated the junior categories on his way up to F1, but has been lumbered with mediocre cars during his time in the world championship.

In appraising The Hulk’s career, and reemergence, F1 journos and pundits do that brilliant thing of somehow conflating the driver and the car, as if it was the German’s fault that a Force India built for about £5 wasn’t good enough to win a race.

With F1 now being so close though, Hulk has taken advantage, lifting the snot green Sauber to his first ever podium.

The Swiss is now back in the midfield battle, and the German is ninth. He’s won Le Mans, for goodness’ sake, show him some respect.

7. Pierre Gasly – 7/10

Alpine would be nowhere without Gasly, who’s in the form of his life.

He’s wrestled all 20 of Enstone’s points from the car, from a team that still seems to be partly in disarray.

Like an even worse version of Red Bull, neither of his team-mates this year – Doohan or Colapinto – had been able to get any sense out of the A525, but Gasly keeps on snatching more than the team deserves at the race finishes.

The Frenchman could be rewarded for all his travails if Alpine comes good with its 2026 machine.

6. Alexander Albon – 7.2/10

The Suffolk native is another who appears to be hitting his peak.

While much-vaunted team-mate Carlos Sainz struggles, it’s Albon who’s doing all the work.

The slightly sarcastic, laid-back driver actually has a bit of personality, a rare thing in F1 these days. So it’s good to see him hauling Team Willies (as its founder called it) back to the front.

5. Charles Leclerc – 7.5/10

It says something about Charles Leclerc’s tenacity that in a season dominated by McLaren, and one in which Verstappen is still capable of scoring wins, the Monegasque has still bagged five podiums.

He’s now within touching distance of George Russell and Max Verstappen in the championship.

Leclerc has deserved to be in a title-winning car for almost the entirety of his career. He might never get it at Ferrari.

4. Lando Norris – 7.75/10

This was supposed to be Lando’s big season. Years of promise, podiums, points (and memes) leading up to this point.

And yet, both the driver himself, and the team a bit, have stifled him.

Norris likes his car to give him feedback through the steering wheel, this being the secret to his speed.

McLaren has lessened this characteristic on its 2025 machine, taking away one of Norris’s superpowers – he described it earlier on in the season as feeling “numb”.

He also had the edge on Piastri in terms of tyre management. But now the MCL25 is so good at looking after its tyres, does this even matter anymore?

Enough with giving Norris excuses though, the situation is compounded by him struggling to hold his nerve too, leading to mistakes. The iron-headed approach of great champions of the past appears to be lacking in the Brit.

He’s been lucky to win the last few races. At this rate, he’ll lose the championship by some distance to Piastri.

3. George Russell – 8/10

F1’s equivalent of a geography teacher has been smashing his way through the season, despite uncertainty over his future at Mercedes.

That consummate win at Canada, plus a few more podiums, means he’s closing down Verstappen.

Third place in the championship would be an impressive achievement behind the wheel of a tricky Silver Arrow.

2. Oscar Piastri – 8.5/10

The man from Melbourne is leading the world championship. As he should be.

The ice-cold Aussie has one of the greatest F1 cars of all time beneath him, and his mercurial team-mate’s got the jitters.

What’s stopping him? Only binning it at his home grand prix, or messing up under the safety car, it seems.

Piastri’s won six of the 14 races so far. You could argue he should have done better than that.

1. Max Verstappen – 9/10

Max Verstappen has 187 points. He’s third in the championship. His team-mate, Yuki Tsunoda, has 10…

To say the Dutchman has been carrying Red Bull would be some understatement, and his two 2025 GP victories were simply sensational.

Until a few races ago, he was still in with a shout of the world championship, before bad fortune – and a car even he couldn’t drag up the order – stymied his chances.

In a more general sense, the RB21 isn’t fit for purpose if only one driver can get anything out of it.

The McLarens should be way further up the road than they are from Verstappen, and the rest of the grid should be embarrassed.