We were promised an exciting first qualifying session of the 2025 Formula 1 season and Saturday in Melbourne didn’t disappoint, even if the battle for pole ended up being a rather one-sided affair.
Who got it right, and who’s already starting the season considerably on the back foot?
Here’s our pick of winners and losers from qualifying at Albert Park.
Loser – Ferrari
Ferrari can’t be anything other than a major loser after failing to make the top six in Q3. With Liam Lawson and Kimi Antonelli both falling in Q1 that should have been the minimum result possible for the two Ferraris, so seventh and eighth represents a proper underperformance.
Everything fell apart in Q2, as both drivers struggled to find time on their second sets of tyres and Leclerc began complaining he couldn’t keep his tyres alive.
Q3 was a mess too – with Leclerc aborting his final lap as the other frontrunners found time, while Hamilton failed to go quicker than he managed in Q2.
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There was a suggestion after Friday practice that Ferrari was using the tyres quite differently to McLaren, bringing them in more gently and going quicker later in their runs.
Obviously that team has made a concerted effort since the end of 2023 to re-bias its tyre usage towards race pace longevity at the expense of qualifying speed, but whatever it is doing now clearly isn’t quite gelling with this latest range of Pirelli tyres – and the tricky C5 in particular.
Hamilton confirmed Ferrari was “definitely overheating” the tyres here and suggested his new team maybe needs to be “a bit more dynamic” after doing “the same thing, same prep, every session”. – Ben Anderson
Winner – McLaren
An obvious winner, considering the front-row lockout and having at least three tenths of a second in hand over the next-quickest car.
The fact both drivers messed up their first Q3 laps suggests the MCL39 can be difficult to keep precisely in the sweet spot – but that’s also a generic challenge for everyone with this generation of F1 car. Generally speaking, if it’s too easy to drive it tends to be slow!
When both drivers refocused for the final laps in Q3, the advantage McLaren showed over Red Bull and Mercedes looked ominous – but it could also simply be a function of McLaren getting the revised C5 Pirelli tyre to work a bit more consistently than the others can right now.
Red Bull had an awful pre-season; Mercedes was so unsure of the C5 it began Q1 on the C4; and Ferrari came properly unstuck as Q2 progressed.
But if McLaren retains that tyre advantage across different compounds and circuits, this could be a serious warning sign for the rest. – BA
Loser – Ollie Bearman
Two crashes. A gearbox issue in qualifying. A total of 15 laps completed over two days.
So far the Australian GP weekend has been an unmitigated disaster for the driver many felt was best prepared among the F1 2025 rookie crop.
It says a lot that Ollie Bearman’s pinned most of his hopes on rain arriving for Sunday – especially considering how turbulent his previous wet F1 race experience was. – Jack Cozens
Winner – Max Verstappen
Given his team-mate was out in Q1 and just how troubled Red Bull’s pre-season has looked at times, third on the grid has to be seen as a positive result for Max Verstappen and Red Bull.
The gap to McLaren will be disheartening but for Verstappen to place Red Bull as the best of the rest is some classically brilliant Verstappen damage limitation.
And if it does rain on Sunday, even with the car advantage, the McLaren drivers won’t be sleeping easily knowing Verstappen is starting right behind them. – Josh Suttill
Winner – Yuki Tsunoda
Fifth place, within two tenths of Verstappen.
That would have been a victory for the driver Red Bull did choose to partner him this year, so it’s a huge win for the driver it snubbed, Yuki Tsunoda, driving in an inferior (but faster than expected) Racing Bulls car.
It’s the perfect response to one of the hardest moments of Tsunoda’s career and a timely reminder of how dependable a performer Tsunoda has matured into. – JS
Loser – Liam Lawson
The simple truth is that while Verstappen was an outside contender for pole in an RB21 that there weren’t great expectations for, the second Red Bull hasn’t looked like a Q2 contender at any point this weekend.
A power unit issue that prevented any running in FP3 was hardly ideal preparation for Liam Lawson’s first qualifying session in a Red Bull and did cut him some slack. But that’s where the positives stop.
He conceded that his first off, a ragged looking overshoot into the Turn 3 gravel trap, “put everything out of order” and left him chasing a laptime – something that ultimately wasn’t there. A snap through the high-speed Turn 10 kink that Lawson reckoned overheated his tyres essentially killed his final sector, and he subsequently overshot the penultimate corner.
This had all the hallmarks of Pierre Gasly’s unremarkable Q1 exit in Melbourne in his first session alongside Verstappen in 2019. There’s obviously no need to panic just yet, but Lawson will be hoping that’s where the similarities with Gasly’s ill-fated stint in the senior team end. – JC
Loser – Kimi Antonelli
Like Lawson, fellow big-team-rookie Kimi Antonelli had looked in a spot of bother at the start of the Australian GP weekend (albeit not to the same extent as the Red Bull driver), but things seemed to be coming good as he set the fifth-fastest time in final practice.
Qualifying didn’t follow that trajectory, though.
Mercedes reported after his Q1 exit that it had noticed bib damage to Antonelli’s car on his second run, via a kerb strike exiting Turn 6, which “caused a loss of performance for his final two laps” – seemingly in the region of multiple tenths a lap.
For a driver who The Race characterised pre-season as “very fast if still a little unrefined”, that was obviously a big penalty to carry: without that damage he might well have been safely through in the top seven or eight positions, rather than 0.009s the wrong side of the Q1 cutoff.
So was this as underwhelming a performance as it looked? Absolutely not.
But was this as underwhelming a result as it looked? Absolutely it was. – JC
Loser – Haas
Bearman’s tumultuous start would be bad enough in normal circumstances, but right now it’s added an extra layer of brutality to the Melbourne weekend for a Haas team that seems utterly lost at present.
The VF-25 looked well off the pace in all the meaningful running Esteban Ocon was able to complete on Friday, and any hopes of an overnight turnaround seem to have amounted to nothing.
The stopwatch doesn’t lie in F1: Ocon was slowest of the 19 drivers who set a time in Q1, and take Lawson (and his two aborted runs) out of the equation and the Haas was half a second down on the next-closest car, 0.6s away from Q2, and 1.2s off the ultimate pace in a session where the top 14 cars were covered by 0.457s.
Yes it’s only round one, but that sustained lack of performance has got to set alarm bells ringing. – JC
Winner – Alex Albon
Testing and practice were real: Williams is genuinely quick. Not race-winning miracle quick. But massively, massively better than 12 months ago and nipping at the heels of any underperforming top teams.
Alex Albon gets the nod for the slot in the winners section, though. Having his undisputed Williams team leader status shaken by Franco Colapinto’s startling early races last year didn’t bode well with established race-winning top-liner Carlos Sainz arriving for 2025.
Yet it’s Albon in the top six on the Melbourne grid, three and a half tenths of a second ahead of Sainz, who felt he was still learning the car’s qualifying habits in a “scrappy” Q3. – Matt Beer
Loser – Aston Martin
Aston Martin could qualify for the Losers section on the grounds that the starts of seasons have been when it starred in 2023 and 2024, and it’s nowhere near that form at the start of 2025. Given its downward trajectory through recent seasons, it doesn’t want 12th and 13th on the Melbourne grid to be its peak.
But actually it’s ended up in Losers not because its outright pace is poor, but because it ended up missing an opportunity on a day it turned out its pace might not be as bad as feared.
After its underwhelming test week and Melbourne practice, Alonso’s top-10 form in Q1 looked legitimate.
Alonso certainly thought so, and was therefore kicking himself for running wide and incurring the damage that led to his Q2 exit.
So Aston Martin is in worse shape than 2024. But not as bad as everyone expected to be. That’s good. Not actually fulfilling that potential isn’t. – MB
Winner – Gabriel Bortoleto
Though by his standards Helmut Marko wasn’t especially scathing when he classed Gabriel Bortoleto as a ‘B tier’ rookie (branding Jack Doohan a ‘C’ who’d soon lose his drive was maybe harsher), the implication was definitely that Kimi Antonelli and Ollie Bearman were actually the ones to watch in the newcomer and new-ish-comer group. And Isack Hadjar, though Marko’s ‘A’ for him maybe wasn’t so objective.
Yet in Melbourne the unfancied rookies impressed most as Bearman, Antonelli and sort-of-rookie Liam Lawson exited in Q1.
Hadjar’s 11th looks less impressive in the context of Racing Bulls team-mate Yuki Tsunoda’s fifth, and though Doohan gets credit for outpacing Alpine team-mate Pierre Gasly in Q1 his qualifying ended up inconclusive as the yellows for Lewis Hamilton’s Q2 spin kept him 14th.
But there are no caveats over Bortoleto. Into Q2 for a Sauber team that had been tipped to prop up the back row and spent most of 2024 just trying to minimise Q1 embarrassments, and faster than vastly experienced team-mate Nico Hulkenberg. Nice start. – MB
